↓
The failure of their parents’ marriage deeply affected both Caroline and James, as is illustrated – with much else of historic importance in a very honest and revealing memoir, Caroline Simpson: A Woman of Very Firm Purpose, compiled by her eldest of three daughters (who were followed by a son, Edward Simpson), Louise Dobson and researcher Michael Collins. Their father in 1948 married Hanne, née Bendixsen, mother of Alan (Bill) Anderson (M’59), who became very dear to the whole family – as did his and James’s half-sister Annalise Thomas née Fairfax, who is the mother of four daughters, including Sian Khuman (Thomas, Ga’95). Hanne was a kind stepmother through the decade of her marriage to Warwick, who in 1959 married Mary (née Wein, originally from Poland and formerly the wife of Cedric Symonds) with whom he not only had Warwick, born in 1960, but also in 1968 adopted Charles and Anna, who married David Cleary (P’83) and is the mother of three, including Ashley (Gl’04). James is survived not only by his second stepmother but also by 19 nephews and nieces and 16 great-nephews and great-nieces. Caroline contributed richly to knowledge of early-colonial New South Wales. James’s own great contribution has been through the collecting and giving to Australian galleries of Old Masters. His huge collection began with the purchase in boyhood of a painting by Eric Wilson, his art master at Cranbrook, from which in 1946 he went on as a boarder for five years to GGS where he was mostly unhappy, not least because of his parents’ divorce, but also because, by his own confession (he was always humbly and wryly self-critical), he was bookish, diffident, unsporty, and seemingly withdrawn by comparison with the more extroverted members of Manifold House. His headmasters were remarkable men (both later knighted), Brian Hone at Cranbrook and James Darling at Geelong (James Fairfax achieved an easy familiarity and friendship with Darling, unusually soon as a young OGG calling him Jim), and other GGS masters were influential: the classical scholar John Ponder (Staff 1934-65) and the former Bauhaus artist Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack (Staff 1942-57), who taught him to appreciate modern and abstract art. Contemporaries included David Roche (Cu’48), later a major collector and art patron, the future art curator and historian Daniel Thomas (FB’49), and Rupert Murdoch (Cu’49), who was to become an arch-rival professionally but with whom James had friendly, if distant and only occasional, relations personally. Kerry Packer AC (P’56) and Ranald Macdonald AO (M’56), who in different ways were to cross his path in the world of the media, were at GGS somewhat later; James was kind, courteous, and friendly to them both. After a short time at Sydney University, he went up to Balliol, the Oxford College of his Fairfax grandfather, great-uncles, and father (who in the early 1920s had read the then new Honour School of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics – or PPE).
LIGHT BLUE - GEELONG GRAMMAR SCHOOL
For three years, 1952-55, James read the Honour School of Modern History (spanning about 2,000 years since the Ancient World) and became increasingly enamoured of the 18th century. Amid Riviera holidays and much foreign travel with his mother, he was being taught how to judge great paintings by John Macdonell, the Queenslander who for many years advised and bought for the National Gallery of Victoria. James’s Balliol years were among the happiest of his life – and it was there that, partly in succession to earlier family friendships, he and I became good friends. With my closest friend, Sir Andrew Hills (1933-1955) – as I recount in a memoir of Andrew (Scholar Gypsy: An Oxford Friendship, published in 2012), where James makes many appearances – and with our friend the Chaplain and Dean of Balliol, Frank MacCarthy WillisBund (The MacCarthy Reagh), a very 18th-century character, we founded one of Oxford’s many evanescent dining clubs, called the Ancien Régime and dedicated to keeping alive the best traditions of pre-Revolutionary France. They were carefree years, until Andrew’s tragic death in a road accident. James and I, with Keith Thomas and Roy Napier, entertained about 400 friends in a farewell outdoor party through a long summer evening in June 1955 before returning together to Australia in SS Strathmore, he to join his father’s world of duty (away, as his father intended, from his mother’s world of pleasure and travel), I to start what has become more than six decades of service to GGS where James, with characteristic generosity, together with the Old Geelong Grammarians, financed the transformation in 2005 of most of the Hawker Library into the Michael Collins Persse Archives Centre. He was also a major benefactor of Balliol, where he and his father established a Fellowship in Ancient Philosophy, and he was elected an Honorary Fellow. A Fairfax Court adorns a Balliol annexe, Holywell Manor. In later years James funded the passage of many Australians through postgraduate degrees at Oxford. He was a director of Amalgamated Television Services Pty Ltd (Australia) from 1958-87 (chairman from 1975) and of Associated Newspapers Ltd (Australia) through the same years, a member of the Council of International House at the University of Sydney (196779), on the board of management of the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children in Sydney (1967-85), and a councillor of the National Gallery of Australia (1976-84), to name but a few areas of his public service. He endowed the Lorimer Dods Chair of Child Medicine at Sydney University. In 2010 he was elevated in the Order of Australia from Officer to its then highest rank, that of Companion. Obituaries in Australia and England, where James long spent about four months annually at his restored manor house, Stanbridge Mill in Dorset, have rightly stressed both his services to the media across the world (for a time John Fairfax and Sons owned The Spectator) and his many artistic benefactions. More than one major Australian gallery has its James Fairfax Room. In my opinion, an always latent spirituality became more and more prominent in his later years (he tended to keep the more intimately religious paintings of medieval and Renaissance masters for his own inspiration). He had a strong sense of what was decent and right – one that helped keep an essentially gay and loving man safe in days when danger of persecution, blackmail, and other injustice prevailed. Despite, or together with, his tendency to quietness and introspection, he had a great gift for friendship, regardless of status (though he enjoyed and had easy entry to exalted circles), and was loved by the large staff whom he could afford to employ and serve him well. He was devoted to his dogs. He lived, in my belief, a blessed life, wisely and well and, like his sister Caroline, has left his country and friends an enduring debt. Michael Collins Persse
37
SECTION 04 — THE MAIL ROOM
Sir Warwick’s first wife, known as Betty, was Marcie Elizabeth (1907-1995), daughter of David Wilson KC and Marcia Rudge, a charming and popular woman (described by an old friend as “cocktails and laughter”), who late in World War 2 left Warwick for a French naval captain, Pierre Gilly (1905-1982), and in 1947 bore James’s half-brother Edward Gilly (my godson), who died in 2005, leaving two sons, Alexander and Oliver, and a daughter, Aurelie-Anne. Alexander was entrusted by James with the writing of a biography that, until strength ran out, he had intended himself to write, in succession to an earlier memoir, My Regards to Broadway (1991). Caroline and James joined Betty and Pierre in China, Japan, France, and England until their mother’s second divorce in 1956, after which they continued to travel with Betty, eventually establishing her in Sydney for her final years.