Harry F. Chaplin letters from Hal Gye, 1949-1966

MLMSS 8650

fonds

1949-1966

423646

0.05 metres of textual material (1 folder)

Harry Floyd Chaplin (1895–1988), bibliophile, was the proprietor of the Chaplin-Elliott Dental Company in Sydney. For many years he was well known as a successful businessman and passionate collector of Australian books, printed ephemera, manuscripts and letters. In 1944 he was elected the foundation president of the Book Collectors’ Society of Australia. Chaplin’s collecting interests are documented in the detailed catalogues that he compiled and which were published by the Wentworth Press.

Harold Frederick Neville (Hal) Gye (1887-1967), artist and writer, was born on 22 May 1887 at Ryde, Sydney. He moved to Melbourne with his family aged 12. Hal worked in a city architect's office for about two years before becoming a law clerk, during which time the Sydney Bulletin published his first verse, 'Mrs. Melba's motor car'. He was an omnivorous reader of books on drawing and joined the art class of Alek Sass. Gye was one of the Melbourne Bohemian group which met at the Mitre Hotel and Fasoli's. He contributed political cartoons, illustrated jokes, caricatures and paragraphs to the Bulletin, and in 1910 inherited the theatrical cartoons when his friend Will Dyson went to London. He provided cartoons for the Melbourne Herald, Weekly Times, Weekly Times Annual, Sporting Globe, Punch and Table Talk, the Sydney Arrow and Referee and Smith's Weekly, as well as decorative pieces for the Lone Hand. He produced, with T. M. Hogan, The Tight Little Island (c.1912), and is also represented in Melba's Gift Book (1915) and Art in Australia.
C. J. Dennis, as editor of the Adelaide Gadfly, had accepted contributions from Gye during 1906-07. They met later in Melbourne and when Dennis requested 'decorations' for The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (1915), a most successful collaboration followed. Gye stayed with Dennis at Toolangi, producing the whimsical 'bloke cupids'; he was to provide the illustrations for most of Dennis's works until the author's objection to a direct arrangement between Angus and Robertson and Gye for Rose of Spadgers (1924) terminated the partnership. Angus and Robertson commissioned book illustrations from Gye for works by Henry Lawson, Will Ogilvie and Banjo Paterson.
In the 1920s Gye sold 'hundreds of oils', exhibited paintings and held a one-man show of monotypes. He designed the costumes for a ballet based on the 'Sentimental Bloke' in 1952. In 1963 he unveiled the Dennis memorial plaque at the Southern Cross Hotel, Melbourne.
After a serious motor accident in the early 1930s, Gye concentrated on writing and in 1937 began his humorous 'Father' and 'Jules' short stories in the Bulletin under the pseudonym of 'James Hackston'. His stories were included four times in Coast to Coast and were later collected, and illustrated by 'Hal Gye', in Father Clears Out (1966) and the posthumous The Hole in the Bedroom Floor (1969). In the 1940s and 1950s he published verse in the Bulletin under the pseudonym 'Hacko'. His facility for writing vernacular verse in the Dennis style is evidenced in The Sentimental Bloke and the Burnie Mill (1959), which he also illustrated.

References:
Chaplin Collection / National Library of Australia http://www.nla.gov.au/selected-library-collections/harry-chaplin-collection, accessed 10 August 2012
McLaren, Ian F., 'Gye, Harold Frederick Neville (Hal) (1887–1967)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/gye-harold-frederick-neville-hal-6512/text11177, accessed 10 August 2012

1 bound volume including 22 letters from Hal Gye to Harry Chaplin, 1949-1966. Also includes 2 letters from Chaplin to Gye, drafts of poems and incidental sketches by Gye.

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