There is almost as much heat generated about John Wren as there is about Ned Kelly. James Griffin’s book will certainly raise the temperature. His thesis could be construed as ‘glory without power’. By examining every account of Wren, incident after incident, commentator after commentator, Griffin argues that Wren did not rig sporting events but did use his wealth to influence pre-selection ballots—he was a productive investor and a genuine philanthropist. Why then did he receive such damning press? This extraordinary biography leaves many puzzles and does not produce a clearer picture of the ‘real’ John Wren.
Griffin relied heavily on journalist and Wren confidant, Hugh Buggy. His retrospective and laudatory accounts in The Real John Wren were published to refute characterisations in Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory, A Novel. Griffin sets about dispelling the myths—well some of them. He argues Wren was not a Tammany Hall figure (as asserted by Frank Hardy and Manning Clark); he ran his totes with ‘fair dealing and orderliness’; and Buggy’s title of a ‘human benevolent institution’ fitted. In so doing he provides some subtle variations.
Whereas historian Niall Brennan in John Wren: Gambler, His Life and Times has Wren born in a slum of slum parents, Griffin’s Wren, a resident of Collingwood, was the product of illiterate parents who had initiative. He describes the Wren family as ‘upper working class’ asserting that the Irish who came to Australia were not as destitute as their American counterparts—they could afford the higher passage or presented well enough for state assistance. He delineates the litany of Wren’s family disasters with siblings, children and grandchildren. Unfortunately he fails to explore either cause or effect.
To understand Wren, writers have focused on his physical appearance. Brennan describes him as ‘short, bandy-legged, rather rodent-faced and almost instinctively furtive of manner’, while Griffin’s portrayal is ‘short but not inordinately so’. Ironically Griffin later refers to Wren’s nemesis, Judkins, as ‘short wiry, with sharp features and the wags said that he and Wren could have been mistaken for each other’. Griffin also dismisses Frank Hardy’s description of West/Wren as ‘Looney Tunes’—not a serious literary work.
Griffin, all too often, does to others what he so vehemently objects to in studies of Wren. He perpetuates the furphies. William Lawrence Baillieu, of Collins House fame, is pilloried for his ‘secret compositions’ during the Depression, but no mention is made of his later work