Orders, Decorations & Medals - Australian Singles

Lot 3944    SESSION 18 (11.30AM FRIDAY 12TH APRIL)    Orders, Decorations & Medals - Australian Singles

Estimate $100
Bid at live.noble.com.au
SOLD $60

WAR MEDAL 1939-45. NX58006 M.Stanley. Impressed. No ribbon, otherwise very fine.

Massey Stanley, journalist employed as Political Secretary to Leader of Australian Country Party (Hon. A.G.Cameron M.P.) and Party Publicity Officer, age 36, born at Dunedin, NZ; Enl.16Jul1940 at Paddington, Sydney, NSW in 2/4 Fld Ambulance, with previous service with NZ Territorials as Sgt in Fld Amb; served in Middle East and New Guinea; appt'd Major 25Nov1942; trf to Reserve of Officers 24May1944; termination of appointment 05Jul1944.
The following article was published in The Canberra Times on Monday 20 August 1979, page 7 following the death of Massey Stanley.
MASSEY STANLEY
Death of a legendary figure of a journalist
SYDNEY: Massey Stanley, a legendary figure among Australian journalists, died in a private hospital in Sydney yesterday.
One of the stories told about him - that he once rode an elephant up the steps of Parliament House, Canberra - has survived even his own vehement denial. Born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1902, Mr Stanley came to Australia in his early 20s and embarked on a long, distinguished and colourful career as a journalist, broadcaster and public-relations officer. As political correspondent in Canberra for the Daily Telegraph he won a reputation for his penetrating analysis of the political scene. His clear style of writing was held up as a model for young journalists. For a time he worked for Sir Earle Page, the Country Party MP and Cabinet minister.
After the start of World War II, he enlisted in the Army and served in the Middle East before becoming editor of the Army magazine Salt. He also served as a war correspondent and was one of the first reporters in Hiroshima after the fall of Japan. In recent years he worked as a public- relations officer for Japanese interests. It was while he was a political correspondent in Canberra in the 1930s that the Massey Stanley legend began and grew, mainly because of the report that he rode a circus elephant up the steps of Parliament House. This story persisted through a generation of journalists until 1976, when Mr Stanley wrote a letter to The Canberra Times seeking to put the record straight.
"This never happened", he wrote. "The fact on which it is based is that, on seeing a very soiled elephant in a cavalcade heading north on a road which would take it past Parliament House, for the sake of a caption, I thereupon arranged (and I have been ashamed ever since) for a photographer to be on hand by the time it reached there. "He posed the beast on the steps, I freighted the picture to Sydney and it was published two days later with its execrable caption - "Two elephants, one white". Myself, I was not within a mile of Parliament House at the time".
The late Allan Fraser, journalist and MP, was one who did not care to accept the Stanley version. In a reply to The Canberra Times, Mr Fraser wrote, "Now that is not at all like the Massey we all knew and admired, 'for despite his foolish pranks, he was admired in the ranks'. "Better far to accept the glorious legend as I shall continue to do, rather than the somewhat squalid truth as now set out by Mr Stanley, for that would be like telling Virginia that there is no Santa Claus".
Mr Stanley is survived by his wife, two stepsons and a step daughter.