Hans Erikson the prospector

In the 1935 newspaper stoush over the number of half-caste Aborigines in central Australia, Hans Erikson stated that he had travelled widely in Australia as a dogger and a prospector. Whilst his dogging activities are covered in The Rhythm of the Shoe, his prospecting activities are not. Why? For a raconteur like Erikson who had an entertaining yarn on every topic imaginable, it is inconceivable to think that he could have lived in the peculiar world of the prospector for a time and not come across something amusing. Why didn’t he write about it?

Well, as a matter of fact, he did. On page 9 of the Sydney Morning Herald of 6 January 1945, there is an article by Hans Erikson recounting some of his experiences as a prospector in such places as Misery Creek near Enfield just south of Ballarat. As usual, the author does not bother clogging up his prose with dates and names. Why these yarns didn’t make it into The Rhythm of the Shoe is beyond me. Perhaps they were edited out by Jacaranda Press for space reasons? Perhaps they didn’t think them funny enough?

You can read the article in full at the link below. Needless to say, his opening prediction – the end of gold mining – has not come to pass!

On Misery Range: From a Prospector’s Notebookby Hans Erikson

http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/27926075 

Hans Erikson as a Dogger in Central Australia in the late 1920s

Of the two Erikson landings I know – Leif Erikson’s landing in America in 1,000 A.D. and Hans Erikson’s landing in South Australia in the 1920s – it is the latter that is far more significant. This is an entirely subjective assessment, of course, and it has to be conceded that Hans Erikson was in no way a pioneer. Swedish sailors had actually been ‘jumping ship’ in South Australia since the 1840s although not too many of them stuck around for very long. In the 1870s, Theodor Fischer, who found work inland at Outaalpa sheep station, even published a book in Sweden entitled Vagabond Life in Australia [Vagabondliv i Australien] describing his adventures in the Great South Land. Erikson probably never read it and even if he had, it would have been of little use. Change had swept across the landscape with the population creeping upwards and outwards. Politically, the Australian colonies had federated in 1901 and there was a new capital, Canberra. The frontier was still lawless but it had moved north: just where Erikson was heading step by step.

In the meantime, he took work wherever he could get it. It was mainly farm work that he got by lying about his work experience back in Sweden. Hence, the comic tales flowed from his pen such as when he worked a horse-drawn combine but forgot to sow the seed. Next he had a stint in the Commonwealth Railways as a porter and chef, fibbing that he “came from a long line of Swedish chefs.” This was, of course, long before the Muppets immortalised the Swedish chef and his specialties like Chocolate Moose. Erikson’s cooking must have been similarly bizarre because, after only one trip across the Nullarbor Plain, he was demoted to the role of porter at Oodnadatta. While performing this role, he managed to lose an entire construction train for over ten hours while sleeping off a hangover. The episode, he says, “has since become a legend” in Oodnadatta and resulted in his summary dismissal.

Oodnadatta at that time was the end of the line. If you wanted to go further north, it was by camel. Erikson was staying at the town’s only boarding house, “Alice’s Joint”, and the grand matriarch Alice was his only supporter. It was she who came up with the idea - and the starting capital - for Erikson to mount a dingo-scalping expedition all the way across the Petermann Ranges and the vast Nullarbor Plain to Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. From her armchair, she taught him everything he would need to know about survival in the desert, looking after camels and how to enlist “a good black-boy” to accompany him. “It all sounded so simple,” Erikson wrote. As usual, he does not supply the date but we can narrow it down to late in the 1920s.

The dingo or “warrigal” is the native dog of Australia thought to have been brought there by Aborigines some five to ten thousand years ago. With the extinction of the frightening marsupial mega-carnivores, it assumed the apex predator role in most parts of the continent. A cunning hunter, it does not bark but howls like a wolf. As tragic modern experience has shown, it is fully capable of killing human infants and children and savaging adults. When the Europeans arrived in Australia with their flocks of grazing animals, the dingo’s predatory habits took a heavy toll. In 1912, the South Australian government passed the Wild Dogs Act offering bounty payments for dingo scalps delivered to police officers and other government officials. Western Australia and the Northern Territory followed suit. But it was the Western Australians who paid the most generous bounty: just shy of two pounds per scalp. And that was at the heart of old Alice’s rort: Erikson would take the scalps he got in South Australia and the Northern Territory and cash them in at Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. Who would know where they came from? According to Erikson, there had been a time when the police would accept dingo ears rather than a full scalp. But some enterprising rogue had duped them by presenting fake ears he made using other parts of the dog’s hide. He got away with it until one of his confidantes dobbed him in. Erikson’s comment on this scam was: “I only wished I had thought of the ear’s idea first.” Sometimes little comments say an awful lot and this one shows Erikson’s admiration for an ingenious fraud, especially where the trickster gets away with it. I feel sure he would have read Uncle Willy’s story about Nicholls Eastbourne: the man who made a fortune by duping South Sea islanders with his gold-coloured chips. Would Erikson have approved of that cunning deception of innocent people or was it only okay when the duped party was a government or big corporation? Like the big newspaper duped by Uncle Willy sitting in his little grey cottage in Sweden tapping out “eyewitness accounts” of the Messina earthquake and getting paid for it?

There was one little trick that Erikson did use, however, in common with nearly all the other ‘doggers’ operating at the time. He used Aboriginal know-how. Nobody understood dingos and their habits better than the Aborigines and nobody could track and hunt them more efficiently. Alice told Erikson he would need to recruit a “black-boy” for the journey, preferably one who had never seen a white man before and certainly not one who came from a mission station. Erikson’s black companion was Jacky, an athletic young man he came across on the edge of the Nullarbor and who had never met a white man before. I find this last assertion hard to believe, particularly as Jacky later on showed that he was expert in handling misbehaving camels, something he must have learned from prior experience with the animals, most likely on camel trains.

There were other doggers in central Australia at this time including Reg (R.M.) Williams who would later become famous as “The Outback Outfitter” selling rustic frontier fashion to Australia’s majority city-slickers, the types who, if they ever did visit the Outback, would probably refuse to leave the air-conditioned cabin of the Pajero. Williams traded with the Aborigines for dingo scalps in much the same way as Europeans traded with Canadian Indians for beaver skins. Other doggers such as Stan Ferguson, Harold Brown, Allan Brumby and Paddy de Conlay had Aboriginal wives and half-caste children.[1] This “inconvenient truth” was not unknown to the authorities. In 1935, the Presbyterian missionary, Dr Charles Duguid, visited north-west South Australia and was shocked by the extent of interracial breeding he encountered. That same year in Adelaide, the Chief Protector of Aborigines reported to the government his concern about doggers fathering half-caste children. But bureaucracies knowing about something and openly acknowledging it are two quite different things as Erikson would later learn in his famous nom de plume dogfight with the government over this very issue.

The Advertiser in Adelaide reported on 28 March 1935:

With the blacks and like the blacks, [white doggers] travel from soak to spring and from spring to waterhole, euro for their meat and flour and tea their only rations. In the camel-boxes or the pack-bags, they carry a stock of mirrors, red handkerchiefs and pocket-knives, to barter with the tribes for the dead warrigal. Two or three times a year, the spoils are sent in … to be counted over at the police-station or the store, a credit balance against flour and tobacco … The pursuit of the wild dog to his lair, further into the desert and the ranges, is certainly colonising the country and opening our eyes to the geography of the unknown, but there is no doubt that in the process of this weird new industry, dependent upon a Government policy on behalf of the pastoralists a thousand miles further in, the two good Australians, the black-fellow and the dingo, are coming in for a great deal of unnecessary exploitation.

Erikson gives a detailed account of his dingo hunting technique. The dogs were poisoned with strychnine using carefully handled baits sweetened with treacle. One of the great advantages of strychnine was that it did not kill the animals immediately but made them very thirsty so that they set off towards the nearest water hole. This was a reliable aid to locating water; all one had to do was track the dying dog and continue on in the direction it was taking and one would find the local water source. Over thirteen months, Erikson claims to have collected 1,200 scalps. The big picture is mind-boggling. By 1934, over half a million scalps had been handed in by doggers throughout this region of Australia. And yet the dingo survives to this day! Why hasn’t it been wiped out after so systematic a persecution? Why didn’t it follow the thylacine of Tasmania into extinction? Some have suggested that the Aborigines were careful to leave enough bitches alive so that the species (and the revenue source) would continue. The dingo bounty debate has raged in Australia for many years, complicated in recent times by the interbreeding of feral dogs and dingos. Some say these bounties just don’t work. Some say they do work and the dingo is only decades away from extinction. There seems to be a good scientific case to show that a stable dingo population helps Australia’s many small marsupials whose numbers are generally in sharp decline due to predation by smaller feral predators like foxes and cats. Economically, are dingo bounties essential for the grazing industry’s viability or are they merely a form of rural social welfare, a crumb brushed off the dinner table of highly-paid city bureaucrats by conservative Bible-belt politicians? I wonder what Hans Erikson would think? Whatever side he took, we can be sure he would argue it passionately and with embellishment.

Historically, the doggers’ use of strychnine apparently had a dark side, too. Paddy de Conlay was accused of poisoning Pitjantjatjara people in the Petermann Ranges in 1936 by leaving them a bag of flour laced with the poison. This accusation – which came from the Aborigines themselves - was relayed to the government in Adelaide by Charles Mountford. No action was taken in this instance (Australian justice bureaucrats generally had no stomach for going to court on the back of evidence from illiterate Aborigines) but the authorities did have “gin men” like de Conlay in their sights. In 1939, the law was changed making it illegal for white men to “habitually consort” with Aboriginal women. De Conlay responded by abandoning South Australia and crossing the Northern Territory border. R.M. Williams gives his version of the story:

Paddy solved the problem by marrying a white bar girl he picked up (I was his best man). Meanwhile, he kept the harem close by and a serious attempt was organised by the Aboriginal husbands of the borrowed wives to liquidate the offender. But Paddy got in first and managed to liquidate the conspirators. Duly charged with a capital crime, Paddy claimed self-defence, which the judge accepted.[2]

Rough frontier justice! Alice had been careful to advise the young Erikson about consorting with Aboriginal women and not to do it without permission from the male elders. One cannot read The Rhythm of the Shoe without getting the impression that Erikson had a robust sex drive. Did he “go combo” during his Outback adventure? He clearly had ample opportunity but, of course, there is no hint in the book that he took that opportunity up. There was an “embarrassing” incident in Alice Springs when a “gin” named her “piccaninny” “Hans Erikson” but this was not an uncommon practice and nobody suspected that he was father to the inky black infant. The closest brush he had with this lifestyle is touched upon in chapter 7 “Charlie and the Tchonk-Tchonk.” Charlie was a “combo” boundary rider who Erikson worked with for a time. His harem was always camped some distance away. The boss knew about them and provided extra supplies for them. One cold winter desert night, Erikson and Charlie were sleeping in a galvanised iron hut. For some inexplicable reason, Erikson’s sleep was disturbed and he awoke to pitch darkness. He struck a match and to his horror saw a huge black snake coiled up on Charlie’s chest as he snored away. Erikson then came up with the ridiculous plan of trying to kill the snake with a broom. Thankfully, the plan transformed into a general panic that included the poor snake and nobody got bitten. Erikson and Charlie were outside the hut in their underpants. They didn’t have the courage to go back inside and so stumbled their way to where Charlie’s wives were camped. The sight of the two men – almost blue with cold – caused much hilarity amongst the Aborigines. There the story ends. Or did it? Did Erikson sleep alone that night?

When I read “Charlie and the Tchonk-Tchonk,” I am convinced that Erikson did experience the real Outback and gain a first-hand knowledge of white-black affairs at that time. The dialogue reeks of openness and authenticity – the kind that only comes when two men see themselves as equals and do not fear being judged by the other. Erikson says he became “great mates” with the 72-year-old Charlie and this is evident in their discussions. When I read the turbulent 1935 debate in which Erikson told Minister Paterson that he had traveled in central Australia by camel and vehicle in the guise of a prospector and dingo scalp hunter and had met hundreds of people who took him as one of their own, I immediately thought of Charlie. Erikson went on to challenge the Minister to travel to central Australia, quietly and unannounced, and find out for himself what was going on there. That, of course, is the last thing Paterson wanted to do: he was hoping to bury the whole thing in paperwork denials so that the British race could save face and hold the high moral ground against the emerging Nazis. Paterson’s ignorant hypocrisy must have been galling to people like Erikson and Xavier Herbert – as it is to us today who have the luxury of hindsight. The argument that, by and large, white men were not consorting with Aboriginal women in central Australia in 1935 is akin to the argument in 2003 that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction: it was a false premise upon which was constructed an agenda for action.

Much has changed since the 1930s and we are in danger of not fully comprehending why “inter-racial breeding” was such a delicate topic then. Why was it a big deal? The following letter appeared in the Brisbane Telegraph on 2 April 1935:

Sir – One of the best biographies of Herr Hitler that has yet been published in the English language is “Germany’s Hitler” by H. A. Heinz. Hitler’s whole life is dealt with. We learn how he experienced a grinding poverty which never soured him; we see him proved a selfless man who won the nation to him because of his own essential truth. We learn of his black hour, during which he himself lost faith after the failure of the 1923 putsch. Ludendorff precipitated this failure himself because he took the word of honour of captured democratic officials and let them go and they broke their parole and prepared for the reception of the patriots by machine guns. Hitler’s biographer offers us no hint of any romance in the career of this leader. Many will be surprised to hear that the Fuhrer is a vegetarian and a non smoker. Hitler arrived because he would not compromise with truth nor would he practise any half measures to placate anyone. He will not swing to the right or swing to the left but he will always go straight on. That is why he is now Germany’s Hitler and why he will some day be “The White Man’s Hitler.” Herr Hitler has the solid support of the German nation and all the propaganda emanating from biased and tainted sources has failed to disprove that Herr Hitler is anything but the nation’s chosen and popular dictator. – Yours, &c J. H. Beecham.

“The White Man’s Hitler” told the German Reichstag on 30 January 1937 that “it is the grandest and most sacred task of man to preserve his race.”[3] To question a sacred task is to display disobedient ignorance towards the divine. The extreme Right at this time blandly accepted “race” as a fundamental biological keynote fact and simply asserted that racial purity meant “strength” and racial impurity “degeneration” without providing any compelling proof or rationale. It was the kind of self-evident quasi-sacred truth that has led to eras of persecution all down the ages. And it wasn’t simply a case of asserting that the white race was superior to other races. Extreme Right wing writers – like Willy Grebst – were very admiring of “pure” non-white races and disapproved of their being “missionised.” They were perfectly adapted to their environment and should be left alone to live as their ancestors had. When non-white races were missionised or interbred with the white race, degeneration set in. Hence, Erikson back in the 1930s, for example, viewed missionary blacks as unfit and untrustworthy. The problem he saw with “half-castes” was that they became outcasts who belonged nowhere, couldn’t get a job and thus became financial burdens upon the State. Better to sterilise them, he argued with some timidity. Thirty years later and after the horrors of World War 2, he would write of “full-blood” Aborigines:

Whatever may happen to them [the Aborigines] in the future, I am thankful that I have had the opportunity of meeting some of them before they had become contaminated by association with whites. I thought they were wonderful. The superiority of the blacks lies more in the moral sense than in their ability to survive in the bush. Admittedly they are experts at bush-craft. But so can a white man become an expert given the same amount of training.[4]

Here was a white man so disgusted with his own murderous Aryan “race” that he is willing to concede moral superiority to the Aborigines and to treat as tainted any Aborigines who had the misfortune of “associating” with whites. In the early 1900s, Willy Grebst would have approved of the above passage, perhaps omitting or toning down the suggestion of Aboriginal moral superiority. Yes, he recognised that the white colonial race had blood on its hands but I do not believe that vain, patriotic Willy would go as far as placing Aborigines above educated upper class Swedes in the moral spectrum. That would be out of the question. He, however, had not witnessed the end point of Barthold Lundén’s beloved Nazism. Judging by Erikson’s view, the “White Man’s Hitler” clearly left a legacy of guilt extending beyond the borders of Germany.

For a great many people, however, I think the real fear underlying all the concerns about racial interbreeding was in fact the very opposite to the Nazi façade of racial superiority. It was a fear that “bastard races” would combine the best elements of each race and produce a race superior to the pure original versions from which they sprung. In Australia, this meant that the half-castes would inherit both the white man’s intelligence and the Aborigines’ endurance, a combination that would make them supremely adapted to life in the Outback such that they would eventually supplant the “pure” but weak Europeans and the “primitive” blacks. We have seen that Erikson sought to debunk the notion of the Aborigines having special powers of survival; Europeans can become equally skilled given the same training. Equally, Aborigines are no less intelligent than their European counterparts and, given the chance, can achieve in academic pursuits just as well. But while people were attaching religious devotion to the blurry notion of “race,” they naturally wanted to see their own race occupy a place of privilege and were anxious about any threat to that privilege.

Not everyone, however, was consumed by notions of race. Some people of goodwill simply looked at the facts of what was happening in the Outback – the kidnapping of Aboriginal women, the brutality of their treatment at times, the reprisals, the debilitating effect upon traditional marriage systems – and argued out of compassion for some sort of segregation between the races that would allow traditional Aboriginal society to preserve itself. The missionaries, of course, did not ultimately wish to see a preservation of Aboriginal culture but a transformation of it into Biblical likeness: a Garden of Eden where they got to choose which plants were weeds and which not. As Willy Grebst loved to point out, the missionaries did much to prepare their converts to be more easily worked over by the less holy members of the Christian community. Those who survived the diseases that spread about in the mission stations, that is, became easy pickings for the likes of Nicholls Eastbourne.

Hans Erikson and Jacky successfully made their way through some of the harshest environments on earth to Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. There, Erikson cashed in his 1,200 dingo scalps and sold his two camels and all his equipment. With 2,500 pounds in hand, he took Jacky to Adelaide and then eventually back to Alice at Oodnadatta where they parted ways. Erikson “was not sorry to part company with” Jacky at this point, perhaps understandable after 13 months together. Reading between the lines, I would not be surprised if the young Aborigine had realised his own vital contribution to the success of the expedition and felt under-compensated for it. Fortunately, it is now becoming better known how many of the famous white Australian explorers owed a huge debt of gratitude to the Aborigines who accompanied them, finding food and water and liaising with the local inhabitants.

So it was that Hans Erikson, whose life had been saved by an old Saami woman near the Arctic Circle, who admired the intricacy of African native languages and the survival skills of Aborigines in the desert, could yet despise the mission blacks and propose the sterilisation of the half-caste offspring of “gin men” like his friend, Charlie. He was a man of many contradictions, a man of confused times.

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[1] Tom Gara, “Doggers in the North-West,” www.history.sa.gov.au/history/conference/tom_gara.pdf

[2] R. M. Williams, A Song in the Desert (Angus & Robertson, 1998) p. 148

[3] International University Society’s Reading Course, Text Matter and Biographical Studies, Volume 8 (Nottingham) p. 277

[4] TROTS, p. 47

Hans Erikson's Childhood as Lars Olof Grebst

Hans Erikson was born Lars Olof Grebst in Gothenburg in 1906. Nearly everything I know about his childhood comes from his own pen, The Rhythm of the Shoe published in Brisbane in 1964. That account is sadly bereft of dates, names and other specifics keenly sought by biographers. Despite this – or perhaps because of it – the book is a funny, entertaining and captivating account of his life with its many joys and sorrows. I know nothing of the editing process the book went through but I am greatly impressed by the author’s command of the English language and his ability to develop a storyline and deliver a punchline. The Rhythm of the Shoe is a great little read. For me, it easily surpasses the verbose and repetitious writings of Erikson’s uncle, Willy Andersson Grebst. It is well to say that Willy was writing in another era when another style was in vogue. Had Willy Grebst been alive and writing in the 1960s, I doubt very much that his sense of self-importance and propriety would have permitted him to match the amiable, self-deprecating humour of his nephew. In the end, they became very different men.

Erikson wrote this of his childhood:

It makes me very annoyed when people say that one’s childhood is the best time of one’s life. If I had my life over again I would gladly skip, not only my early childhood, but the first twenty years of my life. Being the moulding period of one’s character, one has to suffer all the frustrations and discomforts, call them secondary birth-pangs if you wish, inevitably preceding the making of a man.[1]

I think Erikson would need to skip more than the first twenty years of his life to reach a point where he was at peace within himself. But it is no doubt true that many of his emotional problems stemmed from his childhood. We have already examined the love-hate relationship he had with his mother, an upper class socialite who ‘outsourced’ his upbringing to wet nurses and boarding schools. His father, too, he accuses of rarely being around, always off pursuing “big business.” I wonder how much of this is true and how much is the subjective, self-centred and unfair view of a child.

And a sickly child at that. Sweden was hit by epidemics of polio in 1905 and 1911. The latter epidemic involved nearly four thousand cases, one of them being Lars Olof Grebst. His parents were tireless in their efforts to have him cured. He was taken to the best doctors in Sweden and Germany and even to a faith healer. I feel sure he would have been examined by the Swedish expert on polio – the man who named it ‘Heine-Medin disease’ in 1907 – Dr Otto Ivar Wickman. Despite his tremendous knowledge and expertise, Wickman had a stutter that was the cause of his medical colleagues denying him the opportunity to lecture at university. Frustrated by this, Wickman shot himself through the head on 20 April 1914. When medical science failed to cure their child, the Grebsts became desperate. Wally Grebst had heard about an old Lapp woman in the far north of Sweden who claimed to be able to cure polio. She tried to get the woman to come to Gothenburg but her pleas went unanswered. Harald Grebst then travelled to Lapland to meet her and bring her back. He discovered that she was totally illiterate and adamant that she would not be leaving Lapland. She said that the boy would have to be left with her for six months. So it was that Lars Olof and one of his nurses was sent by train and reindeer sled to the old woman’s cabin in the wilderness near the Arctic Circle. The old woman refused to let the nurse stay and had her taken back to the railway station. Lars Olof was left all by himself with the toothless old Lapp who looked like a witch from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. “She could easily have hired herself out to haunt houses,” he wrote. Of course, the Lapps – or Saami as they are more properly called – are culturally very different from the Swedes. The Swedish and English languages are more closely related to Hindi than they are to Saami and even from Viking times, the Saami were avoided because of their power to give “the evil eye” to good Christian folk. So it is little wonder that the young Lars Olof was terrified.

The treatment began. Every day, even in winter, she collected roots and herbs and made a brew for him to drink. “It tasted like squashed worms.” She hugged him, massaged his limbs and made compresses with Stockholm tar. She sang to him in her strange language and combed his hair. Neither of them ever washed but he found their earthy odour to be pleasant. She hunted squirrels and hares and, along with the reindeer meat she got from her kinsfolk, added them to a huge pot of vegetable stew that was forever simmering on a fire. It was delicious. Gradually, the young patient became so fond of “his old witch,” he never wanted to get better and go home. Harald Grebst sent one of his employees to Lapland to check on his son’s progress. When he arrived, the old Lapp was out hunting and Lars Olof crawled over and opened the door. This was seen as a miracle.

In time, the old woman cured him of polio completely. When Harald arrived to take his son home, Lars Olof did not want to leave. He tried to persuade the Lapp to come back to Gothenburg. She wouldn’t hear of it. Father, son and old woman wept openly.

Back in civilisation, Lars Olof’s education went disastrously. He claims to have been expelled from four of Sweden’s best schools. These included “the most exclusive school in Sweden” – which, as usual, he does not name – and where he sat next to “the son of the crown prince.” One doesn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to recognise this as Lundberg’s School in Värmland. Established in 1896 using an English boarding school model, it has educated a succession of youngsters from the Royal Family including the sons of a Crown Prince: Gustaf Adolf (1906-1947), the Duke of Västerbotten who would blossom into a Nazi sympathiser and perish in a plane crash in Copenhagen and Sigvard Bernadotte (1907-2002), the Duke of Uppland who would be stripped of his titles by the snobbish Royal Family as punishment for marrying a German commoner. Sigvard went on to become a famous designer in Germany and Denmark. In 1929, he designed the window in the church at Lundberg’s School. It is an exclusive educational establishment that has attracted its fair share of criticism in a country with strong socialist undercurrents. And it was used as the setting for the 2003 film “Evil” [Ondskan] directed by Mikael Håfström and based on the novel by Jan Guillou, a grindingly wicked tale of bullying and cruelty from step-fathers and fellow students.

Lundberg’s School kindly confirmed for me that Lars Olof Grebst was a student there from 1917 to 1920 and a resident of the boarding house called Berga. The Crown Prince’s sons attended from 1918. The school was unable to supply me with any information about Grebst’s alleged expulsion so for that we must rely upon his own account in The Rhythm of the Shoe. He confesses to being part of a student plot to “get” the school sportsmaster during a ski-jumping lesson. At the top of a mountain, Grebst and the other students attacked the teacher, tied him up and rolled him down the mountain towards the creek at the bottom. He did not roll straight, however, and veered over a precipice, breaking a leg and fracturing some ribs. In a panic, the students drew straws: Grebst and another boy lost out. The other boy went for help while Grebst stayed with the injured teacher. Both were expelled. Given that the teacher himself would have had his own recollection of the incident, I would not be surprised if Grebst had been the ringleader, or one of them, behind the whole affair. In any event, it was 1920 and Lars Olof Grebst was sent back to Gothenburg in disgrace. One can imagine the reception he received from his parents, themselves struggling in a loveless marriage, and from dear Uncle Willy who would not see the year out.

“I think it a mistake to revisit the scenes of your childhood,” Hans Erikson wrote explaining why he had no desire to ever return to Sweden. But he then goes on to give a tantalising, almost homesick account of Christmas in Sweden and all the old traditions the Grebsts followed each year. His favourite part was going to church early in the morning on horse-drawn sleds decorated with little silver bells and birch-bark torches. The church sat atop a hill surrounded by pine trees and one could see the torches of all the other sleds slowly making their way upwards through the snow and ice. The church service itself was only a few minutes long on account of the poor, sweating horses outside. “We Swedes feel that Christmas is not only for the humans but for every living thing,” he wrote with more than a hint of patriotism and forgetting to mention the vast array of meat dishes awaiting the worshippers when they got home from their sacred duties. One of those mythical Swedish national attributes is ‘kindness to animals’ and I recall reading an article in Vidi in which Willy Grebst railed against the cruelty of a bullfight he had witnessed in Lima, Peru. You would never see a bullfight in Sweden. A factory farm – well, that’s another matter altogether. Or is it?

Before 1920 was finished, Willy Grebst was dead, Harald and Wally Grebst were separated and Hans Erikson was on the high seas never to see his parents or his homeland again. It truly was a watershed year.

I cannot see how Erikson could have “run away to sea” without his father’s knowledge. Harald Grebst was very prominent in the shipping life of Gothenburg and no captain would take the Consul’s son on board without official permission. It is my educated guess that Harald, in despair and exasperation at the Lundberg’s School episode, forced – or at least allowed - his son to go to sea in the hope that it would “make a man of him.” In The Rhythm of the Shoe, Erikson says he often heard the expression ‘the sea will make a man of you’ and he debunks it savagely. When the little, rich boy sailed out the Göta River as galley-boy on a square-rigged ship, he soon found himself in rough company. Sailors hated the sea but were unemployable away from it. There was no refrigeration, the food was ghastly and the drinking water rusty. The living quarters were cramped and pest-infested. When you got to port, the locals locked themselves away in fear. The only establishment that welcomed you was the brothel. Using condoms was considered unmanly and, as a result, the whole crew had sexually-transmitted infections. Young Erikson held a pot steady while a Finnish sailor treated his condition by dipping his crown jewels into boiling water. It was all a terrible shock to the fourteen year old who had just come from sitting beside the Crown Prince’s son in the most exclusive school in the kingdom. For the first two months at sea, he cried himself to sleep nearly every night. Things got worse, not better, but he just had to bear it in silence. Galley-boys were paid five shillings a month so it took him a long time to save up for his first visit to the brothel. The big occasion was in the Palm Café in Durban. He nervously insisted on using a condom and the whole thing was over in a flash leaving him feeling a little dazed. But at least now he was “a man at last” like the rest of the crew. Erikson moved from square-rigged ships to steamers where life on board was a little more comfortable. But the life of the sailor remained much the same.

There was no way in the world that Hans Erikson was going to spend a lifetime at sea enduring bleak conditions on miserable wages and entertaining himself at brothels. He had been raised as an uptown boy with his eyes looking beyond the horizon to the exotic shores his father and uncle had explored before him. It was only a matter of time before he left the galley and ‘jumped ship’ at some foreign port. In The Rhythm of the Shoe, he says that port was Melbourne in 1925. Archival records show, however, that he arrived in Melbourne on board the Swedish steamer, Unden, in May 1924. I have no idea when he first boarded the Unden and whether he was part of her crew on 28 January 1922 when she escorted the iceberg-damaged Garthforce into Port Natal. ‘Jumping ship’ was a perilous business. If you were caught and returned to your ship before it sailed, you were made to work your way back to your homeport without pay. It was therefore critical that you remained on the run until the ship sailed. Erikson knew this and so headed inland as fast as he could and ended up in Warburton. What defeated him was lack of money and the fact that he couldn’t speak a word of English. Like his father and uncle, he was fluent in German and was fortunate enough to meet a German man who helped him for a while. He got some work and was the butt of many practical jokes based on his poor English: on one occasion, the other workers sent him to the boss to ask for “six inches of your popubloodylation rod.” He, of course, obeyed, not knowing the trouble it would cause. In the end, hunger got the better of him and when he overheard some Norwegian sailors saying they needed a byssegut [galley-boy], he joined them and set sail for South Australia.

The Rhythm of the Shoe has many little date discrepancies and I suspect the truth was manipulated in some areas to increase the entertainment value of the story. For example, I have some difficulty with the idea that Hans Erikson didn’t speak a word of English. We know that the Grebsts were very much a pro-German family and so it isn’t surprising that Harald, Willy and young Lars Olof were fluent in German. Indeed, Harald and Willy were schooled in Germany – at least for a time. But Willy also spoke French and English and Harald must have had some grasp of English for his consular duties, his exporting of timber to Britain and for when he represented Sweden in the United States. Willy’s wife was an American who presumably spoke English and, if Lars Olof had much to do with her, there was an opportunity for him to develop a grasp of English. Did he study English at school? I was never able to find out. We must remember, too, that the 1935 newspaper article by Eskil Sundström – which Erikson confessed to writing – contains reference to him listening to an Arab speaker in London making impressive use of an alien language. One assumes the Arab was speaking English in London and that Erikson was there, listening and comprehending. Was this pre-1924 when the young galley-boy was sailing the trading routes? Or did Erikson make some subsequent trip to London pre-1935 that he fails to include in his memoirs? Or did he just plagiarise the incident or simply make it up? We may never know. But, using as his starting point a zero knowledge of the local lingo, Erikson was able to empty into his memoirs a swagful of humorous anecdotes about his adventures learning English in Australia. In fact, he claims the whole exercise set him back: he had to unlearn Australian in order to learn English in the years ahead! They are two different languages.

In any event, the battle-weary young Erikson joined the Norwegian ship bound for South Australia. As the hunger pangs subsided in the galley and he was peeling a mountain of potatoes, he began to have second thoughts about resuming the life of a byssegut and returning to Sweden a failure. When the ship docked in Port Germain, he was off again, fleeing inland as fast as he could go. And ‘inland’ in South Australia, he was soon to discover, is a very different place to the verdant fields and forests of Scandinavia. He turned his back on the sea, perhaps forever, and walked towards the deserts that are the Red Centre, the Dead Heart of Australia. The little rich boy from Gothenburg was going to have to toughen up some more.

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[1] TROTS, pp 1-2

Hans Erikson on his parents: "They were like strangers to me." Or not!

“They were like strangers to me.”

Hans Erikson “ran away to sea” at the age of 14 years and never saw his parents again. “They were like strangers to me,” he wrote in his memoir, The Rhythm of the Shoe. But I don’t believe him. There is evidence to show that he corresponded with them and received news about them, long after he sailed down the Göta River and out into the grey Atlantic never to return. His childhood was one of material privilege and emotional angst and in so many ways it made him the tragic man he became. Once away from Sweden, he writes that he never wanted to return. And yet he doggedly held to his Swedish citizenship right to the bitter end, never really considering himself a native of the new land that had adopted him, warts and all.

Erikson’s father, Harald Axel Grebst, was born in Gothenburg on 24 November 1876, just over a year after his half-brother, Willy. Their father, Axel Olof Andersson, a sea captain, was prominent in Gothenburg commercial life as the Consul to Cuba, a position his son would subsequently assume as well as becoming Consul to Costa Rica. Harald Grebst represented Sweden at the International Commercial Congress held in Philadelphia from 12 October to 1 November 1899. It was billed as “a Conference of All Nations for the extension of Commercial Intercourse” and all the Australian colonies sent representatives. His biography in the Congress proceedings reads as follows:

Mr. Grebst was born on November 24, 1876, in Gothenburg, Sweden. After passing the elementary school in Gothenburg, he went to Germany, where for five years he attended a private school in Dresden, Saxony. On his return to Gothenburg, he spent two years in the Commercial School of that city, and since 1896 has been connected with his father's firm, Andersson & Lindberg, of the same place. This firm imports from and exports to Sweden all kinds of metal. Coal, oil and machinery for ship-building purposes, as well as the greatest part of pig iron imported into Sweden, are carried by steamers belonging to them. Timber, which is sawed at their own saw mills in Gothenburg, is exported by them to Great Britain, France and Belgium.

The other half of Andersson & Lindberg was Charles Felix Lindberg who died in 1909. He left the firm some years before his death. His estate was said to be worth 2.2 million kronor and he made many generous donations to the city of Gothenburg. Grateful city officials erected a monument over his grave.

Meanwhile, Harald Grebst became known as a wheeling and dealing entrepreneur and a risk taker. In 1904, he imported from France the first ever electric car in Sweden. It was a Kriegerdroska with a Landaulette coach made by the Compagnie Parisienne des Voitures Electriques. He later sold it to George Seaton, one of Gothenburg’s wealthiest citizens, and it can now be seen in the City Museum along with some driving jackets circa 1900 believed to have once been his.

Harald Grebst married Wally Amalia Klatzö (born in 1871). Erikson, who was born in Gothenburg on 13 January 1906, wrote in his memoirs that he had a sister nine years older than him (born 1897?) and a half-sister twenty years older (from his mother’s previous marriage: she must have been a mere 15 years old when she gave birth to this child). At age 22, the half-sister married an Italian prince and was rarely seen in Sweden again. It seems from all this that Harald and Wally Grebst should have been married around 1897. However, the intriguing diary of a Norwegian whaler, Alexander Lange, who was in the Falkland Islands on Friday 22 December 1905 states:

At last the mail boat arrived. I went overboard and on the way out in the small steamboat, I met several of the passengers, one of whom was a Swedish gentleman by the name of Grebst, from Gothenborg and his wife, an American lady. They were on their honeymoon and he was traveling, he said as a correspondent for the Goteborg Commerce and Shipping Newspaper and would be in South America for 2 or 3 years. He has been reporting the Russo-Japanese war and spoke much of Mukden and Port Arthur. He gave his address as Consul Harald Grebst, Gothenborg, but perhaps that is his father. He himself was a man of about 30 years, a really pleasant and forthright man.[1]

This “Harald Grebst” helped Lange by interpreting for him, speaking French to a Spanish-speaking local from Punta Arenas who was keen to have the Norwegian start up a whaling venture with him. There is no mention of the honeymooners having a daughter with them or of the fact that Mrs Grebst was heavily pregnant with Hans Erikson at the time – he was born in Gothenburg on 13 January 1906, some three weeks later. Indeed, it seems highly unlikely to me that the Grebsts would sail from the Falkland Islands all the way back to Gothenburg just in time for the birth. Harald told Lange he intended to stay in South America for two or three years. I am suspicious about this odd situation and two possibilities present themselves. The first is that Harald’s companion was not his wife but a mistress and that Wally Amalia Grebst was back in Gothenburg with her young daughter preparing for her son’s birth. The second is that the honeymooning couple was, in fact, Willy Grebst and his American wife and there was either an innocent misunderstanding about identity or Willy saw some advantage in falsely passing himself off to Lange as his brother the Consul.

Source: Wikipedia

The second possibility turns out to be the correct one: Alexander Lange met Willy Grebst, not Harald. Records show that, on 6 December 1905, Harald and Wally Grebst were in Gothenburg buying land at Billdal where they would later build their charming jugend-style house, Villa Dalfrid.[2] Harald’s attention had been drawn to Billdal in the summer of 1904 when visiting his father’s business partner, Charles Felix Lindgren. He took the opportunity to go hunting and explore the area and found what he thought was the perfect house site. It was protected from westerly and easterly winds, had shade and good water access. An architect, Gustaf Elliott, was engaged to draw up the plans. His most famous building commission was the Baptist Church on Linnégatan in Gothenburg. The Grebst’s Billdal house has 650 square meters of luxurious woodworked living space. In the dining hall – where 35 guests can be seated for dinner – the artist, Alf Wallander, painted a series of murals depicting the saga of Erik XIV, the turbulent, schizophrenic king who was ultimately poisoned with arsenic. It was in this glorious luxury that Hans Erikson lived the first few years of his life. It didn’t last long though. Harald sold Villa Dalfrid to Louis Stankewitz in 1909 because of “financial difficulties.” With his constant wheeling and dealing, that phrase would dog him all his life.

Check out Villa Dalfrid at this link:

http://www.skonahem.com/inspiration/Inspirerandehem/k-markt-jugenddrom

Political tensions in Europe were now rising. Britain and Germany were engaged in a naval arms race that was making the Swedes nervous. This was particularly so in Gothenburg, a port city that relied heavily on the free passage of merchant shipping. In 1913, Harald Grebst was listed as one of the founders of the Gothenburg Voluntary Motorboat Fleet [Göteborgs Frivilliga Motorbåtsflottilj], a private, nationalistic effort hoping to somehow bolster the country’s defence of its neutrality in the face of war. That same year, Harald published a book entitled Sweden’s Merchant Fleet [Sveriges Handelsflotta] describing the merchant vessels that were soon to face the fury of World War 1. With the outbreak of war, neutral Swedes were divided into pro-German and pro-British factions. Both Harald and Willy Grebst having been educated in Germany, it is not surprising that they were pro-German. Willy Grebst dealt with the subject in his novel, Bread:

At three o’clock in the morning, Viktor again stood outside the restaurant. Through the banqueting room’s open window, he saw the glitter and magnificence inside. The music rang out into the park’s stillness. Now and again the people joined in with the melody. The couples whirled past without pause. Down in the food hall, white clad waiters hurried to and fro with their trays full of food and drink.

“Don’t mind me,” Viktor said to a private chauffeur waiting with his car at the entrance. “Thousands of crowns of posh food going into mouths that aren’t hungry.”

The chauffeur turned away.

“Haven’t you eaten?” snorted Viktor. “Or have you sold your soul at the same time as your body? Are you a worker?”

“I look after my place and don’t give a damn about things that don’t concern me.”

“Ah go to hell with your stinking cart.”

“With this stinking cart, me and mine make a living. And because of this stinking cart and thousands of others, thousands of workers in the workshops make a living. Go to hell yourself if you want. Leave me in peace. I’m looking after myself.”

Viktor wanted to answer with heated, hateful words. But his attention was caught by a pair of gentlemen coming out of the restaurant. They were wearing fur and top hats. White scarves shone under their collars. Shiny dress shoes glistened in the light. They were conducting a high-sounding conversation.

“It’s the Germans’ fault,” Viktor heard one of them call out. “It’s their fault that people are starving and freezing. They sink our grain cargoes and our coal. Nothing that crosses their path escapes its fate. It’s the damn Germans we have to thank for all the trouble and mischief in the land.”

The other was very quiet. “You are completely one-eyed. It was the English who started the arms race at sea. Despite our export ban, the whole time they accused us unjustly of sending necessities to Germany. This although they knew through their spies that our export laws are observed to the strictest levels. The Germans only continued what the English had started. The one is a logical consequence of the other. You have to be fair and see the thing from their point of view.”

“You defend the submarine war!” The first speaker became more and more heated. “Something more inhuman the world has never seen.”

“I don’t defend it. I’m only trying to explain it. Let us repeat what has happened. England started by capturing our boats. They took our grain cargoes and consumed them themselves. They took our saltpetre to make gunpowder. When the Germans at last noticed that the English ‘inspections’ of our steamers led to one confiscation after another, they declared the whole area around England under blockade. Any boats going to the enemy’s harbours would be sunk, they said. That’s it.”

“But the English insisted that they go there.”

“There lies the English extreme guilt. Their pride didn’t want to let them indirectly admit that they are no longer rulers of the sea. Had they exempted the neutral ships from compulsory visits to the English inspection harbours, they would have thereby admitted that it was the Germans and not themselves who had command of the ocean. Had the English really been the magnanimous people they like to be seen as, they would have realised their inability to protect the neutral tonnage within the war zone and let it well alone. But their confounded pride wouldn’t let them. And for that we are now the meat in the sandwich. The Germans would be stupid not to match the English. And because of that it has become their miserable lot to execute the violent deed that the English incited.”

“How you talk! Your words only prove that you are more German than Swedish.”

“And you are not Swedish but English. It explains why you fawned to that poor swaying English Consul General up there. But I understand you and pity you. To need to belittle yourself in this way for the sake of some damn license. Shame on you!”

“You don’t support Germany but you get licenses from there …”

“Hold on …”

The altercation became an open squabble. Both men accused each other back and forth. In the end, they parted in deep anger. They swept through the door and disappeared.

“Bloody profiteering toffs,” Viktor mumbled after them. “They’re the sort who are draining the country of groceries.” That it was a question of imports and not exports Viktor couldn’t grasp.[3]

During the war, Harald Grebst was what the Swedes then called a “goulash” [gulasch], meaning a spiv or profiteer. And it got him into trouble. In October 1915, he was investigated by detectives in Malmö over his involvement in handling a cargo of 1,100 tons of American banned exports on board the Juno bound for Germany.[4] Two Germans fled the country before the Police could contact them. One of the Germans had been staying in the same hotel as Grebst. It was no surprise therefore when in April 1918, the United States War Trade Board placed Grebst on the Enemy Trading List meaning that Americans were not to do business with him.[5] The listing was as follows: Grebst, Harold, Stores Badhuegatan 8, Gothenburg. This was obviously a misreading of Stora Badhusgatan, one street back from the banks of the Göta River at Inom Vallgraven, central Gothenburg where Grebst no doubt had his offices.

All the Scandinavian countries managed to remain neutral during World War 1. That would not be the case in the next conflagration. If Harald and Willy Grebst were told that their son and nephew was destined to fight against Germany on the side of the British in a coming war, I suspect they would have been incredulous, even highly offended. But that is eventually what happened. In the meantime, life went on and the Swedes concentrated on their own domestic issues. One such issue that inflamed temperaments was the temperance movement. Banning alcohol to preserve law and order had been a hot topic in Sweden since the days of Gustav Vasa. Now the prohibitionists were back and had secured a referendum to be held on 27 August 1922: “yes” or “no” to prohibition. Backed by the Gothenburg breweries, Consul Harald Grebst led an anti-prohibition lobby group called propagandacentralen N.E.J. “Nej” is, of course, the Swedish word for “no.” They were supported by the famous Småland artist-cartoonist, Albert Engström, who produced a timeless “No” poster showing himself behind a plate of cooked crayfish and pointing to a bottle of schnapps. “Crayfish demand to be served with alcohol. You must abstain from crayfish if you do not vote NO on 27 August.” Cute rhetoric, if a little weak. Given that the Swedes love their annual crayfish-eating holiday, Engström hit his target. The “no” vote won the referendum by a tiny margin.[6] Harald Grebst’s standing within the commercial elite of Gothenburg was no doubt enhanced by the victory.

Whilst there is much public information about Harald Grebst, the same cannot be said for his wife, Wally Amalia Grebst nee Klatzö. She lies in the Östra begravningsplatsen in a grave beside Willy Grebst’s mausoleum and from that source I know she was born in 1871. I have seen an image of a document offered for sale over the internet: Share Certificate number 312 evidencing the ownership by Mrs Wally Grebst of one share in Andersson & Lindberg Aktiebolag valued at 500 kronor. The certificate is dated 5 April 1918. And there are snippets written about her input in naming Villa Dalfrid and selecting some of its furnishings. But apart from that, I know very little about her.

She is, of course, mentioned by Hans Erikson in The Rhythm of the Shoe without being named. I found those references to be a little unsettling. Erikson seemed to resent his mother, the A-list socialite who had little time for him. He was cared for by two nurses whom he grew to love. He even stoops to mentioning that he was revolted by the sight of his mother with her corsets off (she looked like she had two stomachs) and by her false fringe![7]

1920 was a landmark year for the Grebst family. Apart from Willy’s lingering death, Harald and Wally Grebst became estranged. As Erikson describes it in his memoirs, Harald took up with a mistress, a famous blonde actress, whom he introduced to his disapproving son. Erikson saw her as ”wishy-washy” and tired-looking. This is no doubt the mind of a petulant male adolescent at work here. His father’s mistress was Stina Louise Nordström, then 23 years old, a writer, theatre reviewer and actress. 1920 saw the publication of her one and only book, Rhyme and Review [Rim och recension] by Bonniers. She and Harald Grebst would ultimately marry in 1923. Nevertheless, back in 1920, Erikson continues the story thus:

Then came the fateful day when my father called me into his study and spoke to me man to man, which misguided parents seem to delight in. He told me that he and my mother had decided to get a divorce. He was going to live in Paris with his mistress and my mother was going to stay in Sweden. As they both loved me very much, he said, they both wanted me to stay with them. But they had decided to let the choice be mine. I went to bed that night and sobbed my heart out. I hated them both and made up my mind to run away to sea. That would punish them.[8]

Hans Erikson, aged 14 years (not 12 as he says in his memoirs), did go to sea. I suspect it was more organised than the expression running away to sea suggests. He had just been expelled from one of Sweden’s most elite private schools. His estranged parents had demanded he choose between them. I imagine he told them he would rather go to sea than make that choice and that his father, with all his vast shipping connections, made the necessary arrangements. Erikson then left Sweden secure in the knowledge that he would one day inherit the proceeds of Uncle Willy’s vast estate. I have always wondered who, if anyone, was there on the quayside the day Hans Erikson sailed from his native land, never to return. Who shed a tear? His mother, father and sister? His nurses and friends? On 22 May 2011, the same day I visited the Art Museum in Gothenburg to see the Isaac Grünewald paintings Willy Grebst so loathed, I also visited Saltholmen and watched cargo ships making their way out to sea. I couldn’t help but wonder what was going through Erikson’s teenage mind as the rocky Swedish coastline disappeared from sight. Forever. A cold Arctic wind was blowing in from the North Sea making me shudder. Less than a month earlier, I had stood on the coastline of another continent and another ocean, the place where Erikson chose to come ashore and die, and a hot tropical wind had warmed my cheeks.

When Erikson turned 21 in January 1927, there was nothing left in Uncle Willy’s estate. Harald Grebst had squandered it on one of his deals gone wrong. Erikson received the bitter news in a letter from his father a few weeks before his birthday. It was a terrible blow to his plans. The year dragged on. Svenska Dagbladet has the following entry in its 1927 Yearbook for 21 November:

En känd parissvensk Konsul Harald Grebst skjuter sin hustru, den som skådespelerska och journalist under signature X-tian bekanta Stina Grebst född Nordström, och därefter sig själv i makarnas hem i Paris. Anledningen är ekonomiska svårigheter.

A well-known Paris Swede, Consul Harald Grebst, shoots his wife, the actress and journalist going under the name X-tian but known to be Stina Grebst nee Nordström, and then himself in the couple’s home in Paris. The reason is economic difficulties.

Erikson was notified by the Swedish Foreign Office in 1928.

Wally Amalia Grebst remained in Sweden and married Baron Carl Gustaf von Otter (1873-1931). The von Otter family features prominently in Swedish affairs and particularly in the history of the Swedish navy in Gothenburg and Karlskrona, the main naval port. Wally Grebst’s new husband was the son of Admiral Carl Gustaf von Otter (1827-1900) who was the older brother of Baron Fredrik von Otter, Sweden’s Prime Minister from 1900 to 1902. Admiral von Otter was also grandfather to Göran von Otter and great grandfather to the famous Swedish opera singer, Anne Sofie von Otter. It is perhaps a comment on the status of Wally Grebst as a high-flying socialite that she was able to marry into such an illustrious family.

I cannot resist telling the story of Göran von Otter in this blog that primarily deals with the pro-German Grebsts. He was a Swedish diplomat posted to Berlin during World War 2. On 20 August 1942, he was on a train traveling from Warsaw to Berlin when he was approached by Kurt Gerstein, an SS officer returning from the Treblinka concentration camp. Gerstein was in a state of distress at having witnessed the gassing of several hundred Jews at Belzec. He described everything he had seen and asked the Swedish diplomat to inform his government so that something could perhaps been done about this appalling slaughter. Von Otter did report the matter but the Swedish government sat on the information. After the war, von Otter tried to find Gerstein but the German had committed suicide on 25 July 1945 in Paris. I wonder what would have happened if, in 1942, Gerstein had boarded the train compartment only to find it occupied, not by Göran von Otter, but Willy Grebst and Barthold Lundén? Would they have had any sympathy at all for the distressed SS officer?

“Major Baron C. G. von Otter” and “Wally von Otter nee Grebst” lie together in the Östra begravningsplatsen a few paces uphill from the mausoleum of Willy Grebst. Menja Grebst lies in the same grave but the date beside her name is not clear: 19 VI 19__. I can only assume that Menja Grebst is Hans Erikson’s sister, nine years his senior.

In The Rhythm of the Shoe, Hans Erikson correctly states that his mother died in 1942. However, World War 2 stopped him from receiving the news until years after the event. He was still trying to send her telegrams as late as February 1945. As an “alien,” he required official permission from the Comptroller-General of the Department of Trade and Customs to send telegrams overseas. With the assistance of the Red Cross, he ultimately obtained permission to send a telegram addressed to Baroness Wally Amalia von Otter at Margaretaplatsen E, Walsingborg, Sweden. I expect this was a typographical error and that the von Otters were living at Margaretaplatsen in Helsingborg. In any event, Erikson’s message was telling: NO WORD IN EIGHTEEN MONTHS IN SPITE OF ATTEMPTS BY LETTER AIRMAIL AND CABLE. That was the message: a complaint. His mother had been dead and buried for years. What the telegram does demonstrate is that he had been in contact with his mother, the woman he loved and hated. She was not such a stranger to him after all.

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[1] Susan Adie & Bjørn L Basberg, “The First Antarctic Whaling Season of Admiralen (1905-1906): The Diary of Alexander Lange” (2009) 45 Polar Record 247.

[2] “Villa Dalfrid: En av Sveriges bäst bevarade jugendmiljöer” per http://www.hembygd.se/askim/files/2012/04/1983-2.pdf

[3] Willy Andersson Grebst, Bröd: tvärsnitt genom samhället våren (1917) pp 36-39, translated by A. Thelander.

[4] Kalmar, 1 October 1915

[5] The New York Times, 22 April 1918 p. 12

[6] see the article by Olle Saemund at www.geocities.com/skroenor/kraefta.html page 5

[7] Hans Erikson, TROTS, p. 11

[8] TROTS, p. 11