Australian Dictionary of Biography

Mrs Deborah Moulden formerly Lady Hackett and John Winthrop Hackett Jnr, 1929

State Library of Western Australia

Sir John Winthrop ‘Shan’ Hackett (1910–1997), army officer, scholar, and author, was born on 5 November 1910 in Perth, fourth of five children and only son of Irish-born (Sir) John Winthrop Hackett, newspaper proprietor, politician, and university benefactor, and his wife Deborah Vernon, née Drake-Brockman, later a mining company director and welfare worker. From a young age he was known as ‘Shan,’ a corruption of Sean, the Irish equivalent of John. His father died when he was five, and in April 1918 his mother married the lawyer and alderman (Sir) Frank Beaumont Moulden in Adelaide, moving there with her children. Attending Queen’s School, North Adelaide, John was exposed to the upper social echelons of Adelaide, where his mother was lady mayoress (1919–21) and active in charity work. While boarding (1921–28) at Geelong Grammar School, he showed himself to be a talented athlete and gifted scholar (dux 1927).

Though awarded a University of Melbourne exhibition in European history, Hackett chose to continue his education at New College, Oxford (BA, 1934; MA, 1945; BLitt, 1945). He attained second-class honours in literae humaniores and modern history, declaring later that he had survived the exams ‘by living on whiskey and health tonic’ (Crommelin 1988, 32). Resisting family expectations that he follow in his father’s footsteps as a journalist, in 1932 he was commissioned in the 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars, the successor to his great-grandfather’s regiment. He would later explain that he had chosen a life in Britain because the army there provided more opportunities for a regular soldier than the Australian Army, and because he did not wish to be seen to owe anything to his family’s fortune.

Hackett qualified as an interpreter in French, German, and Italian. Posted with his regiment to Egypt, he found time to learn Arabic, and to research, for his BLitt degree, Saladin’s campaign in northern Syria during the Third Crusade. He served in Palestine in 1936 and was on secondment (1937–41) to the Trans-Jordan Frontier Force when World War II broke out. During that time he was appointed MBE (1938) and awarded the Military Cross (1941), having been wounded in action while leading an operation against Vichy French forces during which he had issued orders in English, French, and Arabic. On 21 March 1942 he married an Austrian-born widow, Margaret Grossman, née Frena, in St George’s Cathedral, Jerusalem. After rejoining his regiment in Libya, he led an attack on a German tank regiment during the Battle of Bir Hakeim in May and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order.

In November 1942 Hackett was selected to raise the 4th Parachute Brigade, for which he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and temporary brigadier in July 1943. The brigade saw action in Italy in September and was decimated in September 1944 during Operation Market Garden at Arnhem in the Netherlands. There Hackett was wounded and captured, but he escaped from a German-controlled hospital. A Dutch family hid him from the German occupying force until he was smuggled behind British lines by the Dutch resistance in February 1945, an experience for which he was awarded a Bar to his DSO, and which he recounted in his memoir I Was a Stranger (1977).

Hackett later claimed to have been offered a Conservative seat in the House of Commons after the war, and suggested that he might have become an Oxford don, but instead he remained a soldier. He returned to the Middle East to disband the Trans-Jordan Frontier Force in 1947, then spent the remainder of his career in Britain and Germany. Promoted successively to colonel (1951), brigadier (1956), major general (1957), lieutenant general (1961), and general (1966), he finished his career as commander-in-chief of the British Army of the Rhine (1966–68), serving concurrently as commander of the Northern Army Group, North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In that capacity he addressed a letter in The Times (London) to the ‘Parliaments, press and public’ (Hackett 1968, 9) of NATO’s member nations, urging continuing support for the force in Europe. He admitted later that for a serving British officer the letter was ‘hopelessly out of turn’ (Thomas 1983, 150).

Elevated to CBE in 1953, Hackett was appointed CB in 1958 and later raised to KCB (1962) then GCB (1967). Notwithstanding his accolades and abundant achievements, a perception that he could be arrogant might have prevented him from attaining the very highest positions in the British military forces. Widely acknowledged as being highly educated, intelligent, and articulate, he was nonetheless ‘never averse to an ostentatious display of intellectual superiority’ (Healey 1990, 266). A frank and unflattering assessment by Sir Geoffrey Baker, then chief of the General Staff for the British Army, conveyed confidentially to (Sir) John Gorton, probably influenced the Australian prime minister’s decision not to recommend that Hackett be appointed governor-general in 1969.

On retiring from the army in 1968, Hackett was appointed an honorary colonel (1969–75) of the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars and became principal (1968–75) of King’s College, London. He maintained his outspokenness, joining protests demanding higher student grants, and urging that universities remain free from government control. Retiring with Margaret to a farm in the Cotswolds in 1975, he continued to deliver guest lectures on military affairs and became a successful author. A persistent advocate for maintaining conventionally armed forces as a deterrent to conflict, he published The Third World War (1978), a fictional, cautionary account of a European nuclear war; a sequel, The Third World War: The Untold Story (1981); and The Profession of Arms (1983), a history of the military profession from ancient times.

Hackett had not returned to Australia until 1963, when the University of Western Australia awarded him an honorary doctorate of laws, but the task of publicising his books drew him back more frequently in the 1980s. The British military historian Sir Michael Howard detected in Hackett a distinctly Australian trait—his ‘determination to show the Poms that anything they could do he could do better’ (1997, 56). To Australians though, in his accent and bearing he was quintessentially of the senior British officer class: ‘He is a short, precise, almost blimpish man with a moustache. You would never think of him as an Australian’ (Blazey 1983, 6). He listed as his recreational interests ‘fishing, wine, music; [and] the pursuit of exactitude, called by some pedantry’ (Who’s Who 1997, 811).

Sir John died of cancer at his home near Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, on 9 September 1997 and was cremated. His ashes were interred with his parents’ remains in the Karrakatta cemetery, Perth. Predeceased by his daughter Susan Veronica (d. 1992), he was survived by his wife and his adopted stepdaughters Bridget and Elizabeth.