Australian Dictionary of Biography

Portrait of Elizabeth Riddell, by Kahan, c.1970

National Library of Australia, PIC Drawer 7911 #R10032

Elizabeth Richmond Riddell (1907–1998), poet and journalist, was born on 21 March 1907 at Napier, New Zealand, younger daughter of New Zealand-born parents Violet Whitbread, née Williams, and her husband Richmond John Sydney Riddell, solicitor and accountant. Elizabeth’s father, who worked for a stock and station agency, died in 1913 after a boating accident. He left behind substantial debts, which forced Violet to sell the family home and to take a job, a daunting prospect given that she had previously devoted her energies to running the household. Yet she found work selling insurance, and Elizabeth and her sister, Margaret, were sent to live with elderly relatives on a farm in Northland. It was a great upheaval in the girls’ lives. For the next two years they seldom saw their mother, and Elizabeth later recalled that she and her sister often quarrelled. Nonetheless, the consolation she found in the house’s collection of books and magazines sparked a passion for reading that she would maintain for the rest of her life. At the age of twelve she was sent as a boarder to the Convent of the Sacred Heart school at Timaru, South Canterbury. There a sympathetic nun helped cure her stutter by sending her into a field to sit and read aloud. By that time she had started writing poetry and, two years later, her poems were being published in the Free Lance magazine.

Continuing to write poetry for New Zealand newspapers, and also for the Sydney Bulletin, after she left school, in 1927 Riddell was recruited to work on Ezra Norton’s tabloid, Truth, in Sydney. Years afterwards, she told an interviewer that she was ‘flung … into journalism’ (Riddell 1992), but she quickly adapted. She reviewed theatre and ballet, later maintaining that she knew little about either and had no ‘critical facility’ (Riddell 1992). Nevertheless, she thrived and was offered a job on Smith’s Weekly. Her colleagues Colin Wills, Colin Simpson, and Kenneth Slessor became her mentors, and she relished the sense of camaraderie that she found at the Weekly. In the early 1930s she worked with fellow New Zealander Eric Baume on the Daily Telegraph. On 14 February 1935 at the district registrar’s office she married Edward Neville ‘Blue’ Greatorex, a fellow journalist and former Rugby Union player whom she had met on the beach at Bondi. He was tall and good-looking and the attraction was immediate. Not long after meeting, they had moved into a flat in Darling Point together. Neither wanted children and they decided on a wedding only because they were planning a trip to England on board a cargo ship and could not share a cabin unless they were married.

In London Riddell—the name she continued to use professionally—was given a temporary job as a reporter on the Daily Express. Impressed by what she had heard about Arthur Christiansen, the paper’s editor, she longed to gain a position at the Express, but she failed to persuade him to take her on to the staff, and she and Blue set out for Europe, living in Spain for three months. Another short spell in London followed before they returned to Sydney. She went back to work as a journalist, eventually taking on the editorship of the magazine Woman. In later life she would consider that she had failed in the role. During World War II, with Blue serving in the Royal Australian Air Force, in 1942 she accepted an offer more to her taste, travelling to New York to open a bureau serving Norton’s Truth and Daily Mirror. Growing impatient with her remoteness from the war, however, she asked her employer if she could move back to London.

Riddell arrived in 1944 during the ‘Little Blitz.’ She wrote articles documenting the effects of the war on individual Britons, interspersed with poetry, which she later described as some of her best. Then, becoming more ambitious, she applied for War Office accreditation under an arrangement that allowed correspondents not attached to any branch of the service to take short trips into Europe. On one of these, she and the correspondent for the Sydney Daily Telegraph, Sam White, found themselves at the front, having taken a jeep to the German city of Aachen, which was yet to surrender. It was the closest she came to the action, yet it was on a later expedition to Nancy after Paris’s liberation that she felt the enormity of the risks she was taking. She and the Argus’s Geoffrey Hutton were on their way back to Paris via Strasbourg. The German army was on the other side of the river and, when they reached Nancy, they were alarmed to learn that the press camp had moved back one hundred miles and they were behind the lines. She was relieved to make it back to Paris.

Based at the Hotel Scribe, Paris, the wartime home of storied international journalists such as Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, Riddell had a box seat from which to report on the war’s effects on the French psyche, a subject that fascinated her as she observed the punishments meted out to Nazi collaborators. But after the fall of Cologne, she had had enough, deciding that it was time to return home. She and Blue resumed married life on the understanding that neither need reveal too much about the relationships they had formed during the years they had been separated.

Returning to her journalistic work, Riddell also appeared on a radio panel show. Back at the Daily Mirror, she enjoyed working for Zell Rabin, the paper’s editor from 1963. After Blue’s death in 1964, however, she stopped writing poetry. In 1969 she transferred to Rupert Murdoch’s national daily, the Australian, which had moved its headquarters from Canberra to Sydney. She and its editor, Adrian Deamer, were good friends, and she became one of the paper’s most respected feature writers and reviewers and, later, its literary editor. In 1968 and 1969 she won Walkley awards for her feature writing, which was much admired for its conversational style—influenced, as it was, by her contempt for pomposity and pretentiousness, the cliched, and the ungrammatical.

During the 1970s Riddell had joined the literature board of the Australian Council for the Arts and, in 1979, she began writing poetry again. Her work spoke of ‘love and landscape, destiny and life’s minutiae’ (Hall 1998, 16); to her a poet was ‘a middleman … between people and the problems of existence’ (ABC Weekly 1959, 7). She published collections that included both old and new poems, and won several prizes, among them the Christopher Brennan award (1991), the Kenneth Slessor prize (1992), the gold medal of the Australian Literature Society (1993), and the literary award named for her friend Patrick White (1995). Direct and unsentimental, Betty—as she was known to friends—made many fond and long-standing friendships owing to her elegance, vivacity, sense of fun, and concern for others. She discussed her career as if it were the fruit of a union of resolve and good fortune; her doubts, sorrows, or regrets could be detected only in her poetry. She died on 3 July 1998 at her home at Waverley, and was cremated. The State Library of New South Wales holds a portrait painted by Dahl Collings in 1946, and she has been inducted into the Australian Media Hall of Fame.