Australian Dictionary of Biography

Beth Thwaites, 1952, by Gordon F. De Lisle

State Library of New South Wales

Elizabeth Frances (Beth) Thwaites (1910–1997), social journalist, was born on 18 June 1910 at Castlemaine, Victoria, eldest of five children of Victorian-born parents William Thwaites, solicitor, and his wife Abbie Marie, neé Newell. There was a distant connection through her maternal grandmother with the American Colgate family, but as Thwaites later observed, ‘that never did us any good’ (People 1952, 16). Her father practised law at Castlemaine and in Melbourne in partnership with (Sir) James McCay, a World War I major-general, and the family moved to suburban Malvern East in 1925.

A ‘tubby tomboy’ (People 1952, 16) crammed with energy—a lifelong trait—Beth was educated at Presbyterian Girls’ College, Castlemaine, and from 1923 at Ruyton Girls’ School, Kew, initially as a boarder. She discovered a talent for entertaining her fellow students but later dismissed her education as a sorry time ‘which made Tom Brown’s school days look like a pleasure cruise’ (Sydney Morning Herald 1997, 33). In 1929 she proceeded to the University of Melbourne, where she studied history and philosophy, and befriended the aspiring journalist Alan Moorehead. Although she did not finish her arts degree, she was prominent in the dramatic society and student revues, and in the social pages of the student newspaper Farrago. A contemporary later recalled that ‘her Rabelaisian roaring could be heard wherever men and women met together’ (Nicholls 1961, 21).

Thwaites’s ambition to become a journalist was thwarted when Melbourne’s major newspapers rejected her. She therefore turned to entertainment, becoming secretary of a social club at the Green Mill ballroom by the Yarra River, and a hostess at the Palais de Danse at St Kilda. There she met the advertising manager of Melbourne’s Truth. Its staple was scandal. She joined the newspaper in late 1933 and was put to work to write up social news, theatre criticisms, and answers to readers’ questions; but it was as a beady-eyed, sharp-tongued chronicler of Melbourne’s ‘champagne set’ that she became famous—dreaded by some and quoted with amusement by others.

At first, ‘dowagers slammed the phone down’ (Sydney Morning Herald 1997, 33) when Thwaites contacted them as a Truth journalist. The breakthrough came when (Dame) Mabel Brookes, wife of the tennis player (Sir) Norman Brookes, invited her to the marriage of her daughter Cynthia to the much older lord mayor of Melbourne, (Sir) Harold Gengoult Smith, an enormous public spectacle. In her energetic way Thwaites broke into ‘the charmed circle of the upper echelon’ (Sydney Morning Herald 1997, 33), where she would ‘shock the staid, disarm the pretentious and deflate the pompous’ (People 1952, 15).

In 1937 Thwaites took time off from the Truth and sailed to England to try her luck as a journalist in Fleet Street, but even she found the going too tough: ‘Either you crack up … or you become a drunk’ (People 1952, 17). After a broken engagement to an English journalist, she met the Melbourne-born architect Ivor McInnes, a quiet man, in every way her opposite. They returned to Melbourne via New York in 1938 and were married on 28 April 1942 at the Cairns Memorial Presbyterian Church, East Melbourne.

Fearless and frank, Thwaites had a bluntness that might be mistaken for rudeness, but everyone interested in society news read her articles, which appeared variously under the headings ‘Social Jottings,’ ‘Out and About,’ or ‘Gals and Gossip.’ Because of the salacious reputation of the Truth, wives would persuade their husbands to buy the paper. Photographs of Thwaites in the 1940s (published in 1952 by People magazine) amply reveal her uninhibited behaviour: dancing on tabletops; showing too much leg for the times; and performing a skit as a ballerina at a wartime benefit concert, and another as the Brazilian dancer Carmen Miranda. A photograph of her in an impromptu dance with the American comedian Will Mahoney was compared by People magazine to a Thurber cartoon. She was more soberly dressed when meeting Eleanor Roosevelt in Melbourne in 1943.

By the late 1940s Thwaites was overwhelmed by the demands of social life, and by friends ‘on their way home, dropping in for one more drink in the middle of the night’ (People 1952, 17). When her retirement was announced in December 1949, the lady mayoress of Melbourne held a reception in her honour. Thwaites and her husband, who had never felt comfortable with her journalist career, retired to Lower Plenty, an outer Melbourne suburb, where she ruralised in ‘an old pair of blue dungarees and a striped jumper’ (People 1952, 17). In October 1952 she was persuaded to return to journalism for a year, writing a weekly column for the Argus. Thereafter she observed the many social changes in postwar Australia with an unillusioned eye, although she rarely published her opinions, which remained strongly held. As she grew older, she revealed her fundamental conservatism in letters to the Age, calling the Australian Democrats a ‘pygmy political party’ (McInnes 1986, 12) and supporting calls for increased censorship (McInnes 1993, 14). During her career she rarely criticised old Melbourne society; it was the thrusting, ostentatious newcomers who were her prey.

Later in life Thwaites returned to Melbourne and lived at Armadale. Survived by her husband, she died on 20 June 1997 at Malvern East and was cremated. An Age obituarist claimed that she ‘held a place as the best gossip columnist, still unrivalled to this day’ (Allen 1997, C2), while the Herald Sun described her as ‘one of Melbourne’s most read and most feared social writers’ (1997, 55). Thwaites herself had recalled: ‘The world was my oyster and the social scene was the shell I had to crack open and, boy, did I smash that shell’ (Sydney Morning Herald 1997, 33). A portrait of her by James William Govett was a finalist in the 1948 Archibald prize and the State Library of New South Wales holds photographs (1952) by Gordon F. De Lisle.