Bill & Shirley: a memoir
Reviewed by: Holly Walker
Bill & Shirley a memoir
Author:
Keith Ovenden
Publisher:
Massey University Press
ISBN:
9780995131835
Date Published:
10 September 2020
Pages:
200
Format:
Hardback
RRP:
$35.00
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“Something every biographer learns is to listen to the silences,” writes Keith Ovenden in Bill & Shirley: a memoir. Various literal and metaphorical silences seem to have characterised Ovenden’s relationship with his parents-in-law Bill Sutch and Shirley Smith, two of the most prominent and influential New Zealanders of the 20th Century and the subjects of this intriguing book.
There was the cold silence of a mother who disapproves of her daughter’s chosen partner and hopes this will be enough to see him off, maintained by Shirley from the moment, in 1970, when she first learned of Ovenden’s relationship with her daughter Helen, until the birth of her second grandchild in 1978. Not a literal silence – she spoke to Ovenden often and politely enough – but just why she objected so strongly to his marrying her daughter seems never to have been made clear to Ovenden.
Consequently, there were the awkward silences around the dinner table at the famous Plischke-designed Sutch house in Brooklyn, where the young couple, determined not to let Helen’s parents’ objection to their marriage destroy her relationship with her family, endured such painful weekly meals that they resorted to taking tranquilisers to get through them. During these dinners, it was Keith and Helen who were silent, while Bill held court about whatever subject of his considerable expertise he felt they would benefit from hearing about.
And then there is the silence of the dead – the secret Bill took to his grave in 1975 following his shocking arrest, trial and ultimate acquittal of espionage under the Official Secrets Act – was he, or was he not, a KGB spy?
This mystery has hung over Bill Sutch’s name (and the lives of his remaining family, including Ovenden) for 45 years, displacing a lifetime’s worth of service to his country as an economist, author, nation-builder and senior public servant. Sutch never denied that he met with the KGB agent Dimitri Rasgovorov when he was arrested in 1974 but vehemently denied that these meetings were for the purpose of handing over official secrets. The investigation and arrest were so badly botched by the SIS that it was impossible to furnish the jury with any evidence of what information Sutch might have passed on; he was acquitted in early 1975.
Exonerated he may have been but the stress of the arrest and trial had taken its toll. Sutch died of liver cancer just six months later, 10 days after the birth of Ovenden and Helen Sutch’s first son.
It is hard to imagine a more tumultuous start to a marriage, nor a more challenging family to marry into. After mulling over these events and their impact on his family for 45 years, Ovenden has finally gathered some of his thoughts in this concise volume; not, he is at pains to point out, a biography of either but a memoir of his own. Presented in two halves, a memoir of Bill and a memoir of Shirley, it makes a compelling companion piece to anyone who has taken an interest in the lives of these two extraordinary people.
As always, Bill Sutch casts a long shadow, and he gets first billing, with Ovenden essentially outlining the two schools of thought that persist about Sutch: that he was a “weasel” who betrayed his country, or a “lion” who did more than perhaps any other to shape the development of New Zealand in the 20th Century. The truth, Ovenden suggests, lies somewhere in between and as for the spy controversy, he suggests we turn our attention instead to the incompetence of the SIS and why, to this day, New Zealand remains so subservient to the demands and worldviews of our Five Eyes intelligence “partners” – a point well made.
Spies will be endlessly fascinating of course, but it’s Shirley Smith – so much more than the wife of a complicated man – who interests me most. The daughter of a High Court Judge, Shirley was interested in the law from a young age but her father discouraged her from entering such an indelicate profession. Instead she studied classics at Oxford University in the 1930s, where she travelled extensively, caught and recovered from TB, before returning to New Zealand and teaching classics at the University of New Zealand in Auckland. She married Sutch (married to someone else when he first met her) in 1944. It was not until she was in her 40s, with a young daughter, and despairing at the inequal distribution of domestic labour in her marriage, that she decided to finally fulfil her ambition to become a lawyer. She later became the first woman to lecture in law in New Zealand and challenged the New Zealand Law Society to end the sexist practise of men-only dinners. Smith broke many glass ceilings in her legal career by “quiet example,” as Ovenden puts it. The latter part of her career was spent in private practice, where she was staunchly committed to the principle of equal justice, perhaps best epitomised by her long-standing role representing members of the Porirua Mongrel Mob.
Despite her considerable achievements, Ovenden’s memoir of Shirley characterises her as plagued with regrets (he titles it ‘If only, if only’) chiefly about aspects of her relationships with various members of her family. If true, this strikes me as particularly sad given the significance of her professional accomplishments. It’s also not the sense I got from Sarah Gaitanos’ excellent biography Shirley Smith: An Examined Life (VUP 2019). Here Ovenden’s own silences are perhaps worth paying attention to; despite rigorous citation of other sources and records, he never mentions Gaitanos’ book, suggesting he objects to it in some way. Silence, objection, things unspoken – aspects of every family’s history and, in the case of Bill Sutch and Shirley Smith, the undercurrents of two remarkable lives. Ovenden’s memoir contributes a significant and intimate thread to the tapestry that will, I suspect, continue to be woven from their lives for years to come.
Holly Walker
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