Singo The John Singleton Story

By Gerald Stone

An icon of Australian life. An inspiring story of success. the uncensored life story of John Singleton: his mates, his women, his larrikin ways. Kerry Packer calls him one of the few men he would trust with a handshake. Four of his ex-wives still think of him as the most charming, romantic and exciting man they've ever met. Within Australia's thriving pub culture he's looked on as a virtual folk hero: a natural-born rebel who enjoys his beer, knows his football and is even prepared to shout the bar after a big win at the races. Yet John Singleton is also a figure of heated controversy whose very name can trigger a lively debate. Many praise him, while others condemn him for creating the 'ocker' commercials that revolutionised the Australian ad industry. His wilder drinking sessions have led to a number of assault charges and his Peter Pan tear-away antics have seen him dive atop a dinner table full of bankers and their wives. He is the constant target of dark whispers about his private life, including his six marriages; but surprisingly, one of his best-kept secrets is the millions he donates to charity. An incurable larrikin, serial lover and explosive genius on a lit fuse - Singo's the nickname that says its all. Others may be more famous than John Singleton but no one has a more fascinating or extraordinary public image.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Dec 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780730493518

Gerald Stone

Veteran journalist Gerald Stone, founding producer of 60 Minutes and former editor-in-chief of the Bulletin, tells this amazing life story as it deserves to be told: uncensored and no-holds-barred. He has recorded scores of revealing interviews and delved behind the headlines to discover the complex and amazingly sensitive man behind the larrikin legend. Gerald Stone lives on Sydney's lower North Shore.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Yes, I would trust him with a handshake.

There are not many I would trust like that

any more.

Kerry Packer

Fortunately his good points far outweigh

the bad, but there’d be many a time I’d say

‘John, you’re just crazy, why are you getting

into all these fucking fights?’

Gerry Harvey

He lives his life on the edge and I think

maybe for all the women, that’s part of the

deal—the risk, the danger factor.

Belinda Green

On a thirsty Friday the first-floor bar at Sydney’s Forbes Hotel has been known to swallow bodies like a black hole in the cosmos. The magnetic pull of moist suntanned flesh keeps sucking more into the vortex. Drinkers flick back their beers with metronomic precision while four high-powered speakers blast away, numbing all surviving senses. Amid the compacted throng, a few amorous couples attempt to dance, though there is no dance floor. Why should they care when, in the zero gravity of an alcoholic daze, their feet barely touch the ground?

Such is the scene the night of 28 October 1994, when accountant Scott Griffin arrives about 11.30 pm with his fiancée Simone Peric, his work mate Andrew Fleming and six or so friends.

They are, for the moment, indistinguishable from other young office workers flocking into the Forbes after earlier drinking sessions at office parties and pubs around the CBD. Soon enough they will find themselves plucked from the crush to become the reluctant cast of an unscripted drama.

‘Look, isn’t that John Singleton over there?’ the friends nudge each other.

Yes, it’s the millionaire advertising boss, though that’s hardly a job description to set a crowded nightspot abuzz. More relevant to this milieu, it’s also the Singleton who bets big on the horses, loves his football, raises hell with his mates and, in the right mood, is known to pick up the tab for the entire bar. Now, these are the attributes of a genuine Aussie icon.

‘Singleton’s shout!’ they call out against the jack-hammering of the music. ‘Hey, Singo, over here! We’ll buy you one!’ Everywhere in the room people start screaming the nickname that’s almost become a part of the vernacular. Singo. noun colloquial. 1) incurable larrikin. 2) serial lover. 3) explosive genius on a lit fuse. There may be other Australians more famous than John Singleton but no one has a public image so clearly defined. It’s not an easy persona to live up to. On occasions it has proved even harder to live down.

‘It’s a very friendly pub, a lot of young people crammed into the place,’ he later recounts. ‘I got myself involved in a series of shouts as I moved from group to group. Bought some drinks and vice versa. I would have finished up square. It was the most happy, high-spirited bar I’ve been into.’

Singleton’s work day has ended around 7 pm. He spends the next couple of hours relaxing with colleagues in his 18th-floor offices on the eastern shore of Darling Harbour, drinking cans of Tooheys at the rate—by his calculation—of two or three an hour. He then strolls over to the upstairs dining room of the Forbes where he has arranged to meet his son Jack, who is having dinner with friends to celebrate his forthcoming 23rd birthday. They are still completing their meal, so Dad, making what will be a fateful decision, decides to wait for them in the first-floor bar.

By the time his son’s group comes down from dinner to join him, Dad is in very high spirits indeed. After a few more drinks they make a quick exit, landing in the main bar downstairs. There they get caught up in an impromptu football match with members of a team from the northern suburbs known as the Warringah Rats.

‘They decided it would be a good idea to have a game against Jack and his friends, which I became involved in,’ Singleton says modestly, considering he’s credited with scoring a try. ‘It spilled out onto the footpath. Everyone had a good time.’

To cap off the celebration, the party decides to go on to the upmarket Hilton Hotel for still more drinks. Shortly after they arrive there, Singleton is confronted by police. They inform him that a complaint has been filed against him for assault. At first he wrongly assumes the allegation somehow relates to the football game. Next day he’s surprised to learn that his accuser is none other than the young accountant Scott Griffin. Who the hell was he? John Singleton, at his subsequent trial, insists that he doesn’t even recall setting eyes on him, let alone banging heads with such force as to send Griffin hurtling backwards against the bar with blood gushing from a cut above his left eye.

Prosecutor: The alcohol you consumed on this night may have had some effect on your memory?

Singo: It never helps.

John Desmond Singleton is defended at the trial by criminal lawyer Chris Murphy—himself a colourful character on the Sydney scene. His first task is to refute any suggestion that his client intentionally set out to deliver a head-butt, or ‘Liverpool Kiss’, as the tactic is commonly referred to in pub-brawl terminology.

‘The defence case is that if it happened, it wasn’t deliberate,’ Murphy insists, proposing that Singleton could have simply been propelled into the unfortunate accountant by a bump from behind. Murphy’s problem is that, as hard as he tries, he can’t persuade the victim to see it that way. According to Scott Griffin’s testimony, he was standing a few paces away from Singleton when the advertising executive turned to say something to him—he couldn’t hear the words—and then just suddenly attacked him.

Murphy: There was a lot of pushing and shoving going on in the pub?

Griffin: There were a lot of people around Singleton. He was with a big group and yeah, they were playing around, they were fairly boisterous and pushing each other.

Murphy: He was laughing and joking with people. He was being what we might call ‘Singo’—he is almost a name for the conduct?

Griffin: Correct.

Murphy: While he was trying to talk to you at some stage you saw him stumble towards you, didn’t you?

Griffin: Well, it was a very direct movement. We were a fair space away.

Murphy: This is one of those accidents that happen, isn’t it?

Griffin: I don’t believe it was an accident. No.

Griffin’s girlfriend, Simone Peric, turns out to have been in the best vantage point to witness the incident. According to her recollection, she entered the bar happily chatting with Griffin and Andrew Fleming. Griffin wandered off; then Andrew left to speak to an old friend from university. She was soon deserted of male company, standing on her own.

Peric: I looked over toward Scott. Scott was over near Mr Singleton, sort of gesturing towards me to come over. And as he did that, Mr Singleton turned around and lunged forward and head-butted Scott.

Murphy: Objection!

Peric: Sorry. I can’t [say what I] thought?

Prosecutor: You can’t come to any conclusion. Just describe to us his movements.

Peric: Okay, I mean, I don’t know how else to say it. Scott was standing still at the time. I just saw

Mr Singleton step forward and I saw their heads connect. Scott then stumbled back towards the bar.

Singleton would maintain he had absolutely no recollection of the event Peric described. If there had been a clash of heads, the moment had simply vanished from his memory. A second or so may not seem all that important in an average life span, until one goes missing. Then it can mean all hell to pay. Black spots have a way of proving particularly troublesome in a court of law. After all, if the defendant can’t remember banging heads, how would he possibly know whether it was accidental or not?

Prosecutor: You’re not saying that your head didn’t come into collision with Mr Griffin, are you?

Singo: No, I’m saying I’m not aware of it.

Prosecutor: But you don’t recall it, is that right?

Singo: No, I don’t recall it, if I did.

Prosecutor: And is the reason you don’t recall it because of your intoxication?

Singo: No, No. Because the night was a pretty memorable night. And seeing I can remember the events after being in the upstairs bar, I find it hard to believe that I wouldn’t remember what happened before that.

Magistrate Philip Molan obviously found that hard to believe as well. How could any defendant be able to rattle off a play-by-play description of some ridiculous football match against the Warringah Rats yet claim to be unable to recall committing a possible criminal act a few minutes before? He declared John Desmond Singleton guilty of assault occasioning bodily harm, fining him $1000 plus $46 costs.

Though the verdict might be seen as a black mark against Singleton’s name, in a strange way it’s just the opposite—testament to his compulsive need to speak the truth no matter how painful it is to himself or others. To get the charge dismissed, he only had to tell the simplest of lies: that he noticed a young stranger looking at him, walked over to say hello and accidentally tripped, falling against him. As lawyer Chris Murphy stressed in his summing up, such a fib would have been almost impossible to refute considering the crowded conditions in the bar. His client, however, had chosen to stick by his more troubling account of not being able to remember one way or another. Not so much a defence as a confession: the self-revelation of someone subject to impulses powerful enough to assert themselves beyond his conscious control.

The Forbes Hotel case, in that sense, offers valuable insights into a controversial personality widely regarded within Australia’s thriving pub culture as a modern-day folk hero, a natural-born rebel ever ready to thumb his nose at social convention. If Singo has his ‘missing moments’, they seem to go with the territory: part of a passionate nature that can erupt without warning in much the same way that a sudden power surge can blow a fuse or short-circuit the system. It’s this very unpredictability that sets the air crackling around him, bristling with expectation. Other males see him as symbolising the rowdy, old-style mateship which once stamped Australian men as a tribe apart. He doesn’t really need to do a thing—he has the look of a stirrer. His pale-blue eyes flicker with the ambiguous message ‘Fuck off, you bastard’ in the two ways Australians can mean that—friendly or hostile. He mumbles his words in a blue-collar accent thick as Vegemite. Listeners often have to lean forward to make out what he’s trying to say. When they do that, they’re inevitably caught in his web of mischievous conspiracy.

But of course women, too, feel the sparks when he enters a room. And it must be said, when it comes to the attraction he holds for the opposite sex, his references are impressive. In the course of my research for this book, I talked to four of his five former wives. Three of them enjoyed high public profiles of their own and all could be described as devoted to their chosen careers before they met him. As we’ll see in later chapters, they are women of independent spirit who would hardly feel any need to make excuses for an unfaithful or otherwise unworthy partner. Yet they are each in their own way still happy to recommend John Singleton as a charismatic and charming man to fall in love with.

From second wife, model Maggi Eckardt: ‘He is the most honest and passionate person and totally lovable. He’s a romantic.’

From third wife, ex-Miss World, Belinda Green: ‘John is a great playmate and creative lover. He lives his life on the edge and I think maybe for all the women, that’s part of the deal—the risk, the danger factor.’

From fourth wife, television reporter Liz Hayes: ‘He can be really gentle, which I think is the thing that just about every woman he has met has fallen for. He surprises you because he comes in plain brown paper packaging; but inside is gold.’

Jennifer Murrant is most definitely to be counted as wife number five although they never quite got around to marrying. She thinks of him as ‘exceptionally charming, funny and good to be with’, despite a needlepoint sense of humour capable of inflicting more pain than he may realise at times. Then again, she found his own feelings could be surprisingly easy to hurt.

‘Underneath,’ she insists, ‘he is a very sensitive and caring person—and I think perhaps he expects too much from his relationships. Like when the euphoria of the early stages begins to wear off, which it always does, he starts to feel insecure.’

Only his first wife, Margaret, refused to be drawn into a discussion of their relationship, which is understandable since it can’t be compared to any other. She was his high-school sweetheart: his ‘Saturday-night girl’, as Singleton still quaintly differentiates the young women whom boys respect and marry from those who are simply worth a fling. Margaret knew Singleton as no other woman ever could again, before he inevitably became transformed by another kind of love: for success and power.

His eyebrow-raising number of marriages is only the tip of the iceberg—though that seems too chilly a metaphor in the circumstances. The short-lived affairs and one-night stands are like tiny white blurs in the Milky Way, awesome to contemplate and beyond measure.

‘I dare you to show me a woman who can resist once Singo decided he wanted her,’ says the wife of one of Singleton’s best mates. That status no doubt explains the platonic detachment inherent in her assessment. Still, there are undoubtedly many women—and a lot of men—who are put off by all they’ve heard and read about Singleton’s wilful ways. Magnetic personalities repel as well as attract.

It is intriguing to compare the reactions of the people I sought to interview for this biography with those in a previous book I wrote dealing with media magnate Kerry Packer. Packer, in theory, was a much more formidable figure—able to inflict considerable retribution on those he might see as doing the wrong thing by him. Yet never once, when I sought personal recollections, did anyone ask: ‘Did Kerry say it’s okay to talk about him?’ Everyone asked that about Singleton.

What invisible power does he hold over them that could be so much more intimidating than Packer’s? Singleton himself admits he does not forgive a hurt easily and can nurse a resentment for years until he finds the right opportunity to get even in some way. When I pressed my interviewees about why they were so hesitant, a number did mention not wanting to risk getting on his dark side. Most said they simply felt obliged to respect his desire for privacy, which has escalated dramatically in recent years along with his fame and wealth.

The answer that strikes me as nearer the truth came from just the kind of person you would expect. The Reverend Bill Crews is one of Sydney’s most respected churchmen and social workers, regarded by Singleton as his family minister. Crews tells me: ‘I think his closest friends hesitate to speak about him because they know how vulnerable he really is. They don’t want to do anything that might damage the veneer.’

That doesn’t mean that Singleton’s carefree public persona is false to any degree, only that it is reflected in a lens far too tiny to capture the full picture. As his former wives attest, his is a highly complex nature coloured by every shade of emotion from bliss to utter despair. But whatever else he may be—he remains best known for being the lord of the larrikins. That status is confirmed beyond doubt in the briefest sampling of anecdotes from those whose lives he has touched over some six decades. It is traceable all the way back to his days at primary school. His favourite teacher, Les Hagan, still chuckles remembering how the 11-year-old—popular, ambitious and entrepreneurial even then—just missed out on his bid to get elected captain.

‘Everyone was worried he might try to sell the school,’ Hagan recalls.

The man who gave him his first big break in advertising, Bill Currie, will never forget dinner one night at Melbourne’s elegant Florentino restaurant, when Singo demanded chips with his steak. After being told the restaurant never served them, he sent his hire-car driver out to McDonald’s for 30 orders, making a point to offer them around the room to be gratefully munched by other diners.

‘He simply refuses to accept that something can’t be done. That’s the worst thing in the world you can ever say to John,’ Currie says, ‘because he will be hell-bent on finding a way around it. With him it’s never say never.’

The chips night at Florentino was Singo in a good/bad mood. In a bad/bad mood, he could do a flying leap onto the top of a glittering dinner table set for 10, obliterating everything in his path like a crippled jet fighter skidding across the deck of a carrier.

‘Of course, I’ve seen that side of him,’ says Gerry Harvey, the billionaire retailer whose first ad campaign with Singleton still ranks as one of the great legends of Australian advertising. ‘Fortunately his good points far outweigh the bad, but there’d be many a time I’d say John, you’re just crazy, why are you getting into all these fucking fights?’

Yet, such physical transgressions fall a long way short of explaining the cryptic comment which third wife Belinda Green still struggles to solve.

‘He always said he has only ever had one regret in life,’ she confides. ‘But he would never tell a soul what it was.’

With some sense of irony, Kerry Packer—who steadfastly refused to speak to me for my book about him—agreed to share his memories of Singleton. Perhaps with his own serious health problems not far from his mind, Packer told the story of how the advertising executive was rushed off to hospital with a suspected coronary, though barely into his thirties.

‘He was drinking a lot at the time,’ Packer grins. ‘There was a suggestion that whatever he was suffering from was caused by an excess of alcohol and delusions of indestructibility. I sent him a funeral wreath with the message: If you want to keep living this way, this is the future.’

The two, as we’ll see later in this book, began their long relationship with a thunderous personality clash. Yet Packer pays this rare tribute: ‘Yes, I would trust him with a handshake. There are not many I would trust like that any more. If he told me he was going to do something, I would believe him completely. And I would expect to rely on that handshake. I have absolutely no doubt that I could.’

Singo’s big night out at the Forbes occurred 12 days before his 53rd birthday and just as he was entering the most successful decade of his career. Nine months earlier the agency that bore his name had made a stunning debut on the share market, yielding him a personal windfall of $14 million. His professional reputation was at an all-time high after saving Labor from almost certain defeat in the Federal election of 1993. With his network of powerful and wealthy friends, he was rapidly gaining recognition as one of the most influential figures in the land, a pivotal force in his own right.

Yet for all John Singleton’s remarkable triumphs, he has often been but an impulse away from disaster. How could it be otherwise with a life that rides a saw-toothed edge of creative highs and self-destructive lows; with a destiny so fragile, it can teeter on a microdot of missing memory?

That’s what makes him Singo: everybody’s mate but, at times, his own worst enemy.

CHAPTER I

BIRTH OF A SALESMAN

John was always told he was the equal of anyone, not better than anyone, not worse than anyone, but equal—and could do whatever he wanted.

Cousin Kay

Mavis Singleton kept three scrapbooks. They contain every press report ever written about her son from the very first mention of him as an upcoming young copywriter in 1964 to his crowning as a 21st-century media mogul. The clippings are countless, tracking his ascension in a greyish blur of newsprint like the tail of a comet. The stories begin as a trickle, separated by months, then weeks; but soon build into a torrent of coverage day after day. They tell of public outcries over his ‘ocker’ advertising and his provocative political views; his bold gambles at the racetrack mixed in with the titillating details of his romances and break-ups; his rise as a controversial television and radio personality, overshadowed at times by the scandals of his assault cases and sackings. No one theme is given prominence over another. In nearly 40 years of dedicated cutting and pasting, Mavis never made a value call. There are no notations other than the date and name of publication, nor attempts to delete an uncomplimentary photograph or edit out an unsavoury reference.

For months I pored over the contents, establishing a biographical time line, attempting to detect behavioural patterns that might help me decipher the secret inner workings of a very public man. Then one day, while sitting at my desk in the morning sunlight, I glanced at the battered brown cardboard cover of the first volume and noticed I had missed a title inscribed in faded gold leaf: ‘MY SON, MY SON’. At that moment I realised that the key to unravelling the life of John Singleton wasn’t buried somewhere in the contents. It was right there before my eyes, in the very fact that such a monumental collection should exist at all. Here was a mother’s son whose every deed was a cause for celebration, though no more or less than every misdeed.

What Mavis had put her hand to was truly a labour of unconditional love. A boy who grows up in the comforting glow of such adoration must surely count himself blessed. But as he reaches manhood he is also at risk of fooling himself into believing that he can get away with almost anything, that he can do no wrong. Driven by that kind of untamed spirit and a boundless raw energy, Singleton was destined to be a handful wherever his life might lead.

*   *   *

Anyone examining John Singleton’s bloodlines, as he himself would one day scrutinise the parentage of his champion thoroughbreds, wouldn’t find much to suggest a bright future in advertising. Then again, there was certainly a glint of something out of the ordinary imprinted in his DNA.

Grandpa Bill, during a drunken row, once dumped a cop in a horse trough. His eldest son, John’s Uncle Bill, hit an opponent with such force during an amateur boxing match that the man later died from his injuries. Two other uncles, Ron and Len, got into so much trouble for drinking and brawling that they spent time in Long Bay prison and were written out of the family history. Singleton didn’t even know they existed until he was well into his forties.

His father, Jack, and another uncle, Tom, were also boxers—Tom a good enough welterweight to turn professional. In the depression years, there was nothing all that unusual about men releasing a bit of tension by belting the shit out of each other. They either did it in the streets, goaded on by the frustration of unemployment and rivalry for the few odd jobs available, or they channelled their aggression into the ring. The inner-west suburb of Leichhardt, where Grandpa Bill settled, boasted a fight arena second in prestige only to Rushcutters Bay Stadium over in the wealthier eastern part of town. It was regularly jammed with capacity crowds of 5000 roaring fans who paid 1 shilling to get in or 2 shillings to play the dandy at ringside. There weren’t many who could afford the difference in an area where the average male wage in 1933 was little more than £1 a week, a quarter of the official basic wage. Leichhardt, along with nearby Glebe and Balmain, was the bustling quarry from which Sydney drew its rock-bed working class—the equivalent of East London or New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. Slum was perhaps too harsh a word to apply, but in the disapproving descriptions of social commentators of the day, the inner-west was certainly regarded as an eyesore. Visitors from more genteel suburbs complained of ‘hideous backyards, full of garbage cans, tom-cats and lavatories with swinging broken doors and rusty-bucketed tin roofs’. A board of inquiry went further in a 1937 report that spoke of ‘breeding places for crime, disease and social demoralisation’.

Yet sheltering within the detritus of such urban decay was a rich warm layer of community life, labouring families brought close together by the common struggle to survive and inch ahead. Leichhardt municipality is best known today for its good Italian restaurants, trendy boutiques and the deafening noise of Boeing 747s on their way to land at Mascot. During the time Grandpa Bill was bringing up his brood in a modest one-storey terrace at 37 Marlborough Street, it was part of the pulsing heartland of Australia’s emerging classless society. Fortunately, the battling Singletons had a lot more going for them there than their fists.

On days when Grandpa Bill managed to stay clear of the pub, he drove around in his two-horse dray peddling coal, coke and wood to fuel the stoves and coppers of the neighbourhood. Family legend has it that he was not above putting an occasional brick in a sack to make it feel heavier. Although raised as a Catholic, he married an Anglican of Scottish descent, Isabella Laing. She was educated enough to write her signature on the marriage certificate, while he could only leave his mark. After losing their first born, a daughter, they had seven children: William, Jack, Tom, Belle, Ron, Len and Joyce.

Uncle Bill and John’s father, Jack, were by all accounts the steadying influences that held the family together in times of crisis. Neither drank or smoked. They worked hard from an early age, making sure that their sister Belle had enough money to go to music classes to develop her talent as a classical pianist. As protective as they were of their younger siblings, they obviously felt a greater loyalty to the family’s good name. They were prepared to cut all ties with their wilder brothers, Ron and Len, who both died at relatively early ages. Their passing wasn’t even accorded the traditional death notices in the Sydney Morning Herald. A death notice might not seem such an important issue today but in traditional working-class homes it was almost unthinkable for a family member not to be given those few printed lines of recognition. Indeed, when Belle told her employer she needed to take time off work to go to her younger brother’s funeral he refused to believe her because there was no mention in the Herald. She went anyway and got fired.

Ron, like Belle, loved music and was remembered as a honey-fingered violinist before the grog took hold. In what might well be the only photo of him that has survived his banishment, he strides down the street as handsome and dapper a gentleman of the thirties era as Fred Astaire. Len, on the other hand, looks every bit the scruffy boy from the wrong side of the tracks. The photo that exists of him as a stocky adolescent shows him glowering into the camera as if he’s ready to kick somebody in the shin and run off laughing. There is another picture of him, though, that is the essence of innocent boyhood. He’s sitting proudly alone in the driver’s seat of Grandpa Bill’s dray, the reins of the two horses firmly in his grip. He’s only eight at the time, so tiny and vulnerable in relation to the coal-lugging rig that he could almost be atop a semi-trailer. I found myself wondering what could have possibly gone so wrong for him that he should one day be branded a black sheep and dumped from the family tree.

John Singleton’s Aunty Joyce, as the youngest in the Leichhardt brood, retains the most vivid recollection of her brothers Ron and Len. She offers a perspective that might cause Singleton to squirm a bit.

‘Yes, they got into trouble with the law and had to go to jail a couple of times, but not for anything major,’ Joyce insists. ‘Mainly drinking too much and getting into a few scraps and that sort of thing—but really nothing more or less than John has done himself. In those days, though, that kind of behaviour was taken a bit more seriously.’

John Singleton has only a faint recollection of being allowed to climb aboard his Grandpa Bill’s dray, an experience his parents may not have encouraged him to repeat. By the time John was born, his father Jack and mother Mavis had already managed to work their way a couple of rungs higher up the social ladder. For a 1940s Australian family with middle-class ambitions, having a hard-drinking, illiterate peddler in the family would hardly have helped in keeping up appearances. It certainly wouldn’t have been considered a good role model for their son.

Jack and Mavis married in 1938 and established their home in Enfield, only a few kilometres southwest of Leichhardt, but in more sedate surroundings, close to St Thomas’ Anglican church. In fact the old church cemetery, long ago filled to capacity, was right at the end of their backyard. Jack Singleton was as dependable in his habits as the ‘Rock of Ages’, working his way up to production manager in a battery factory. His and Mavis’s first baby, a girl named Dawn Grace, was born prematurely at six months, one week, and survived for just nine days. Mavis blames the premature delivery on tripping and falling two days earlier. Though she is nearly 89 when we first speak, it’s still on her mind that she suffered the mishap while trying to do a good deed: visiting a sister-in-law who had just become pregnant, to make sure she was okay. After Dawn Grace, doctors warned her not to have another baby for 18 months.

Ask Singo when he was born and he likes to associate it with the Melbourne Cup. In 1941 Skipton crossed the line at odds of 8 to 1. John Singleton bolted from the barriers five days later, at 12.45 pm on Sunday, 9 November. He reckons he’s always enjoyed more than his share of luck betting on the big race. Singleton’s sister Dianne was born two years later and another sister, Heather, came home from hospital on John’s fifth birthday.

‘It was a very close family and we really had a wonderful home life,’ Mavis tells me. ‘We certainly weren’t wealthy but we never wanted for anything.’

John was only a toddler through the World War II years but he must have listened carefully to the adults. Mavis recalls that from a very early age, when she went to kiss him goodnight, he would ask her about something in the news that had been under discussion that day. She also remembers that John was short for his age—so much so that he had trouble persuading teachers to allow him on the football team. He was the last of the kids in his group to wear long pants, which his mum admits ‘didn’t make him very happy’. Older boys in the neighbourhood made sure he wasn’t bullied, however. If there was a scrap in the streets they sometimes picked him up and sat him on a high fence to keep him out of trouble.

Obviously ‘neighbours’ in those days looked out for each other more than they tend to do in these more hectic times. Jack Singleton didn’t just play with his own children—he organised sporting activities for all the kids around or invited them home to join the backyard barbecues.

‘John’s dad was a great mentor for us,’ recalls Brian Ray, who has been friends with Singleton since their kindergarten days. ‘He would organise sports for everyone: playing cricket in the backyard or doing laps at the Enfield swimming pool or having us box each other. We were all very much under the influence of old Jack. In fact we were living in the western suburbs when it was the archetypal lower-middle Australia. Family life was highly structured in those days and we were very much under the influence of our parents who kept drumming into us to do the right thing.’

Singleton’s Uncle Bill did much the same and the two families saw a lot of each other.

‘John was always told he was the equal of anyone, not better than anyone, not worse than anyone, but equal—and could do whatever he wanted,’ says his cousin Kay Keller, Uncle Bill’s daughter. She remembers being deeply impressed at family gatherings by how much pride Jack and Mavis showed in their only boy. ‘It was always my son, my son—John was always something special.’

Whatever the current failings of the NSW public education system, in the early 1950s it was efficient enough to single out a bright primary student for special attention and John Singleton, aged 10, was sent to a newly organised opportunity school at Enfield. There he was taken under the wing of ‘the only teacher he ever learned anything from’, Les Hagan. Hagan today gets a lump in his voice remembering the things he learned from young Singleton.

‘They all were obviously talented