Name Edmund Barclay | Died 1961 | |
Edmund Piers Barclay (2 May 1898 – 26 August 1961) was an English-Australian writer known for his work in radio drama. Radio historian Richard Lane called him "Australian radio's first great writer and, many would say, Australian radio's greatest playwright ever."
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Biography
Barclay claimed to have been born on 2 May 1898 at Dinapore, India, the son of Major Edmund Compston-Buckleigh, from Middlesex, England. He also maintained that he was educated at Stonyhurst College, joined the Middlesex Regiment on 11 August 1914, and won the Military Cross and Croix de Guerre while serving with the Royal Flying Corps. However, there is no record of anyone with the surname Barclay or Compston-Buckleigh having attended Stonyhurst or served with the Royal Flying Corps. He claimed that after WWI he worked as a journalist in Fleet Street, London, until sacked for costing his employers £2000 in a libel suit; he then reputedly ran his own short-lived, weekly newspaper.
Arriving in Australia in August 1926, he was determined to show the world that "he was the world's greatest novelist". He worked as a journalist, wrote film scripts (The Silence of Dean Maitland, 1934), short stories, plays, newspaper articles and verse. On 17 December 1933 he was employed by the Australian Broadcasting Commission as a dramatist. The first radio play Barclay wrote was An Antarctic Epic. Barclay wrote very little for the stage. In 1934 he collaborated with Varney Monk as composer to write The Cedar Tree, a musical romance produced by F. W. Thring in Melbourne. Barclay's wife Helene was the lyricist.
Family
His relationship with his wife Helene, who wrote plays for the ABC, was desperately unhappy. Survived by his daughter and son, Barclay died of a coronary occlusion on 26 August 1961 at Gosford, New South Wales. He was interred in Point Clare cemetery with Catholic rites.