the main reason for Sandy’s satisfying density of texture is that Humphries is not taking revenge on him. They entranced Barry’s friend, the Poet Laureate, John Betjeman. See the Sandy transcripts collected in A Nice Night’s Entertainment (1982) and The Life and Death of Sandy Stone (1991). And so the writing assumes greater significance. The words are at a loss for events.”Ĭompared with the high-kicking Edna and the gesticulating, expectorating Sir Les, Sandy is positively catatonic. As Clive James put it in a brilliant London Review of Books essay, “ Approximately in the Vicinity of Barry Humphries” (1983), “The events in life don’t leave him at a loss for words. They should enjoy it while they can.”įrom his first appearance Sandy always had ‘a bit of strife parking the vehicle’ sometimes several times in the same monologue. And it will haunt probably the house my father built in Camberwell … I feel sorry for the very nice Ukranians who live there. I think Australia would be quite a place really ….I will be a ghost, because I have a very strong … kind of psychic dopplegänger which will survive. He became a sort of flannelette-and-slippered guardian angel keeping an unpeeled, almost affectionate, eye on the undeserving Beryl in her widowhood.Īlthough he was not one to haunt, Sandy’s resurrection had shades of Barry’s prophesy to David Leser in an interview for the Australian Women’s Weekly in 2001: “So I think the last part of one’s life is a journey back. Subsequent appearances featured Sandy as a ghost – sitting in a chair wearing the same striped pajamas and dressing gown, usually with a hot-water bottle in his lap. A live stage life of a mere twelve years.

After all, there’s enough unhappiness in the world….”īut by 1971 and A Load of Old Stuffe, Sandy was dead. When we go we like to see a good, bright show. We’re not one for the pictures as a rule. “Well not much that I can say about Tuesday, except it was a very nice night’s entertainment. We first saw this thin, sandy-haired, white-faced (but for his rosy, finely capillaried cheeks) septuagenerarian in 1959 in slippers and one of those brownish wide-checked fifties dressing gowns (in fact Barry had lent Sandy his own) in ‘Days of the Week’ among some fifteen sketches from Rock ‘n’ Reel Revue. To Sandy and Beryl, it was their anchor, their refuge, their ‘home’ – where they had lived for decades where Sandy died and to which he would return. The bedrock of Sandy’s life was Kia Ora (Maori for Good Health), 36 Gallipoli Crescent, Glen Iris. Many Australians could never again park the vehicle or drop a curried egg sandwich on a burgundy axminster wall-to-wall without being reminded of Sandy and their claustrophobic cosmos.

That recording is said to have changed the nation’s psyche. We first heard Sandy in a recording, Wild Life in Suburbia - that cracked, halting, croaky, almost falsetto voice so like that of an old man Barry once met on Bondi Beach. He was said to be very like a Camberwell neighbour of the Humphries’, a Mr Whittle, and not unlike the family’s Uncle Lewis. We first met him in print in 1958 portrayed in a short story, “Sandy’s Big Week”, in a student magazine, Prometheus, first written in 1956.

Although Sandy had died half a century ago - in his bed in April 1971 - his ghost continued to reappear, not to haunt us but to remind us of a parochial, partisan, prejudiced age yet one which was otherwise gentler, simpler and overwhlemingly suburban.Īlexander Horace Stone (always Sandy) was so venerable that it was unclear if he was a veteran of the First or the Second World War.

It is the greatest misfortune and the spookiest coincidence that Sandy Stone vanished on the same day his brilliant manager, Barry Humphries, died.

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