William "Bill" Hornadge
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1918- 2013
Bill Hornadge, who died on March 21 aged 94, was by any measure an extraordinary man. He intended to be a journalist from an early age, starting a temporary job with the iconic and irreverent Smith's Weekly when he was sixteen, and the following year had his first copy published in the Australian Women's Weekly of March 10 1934, a 'clever verse' titled Whistling Wind for which he was awarded a handsome prize of five shillings.
Hornadge quickly realised that he would never land a job on a major newspaper without shorthand, so he spent six months at technical college gaining the requisite speed and accuracy. Simultaneously he began selling stamps from the family home at Catherine Hill Bay and shortly after his eighteenth birthday, launched a bi-monthly The Australian Stamp Collector, with his mother Lily as its sub-editor. He charged three pence a copy and continued its publication until 1939. Despite his youth, Hornadge clearly understood the value of cross promotion and used his fledgling magazine to establish the South Seas Stamp Club, a wholesale stamp magazine, a wholesale approvals business and a small printing entity.
However the lure of newspapers was stronger than his love of philately and in 1942 he joined The Northern Star at Lismore as a junior journalist. In Lismore he met Jean Dunning and they married the following year. Hornadge rose through the ranks at the Star but was restless and wanted a newspaper of his own. He established the North Coast Review at Murwillumbah with his father Thomas, but when the Review didn't meet his expectations, joined the Sydney Morning Herald as a sub-editor.
Hornadge was 31 when he replied to an advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald for a position at the Dubbo Liberal that sought 'a relieving man for one month, senior, with country experience preferred.' He was appointed, instead, to the full time position of editor of the (then) tri-weekly. The Liberal's new proprietor, Leo Armati, had recently retired from a stellar career in journalism that had included more than seven years as editor of the Sydney Sun and brought to the Liberal the reputation of a hard taskmaster with a fiery temper.
Armati, then 67, had a burning ambition to reinvigorate the moribund Liberal and quickly embraced Hornadge's skill and youthful energy to implement sweeping changes to the newspaper. Hornadge had been surprised to learn that he was the only applicant but regardless was enthused to be working closely with such a distinguished journalist. He soon learned that the dearth of applicants for the position was because most Sydney journalists knew Armati was difficult to work with and a tyrant in the newsroom.
Less than a year later, Hornadge was thrown into managing (and editing) the Liberal after Armati and his young wife, Patricia, were seriously injured when their car collided with a train on a level crossing near Dubbo. He, with Doug Tomsett the production manager, kept the struggling business afloat for more than six months until their irritable proprietor returned.
Despite his serious injuries, Armati came back to work with expansionary plans uppermost and pressed Hornadge to establish a fourth edition of the Liberal. As a result, a procession of journalists passed through the newsroom, many daunted by the incessant demand for more and better copy. Years later, Hornadge wrote that 'working for Leo was like sitting on volcano; you never knew when he was going to explode.' One Friday afternoon, after severe winter storms caused production delays, the two men clashed one last time.
Hornadge lost his temper and a furious argument culminated with Hornadge lifting a portable typewriter above his head as if to throw it at Armati who, in turn, had reached for a 15-cm long copy spike that he thrust towards Hornadge's stomach. Hornadge later said that it was a Mexican standoff: 'neither of us could move, so I put my typewriter down and resigned.'
Hornadge had gained valuable management experience while Armati was hospitalised, which gave him confidence to make a prompt and unplanned career change, and immediately turned his energies to creating a philatelic business. He named the new enterprise Seven Seas Stamps. He and Jean worked side by side from the spare bedroom at their home, sorting stamps and packaging them for sale.
Seven Seas Stamps grew rapidly and as additional staff were employed the business literally took over the entire house, forcing Hornadge to move the business to larger premises. In April 1954 he published Volume 1, No 1 edition of Stamp News, replicating his earlier modest endeavor, but this time with great success, often publishing editions of more than 300 pages.
Following a trip to the United States in 1957, Hornadge decided to sell stamps 'on approval' and for the next decade took a full-page advertisement in every comic book published in Australia. He believed children would be his main customers, but soon realised adults were also keen stamp collectors. As a direct result, Seven Seas Stamps became the largest mail order operation of its kind in the world and was soon dispatching five thousand customer selections every week.
His fledgling company soared to even greater heights in 1963 when it won a contract with Ampol Petroleum to handle a major national sales promotion based on stamp collecting. Ampol's initial order to launch its planned three-month campaign was for two million packets of stamps. The public response was staggering. The promotion lasted eighteen months and at its peak required Seven Seas Stamps to assemble 250,000 packets of stamps a week. Other major companies, including Coles, Woolworths, Cottees and Quaker Oats Company, followed Ampol's lead, with orders pouring into Seven Seas Stamps for millions of stamp packets.
In 1971, Hornadge sold Seven Seas Stamps to Sydney businessman Kevin Duffy to concentrate on developing Stamp News and a comprehensive range of stamp catalogues.
Hornadge was the archetypal storyteller. He was a prolific author of mostly-self published gems on the most obscure topics including The Yellow Peril - A Squint at some Australian Attitudes towards Orientals (1971), The Australian Slanguage (1980) and Cricket in Australia 1804-1884 (2006). One of his first books, Chidley's Answer to the Sex Problem published in 1971 caused a minor furore in Dubbo because its then-controversial subject was not often publicly discussed, let alone documented in such an explicit fashion. (Chidley believed, amongst other things, that sex should take place 'only in the spring and between true lovers only'.)
Hornadge was a meticulous researcher, spinning the "facts" into beautifully written and quirky yarns. His biography Lennie Lower: He Made the Nation Laugh (1993) told the story of a humorist acclaimed for many years to be Australia's funniest writer. Lower was launched in the offices of the (then) Daily Liberal on the basis that Lower had been conceived in an upstairs room of the newspaper's former building in Macquarie Street, Dubbo.
Despite Hornadge's angry departure from the Liberal in 1951, he was in later years a frequent contributor to the newspaper, either with a letter to the editor or, on occasion, a short story about the city - often on one of his favorite topics, the Australian 'slanguage'.
Hornadge was a keen Rotarian who was awarded the prestigious Paul Harris Fellowship and for many years was leader of the Rotary Youth Exchange Program. He formed the Dubbo Philatelic Society, local branch of Rostrum and was a vibrant contributor to U3A, the University of the Third Age, for which he taught universally popular Australian history classes. Hornadge was almost always impeccably dressed, often wearing a suit and tie, to match his meticulous writing and presentation - typed and double spaced - a constant reminder of how newspaper copy was written in the 'old days.' He was a disarmingly cheery, charmingly offbeat personality who lived a long life with rare joie de vivre.
Hornadge, who died in care on the Central Coast, is survived by daughters Kerrie and Lindy; sons-in-law Anthony and Ron; grand-children Sharni, Kristy, Scott, Alexander, Triona and Joanna; and great grand-children Sophie and Beau.
His wife, Jean, died tragically in 1990.