Remembering Arthur Arnott (Pt 3) – king of the kids and melody maker
BY BARRY GITTINS
Arthur went on to serve for 37 years in various roles, including Director of the Melbourne Subscribers’ Department, Men’s Social Secretary (1906-12), Secretary for War Work in the Great War, Special Efforts Secretary (1912-21 & 1933-35), and Young People’s Secretary (1921-33).
His other gig was serving as the first side-officer at the new training garrison. Arthur would take his squad of cadets out scouting through Melbourne’s narrow streets and alleys, picking up drunks to get cleaned up, fed, prayed with, and put to bed at the training garrison. Those drinkers, on waking, were said to be “not infrequently led to Christ”.
Eventually, he became Colonel Arthur.
For 33 years, he dashed up the annual Young People’s Demonstrations at the Melbourne Exhibition Hall, working with 1000 children with zeal and joy. He loved this ministry.
“It is impossible to sing and grumble at the same time,” he’d tell the kids. “But it is quite natural to sing and pray and rejoice all at once.”
A brilliant mimic and choreographer, Arthur would have “two thousand young hands opening and shutting simultaneously, two thousand eyes upturned, and twenty thousand waving fingers” entertaining and moving the audience as their voices soared.
Arnott, still a presence in our songbook and our memories, left the Army with more than 90 songs.
Musicians may be surprised to find that the songwriter in Arthur was not strongly influenced by classical music; creatively, he lived for and was moved by melody.
Arthur loved children's singing; he loved kids, and they loved him. He would sit among them and laugh heartily at their enthusiasm and interplay.
If he enjoyed music, his highest compliment was “there’s real soul in that”.
Arthur, when presented with a baby, would raise it aloft and say, “This is how we grow them in Australia.” He saw the future in their joy and openness. He sweated through decades of Australian Christmases, dressed as Father Christmas; Santa Arthur brought tidings of comfort and joy to children living, for better or worse, in Salvation Army children’s homes.
On Saturday afternoons, as a young bloke at a loose end, Arthur would spring for a rowing boat and, armed with his violin and copies of the War Cry, he’d row out to ships in port to entertain and engage with the sailors.
Envoy David Rogers said Arthur was “a singularly pure and single-minded soul; no narrow-souled puritan, but [a man who] enjoyed a joke and a romp with the best”.
Colonel Arnott retired in 1933 and remained just as busy with the Canterbury (Vic.) Corps, visiting, collecting, and spending time and money on people who needed him.
Living in a dry area meant he had no pubs to boom in, so instead, he visited a circuit of dance halls with his trusty violin. He loved it, and so did the dancers. He’d often drag himself off his sickbed to attend his gigs. When they heard that Arthur had died (dance hall regulars may not have known our concept of being promoted to glory) on 1 May 1941, the young couples at one club observed a two-minute silence for their old mate.
His biographer, Adelaide Ah Kow, knew Arthur well. She saw him as a man with “the soul of a poet and the abiding wonder of a child”.
Arthur loved cricket and rounders and would play them and other games with kids. He had a great passion for chess but indulged it rarely, as it took time he could spend on the work of his captain, Jesus. Self-denial meant something to Arthur.
Arnott was quicksilver. Mercury. A good-natured sprite. Puck, Robin Hood and the Scarlet Pimpernel, all rolled into one.
“The Colonel’s whole life has largely been governed by quick impulses,” the War Cry wrote upon his retirement.
“Inspiration for his many children’s songs has come to him all of a sudden, and he has switched off from what he was doing to put on paper some haunting melody or some poetical thought which later he had been able to develop into a stirring Army song ...
“Hardly anybody less conventional than the Colonel could be imagined. He was always doing unexpected things, and turning up in unexpected places, and he had a Divine restlessness, which indicated the secret of much of his success in Army work.”
Arnott always knew what would draw a crowd. He had a flair for the dramatic and a quick response at the ready. Yet Arthur was also the sort of man who would drive 40 miles into the bush after receiving an SOS that a man was about to commit suicide.
While life was often grim, Arthur embodied sunshine. His wit and humour were a constant. His biographer said, “he never used the gift merely to raise a laugh or to appear smart, much less to interrupt another’s discourse. But let it be in a meeting, an embarrassing moment, a time of tension, a feeling of boredom, a stiffness that a leader found difficult to dispel – and [Arthur], with one of his terse comments, could dissolve the congregation in laughter”.
The colonel was a decent scratch artist who could whip off a comrade’s profile with a few strokes of his pen or pencil. Sometimes he gleefully rendered them when he was supposed to be doing something else or listening to someone else. That suggests to me that he was staving off the fear of every creative soul – boredom.
For a man who was so quick-witted, who could talk birds off trees and loved games and wordplay, Arthur could be awful at small talk. He lived by the saying: ‘If you can’t say anything good about a person, don’t say anything at all.” He wouldn’t gossip. That is a rare quality indeed.
One officer who served on Arthur’s staff for 17 years recalled he’d only seen Arnott lose his temper once. “I had heard that a man whom we not infrequently employed was strongly suspected of dishonest practices,” the person said. “The evidence seemed to me fairly conclusive; I thought the Colonel should know of it.
“He listened – as he invariably listened to anything in the nature of gossip or uncharitable judgment – in absolute silence, sitting perfectly still, his eyes upon his desk; and he made no comment whatever.”
The junior officer wasn’t sure the message had got through, so they figured “his mind had been on something else ... finding myself in his office shortly after, I returned to go over the whole story again. This was evidently too much for him.
“He spoke no word, but struck the desk sharply with his fist. I lost no time in escaping. Five minutes had not elapsed. I was in the garage, getting my car, when he came down for his. “I’m sorry,” he said, briefly but sincerely as he passed me.
“As it happened, the story of the man’s dishonesty was true; but the Colonel would never hear ill of any one till forced to do so. This was, in an administrator, perhaps a weakness as well as a strength, but it certainly fulfilled Paul’s law of love: ‘Charity … thinketh no evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity’.”
To read Part Four of the series, click here.
