[MILITARY] We were the rats

Sydney : Angus and Robertson, 1944. First edition. Octavo, brown cloth over boards (canted), in the rare illustrated dust jacket by Frank Hodgkinson (defective, splits and tears repaired with old brown paper), 275 pp; foreword by Norman Lindsay; contents clean and sound.

Author and journalist Lawson Glassop served in the Middle East between 1940-1943, during which time he worked in Cairo as an editor on the Australian army newspaper, the AIF News. His novel We were the rats is based around the experience of Australian soldiers at the siege of Tobruk in 1941. Glassop collaborated with two of Australia’s major artistic talents of the time, Frank Hodgkinson and Norman Lindsay, in producing his book, which was published in Sydney in late 1944 while the war in Europe and the Pacific still raged.

He arranged for his friend, Sydney artist Frank Hodgkinson (1919-2001) to design the dramatic image that adorns the dust jacket. Hodgkinson had enlisted in the AIF at the outbreak of World War II and had served as an official war artist in the Middle East – with Glassop – and in North Africa, New Guinea and Borneo.

The book also has an interesting connection with Australia’s most popular artist of the period, Norman Lindsay (1879-1969), who provided the foreword. During the war prints of Norman Lindsay’s risque works were popular morale boosters among Australian troops – including the now-legendary Rats of Tobruk. Lindsay, like Hodgkinson, was a personal friend of Glassop.

Although the first edition sold reasonably well, all was not plain sailing for Glassop. From the ADB:

“On 24 April 1946 Glassop found himself famous when a Sydney magistrate held that certain passages in We Were the Rats were obscene and imposed a £10 fine on the publishers, Angus & Robertson Ltd. During the proceedings the chief police witness, Sergeant Roy Munro, had testified that the word ‘bloody’ in the text was offensive to him. On 13 June Judge Studdert dismissed an appeal, ruling that thirty-one pages of the book were ‘legally obscene’ and describing passages in chapter 31 as ‘just plain filth’.”