People Australia

Charles Edmund Dumaresq (James) Clavell (1921–1994), screenwriter, director, and novelist, was born Charles Edmund Dumaresq Clavell on 10 October 1921, in North Sydney, New South Wales, the second of three children and only son of Irish-born Eileen Margaret Agnes Clavell, née Ross, and her husband, Royal Navy (RN) lieutenant Richard Charles Clavell. Richard had been seconded to the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) to assist with its development. Serving on the RAN’s flagship HMAS Melbourne as fleet torpedo officer (1919–22), Clavell made a very favourable impression on his commanding officer, the first Australian-born rear admiral, John Saumarez Dumaresq. James, as Charles would later be commonly known, was born during his father’s secondment. He would subsequently maintain that he had been ‘christened in the upturned bell of…HM[A]S Melbourne, and bid a happy life with a song by Dame Nellie Melba’ (Treaster 1981).

The Clavells returned to England at the end of October 1922 to live at Portsmouth, Hampshire, from where Richard held a series of British naval appointments (1923–35) in the United Kingdom and on the North Atlantic Station. James and his sisters Margaret (Peggy) and Joan grew up listening to family stories of seafaring adventures and overseas ports. James would remain intensely proud of a family lineage of British officers he claimed stretched back to Walterus de Claville, armour-bearer to William the Conqueror.

Historically, males within the Clavell family were expected to join the armed services, and it was anticipated that James, who received a very disciplined upbringing, would become a naval officer. In April 1935—about two months after his father retired—he was enrolled at Portsmouth Grammar School (PGS), becoming a boarder in 1937. ‘Jimmy,’ as he was known to his schoolmates, completed the Officer Training Corps Certificate ‘A’ and the School Certificate, and was a member of the current affairs, debating, and dramatic societies. A talented all-round athlete, he participated in sailing, athletics, swimming, fives, playing 1st XI football and 1st XI cricket, and became a member of the shooting VII and captain of the boxing club. He was also a school prefect, the head of Smith House, senior platoon commander, and a member of the Local Defence Volunteers (Home Guard). Schoolmate and lifelong friend Alan Bristow, who became a famous helicopter pioneer, would later recall that Clavell ‘was a born leader of men, clear of speech and decisive in manner’ (Bristow 2010, 24). Clavell had long planned to attend university, but further study was ruled out by global hostilities. Yet, when he attempted to enlist for military service, he was prevented from joining either the RN or the Royal Air Force on account of his eyesight.

Clavell instead enlisted in the Royal Regiment of Artillery on his eighteenth birthday in October 1939, even before leaving PGS (July 1940), and in May 1941 was commissioned as a second lieutenant, reserve Anti-Aircraft Regiment and 35th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment. Later that year he was sent to Singapore as part of the 18th Division, and in mid-March 1942, a little over a month after the fall of Singapore, was captured while on deployment to Java. Following an initial eighteen-months of captivity, he spent another two years confined to the officer’s encampment of the Changi prison camp at Singapore until liberation in September 1945.

After returning to England Clavell was promoted to captain and posted to Woolwich, but his post-war military career ended later that year after a motorcycle accident left him with a severely broken leg that failed to heal properly. Trained only for military service and unsure of what to do next, he would later claim that he commenced studies at the University of Birmingham with a view to becoming either an engineer or a lawyer, but withdrew to concentrate instead on becoming a Hollywood film director, a decision reached after visiting his sister’s friend April José Stride—a  Hampshire-born ballerina, fashion model, and actress—on movie sets. He believed that to become a film director he needed first to be a producer which, in turn, necessitated the ownership of rights to books or screenplays. Thus by 1948 he began writing after regular work hours. At that time he was living in London, where he was a sales executive of Monarch Film Corporation, which distributed American, Australian, and British ‘second features’ to British cinemas. James and April were married at Holy Trinity Church, Sloan Square, Chelsea, London on 26 February 1949, and although Clavell stayed on with MFC for another year or two, by December 1951 they had arrived in the United States of America seeking career opportunities. 

American interest in one of Clavell’s screenplays, a television pilot, encouraged the couple to move to New York before continuing, in about 1953–54, to Hollywood where he perceived that his refined British manners and accent gave credibility to his bold claims of being a screenwriter. There he worked as a carpenter for the better part of two years as he continued to pursue his dream of breaking into the entertainment industry. Not until 1956 did he begin to earn a substantial income through the sale of his screenplays, Far Alert and a portion of Forbidden Territory. The former came to the attention of film producer Robert L. Lippert who then hired Clavell to write The Fly (1958). The film became a science fiction hit—his extremely ‘sudden and atypical’ break from being an ‘anonymous to credited screenwriter’ (Clavell 1986). He went on to write Watusi (1959), the ‘First Woman on the Moon’ episode of the television series Men Into Space (1959), and Five Gates to Hell (1959), which he also directed. He then wrote, directed and produced Walk Like a Dragon (1960), a western for Paramount Pictures Corporation.

Clavell had still not shared his wartime experiences with anyone, but during a screenwriters’ strike in 1960 began writing a novel based on his days as a prisoner of war. Encouraged by April, King Rat was published in 1962, the first in a series of what he described as his ‘Asian saga’ novels in which he sought to tell, in fictional terms, the history of Anglo-Saxon involvement in Asia. Other works in the series included Tai-Pan (1966), Shōgun (1975), Noble House(1981), Whirlwind (1986), Gai-jin (1993), and Escape: The Love Story from Whirlwind (1994). ‘Tai-Pan and Noble House were stunning commercial successes’ (Opus 2010, 19), with the latter earning him a one-million-dollar advance.

Clavell acted as his own agent in the publishing rights auction for Whirlwind—‘a fictionalised account of [his] PGS schoolmate Allan Bristow’s audacious dawn [helicopter] airlift of his staff under the guns of Ayatollah Komeini’s Iranian Revolutionary Guard’ (Opus 2010, 19). Despite earning five million dollars, a record for such a sale, and subsequently remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for about three months, Whirlwind received mixed reviews and failed to recover this advance. Nevertheless, his publications sold many millions of copies and several were turned into films or television series, making his name synonymous with Asia, particularly Hong Kong and Japan. In 1980 a group of Asian studies professors in the United States conceded that a significant number of students had enrolled in courses about Japan after having read Shōgun, and that ‘American consciousness of Japan has grown by a quantum leap because of this one book’ (Smith 1980, xii).

Meanwhile, when Clavell went to Vancouver in 1962 to produce and direct The Sweet and the Bitter (1967)—a film based on his screenplay about post-World War II racial tensions between Caucasian and Japanese Canadians—he used the two hundred thousand dollar advance he had received for writing King Rat to buy a house in West Vancouver. With the success of King Rat, he became a naturalised citizen of the United States in 1963, but that same year his family joined him in Vancouver where he and April would bring up their daughters, Holly (b. 1959) and Michaela (b. 1961), before moving to Switzerland in 1972. Another daughter, Petra, from his relationship with actor Caroline Barrett Naylen, had been born in 1970, but he would have little if any involvement in her life.

In addition to writing novels, Clavell continued to work in the movie industry, writing and/or producing and/or directing The Great Escape (1963), 633 Squadron (1964), The Satan Bug (1965), To Sir, With Love (1967), Where’s Jack (1969), and The Last Valley (1971). When the latter two were unsuccessful at the box office he focused on finishing what would be the last four novels of his ‘Asian Saga’ series, and two other works of fiction: The Children’s Story, a novelette originally published in Reader’s Digest in 1964, and re-printed in book form in 1981; and Thrump-O-Moto (1986), for both children and adults and featuring an Australian central character. 

Over the course of his career, Clavell was nominated for a Hugo Award, Best Dramatic Presentation (1959) for The Fly; the Writers Guild of America’s Best Written American Drama award for the Screen (1964) for The Great Escape; and the Directors Guild of America’s Outstanding Directional Achievement in Motion Pictures award (1968) for To, Sir With Love. He was awarded the Goldener Eiger (Austria, 1980) and a Primetime Emmy Award for ‘Outstanding Limited Series’ (1981) as executive producer of the television mini-series Shōgun. He received honorary D. Litt degrees from the University of Maryland (1980) and the University of Bradford (1986).  In 1986 Clavell would declare publicly, ‘Thank God for America. One hundred per cent of my opportunities, both in the book business and in film industry were given me by Americans’ (Clavell 1986).

‘[T]all, sturdily built, with sandy grey hair and pale blue eyes’ (Treaster 1981), ‘[with a] scar on his right cheek…[as] a permanent souvenir of his POW days (Cunningham 1986),’ Clavell continued to walk with a limp after his 1946 motorcycle accident. ‘[S]oft spoken, with an extremely polite but unmistakably steely manner … [he liked] to affect an air of mystery’ (Cunningham 1986). He proudly described himself as an ‘old-fashioned storyteller’ (Funston 1999) rather than a novelist, despite his novels having sold nearly twenty-one million copies by the time he died. He was known for meticulously researching his works, including his ‘long and intricately plotted novels.’ In regard to Noble House one reviewer quipped, ‘Clavell covers a single week in 1,274 pages. Let’s hope he doesn’t turn to history’ (Dunlevy 1981, 16), a sentiment supported by those focussed on historical accuracy, even though he himself insisted that he was primarily ‘a storyteller, not an historian’ (Smith 1980, xv). He also viewed his earlier work, Tai-pan, as, ‘in its [own] way[,] educational … [as it] tries to illuminate the greatest story of our times: the problem of China and her awakening’ (Clavell 1967).

Despite his wealth, Clavell had modest personal tastes. He often travelled economy class, and wherever he went spent most of the time writing and researching. When relaxing he tended to avoid socialising to spend time with his wife, go sailing, or pilot rented fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters. He also ‘fiercely guarded his private life’ (Haig 2006). Remembering his father’s advice to ‘always present a moving target,’ (Clavell 1986) he and his wife, while eventually basing themselves in Switzerland, also maintained homes in Austria, the French Riviera (Cap Ferratt), the United States, and in the United Kingdom, where they owned an estate on the north Surrey downs.

Clavell returned to Australia for the first time in 1975 to promote Shōgun, claiming at the time that he hoped his next book would have ‘Australasia as its background’ (Rowbotham 1975, 11), but this never eventuated. After battling cancer for a short time, Clavell died from a stroke at Vevey, Switzerland, aged seventy-two, on 6 September 1994. He was survived by his wife and their two daughters, and his other daughter. In 2004 the library and archive of the Royal Artillery Museum, Woolwich, was renamed the James Clavell Library: although the museum later moved to Wiltshire, James Clavell Square remains at its original site. PGS’s Bristow-Clavell Science Centre, which opened in 2010, is jointly named for Alan Bristow.

Select Bibliography

Bristow, Alan, with Patrick Malone. Alan Bristow: Helicopter Pioneer: The Autobiography, Pen & Sword, 2010.

Clavell, James. Interviewed by Don Swain. November 1986. Don Swain Collection, Ohio University Libraries Digital Archives Collection.

Clavell, James to Dr Evelyn B. Byrne, letter, 31 August 1967, https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/james-clavell-signed-letter-sir-love-1800497568

Cunningham, Ann Marie. ‘It’s All Feast, No Famine for Clavell: But Hunger Still Haunts Best-Selling “Whirlwind” Author,’ LA Times, 11 December 1986.

Dunlevy, Maurice. ‘Writers’ World: And Now, the Bestselling Blockbuster Show!’ Canberra Times, 4 April 1981, 16.

Funston, Judith E. ‘Clavell, James (1925–1994), screen writer and novelist.’ American National Biography, published 1999 (online February 2000).

Haig, Catriona, ‘Clavell, Charles Edmund Dumaresq [pseud. James Clavell]’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 September 2004, https://www-oxforddnb-com.virtual.anu.edu.au/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-54812?rskey=D2QnrN&result=1.

National Archives (UK). ADM 196/53/144; ADM, 196/61/264; ADM, 196/145/135; ADM, 196/157/192; WO 76/189.

National Archives of Australia. A6769, CLAVELL R C.

Opus [magazine of Portsmouth Grammar School]. ‘Happy Ending from PGS’s Master Storyteller.’ Issue 3, Autumn 2010, 18-19.

Rose, Charlie Interview of James Clavell, ‘Charlie Rose Conversations’, 21 June 1993, https://charlierose.com/videos/16293.   

Rowbotham, David. ‘Sense Better Than Censors,’ Courier-Mail (Brisbane), 18 November 1975, 11.

Sadden, John, Archivist, Portsmouth Grammar School. Personal communication.

Smith, Henry (ed.), Learning from Shōgun: Japanese History and Western Fantasy. Santa Barbara (USA): Program in Asian Studies, University of California, 1980.

Treaster, Joseph B. ‘Asia via James Clavell.’ Penthouse, October 1981.