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DR. FRANK W. BOREHAM-
THE MAN AND THE WRITER 

Sir Clarence Irving Benson,
Wesley Methodist Church, Melbourne, 1961

HERE was a man for whom life never lost the halo of wonder – that is the abiding impression of my long friendship with Frank Boreham. What a relish he had for living and how vastly he enjoyed being alive! He was interesting because he was interested in everybody and everything. 

His forty books won for him a multitude of friends across the seven seas. But the man himself was greater than all that he wrote. His books were only the ‘fancies that broke through language and escaped’. 

There was more in him than could be uttered in one life time. ‘If there is anything in the doctrine of reincarnation,’ he said, ‘I intend to spend at least one of my future spans of existence as a novelist, working up into thrilling romances the plots that I have collected in the course of my life as a minister.’

There was a Dickensian quality in his mind, a quickness to sense the possibilities of a story, a situation or a scene. But the chief charm of his books lies in their rich veins of autobiography. Pick up any one of them and you will not read far before striking some personal experience, confession or adventure. He poured himself into his writing. When the French King Henry III told Montaigne that he liked his books, the essayist replied: ‘I am my books.’ So it was with Frank Boreham…[continue reading]