Soldier, showman, scoundrel
For all his monumental untrustworthiness, Leopold McLaglen knew a thing or two about "deathdealing science".
The Weekly shelled out." Sorry, seven foot? McLaglen was supposedly more than 2 metres tall.
Unlikely, but he was certainly from a lofty family.
By October 1915, McLaglen’s popularity was starting to wane, with The Observer paper writing about a fundraising exhibition in Wellington, during which he had, at a gallop, chopped a sheep in half with his sabre. The paper crunched the figures. Receipts more than £325, expenditure £364.
"The gallant McLaglen, of course, couldn’t be expected to chop sheep in half for nothing so his fee for organising and performing was £70.
The paper wondered aloud whether anyone of his skills should be exercising them somewhere other than Newtown Park
"On the other hand, he couldn’t hope to earn £70 for chopping off real Turks’ heads."
McLaglen swiftly replied, asserting anew his credentials giving the assurance that he was shortly to proceed to the front. And he did leave, for London
He was the second of at least six brothers with one sister, the children of "bishop" Andrew McLaglen -- the quote marks necessary because he was more properly a missionary for the Free Protestant Episcopal Church in South Africa, and one of a group who claimed the title on the basis of the sheer size of the areas they covered.
Leopold had served in the Boer War, underaged though he was, after which he married Gladys Rose in 1905. Shortly after the birth of their daughter the following year, she filed for divorce claiming cruelty. He denied it, but the divorce was granted on the basis of adultery.
It was after the war that, by his account, he set up as a jiu jitsu instructor. But then came the extraordinary matter of what happened in Milwaukee.
The McLaglen brothers were athletic types with showbiz ambitions and one of them, Victor, had become a seriously good boxer who in 1909 had taken on the mighty heavyweight champion Jack Johnson.
"He never knocked me down . . . but he sure beat the livin’ be-Jesus out of me," Victor once said.
Imagine the surprise of readers in the Milwaukee Free Press to read in 1911 that Victor was now a downtown doorman who, apart from his boxing credentials, had been a Boer War hero, a former British intelligence agent, member of King Edward’s personal guard, and a soldier of fortune. And, as he’d be willing to demonstrate, the "champion broadswordsman of the world".
The boxing.com website recounts this, only to reveal the boaster was not, in fact, Victor but his big brother Leopold, who had stolen his identity.
After a display of broadsword fighting proved more distasteful than exciting, at least by press accounts, Leopold-as-Victor turned to the boxing ring, to be knocked out by "Fireman" Jim Flynn.
The real Victor saw the advertising for that bout and wrote to the local paper.
Without identifying the culprit, Victor wrote: "This man is an imposter and . . . he is taking my name. I am now in vaudeville, playing the interstate circuit . . you would do the public and myself a lot of good if you would expose this imposter. . . "Awkward. The boxing.com website reports Leopold’s own name by then "had acquired considerable tarnish", having defended that jui jitsu "title" in a serious of matches of dubious authenticity.
In his next incarnation he resurfaced as "Leopold the Great" on music hall stages, inducing trances and "paralyising the nerve centres" of audience members who were "mostly plants".
As for his military credentials, even critical reports acknowledged he was indeed a captain in the Middlesex Regiment
As World War I ground on, at some stage after his New Zealand tour he was posted to East Africa, and the 25th Battalion Royal Fusiliers, or Frontiersmen. A worthy outfit, but for a man of such putative combat expertise, this was not exactly where the action was.
After the war he went on to write a series of books, said to be popular, on the science of jiu jitsu and bayonetry.
Next, we turn to his wife Eleanor Southey Baker of Akaroa. She was travelling in Britain in 1923 when she met, and quickly married, Leopold, who was seven years her junior.
Her entry in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography says the couple returned to New Zealand and lived together until at least 1926. Elizabeth was an impressive woman, a doctor no less, who became house surgeon at Auckland Hospital, struggling against the "organised ill-will" of male colleagues, and took up a position in the school medical service.
She initiated special classes for children with defective speech, published path-breaking research into the incidence of goitre in New Zealand, and was a pioneer of the children’s health camps movement.
She returned to medical practice after World War II, ending a varied career as second in command of he Silverstream geriatric hospital.
So hers was a notable, admirable life.
Yet neither her obituaries nor her autobiography, Stethoscope and Saddlebags, contains any mention of her marriage.
Meanwhile, Leopold’s brother Victor had developed a startlingly good career in the movies.
"Acting never appealed to me," he said of his early acting years. "I was dabbling in it solely as a means of making money. I rather felt that the greasepaint business was somewhat beneath a man who was once a reasonably useful boxer."
"I have no illusions about acting and certainly I have none about myself. Long ago I came to the conclusion that actors are victims of luck and circumstance. If the role you are in fits the size of your head and some inherent quality in yourself, you do it well."
But considerable fame, wealth and acclaim awaited the man who would often appear alongside John Wayne in John Ford-directed movies.
A towering presence who managed to dwarf even the Duke, Victor had an extraordinary screen presence.
His brothers Clifford, Cyril, Kenneth and Arthur were also actors . . . his son Andrew a director . . . and yes, there’s Leopold again, though his own Internet Movie Database entry is much more modest, noting only the film Bars of Iron way back in 1920. In which, as you’ll no doubt recall, a man kills a drunkard in Australia, flees to England, and unknowingly weds the man’s widow.
Another massive fraternal falling-out was on the horizon.
By 1930 Leopold had presented himself in Los Angeles, intent on finding fame.
Next year The New Zealand Herald reported a suit for slander emanating from LA.
"Captain Leopold McLaglen has started an action against his brother Victor, the film actor, alleging slander and defamation of character."
The £20,000 claim cited a declaration from Victor: "There is only room for one McLaglen in Hollywood."
Leopold alleged his brother set detectives to watch his movements and slandered him at every opportunity.
He was "compelled against my real wishes" to bring the action. "I’ve been here a year hoping to get an opportunity to act and direct, but my own brother has closed the doors of opportunity against me.
The boxing.com website forays into coverage of the dispute, noting one newspaper’s observation that the film colony did not seem to know what lay behind the bitterness.
"Apparently it was an argument of long standing."
At the trial, Leopold testified Victor had spread the vile defamation that he was unreliable and should be watched.
Victor’s reply: "Leopold has a kink in his mind and I can prove it."
So he did, at least to the court’s content. When the lawsuit was dismissed, Victor went to shake hands but Leopold rebuffed him.
Victor’s career continued upwards.
In 1935 he won the Best Actor Oscar in The Informer.
Much later, in 1952, he was back among the Oscar nominations again, this time as best supporting actor in The Quiet Man.
As for Leopold, The Frontiersmen Historian in a profile of the family reports that in October 1937 he was in jail in the US for subornation of perjury and soliciting a commission of a crime.
Released on bond he was arrested again in early 1938 and charged with attempted extortion.
The allegation this time was he demanded money from a millionaire sportsman, Philip Chancellor.
In his defence Leopold reportedly claimed to have been acting as a secret agent to spread anti-semitic propaganda and to spy on communists. This, he explained, was with the knowledge and approval of both British and German consular authorities.
This, we will all be astonished to learn, did not sway the court and he was sentenced to five years’ jail, though the sentence was suspended on the condition he left the United States immediately and stayed away for at least five years.
Reports suggested the intervention of his well-regarded, and by this stage long-suffering, brother Victor was a factor.
By 1946 Leopold was lobbying the War Office to get the US conviction reversed, still asserting that he had been spying on the Japanese on behalf of Britain and that Chancellor really was a spy.
The War Office, however, held information against McLaglen including that he had made efforts to organise a front of extreme rightist groups.
He was reported to have been back in South Africa by 1948, ill and having lost part of his tongue, claiming to have been captured and tortured by the Japanese.
His brief entry in the Internet Movie Database has him dying in Devon in 1951, aged 66.
So not a lot to be said in favour of the guy, really. Except, perhaps, this. . .
An article on unarmed combat training in World War 1, by James Lee-Barron of the Institute of Martial Arts and Sciences (an independent researcher, albeit not with a conspicuously wide readership) says this:
"I personally feel that Capt. McLaglen has been treated very unfairly up to now, with people tending to concentrate upon the more negative sides of his character and life.
"In fact he was quite genuinely one of the early pioneers of a jiu jitsu-based unarmed combat system for the military . . .
"The fact that me might have ’exaggerated’ the truth here and there, while not a good thing, should still not detract from the valuable contribution he made to modern military close combat methods and techniques."
As for those exaggerations, LeeBarron suggested to his readers that "I think we probably would all agree that a there are, perhaps, a great deal of people teaching martial arts and close combat today that are just as guilty of this.
"It is high time that Captain Leo McLaglen was remembered for what he did well, rather than what he could have done better."
As for the potential benefit that his teaching might have carried for those enthusiastic young Southlanders, Aaron Fox has this to add:
"A lot of it could never be put to the test. World War I really didn’t involve massed bayonet charges."
The war had, for the most part moved on from that. To a much greater degree, it was machine guns and barbed wire that awaited those young men.