Above: screengrab of John Sherman as “Digger” in The Hasty Heart (1949). The role brought him some immediate publicity but no lasting career.^[1]Source of screengrab – cinema Trailer for The Hasty Heart, youtube

The Five Second Version
While a furrier by trade, John Sherman earned his acting chops in Sydney’s New Theatre in the mid 1930s. Following war service he travelled to Britain to pursue acting, like so many other aspiring Australians. An early highlight of his career was as a supporting role in the popular filmed version of the play The Hasty Heart (1949), which starred Richard Todd and Ronald Reagan. A foray into Hollywood was less successful and he returned again to Britain – where radio and television roles gave way to scriptwriting, including three films. In 1958 he returned to Australia for good. He wrote for TV, radio and film, before an early death from lymphomatosis. Tall, generous, good humoured and optimistic, not long before his death he told his good friend Lloyd Lamble “Oh yeah – I’ve been a bit crook, but she’ll be apples. I’ll be OK again soon.”

Life in Australia

<figure class="alignleft size-full is-resized"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">John Sherman in late 1942, at the time he joined the Royal Australian Air Force. ^[2]National Archives of Australia</figcaption></figure>

Born Solomon Sherman in Carlton, an inner suburb of Melbourne, Australia, on 2 June 1910, ^[3]Sherman apparently believed he had been born on the same day in 1911, as he stated this on his military application. However the Victorian Births, Deaths & Marriages record is quite unequivocal. … Continue reading he was the second child of Erome (Joseph) Sherman, a tailor, and Sara nee Levine, likely refugees from Tsarist Russia. Joseph and Sara had married in Cape Town, South Africa in December 1905, where their first child Minnie was born. They came on to Australia around 1909, where Joseph set up a tailor’s shop in Lygon Street, Carlton.

By 1930, the family had moved on – to High Street, in Melbourne’s southern suburb of Prahran, where Solomon, his brother Leon and his two sisters Minnie and Annie joined their father in running the business. The two boys became expert furriers.^[4]Lloyd Lamble (1990) The Strutting and the Fretting p279-283 We know a little more of John Sherman from his Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) application in 1942. This reveals that he had attended Elwood High School until he was 15, and was also fluent in Hebrew or Yiddish,^[5]The RAAF paperwork states he speaks “Jewish” could speak some German and Polish, and make himself understood in Russian – an impressive list of language skills.^[6]National Archives of Australia: John Sherman, Royal Australian Air Force enlistment November 1942. Service Number – 72271 Sometime around 1935, Australian electoral rolls indicate that family patriarch Joseph moved yet again, to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, while Annie, Leon and John (as Solomon now called himself) appear to have set themselves up as tailors in Bondi.^[7]This writer has seen suggestions that Solomon and John Sherman were two different children. However, the 1971 death certificate of Joseph Erome Sherman is clear. He had four children – who are … Continue reading

<figure class="aligncenter size-full is-resized"><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Joseph Sherman operating in Katoomba, NSW.^[8]The Blue Mountains Advertiser (Katoomba) 9 Sept 1949, p2</figcaption></figure>

Political activism

At about the same time, John Sherman and his brother Leon became very active in the newly established Worker’s Art Club (WAC) in Sydney. WAC’s politics were firmly of the left, and it maintained formal and informal associations with the Communist Party of Australia. As a member of a emigre European Jewish family, John Sherman’s world view was undoubtedly coloured by the family’s own experiences and an acute awareness of the rise of fascism in Europe.

Sherman’s radical politics are reflected in his poem for the Worker’s Weekly in April 1938, entitled Hang out your Swastika, Chamberlain. The poem is a critique of Britain’s foreign policy in Europe and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in particular. It read, in part;

So hang out your swastika, Chamberlain.
For the tens of thousands that have died in Spain.
For the babes and the crippled that you have slain.
For your betrayal of a democratic cause!
For all these crimes and more
You have earned this mark of shame.
Bowing and scraping before Berlin’s decrees.
You give them gold, unhindered action,
That they smash the cause of peace

And all the while you prate, with high sounding phrases
Of England’s democratic soul, of England’s justice.
But your lies, your hypocritical ravings have no truth with us,
We who are the masses,
Who still fight and struggle
For what we know is right.
For the unity of the workers,
For the smashing of your fascist terror
We fight.

This appeared well before the ‘Munich Agreement’ and Chamberlain’s ‘Peace for our time’ announcement in September 1938.^[9]Worker’s Weekly,(Syd) 19 April 1938, p3 Over time, Sherman was a regular correspondent to newspapers – on the arts, acting and politics.

Through the WAC, which soon became the New Theatre, Sherman also came in contact with many of Australia’s young idealistic socialists – including writer Betty Roland (1903-1996), actor-director Victor Arnold (1905-1982) and actor Lloyd Lamble (1914-2008). However, as academics Phillip Deery and Lisa Milner note, for the New Theatre, “artistic liberalism remained as important as political commitment.”^[10]Deery and Milner (2015), p115 This was reported even at the time – in 1