This is the final chapter in the life of Raymon Campbell Miller. When Miller was seven years old, his mother began a passionate affair with an Italian Count. She divorced, abandoned her son, and left Sydney to marry her lover. Three months after the wedding in Rome she died of typhoid poisoning. To read the full story, CLICK HERE.
In 1942/3 Miller served a year in prison after dressing in women’s clothes and sitting matriculation exams for his female student Ngaire Payne, at New England University in Armidale.
Raymond Campbell Miller
For a man whose grip on reality was already tenuous, that gaol term proved to be the beginning of the end. In April 1946 the 44 year old was arrested for vagrancy in Sydney’s George Street. It was alleged that he had begged money for alcohol from an English sailor.
The sailor curtly refused, and Miller approached a nearby policeman. He complained about the man’s rudeness and made an even worse mistake by asking the copper to give him a shilling. The policeman, noting that Miller was in a ‘filthy and verminous state’, said he was going to arrest him, ‘You can’t do that, I’m a doctor of divinity,’ Miller replied.
When the matter came up in Central Court, Miller’s approach to the sailor was described as having an Old World Grace; ‘Could you oblige me with a shilling? I am desirous of partaking of liquid refreshment.‘
Asked for his address he told the magistrate.’ ‘You know how difficult it is to obtain board and lodgings, At present I am not residing anywhere. ‘
To the question, ‘Have you any money, pension, or other means of support?‘ he said that the Lord would provide. He had only 11d on him when arrested.
It was an indication of Miller’s impaired mental state that he then told the court he was employed as a teacher at Lincoln College, Daking House and had given a lesson in Old Testament Hebrew just before his arrest.
In fact, he had been a tutor at the college when he posed as a woman to sit matriculation exams for one of his pupils in 1942. The student had wanted to study medicine at Sydney University. In a strange echo of this, Miller said he had applied to study medicine at the university himself the previous March, but that the quota was full. He blamed his current arrest for being unable to try again; ‘The precipitation of this charge caused a hiatus in my subsequent arrangements to commence at the faculty this year.’
It was all very sad and of course impossible to believe. However, the magistrate observed (correctly) that there was no doubt Miller was a man of intellectual attainments. (Despite all efforts I have been unable to discover when and where he received his classical education) He was sentenced to a week’s gaol on the charge of begging, mainly so the poor fellow could get himself cleaned up.
I can hardly bear to think what happened to him in the next few years.
Raymond died in 1951 aged 49. He had no friend or relative to place a death notice in the newspaper. After a brief service in the chapel at Andrew’s Funeral Directors in Enmore he was cremated and his ashes interred in Rookwood Cemetery.
‘THE CHILD IS FATHER TO THE MAN’ ……William Wordsworth
Rest in peace Raymond Campbell Miller; a brilliant, flawed man haunted by his traumatic childhood.
A MORE POSITIVE OUTCOME FOR MRS PAYNE
For Ngaire Payne, the student who so foolishly agreed for Raymond Miller to sit university entrance exams in her place, the years following the incident were very different. Mrs Payne escaped with a three year good behaviour bond. She was fully supported by her employer at the Sydney Vaccination Institute in Randwick, Francois Ray, who even paid her £50 bail.
Francois Ray and Ngaire Payne (Daily Telegraph, May 5 1949)
Ngaire Payne continued her research work. When Monsieur Ray died in 1949 his will included the wish that she would continue to develop new vaccines. He bequeathed her all his property, including his valuable scientific equipment. The odd thing is that I cannot find any mention of the Institute after 1949 . It would be ironic if Ngaire had been unable to take over the laboratory because she did not have a degree.
