Mr Tindale called his mother a cruel and vain woman who held no affection for her three sons.

The late Geraldine Tindale “dumped her children on the scrap heap”, he said.

She had placed Bruce and his older brother John into an orphanage when they were five and seven.

She kept their younger brother Graham with her because he was too young to be sent to an orphanage.

“I would believe every word she told me and when I asked her where do we go when we die and she told me heaven and that it is a wonderful place and I believed her,” Mr Tindale said.

“So I tried to kill myself at age five by jumping off a second floor fire escape at the orphanage because it was run by a brutal, paedophile bastard who abused all of us.

“He would hold inspections and make us take off our clothes and he would run his hands over us.

“I hated my mother for doing that to us.”

Mr Tindale recalled landing on a vegetable garden and shattering the matron’s tea pot on the way down during the suicide attempt.

“I burst out laughing and she was furious then I screamed out that I wanted to die.

“She picked me up and had me checked by a doctor and then my mother was notified to take us home.”

(It was not until many years later Mr Tindale found out he had fractured his spine in four places.)

Mr Tindale and his brother John were with their mother for two days when she dressed them up and took them to Sydney’s Central Railway Station.

“She left us there and we didn’t see her again for eight years,” he said.

“We sat on the suitcases waiting for her. She told us she had forgotten one of her cases but she got on a train to Melbourne.”

A kind taxi driver had driven past the children five times and offered to find their mother and then drove them to their grandmother’s house (their father’s mother) in Mosman.

“We chose Granny because she had two big glass jars filled with lollies and all we could remember was she lived in a house called Hendon.

“All at once we called out Punch Street when we saw the sign and that’s where he took us.”

Mr Tindale enjoyed staying with his grandmother and Aunt Nance until his father Douglas who tormented his sons with psychological and physical abuse and ridicule, came to stay.

“Gran used to tell me that my mother and father, who came from wealthy families, were spoilt, that’s why they acted they way they did.

“Gran would tell me never spoil your children, you are better off drowning them.

“I never married and I never had children because I did not want to inflict any sort of cruelty on them, as my father and mother did to me.”

Mr Tindale’s father was a sadistic man who had no time for his sons.

“A horrible bit of rubbish, a shit head Aunt Nance would call him,” Mr Tindale said.

“He threw me into an Olympic size swimming pool, clothes and all, in the hope I would drown when I was four.

“He would put a pillow over my face and smother me until I went blue and unconscious.

“I was raped when I was 13 by a stranger in a car and I didn’t bother to tell my father because there was never any sympathy from him.”

Mr Tindale went with the stranger who had promised to drive him to Manly for a hamburger.

“That ruined my life. He strangled me and raped me and I went home and sat in a hot bath all night trying to rid myself of that experience.

“My body did not feel like it was mine. Two weeks later I decided I could not live with myself and I tried to hang myself from a beam, but the beam broke, I fell onto a concrete floor and I burst out laughing.

“I never attempted suicide again.”

Mr Tindale suffered from manic depression later in life, overdosed on his medications at one point and again he recovered.

He worked and saved his money while living at Mosman and moved to England in 1957 to act in the theatre.

“I thought when I went to England I would escape my childhood,” he said.

“No such luck. I have remembered it all my life.”

After many crushes and love affairs with older women, Mr Tindale returned to Sydney’s eastern suburbs and worked various jobs.

“I decided to get out of Sydney and ended up here in High Street, Maitland in 2000.”

Mr Tindale’s advice to anybody struggling with life’s torments is to stand up for what you believe in.

“I have learnt never to allow anyone to stand over me,” he said.

“I have always kept my sense of humour in every situation, including after the death of my father.

“I value the lives of other people around me, more than my own, because I become a father figure for them.

“Speaking out now is good for me, a type of therapy, I suppose.”

It is not unusual for Mr Tindale to wander around his immaculate apartment at Hampton Court talking out loud to himself.

“Why have all these things happened to me? I can’t figure it out.

“Get over it, I tell myself, and it works for me.

“In some ways I have been successful in life and I have drawn on the strength and success of people in my family.”

Some of his ancestors include William Tyndale 1494-1536 (the original spelling of the surname) a scholar and Bible translator and the father of Penrith John Tindale who built Hornseywood in 1824 (now demolished).