Soon after Webb's 1949 arrival in England, he was confined to a mental asylum following a suicide attempt. His younger sister Leonie flew to England and retrieved her brother in 1950, stopping off at Rome on the trip home. Once back in Australia, he endured a period of itinerancy combined with ecstatic episodes of writing in Galston, New South Wales; Melbourne; Semaphore, South Australia; and Jamestown, South Australia until 1953. The creative product of these years, including his famous poems 'Birthday' (about Adolf Hitler's last hours) and 'The Canticle' (a poem about the life of Francis of Assisi), was self-published in his third collection simply entitled "Birthday" (1953).