William Hughes

Australia

Carl Bridge

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781905791903
• eBook ISBN: 9781907822209
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: History

The First World War marked the emergence of the Dominions on the world stage as independent nations, none more so than Australia. The country's sacrifice at Gallipoli in 1915, and the splendid combat record of Australian troops on the Western Front not only created a national awakening at home, but also put Great Britain in their debt, ensuring them greater influence at the Peace Conferences. Australia was represented at Versailles by the Prime Minister, the colourful Billy Hughes, whom Woodrow Wilson called 'a pestiferous varmint' after their repeated clashes over Australia's claims to the Pacific Islands its troops had taken from Germany during the War. Hughes was also the most vociferous (though by no means at all the only) opponent of the racial equality clause put forward by Japan. Indeed, it was fear of Japanese expansion that drove Australia's territorial demands in the Pacific.

I

The Life and the Land

1

New South Welshman, 1862–1901

Like his illustrious British contemporary, David Lloyd George, William Morris Hughes was a Welshman who happened to be born in England, in his case in London; unlike Lloyd George, Hughes made his career as a New South Welshman, as an Australian Briton. Born on 25 September 1862 in the London working-class suburb of Pimlico, which acted as a buffer between moneyed Belgravia and the ‘Devil’s Acre’ and other Westminster slums, William, ‘Little Willy’, Will or Billy as he became known, was the only child of a Welsh-speaking carpenter and his English-speaking Welsh wife. His father, who was originally from Holyhead in Anglesey, north Wales, worked maintaining the Houses of Parliament, was a deacon in his local Particular Baptist Church, and a pillar of respectable working class Toryism. His mother, who was Anglican, worked in service. Her family had for generations owned and worked a small farm at Llansantffraid, also in north Wales just 3 miles across the border with England. Hughes was thus a cultural hybrid, truly British: a Cockney Welshman, relatively anglicised and the result of two internal migrations from the Welsh countryside to the English and Imperial metropolis.

Will Hughes spent his first 22 years in state schools in inner London and on the north Welsh borders. His mother died when he was six years old and he went to live with his father’s sister who ran a substantial boarding house in the Welsh holiday town of Llandudno, where he attended the local grammar school. Here he was taught well in English but also picked up a smattering of colloquial Welsh. Despite his small frame (he grew to a very spare, though wiry, 5 feet 5 inches) and chronic dyspepsia, which bedevilled him all his life, he became a good sportsman as a runner and with his fists, and a champion at marbles.

Aged nearly 12, Will moved back to London and attended St Stephen’s Grammar School in Pimlico, where two years later he became a pupil teacher for five years. There he was inspired by the great Liberal intellectual Matthew Arnold, who inspected the school and presented him with a prize of the complete works of Shakespeare, probably for his ability at reading aloud. Perhaps it was also Arnold who later inspired in him the ideal that an enlightened elite should govern the state for the benefit of all.¹ At St Stephen’s Hughes read widely, learned French well, played cricket, rang the church bells and later remembered leading boisterous ‘hit-and-run’ raids on the local Wesleyan school when he would guard his shins for the fray by cramming exercise books into his socks.² But among the most important skills learned there would have been how to keep the attention of very large classes of potentially unruly pupils.

When he finished his apprenticeship and could afford it, he joined a volunteer battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. Unable or unwilling to secure a permanent teaching post, shunning the offer of a clerk’s stool in Coutts’ Bank and lured by adventure, he and a friend took advantage of one of the great, readily accessible human highways of the British world and migrated to Queensland on a colonial government-assisted passage in October 1884.

The Australia to which Hughes emigrated – the six separate Australian colonies of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania and Queensland – was one of a number of ‘neo-Britains’, countries of British settlement spread across the globe, alongside Canada, Newfoundland and New Zealand. These were thrusting, raw, new frontier societies, with a preponderance of men and youth, politically advanced and liberal, yet parts of ‘Greater Britain’ none the less. Among them, the Australian colonies first introduced the secret ballot, male then universal suffrage, payment of MPs, ‘secular, compulsory and free’ primary education, industrial arbitration, an eight-hour day for skilled workers, and the world’s first Labor government. All this occurred a generation and more in advance of the Mother Country.

The colonists across the diaspora saw themselves as building modern and better Britains. The telephone, tramway, bicycle and electric light arrived in Australia in the 1880s. ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, built on the foundations of the mid-century gold rushes, saw itself as the second city of the Empire after London. The Australian economy rode on the sheep’s back (wool being the principal export); but beef, wheat and minerals (gold, copper, silver, lead and zinc) were also significant. The limits of agrarian settlement had been reached in the 1870s in most colonies but California-style irrigation schemes were promising more intensive farming along the rivers. The infrastructure was growing apace; and with the railway and telegraph, ‘the mighty bush … was tethered to the world’.³ In 1875 there were only 1,000 miles of track and by 1891 there were 10,000. An era ended in 1880 when Ned Kelly, the last great bushranger or outlaw, was captured at Glenrowan in rural Victoria with the aid of the steam train and the electric telegraph. A year earlier, the first cargo of frozen beef had been shipped from Sydney to London on the Strathleven. The era of the Imperial breakfast table had arrived.

The Australian population was 2.25 million in 1881, with a third living in towns and cities and fuelling a building boom. Literacy was virtually universal and women had been admitted to the University of Adelaide. Judged by meat consumption, Australians at that time had the highest standard of living in the world. The visiting British Fabian socialist, Beatrice Webb, remarked on the colonials’ ‘vulgarity and a rather gross materialism’⁴ but they preferred to think of themselves as living in a ‘workingman’s paradise’.⁵ Although in its peak years since the gold rushes of the 1850s government-assisted migration had added 38,054 in 1883 and 23,633 in 1884 (of whom Hughes was one), by this time nearly two-thirds of the people were Australian-born.⁶ An Australian Natives’ Association, for white colonists, had been formed in 1871 and, to mark their Australian-ness, they celebrated Wattle Day, when the first native flowers bloomed after winter, and used three Aboriginal ‘cooees’, or bush calls, instead of three cheers at meetings. The Heidelberg School of Australian Impressionists, among whose leading lights were Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder, were about to paint ‘authentic’ Australian landscapes; and a distinctive Australian literature was about to emerge featuring the bush authors Henry Lawson, ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Steele Rudd and Joseph Furphy. An Australian XI won the first ‘Ashes’ cricket series against England in 1882, beating the English at their own game.

Yet this burgeoning nationalism was also clothed in Imperial garb. The colonies fell over each other to offer a contingent to help avenge General Gordon in the Sudan in 1885 – New South Wales won – and they were very proud that the British Royal Navy, the world’s strongest, guarded their coastline from its ‘Australian Station’ in Sydney Harbour. Many of the leading politicians, lawyers and businessmen aspired to or possessed Imperial knighthoods. Australians may have been radical and a little raffish, but they were also more literate, well-fed and ‘respectable’ than those they left behind in Europe.

Like hundreds of thousands before and after him, Will (soon to be rechristened Billy) Hughes arrived in Queensland anxious to put his foot on the first rung of the ladder of colonial success in this land of opportunities. He soon learnt it was a land prone not only to droughts and floods but to violent booms and busts in the labour market. In the previous 30 years, 29 million acres of land had been sold but, in this driest of continents, only half a million had been cultivated; ‘wool kings’ and land speculators had borrowed to the hilt against rising wool and house prices and debt had grown from £39 to £159 per head of population. The economy was based on a vast bubble of speculation that was about to burst. Hughes was one of many new arrivals who helped flood the labour market.⁷

Failing to find employment as a teacher in Brisbane, Hughes spent two knockabout years as an itinerant odd-job man, ‘humping his Bluey’ (his swag or blanket with his worldly goods rolled inside) mostly on foot in the outback in drought-stricken Queensland and New South Wales. He worked successively as a drover, blacksmith’s striker, railway fettler, kitchen hand, cook, labourer, and part-time soldier. During this period he caught a chill sleeping outside in a frost which made him deaf in one ear (and, incidentally, would give him a useful political prop for the future). His clothes became increasingly ragged and he was sometimes close to starving. He also spent six months as a deck-hand on coastal steamers, and it was in this capacity that he worked his passage to Sydney in 1886. Tempered in the hard crucible of rural unskilled labour, he had picked up his fellows’ hard-edged racism – at the time Queensland sugar-cane cutters had to compete with Kanaka labour imported from Melanesia – and delighted in their physical robustness. He also learned to curse. As one of his biographers puts it, ‘[w]ith buggers, bloodies, bastards and blithering blazes’ he became an Australian.⁸

After a series of short-lived jobs, and bouts of unemployment – at one stage he spent a few days living in the harbourside caves near the Domain – he finally found steady work as an oven-maker’s mate forging and fitting hinges. With a modest and reliable income, he found lodgings in ‘Oleander Lodge’, a boarding house near Moore Park, and formed a common law relationship with his landlady’s daughter, Elizabeth Cutts, who had a young son from a previous relationship. Over the next several years Billy and Elizabeth had three daughters and two surviving sons (another died as an infant).

The family finally settled in the working-class, dock-side suburb of Balmain where the Hugheses rented a small, weatherboard shop. He worked as a second-hand bookseller, locksmith and door-to-door umbrella mender, and she took in laundry. There, amid the hurly-burly of the docks, Billy read widely, met like-minded young Socialists, and trained himself as a speaker, first as a disciple of the American radical Henry George in the Single Tax League, later in the Socialist League, and then in the Labor Electoral League, a predecessor of the Australian Labor Party. He published his first writing (a letter on the unselfishness of Socialism) in the short-lived Single Tax propaganda newspaper Democrat, and won a prize at the Sydney Eisteddfod (for an impromptu speech on ‘Myself’). This happened to be in Sydney, but a similar evolution might have occurred in Glasgow, Auckland or Johannesburg.

The time was ripe for radical political action. Shearing strikes in Queensland in 1889 had by 1890–91 escalated into a general maritime strike down the east coast of Australia and miners and waterside workers had also joined in. After a bitter struggle, the men were defeated. Socially and economically, Australia was in a dire crisis. Loans on the London market were unobtainable and the prices of Australian products plummeted. By 1893 most of the banks had crashed, skilled unemployment stood at 30 per cent, unskilled much more and the economy had shrunk by a third.

Hughes, as a self-employed man, had not been directly involved in the strikes, but he was among those ‘intellectuals’ whose street-corner oratory and pamphleteering advocated a new political approach whereby the trade unions would elect their own representatives to Parliament and achieve by political means what they had failed to do by direct strike action. Hughes and his friend and rival within the Labor Electoral League W A Holman, another recently arrived Londoner with a keen intelligence and the gift of the gab, were at the forefront of this new wave of thought. They read Edward Bellamy, Henry George, Samuel Butler, Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx. However, for Hughes and his associates, society and the state would be restructured not by revolution but by peaceful evolution brought about by Parliamentary action.

Craft unions had been significant in Australian cities since the 1850s and the mass of lesser-skilled workers – shearers, miners, transport workers – had begun to organise in the 1880s. The first Inter-Colonial Trades Union Congress met in Sydney in 1879. Unions endorsed a handful of MPs in this period, but first organised their own party and won significant numbers of seats in the mainland eastern colonies after the failure of the Great Strike of 1890. As a contemporary poem put it:

Then keep your heads, I say, my boys; your comrades in the town
Will help you yet to win the vote and put your tyrants down.
Throw your guns aside, my boys, the ballot is the thing
They did not have to reckon with when George the Fourth was king.

Political Labor had burst on the scene in 1891, in the form of the Labor Electoral League, which won 36 seats in the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, enough to bargain for concessions from the Liberal government, and they now aspired for more in the general elections of 1894. As part of Labor’s push to expand in the rural areas, in September 1893 Hughes was awarded an eight-month commission – he was to be paid by results – from the powerful Amalgamated Shearers’ Union, soon to be renamed the Australian Workers Union (AWU) and the Young Trades Council. Using his public speaking and organising abilities, his task was to travel a sector of outback New South Wales, by bicycle, horse and foot, in the manner of an itinerant Methodist preacher, signing up members for the union and the Labor Electoral League prior to the 1894 New South Wales general election. This marked the real beginning of his political career.

On Hughes’s return to Sydney, he and Holman were prime movers in introducing the ‘pledge’ to the Labor constitution whereby all Labor MPs undertook to maintain solidarity and to vote in Parliament along party lines. His prominence at the 1894 party conference led to his being selected to run for the seat of Lang, centred on Darling Harbour, one of Sydney’s inner-city docks. The young Welsh teacher who had arrived as a ‘new chum’ in 1884 was now fully Australianised; he was in all senses a New South Welshman.

On the Saturday night before the 1894 election Hughes organised a mass demonstration in support of his party. A noisy, half-mile-long procession of workers carrying banners, some men riding on decorated floats, marched to the accompaniment of four bands the mile or so from the Queen’s Statue in St James’s Square to Prince Alfred Park in Surry Hills where at midnight they heard a succession of rousing speeches. The main banner said, ‘Workers, arise, awake! Or ever be fallen’ and 100,000 leaflets were distributed.⁹ In the poll, Hughes won Lang with a majority of only 105, but his supporters were so jubilant they ran him around the streets in a dog cart and bought him a new suit to improve his appearance when he went to the House. He would remain a colonial or federal MP for the rest of his long life, another 58 years. (In Britain, Lloyd George’s career was uncannily similar.) Hughes was now one of 15 ‘pledged’ Labor MPs who, along with 12 ‘unpledged’ Laborites, supported Sir George Reid’s ‘Free Trade’ Liberal government. Five of the ‘pledged’, including Hughes, were avowed Socialists. But William Morris Hughes, Member of the Legislative Assembly, was now also perforce a gentleman with a salary of £300 a year, a free gold pass on the railways and membership of the colony’s most exclusive club.

Hughes entered a legislature in which the Labor members were a small, third force alongside the two big parties, the Free Traders and Protectionists, but potentially Labor might have held the balance of power. Labor’s task was to have its programme implemented by means of persuading the party in government to do so. Labor wanted, among other things, an eight-hour day, early (6 p.m.) closing of shops and businesses, old age pensions (in Hughes’s words: ‘to raise men from the fear of receiving cold crusts and grudging charity’¹⁰), reform of the Sydney City Council to introduce one-man-one-vote, abolition of the Upper House or Legislative Council (‘that tinselled abortion of a House of Lords’¹¹) and a new Navigation Act to protect seamen’s working conditions.

Hughes, who quickly gained a reputation as a leading spokesman for Labor and was a free trader by conviction, after years of frustration, switched sides dramatically in 1899 with his Labor colleagues to support William Lyne’s Protectionists. The final trigger was an outbreak of bubonic plague in the Darling Harbour slums. After inspecting one of the worst streets – there were terraces with ten people to a room and only two filthy open privies jutting out over the harbour to serve their needs – Hughes confronted Lyne in his office and frog-marched him off to inspect the site. They found hordes of bloated, blotchy rats swarming over the slimy harbour wall and dock piles.¹² The plague would take 103 lives in Sydney in 1900. Lyne saw his chance, gained Labor support, cleared the slum and, by giving tenants the vote, reformed the City Council, which had allowed the appalling conditions to persist and a few of whose Aldermen owned some of the hovels in question. Other reforms on the Labor platform followed, and Hughes was lauded by his party.

Also in 1899, Hughes was approached by the languishing Wharf Labourers’ Union to be their secretary. He accepted the offer with alacrity as this gave him the chance of an industrial base and a higher public profile. In due course he reorganised the ‘wharfies’, succeeding through his organisational skills in enlisting two-thirds of all of Sydney’s waterfront workers within two years. They were now in a position to compete in the new world of compulsory industrial arbitration which was emerging following the disastrous strikes of the early 1890s. He would remain their very successful voluntary secretary until 1916. He also re-organised, as President, the allied Trolley, Draymen and Carters’ Union which represented the men who took the goods from wharf to warehouse.

The wharfies met in St Phillip’s Church School Hall and drank in Mann’s Hotel, both in Hughes’s electorate; and it was the publican at Mann’s who first put him in touch with the union. No doubt Hughes selected the union as a test case for the (compulsory) Industrial Arbitration Act (1901) he supported w...

Table of contents

• William Hughes: Australia
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: The Life and the Land
• 1. New South Welshman, 1862–1901
• 2. Nation-building and Troubleshooting, 1901–14
• 3. War, 1914–16
• 4. The Battle for Conscription, 1916–18
• 5. Man of Empire, 1918
• Part II: The Paris Peace Conference
• 6. Peacemaking, 1919
• 7. Dividing the Spoils, 1919
• Part III: The Legacy
• 8. On Top of the British World? 1919–23
• 9. Elder Statesman, 1923–52
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Chronology
• Further Reading
• Select Bibliography
• Picture Sources