Remembering Stanley Melbourne Bruce – Ann Moyal

On Tuesday 17 May 2011, Dr Ann Moyal was to have joined Dr David Lee to discuss the legacy of Viscount Stanley Melbourne Bruce in the Australian story. At late notice, Dr Moyal was too ill to attend the meeting – but her paper was read to the audience by Gerard Henderson. Dr Ann Moyal, a social historian of science, is also the author of Breakfast with Beaverbrook: Memoirs of an Independent Woman.

REMEMBERING STANLEY MELBOURNE BRUCE

ANN MOYAL

It is important to have this deeply researched biography for this rather melancholy man, Viscount Bruce, has been largely forgotten in Australian historiography. Yet here is a unique figure in Australia’s twentieth century political history who both wielded power in the 1920s as an elected, if “unanticipated” prime minister, and in the next decade exercised significant power as a highly influential but unelected figure in the shaping of Australia’s foreign policy.  It is this theme of S.M. Bruce’s role as foreign policy adviser and advocate to the Australian government during the 1930’s that I wish I wish to take up arising from my reading of the biography.

As David Lee records, it was during his period as resident minister in London and Australian High Commissioner from 1933 that Bruce, as an engaged delegate and participant in the affairs of the League of Nations, formed the conclusion that the League was unfit to act as a collective security organization and came to believe that fundamental changes to the international economic system could remove the root causes of international conflict and stave off world war.

While Bruce had himself visited Germany in the 1930s, Lee observes that “he lacked a sound understanding of the nature of the Fascist regimes which had emerged in Europe and was too sanguine, as a rational businessman, about Nazi Germany’s amenability to reason”.

Bruce’s emphasis on reform of the international economic system and his close association with such conservative British politicians as Stanley Baldwin, Samuel Hoare and Neville Chamberlain led him increasingly through the thirties to the support of political conciliation in Europe and to endorsement of the appeasement policies pursued by successive British National governments. His position in respect of Australia was hence a singular one. He had early championed the notion that the Australian High Commissioner should act as the unofficial channel between the Australian and UK Governments on all matters concerning Imperial policy and that the Empire should act as one in its foreign policy. Thus at a time when Australia had no diplomatic missions of its own in the world (and would have none until the end of  1939) S.M. Bruce  stood as the key Australian figure beside the Prime Minister in the shaping of the  Australian government’s responses to the growing crisis in Europe.
The political mood in Australia was particularly receptive to its High Commissioner’s ideas. Prime Minister J.A.  Lyons, a confirmed pacifist and devout Catholic who saw the rise of Nazism and fascism in Europe as a lesser threat than the growing emergence of communism, had early veered towards extending his domestic code of “consultation, concession and compromise” to the international sphere. Thus on two trips to London in 1935 and 1937 he stopped in Italy to meet Mussolini and express his enthusiasm for the dictator, whom he said publicly was “a man who has done immense good” and to confirm Australia’s friendly feelings towards him.

Earle Page, Lyons’ coalition partner and deputy prime minister who himself had pressed for increasing rearmament in government in the 1920s, now as Minister for Commerce on two trade missions to Britain in 1936 and 1938 took little interest in the gathering political situation in Europe but developed what he describes in his autobiography as “an unqualified regard” for Neville Chamberlain. Similarly the Attorney-General, Robert  Menzies, also on the  trade mission to London in 1936, had endorsed Baldwin’s sustained policy of friendly dealings with Germany and, visiting that country himself in 1938 assured the Australian public in newspaper articles on his return that German intentions were essentially defensive.  Only the “old fire-eater” W.M. Hughes writing in his small book The Price of Peace: Australia and War Today in 1935 emerged as a critic of the theory of appeasement which he characterised in parliament as like “giving a snack of sandwiches to a hungry tiger”.

The Lyons Government was accordingly at one with the British Government in recognising Germany’s annexation of Austria in the Anchluss of April 1938 and supported Neville Chamberlain’s ultimate capitulation to Hitler over Czechoslovakia and the position of the Sudeten Germans. In this Bruce’s views and influence proved pivotal. As David Lee tells us “he was unsympathetic to multi-ethnic Czechoslovakia” and its 1924 Treaty with France which committed France to go to war if Germany invaded it. In October 1938 he advised Lyons, “If Czechoslovakia was not to remain a festering sore threatening the peace, the issue of the transference of the Sudeten area to Germany either by plebiscite or some other means, would have to be faced.” He himself became directly involved in defining the conditions for the timing of the transfer and clung firmly to the view that going to war over the Sudeten German question was unthinkable and should be avoided by necessary compromises with Germany to the eleventh hour.

As a result, Lyons and his government added their support for Britain in its direct representation to Czechoslovakia that its government “should not delay in making a public announcement of the most liberal concessions which they could offer to Germany”. Lyons, subsequently, in an act of diplomacy at a distance, cabled Neville Chamberlain suggesting that Bruce could fly to Rome as the British Prime Minister’s emissary to enlist Mussolini’s good offices in the matter.

Central to the Australian situation was the lack of independent and informed internal input and analysis on the swiftly moving international situation. Lyons’ attempt, prodded by his then Minister of External Affairs Senator George Pearce, in the mid1930s to set up a Department of External Affairs as an analytical and advisory arm, proved ineffective. Placed in the hands of a gruff military man, Colonel W. R. Hodgson, with scant resources and no concept of training graduates to fill diplomatic posts, this small unit was readily sidelined and did not act as a functional departmental arm of Australia’s foreign service until 1941.
Information on the rapidly changing European situation continued to flow to the Australian Government through the Australian High Commissioner and the Dominions Office. Importantly, there was little impartiality or balance in the views Bruce presented.  A sustained critic of Winston Churchill, he appears to have had no dealings with the political figures Harold Macmillan, Harold Nicholson and Robert Boothy who, independently of Churchill, made up the younger British band of articulate anti-appeasers.

A revealing perspective on the Australian government’s position and their handling of major foreign policy issues emerges from a diary entry written by Richard Casey – Treasurer in the Lyons Government and a man who had had wide international experience as Australian liaison officer in Britain in the 1920s. As Casey recorded reflectively in 1940, he and his fellow Ministers, had “given only an odd and uninformed half-hour every three months to some ad hoc aspects of foreign affairs … so much so, were we indifferent to the great forces that were in gestation that I don’t remember a single discussion in Cabinet of any event or tendencies in the ‘Manchuria to Munich’ period except what I now look back on as a most unreal discussion on Munich the implications of which were entirely hidden from us.”  He added that “Australia had its head in the domestic sands in those years with a vengeance.” With John Curtin’s leadership from 1935, the Labor Party also considered that their business was “to keep Australia aloof from the wars of the world”.

As events sharpened in 1939, Bruce’s commitment to appeasement remained unshaken. Visiting Australia with his wife in January 1939, Lee records that Bruce toured the nation defending Chamberlain’s appeasement policy to state cabinets, federal members and the National Defence Council. The biography is silent on Bruce’s reaction to Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, but notes Bruce’s concern at Chamberlain’s firm stance on Britain’s guarantee to Poland. Indeed, as late as August 1939, Bruce was warning Menzies as Prime Minister that “with the limited effects which Britain and France could afford for  Poland,  I have been urging on the United Kingdom government  the possibility of exploring every avenue to keep the door of negotiation open”.
Bruce’s long commitment to compromise and peace at any price would lead him to decline Menzies’ offer in November 1939 of the new post as Australia’s representative in Washington because, as David Lee suggests, he hoped, “idealistically and naively” for  a negotiated end of the war. It was a position that in the dark years of war as Britain and the Empire struggled alone to defeat Germany, Bruce continued to uphold, believing (with some others) until 1943 “that a negotiated peace, if not with Hitler, then with a successor German government, seemed a credible alternative”.

With such evidence before us, the attempt made following Lyons’ sudden death in office in April 1939 – notably by Page and Casey – to induce Bruce to return to Australia with a view to his possible leadership of a national government formed by all parties (a position Bruce was ready to contemplate) takes on a new dimension and invites some serious historical reflection. Fortunately Menzies’ election and subsequent dismissal delivered Australia into the purposeful wartime leadership of John Curtin.
Reflecting on S.M. Bruce trajectory across the critical 1930s, my evaluation of this complex man rests essentially on the fact that from his entrenched position, his contacts, and his reappointment as Australian High Commissioner for a second term in 1938, he remained the major prevailing and authoritative voice for the Australian government in respect of its foreign policy in Europe. The 1930s, in general, was in no way a period of distinguished statesmanship. In light of this, I cannot subscribe to David Lee’s concluding endorsement of the tribute paid by Menzies to Viscount Bruce in 1962 at his installation as Chancellor of the new Australian National University that, “as a statesman, he was the outstanding Australian of our time”.

In brief, however, it can be said that the period of the Bruce-Page Government, did exhibit statesmanlike qualities. Then these two very different men, Bruce the financially gifted Prime Minister and Page, the founder of the federal Country Party and deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer, managed to establish successful conservative coalition government as a part of the political culture of Australia which continued to dominate Australian politics for most of the twentieth century. Moreover, working from a shared national perspective, they transformed and systematised Commonwealth and State relations and gave the Commonwealth government a strong new central authority. In many fields theirs was a remarkably constructive collaboration.
I have, then, to take issue with David Lee’s observation that Page’s autobiography, Truant Surgeon, was a case of “the tail wagging the dog in the Bruce-Page government”. Although he himself concedes that “Bruce never underestimated Page and the strong personal and professional relationship which the two men created was fundamental to the success of the coalition”, Page is singularly absent from Lee’s story and he ascribes all the constructive undertaking of that government to S.M. Bruce. It was, however, essentially a highly co-operative administration. Writing to his old friend and colleague, as Page prepared to take up his autobiographical pen in 1956, Bruce had this to say: ‘You are better equipped than anyone else to do this job. The interesting fact that will emerge…is that our government was the only one that faced Australia’s problems and her future progress realistically and constructively. We laid some very sound foundations which have been built upon in the years since. [and] … many of our ideas which were received with the  utmost hostility when we propounded them have after a lapse of twenty to thirty years become platitudes even in the mouths of those who derided them.”