Remembering Stanley Melbourne Bruce – David Lee

Dr David Lee is the director of the Historical Publications and Information Section of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. On Wednesday 18 May 2011, David Lee addressed The Sydney Institute to discuss the legacy of former Australian Prime Minister, Stanley Melbourne Bruce. David Lee is the author of Stanley Melbourne Bruce: Australian Internationalist. Dr Ann Moyal, who was to present a paper with David Lee, was unable to attend but her paper was read by Gerard Henderson at the event and is also published online in this issue of The Sydney Papers Online.

REMEMBERING STANLEY MELBOURNE BRUCE

 

DAVID LEE

In 1962, Australia’s longest-serving prime minister, Robert Menzies, paid a gracious and surprising tribute to Bruce, Australia’s prime minister from 1923 to 1929 and High Commissioner in London from 1933 to 1945. Menzies referred to Bruce as “probably the outstanding Australian of our time”. [i] Menzies made this remark as he himself was approaching his record term as prime minister from 1949 to 1966.

The Sun Herald commented that Menzies’ remark would be “neither popular nor historically endorsed”.[ii] Bruce’s six-year period as prime minister, the paper observed, was “averagely successful” but wrecked by “a gross political miscalculation in 1929” and the fact remained “that the greater part of his career was spent abroad”.[iii] This parochial commentator voiced the sentiments of many Australians then and later. For many Bruce was, and remained, simply a caricature: the man who wore spats, who lost his seat and was more “English” than Australian.

In this address I will elaborate on why Menzies made this assessment of Bruce so at odds with the popular view of many then and today. I draw on the fourth book published on Bruce – my Stanley Melbourne Bruce: Australian Internationalist, (Continuum, London and New York, 2010).[iv]

Stanley Melbourne Bruce was no “Englishman”. He was born in 1883 the son of a Scots Northern Irish immigrant, John Munro Bruce. John Munro Bruce had emigrated to Victoria almost penniless in the mid-nineteenth century. A self-made man, he became a partner in the Melbourne soft goods firm, Paterson, Laing and Bruce. Stanley had three older brothers and one older sister. His father was doing well enough by the 1890s to send his youngest son to the prestigious Melbourne Grammar School. Stanley’s scholastic abilities were inferior to his athletic ones. But while he could not be described as an intellectual, he was an intelligent man capable of synthesising vast amounts of information and conveying his arguments in cogent prose.

Stanley Melbourne had a troubled adolescence. The 1890s Depression hit the family hard and John Munro Bruce was forced to launch a risky takeover of the company. In the midst of this corporate restructure in 1899, Stanley’s second oldest brother, William Crawford Bruce, threw himself under a train at Rockdale Railway Station. Two years later, John Munro Bruce, afflicted by untreated diabetes, took his own life in a Paris Hotel. After their father’s death, the oldest brother Ernest combined with his youngest brother, Stanley, to put Paterson, Laing and Bruce on a sound footing. But first, Stanley travelled to England in 1902 to put himself through Cambridge University, taking his mother and sister with him.

Before he had even taken his degree, Ernest engineered for Stanley to take over as acting Chairman, then Chairman of this major Anglo-Australian company. While Ernest ran the company in Australia, Stanley helped direct the enterprise as a whole from London while practising as a commercial barrister. Stanley returned to Australia somewhat by accident during the First World War.

By family agreement, Ernest Bruce, who had served in the Boer War, was supposed to stay in Australia as General Manager of Paterson, Laing and Bruce, while Stanley would enlist.

Stanley joined the 2^nd Battalion Royal Fusiliers, served with distinction in the British Army in Gallipoli and was invalided out of the army after being wounded in the knee in 1916. His war service left in Bruce a detestation of industrial warfare and conditioned his later approach to appeasement in the 1930s. Although he was then in middle age, Ernest also enlisted and served through the war on the Western Front in the Royal Artillery. Ernest added to the Bruce family tragedies by taking his own life just before being demobilised in 1919. His mother and sister also having died earlier, the death of his much loved brother affected Stanley most of all. Stanley had had to return to Australia to take his brother’s place in the running of the family firm in 1917. While he was in Australia Bruce’s family connection – (he had married Ethel Anderson one of the Manifold family) – persuaded him to stand for the Nationalists in the seat of Flinders.

A by-product of this campaign was that to ward off a campaign for this semi-rural seat from the newly formed Country Party, the government led by Billy Hughes undertook to introduce preferential voting in Australian federal elections.

It was in order to strengthen the Nationalist Government from attack by the Country Party that Hughes in 1921 invited Bruce to become his Treasurer. The key figures in Hughes’ Government in 1922, besides Bruce, were Hughes himself and Walter Massey-Greene, the Minister for Trade and architect of the protectionist “Greene” tariff. To general surprise Massey-Greene was defeated at the 1922 election by the Country Party Candidate, Roland Green, campaigning on the slogan “Vote for Greene without an ‘e’”.

The election gave the Country Party the balance of power in the House of Representatives and gravely weakened Hughes’s prime ministership. That left the still relatively young Bruce as Hughes’s only viable successor despite having only one year’s experience in government. As a cleanskin, Bruce was well equipped to conduct negotiations with the Country Party Leader Earle Page. These negotiations led to the composite Nationalist–Country Party government being formed. Bruce became Prime Minister at not quite forty years of age in 1923.

Bruce’s prime ministership has been described as unremarkable. Such a view, however, underestimates his period as prime minister from 1923 to 1929. I will mention three of the coalition government’s major achievements. The first was to construct with Page the Nationalist-Country Party coalition (which is today the Liberal-National Party coalition). From Bruce’s time for the rest of the twentieth century the coalition would be in power for twice the length of time of Labor. After forming the government in 1923, Bruce and Page forced their respective party organisations to respect an electoral pact to give each other’s sitting members immunity and generally to exchange electoral preferences.

Bruce’s second major achievement can broadly be described as “nation-building”. Bruce oversaw the movement of Australia’s federal capital to Canberra and the opening of the Parliament House in Canberra by the Duke of York. Other aspects of this nation building were federal aid to road building, the formation of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and supervision of a significant immigration intake.

The third achievement was the Financial Agreement of 1927. In the most decisive reform of the Australian constitution to that time, it established a Loan Council to coordinate the borrowings of Commonwealth and State governments.

In an effort to reform the system of Commonwealth arbitration Bruce lost office and his seat in 1929. But the end of his prime ministership was by no means the completion of his public service. When Joseph Lyons appointed him as Resident Minister and then High Commissioner in London, Bruce embarked on a second career perhaps even more significant than his prime ministership – as a diplomat.

As well as negotiating the Ottawa Agreement (a system of reciprocal preferences between Britain and Empire countries), Bruce oversaw the conversion of Commonwealth and State debts, incurred before the Depression at high interest rates, into loans with the lower interest rates that prevailed during the 1930s in the Great Depression. He also earned a considerable international reputation in the 1930s for his work at the League of Nations. Broadly, he thought that the League, because of its military weakness, would fail if it tried to act as a security organisation.

But he considered that it had great potential in the technical and economic fields and advocated international economic cooperation to raise world standards of living and nutrition. For this, he was nominated by his government for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1936.

In 1939, a League of Nations committee chaired by Bruce recommended establishing a Central Committee for Economic and Social Questions to direct the work of all the relevant League committees:[v] Although the committee’s “Bruce Report” was overtaken by the outbreak of war, it was a landmark in the history of international organisation that subsequently paved the way for the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations which would co-ordinate the work of the United Nations’ manifold specialised agencies.

Indeed it was the culmination of a movement to transform the League into an organisation for the study of socio-economic concerns and to promote the idea that international economic policies should promote the well-being of the masses. While the League was soon to break up, the Bruce Report helped lay the foundation for the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in whose establishment he was later centrally involved. Another high point in his diplomatic career was in 1936 when he chaired an international conference at the Swiss town of Montreux which restored to Turkey its full national control over the Dardanelles by peaceful negotiation between treaty partners.

Bruce’s period as high commissioner in London in the lead up to and during the Second World War was a frustrating one. As a rationalist and peaceable man, Bruce naively thought that the warring nations, rather than fight the horrors of industrial and total war, could be induced to the negotiating table where a peaceable world order would be negotiated. Bruce, like most members of the Lyons Government, supported the appeasement of Germany, while urging that the Empire use the breathing space of peace to rearm.

His support for appeasement stemmed from both his military experience in the First World War and his internationalist ideas.

Moreover, Bruce’s tireless advocacy for the proper reflection of the Australian point of view in the making of imperial policy put him at odds with the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who succeeded Neville Chamberlain in 1940. Bruce and Churchill disagreed on many issues: the botched British attack on Narvik in April 1940, the possibility of a negotiated peace with Germany in 1939 and 1940 and the failure of the largely ANZAC operations in Greece and Crete.

On fundamental issues like the idea of a negotiated peace in May –June 1940, Churchill was right and Bruce wrong. But on many strategic issues Bruce’s advice was sound. The real long-term significance of his diplomatic work in the 1940s was not strategic but in the area of international post-war reconstruction. Bruce tirelessly lobbied British, Australian and US policy-makers for international cooperation. As well as being put on the shortlist for the UN’s first Secretary-General in 1945 he played a major role in the establishment of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the first of the UN’s specialised agencies. After retirement in 1945, Bruce was made a Viscount and became first Chancellor of the Australian National University.

The legacies of Bruce’s public life are considerable.

As the contemporary journalist Warren Denning noted of his prime ministership he was ‘worthy of consideration alongside Deakin; in some ways the Cambridge Blue was a better Prime Minister, because more enduring things took solid shape under his practical businesslike hand’.[vi] And as a diplomat he made a significant contribution to the development of international organisation. When one considers the totality of his extraordinary public career one can see the merits of Menzies’ 1962 assessment of Stanley Melbourne Bruce.

Endnotes

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[i] ‘Forgotten Man’, Sun Herald, 15 April 1962.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] David Lee, Stanley Melbourne Bruce: Australian Internationalist, Continuum, New York and London, 2010.

[v] Victor-Yves Ghebali, La Société des Nations et la réforme Bruce 1939–1940, (Geneva, 1970).

[vi] Stanley Melbourne Bruce. Transcript. Denning Papers, MS 5129, Box 1, folder 4, National Library of Australia.