William Ferguson Massey

Prime minister of New Zealand (1912-1925)

• Born: March 26, 1856
• Birthplace: Limavady, County Londonderry, Ireland
• Died: May 10, 1925
• Place of death: Wellington, New Zealand

Massey’s tenure as prime minister marked the coming-of-age and domination of the small farmer in New Zealand politics. Steadfastly steering his country through the trials of World War I, he combined conservative social values and fierce anti-Labour attitudes with a continuation of policies based on the intervention of the state to develop New Zealand as a prosperous outlying farm of the British Empire.

Early Life

William Ferguson Massey was the eldest son of a small Ulster freeholder, John Massey, and his Scottish wife, Marianne (née Ferguson) Massey. Educated at the local National School and a private secondary school, Massey emigrated to New Zealand at the age of fourteen in December, 1870, to join his father in farming at Tamaki, near Auckland. Between 1872 and 1876, he was a plowman on John Grigg’s Longbeach estate, Canterbury, where the most advanced agricultural techniques were being implemented. Massey received a valuable practical education at a time when New Zealand’s economy, formerly based on wool and gold, was being supplemented by intensive grassland farming, supplying refrigerated products for the British table.

Returning north, Massey leased and subsequently purchased a small farm at Mangere (near the present Auckland International Airport), operated a lucrative portable threshing business, and married Christina Allen Paul (1863-1932), by whom he had three sons and two daughters. Christina Massey’s public services were recognized when she was created New Zealand’s first Dame Commander of the British Empire. Two sons subsequently became rural members of Parliament.

Markedly successful, Massey joined a Farmers’ Club, revived the Auckland Agricultural and Pastoral Society and, in 1891, became the driving force behind the quasi-political Auckland National Association formed to combat radical liberalism, advocate freehold land tenure, and, through roads and bridges policies, drag the rising numbers of small bush farmers in the Auckland Province out of the mud. In 1894, he entered Parliament as M.P. for Waitemata, after acceding to a requisition from electors, presented to him on a pitchfork while he was building a haystack. Massey was the acknowledged champion of the small farmers, as well as the leader of the new groups that were emerging to challenge the Liberal hegemony of Richard John Seddon that had emerged following the shattering of the old conservatives during the economic depression.

A born organizer and party manager, Massey became Leader of the Opposition in 1902, undisputed head of the new Reform Party in February, 1909, and prime minister of New Zealand on July 6, 1912, when, after a confused election result the previous year, he defeated the Liberals on the floor of Parliament. This office he retained until his death.

Massey’s character and beliefs were fixed by his youthful Ulster farming experiences. Strong-framed and portly in his later years, Massey was instantly recognizable. With a round, red, jowly face dominated by piercing blue eyes and a large white mustache, “Old Bill,” as Massey was universally called, was a cartoonist’s delight. Initially underestimated by senior politicians the intellectual Fabian William Pember Reeves thought him to be “merely a decent country member; what we called a ’roads and bridges’ man” Massey’s prodigious industry, ability to master detail, and expert grasp of the principles of legislation and of parliamentary procedure made him a formidable, indeed dominant, debater. Drawing his precepts and examples from the Old Testament, his deep Presbyterian faith, and his attachment to British Israelism’s notion of the divine mission of the scattered British people, Massey epitomized the virtues and limitations of his farming fraternity.

Life’s Work

Massey’s career as prime minister was troubled by the fact that only once, in 1919, did he have an adequate majority. “Never try to carry on a Government with a majority of only two or three; it is hell all the time,” he said. Yet he did have an inbuilt electoral advantage in that a 28 percent “country quota” was automatically added to rural electorates at the expense of voters in the larger towns and cities. Nevertheless, he vigorously embarked on his policy of giving freehold tenure to Crown leaseholders at original valuation, thereby presenting farmers with the unearned increment. He maintained populist expenditure on rural public works and reformed the patronage system riddling the civil service. Privately profoundly Orange (Protestant Irish) in outlook, he shared the sectarian views of Protestant extremists but was too astute to endorse publicly their fulminations against the Roman Catholic minority. A moderate whiskey drinker, he contained the socially divisive Prohibition movement, which, but for the soldiers’ votes, would have had New Zealand following the experiment by the United States in 1919.

Continual crises marked his years in office, reflecting emerging fissures and new conflicts in New Zealand and overseas. In 1912, miners at the Waihi gold mine struck under the influence of the “Red” Federation of labor. Massey smashed the strike by deregistering the union, employing scab labor and using the police. The following year the waterfront, mines, railways, and processing plants all elements in New Zealand’s rural export trade on which the country lived were hit by further strikes and similarly crushed, this time by “Massey’s Cossacks,” special constables of young farmers on horseback. Increasingly, Massey saw organized urban labor and its political representatives as tools of syndicalist agitations and later as Bolshevik revolutionaries and unpatriotic wreckers. His detestation was reciprocated by his opponents.

A new trial fell on Massey in August, 1914. On Great Britain declaring war on Germany, Massey declared with almost universal approval that “All we have and all we are are at the disposal of the Imperial Government.” In August, 1915, Sir Joseph Ward’s Liberals joined Massey in a coalition government that lasted until July, 1919; conscription was imposed in 1916, Labour leaders were jailed for sedition, primary products were commandeered and shipped to England at regulated prices, and all efforts were directed at winning the war. Massey himself was frequently overseas, attending several meetings of the Imperial War Cabinet in London and signing, on behalf of New Zealand, the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. New Zealand casualties were horrific nearly seventeen thousand men were killed and forty-one thousand wounded. This represented one in every three New Zealand males aged between twenty and forty. More than $160 million, 36.4 percent of the total, had been added to the public debt of the Dominion.

Although Ward, as treasurer, had great domestic influence, Massey easily won the 1919 election, resumed borrowing for public works, attempted (disastrously in the event) to settle former servicemen on the land, and combated rising social weariness and unrest culminating in the sharp recession of 1921-1922. Massey moved the state, in cooperation with the farmers, into regulated marketing schemes for dairy products and meat, thus demonstrating that he was not a traditional conservative but a politician firmly entrenched in this key aspect of New Zealand’s social life and economic history.

Although he had participated in imperial wartime decisions concerning the empire as a whole, Massey, while holding little if any faith in the League of Nations, declined to seize, or indeed accept, after 1918 the new opportunities offered for New Zealand’s developing independence in world affairs. He reverted to the subservient empire loyalty of his past. Yet he had threatened resignation in 1914 if the Admiralty did not provide adequate escorts for the New Zealand troopships. He secured formerly German Western Samoa as a New Zealand mandate, and, by a brilliant coup, obtained a share in the phosphates of Nauru Island for his fellow farmers. Massey regarded moves toward independence as unique, and the Royal Navy and the Singapore naval base as New Zealand’s only sure shield.

Massey barely survived the 1922 election. Worried by the rise of Labour and the difficulty of making old remedies effective, fearful of burgeoning agrarian protest and well aware of New Zealand’s almost total dependence on the British market, Massey adopted new versions of developmental policies. He initiated electrification schemes, raised rural production through promoting intensive farming on artificial pastures, and pursued urban wage restraint. Yet these remedies could not cure “the instability of a dependent economy.” Worn out by work and political cares and suffering from intestinal cancer from 1923, Massey died at Wellington on May 10, 1925, and was buried at Point Halswell, where a substantial memorial was erected. Massey University at Palmerston North honors his memory.

Significance

William Ferguson Massey’s career encapsulated many of the enduring verities of New Zealand political life between 1890 and 1929. His life marked the coming of political and social power to the small farmer, particularly in the North Island. An Ulster Presbyterian migrant, he brought many of the virtues and flaws of that tribe to his adopted country as his cultural baggage. Personally hearty and genial, often bigoted, of limited vision as the world shifted under his feet, he was, beneath an apparently uncaring demeanor when challenged, intensely sensitive to criticism. His mind seldom expanded to meet the new challenges after 1918 that his political abilities tactical perception and a capacity to work with talented lieutenants of superior formal education had thrust before him. The parliamentary equal of Seddon, many of whose populist approaches and astute distributions of political largesse he continued, Massey lacked Seddon’s wider visions and more appealing humanity. Yet, as his young, radical opponent J. A. Lee observed, “I can truthfully say every member [of Parliament] listened, some to cheer, some to jeer, but they listened. . . . He was master and the class knew he was.” Lee continued to relate how the normally taciturn and phlegmatic Massey had burst into tears when cheered by limbless New Zealand soldiers at Twickenham and how he had later insisted in traversing the “nightmare ward” of the physically shattered at Brockenhurst, England.

The foundations of Massey’s values the Bible, the virtues of thrift, hard work, rural toil, self-denial, and loyalty to the Mother Country, Great Britain were simple. So, too, was his political objective of fulfilling what seemed to be New Zealand’s destiny as the ever-productive dairy farm of the Empire. Yet his character was more complex than his simple tenets suggested, and his virtues of loyalty, steadfastness, self-improvement, and conformity reflected those of so many of his adopted fellow countrymen.

Bibliography

Burdon, R. M. The New Dominion: A Social and Political History of New Zealand, 1918-1939. London: Reed and George Allen and Unwin, 1965. The standard account of Massey’s last years in politics and the new forces that were ultimately to overwhelm many of his values, assumptions, and political structures.

Gardner, William J. The Farmer Politician in New Zealand History. Palmerston North, New Zealand: Massey University, 1970. A partial biography of Massey by the acknowledged expert on his life.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. William Massey. Wellington, New Zealand: A. H. and A. W. Reed, 1969. Gardner, sympathetic yet scholarly, has restored Massey to his rightful place in New Zealand history while recognizing his subject’s limitations.

Macdonald, Barrie. Massey’s Imperialism and the Politics of Phosphate. Palmerston North, New Zealand: Massey University, 1982. A fascinating analysis of Massey’s success in securing the spoils of war in the form of cheap Nauruan phosphate for New Zealand’s artificial pastures partly at the expense of Australian and British interests and those of the indigenous people.

O’Connor, Peter S. Mr. Massey and the American Meat Trust: Some Sidelights on the Origins of the Meat Board. Palmerston North, New Zealand: Massey University, 1973. A detailed monograph examining Massey’s shrewd use of the “conspiracy notion” in politics. In this case the American meat packers, Armours, were the villains and the South Americans the rivals. Massey’s exploitation of economic fears and uncertainties ultimately led to producer control and government regulation of New Zealand’s meat export trade to the United Kingdom. Other exports were similarly dealt with.

Oliver, William H., ed., with B. R. Williams. The Oxford History of New Zealand. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Chapters 8 and 9 covering Massey and his times by Len Richardson (“Parties and Political Change”) and Tom Brooking (“Economic Transformation”) convey the results of recent research and soften earlier and harsher judgments of Massey’s policies and personality.

Sinclair, Sir Keith. A Destiny Apart: New Zealand’s Search for National Identity. Wellington, New Zealand: Allen and Unwin, 1986. A history of New Zealand by its leading historian, often critical of Massey’s ideology and imperial sentiments.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. A History of New Zealand. London: Penguin Books, 1959. A readable, penetrating account by New Zealand’s leading historian of unashamedly social democratic and nationalist beliefs.

Stewart, W. Downie. Sir Francis Bell, His Life and Times. London: Butterworth, 1937. Both the biographer and his subject served in Massey’s cabinets, the latter as Massey’s indispensable alter ego in finance and legislation. Includes lively and anecdotal portraits of Massey by a younger, returned-soldier contemporary.