William Morris Hughes

Prime minister of Australia (1915-1923)

• Born: September 25, 1862
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: October 28, 1952
• Place of death: Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Trade union organizer and wartime leader, Hughes was the first prime minister to put Australia’s case on the international scene, especially winning concessions from a reluctant U.S. president Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

Early Life

William Morris Hughes was born in London to Jane Morris, a farmer’s daughter who worked as a domestic servant. Welsh-speaking and a deacon of the Particular Baptist Church, his father, William Hughes, was a carpenter at the Houses of Parliament. On the death of his mother, young Hughes, an only child, went to live with family members in Wales. At the age of twelve, he returned to St. Stephen’s School, Westminster, where as a pupil-teacher he later came under the influence of poet and critic Matthew Arnold.

A short, slight, but energetic and adventurous young man, at twenty-two Hughes sailed for Queensland as an assisted migrant. After two years of rough life in the outback, he settled in Sydney living, by 1890, in the suburb of Balmain with a wife, née Elizabeth Cutts, and two children. Their little shop distributed political tracts and provided a meeting place for young socialists who discussed the theories of Karl Marx and Henry George while helping to lay the foundation for the Australian Labor Party.

Elizabeth Hughes died at age forty-two on September 1, 1906, survived by six children. In 1911, Hughes was married again, to Mary Ethel (née Campbell); he was fifty-three when their beloved daughter, Helen, was born.

Life’s Work

Seeking parliamentary representation for Labor, in 1894, Hughes won the seat of Lang. After revitalizing the Sydney wharf-laborers’ union and becoming its secretary, he became organizer and president of the Trolley, Draymen and Carters’ Union. Although preferring a constitution that gave greater powers to the Commonwealth, he saw the federation’s advantages and in 1901 joined those elected to the first parliament. His seat of West Sydney incorporated Lang and an adjoining waterside precinct, so he was well placed to organize and become president of the Waterside Workers’ Federation. Industrial relations proved to be his forte. A believer in the arbitration system, he used the courts with spectacular success; Hughes gained increased wages and shorter working hours for his members, while qualifying (1903) as a lawyer.

In the first, short-lived federal Labor government (1904), led by John C. Watson, he became minister for external affairs. The dominant figure in this and in the Labor governments of Andrew Fisher (1908-1909, 1910-1913, 1914-1915), in which he served as attorney general, Hughes began to carry out many of Fisher’s duties even before the prime minister resigned in October, 1915, for health reasons.

Great Britain had been at war with Germany since August, 1914. Fisher, then briefly in opposition, promised to stand by the mother country to the “last man and the last shilling”; a large contingent of volunteers with the Australian Imperial Force had departed for England on November 1, 1914; on resuming the position of attorney general Hughes had pressed for economic sanctions against enemy interests. Fearful of Germany’s proximity in New Guinea and of Japanese intentions (even though the latter was an ally), he invited himself to London, where his speeches (published in 1916 as“The Day” And After: War Speeches) met with amazing success. He attended meetings of the British cabinet and the War Committee, represented Australia at an allied conference in Paris, and visited his nation’s troops at the front.

Hughes returned from Europe ready to follow the lead of Great Britain (and New Zealand) by conscripting men for overseas service. The Senate blocked the legislation so instead he held a referendum. Most people undoubtedly supported the war, but on October 28, 1916, they narrowly voted against compelling young men to fight. The Labor Party split over the issue: Conscriptionists, considered to have contravened the spirit of the party platform, were expelled. Among them was the prime minister.

No longer acceptable to West Sydney voters, Hughes sought a base in Victoria, which, along with Tasmania and Western Australia, had voted for conscription. On May 5, 1917, he carried the seat of Bendigo and his “Win the War” Nationalist Party won government. He had, however, given an election promise to call another referendum should volunteers fall short, which they did. Affected partly by mounting casualty figures, recruiting numbers dropped from 11,520 in October, 1916, to an average of 3,180 per month from January, 1917. The second referendum campaign was even more divisive, especially in Victoria, the stronghold of one of conscription’s most virulent opponents, Archbishop Daniel Mannix, who used the issue to press for independence for his native Ireland. A majority of voters on December 20, 1917, again were opposed, and this time Victoria changed sides.

The United States having entered the conflict in April, 1917, eventual victory seemed certain, but the war continued to be Hughes’s consuming interest. He attended meetings of the Imperial War Cabinet and Imperial War Conference during 1918; he also vigorously represented Australia at the Paris Peace Conference the following year, returning from Versailles to a triumphant welcome. Twenty-five thousand pounds were subscribed in 1920 in recognition of his services to Australia and the British Empire, but the “Little Digger,” as soldiers called him, gradually fell from favor. With a majority of only one in the House of Representatives, he called an early election. Not only was he opposed by the Labor Party, but the Country Party and the dissident Nationalists also campaigned against him. Unable to form a government, he was forced to resign and Stanley M. Bruce, his former treasurer, arranged a coalition with Sir Earle Page of the Country Party. In 1922, at age sixty, Hughes was merely the member for North Sydney. His parliamentary career, however, lasted almost another three decades.

Always distrustful of coalitions, Hughes was surprised to see it win on “law and order” on November 14, 1925, the first election at which voting was compulsory. He began to criticize Bruce’s handling of industrial relations, immigration, and the economy. The coalition fared less well in 1928 and lost office in October, 1929, through a motion moved by Hughes on the Maritime Services Bill. His biographer, Professor L. F. Fitzhardinge, discerns in his motive not merely revenge on Bruce for confining him to the backbench but also “a shrewd premonition of impending catastrophe, political consistency, and even a measure of disinterested patriotism.” Nationalist efforts to oust him from North Sydney failed, in an election in which even Bruce lost his seat.

Expelled from the Nationalist Party, Hughes briefly supported the Labor government of James H. Scullin. After an abortive attempt to help establish an Australian Party, he then swung his support to the United Australia Party led by Joseph Aloysius Lyons, a former Scullin minister who broke with the Labor Party over its fiscal policies during the depression. In an “amazing metamorphosis,” as Hughes described it, he served first as vice president of the executive council and minister for health and repatriation and then as minister for external affairs, a position only recently reinstated after he abolished the department in 1915. Always concerned about national security, alone among the cabinet he was dismayed at the Munich Agreement (1938). The external affairs portfolio gave him very little influence, the real power resting with the prime minister. He was, however, also a member of the Council of Defence, and Lyons, once a vigorous opponent of Hughes’s conscription referenda and still a pacifist, asked him to take charge of a volunteer recruitment campaign.

After some uncertainty and much intrigue, Robert Gordon Menzies became prime minister when on April 7, 1939, Lyons died unexpectedly. Then, on September 3, 1939, Great Britain declared war on Germany. Australia was also at war. Hughes was again member of a wartime government, staying on as attorney general and minister for industry, and then as attorney general and minister for the navy under Menzies’ successor, until John Curtin took power on October 7, 1941. Later in the war, in 1944, at his request Hughes resumed his seat on the Advisory War Council after the United Australia Party withdrew its members. For the third time the almost totally deaf, but still indomitable and always immaculately dressed, Hughes was expelled from a political party. He now settled down to write two volumes of memoirs: Crusts and Crusades (1947) and Policies and Potentates (1950).

Hughes loved children and idealized motherhood, but his restless striving infringed on the lives of his own children and their mothers. As his career progressed, he was absent from his first family for weeks at a time. He did, however, see that his children had a good education and when his two younger sons enlisted, he asked a ministerial colleague to watch out for them. In later years, following the death of their daughter in 1937, Dame Mary (since 1922 a Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire) increasingly became the butt of his dyspeptic bad humor. Because of her nursing skills, however, she was always indispensable to his comfort, especially on overseas trips.

Hughes died at his home in Lindfield, Sydney, on October 28, 1952, having been in Parliament for so long he seemed an intrinsic part of that institution. For two days, Australians came to pay their last respects as his body lay in state at St. Andrew’s Anglican Cathedral.

Significance

In 1916, the United States ambassador reported to President Wilson that Hughes was hailed by the British press as a Moses, touring the United Kingdom from end to end. Fifty thousand women were so impressed that they signed a petition urging his continued presence in the Imperial War Cabinet. He returned in 1918 at a disadvantage because, unlike the other prime ministers from the British dominions of Canada (Robert Laird Borden), New Zealand (William F. Massey), and South Africa (Jan Christian Smuts), he had been unable to be in England during 1917. Like them he was critical of the management of the war that consumed so many lives including sixty thousand Australians. Then, through what he and his aides saw as another blunder, in November the armistice was signed with Germany without his having been consulted on the Fourteen Points governing peace conditions. The British prime minister David Lloyd George offered representation to the dominions at the Paris Peace Conference the following year through rotating membership in the British Empire delegation; Hughes, supported by Borden, held out for separate representation and they achieved both.

Wilson, whom Hughes dubbed “Heaven-born,” was determined to establish the League of Nations through the Treaty of Peace. Hughes came to Paris equally as determined to protect Australia’s interests: He successfully argued for war reparations, control over German New Guinea, and the right for a member country to set its own immigration code.

A brilliant and imaginative wartime leader, achieving a voice for his nation on the conduct of the Great War and postwar events, Hughes remains, however, a controversial figure. He is looked on as an unprincipled opportunist by some. Others would agree with Dame Enid Lyons, the first woman to enter the Australian House of Representatives, who wrote in 1972 that of all the prime ministers to that date, through his early work in the Labor movement “he had the greatest influence on the developing pattern of Australian life.”

Bibliography

Booker, Malcolm. The Great Professional: A Study of W. M. Hughes. Sydney: McGraw-Hill, 1980. A provocative account of Hughes’s career to 1923 by a former private secretary (1940-1941) and career diplomat.

Edwards, P. G. Prime Ministers and Diplomats: The Making of Australian Foreign Policy, 1901-1949. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1983. Providing a useful sequel to Neville Meaney’s book, Edwards demonstrates how Australia’s foreign policy was conducted almost exclusively by Hughes during his prime ministry.

Fitzhardinge, L. F. William Morris Hughes: A Political Biography. 2 vols. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1964-1979. A scholarly work, commenced with Hughes’s approval and written with sole access to his papers during its long gestation. The post-1923 years, however, receive inadequate attention.

Hughes, Aneurin. Billy Hughes: Prime Minister and Controversial Founding Father of the Australian Labor Party. Milton, Qld.: John Wiley and Sons Australia, 2005. Comprehensive biography, recounting Hughes’s life as a young boy and his relationships with his wife and family, as well as his political career and accomplishments.

Hughes, W. M. The Case for Labour. 1910. Reprint. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1970. Described by R. G. Menzies as a masterpiece of political polemics, this work collects twenty out of more than two hundred articles written for the Sydney Daily Telegraph.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Splendid Adventure: A Review of Empire Relations Within and Without the Commonwealth of Britannic Nations. London: Ernest Benn, 1928. Part 1 has often been drawn on by writers of textbooks on the Commonwealth.

McIntyre, Stuart. The Succeeding Age, 1901-1942. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1986. A good general survey of the period.

Meaney, Neville. The Search for Security in the Pacific, 1901-1914. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1976. An original, well-documented study, providing the background to Australia’s development of an independent national defense and foreign policy.

Whyte, W. Farmer. William Morris Hughes: His Life and Times. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1957. Although not always reliable, a useful biography by a journalist long associated with Hughes.