Labor’s titan: the story of Percy Brookfield, 1878-1921, Gilbert Giles Roper
Source: Warrnambool Institute Press, 1983, edited by Allan and Wendy Scarfe. Copyright Allan and Wendy Scarfe. This digital edition for Marxists Internet Archive is published with the permission of the copyright holders. It may be used for private study but not for any commercial purpose.
Transcription, mark-up: Steve Painter
“You had your police pimps and spies on my heels for four years, in order to try to misconstrue one word, or take one sentence from some speech which would land me behind prison bars.”
The grim fight against wartime conscription began in 1916, when “Billy” Hughes, then prime minister, returned from England with a scheme to fill the depleted ranks of the Australian Expeditionary Forces by passing an act of parliament to conscript the manhood of Australia. Outwitted in caucus mainly through the keen foresight of the celebrated Melbourne anti-conscriptionist Maurice Blackburn, Hughes was forced to compromise on the issue by agreeing to hold a national referendum on conscription.
Hughes was a dazzling orator, equipped with the power to exhort men to go to the battlefields and die, but he generally behaved as a dictator of the nation’s destiny and the virulence of his war hysteria made calm discussion of political issues impossible. Of extraordinary appearance, small in build, he bowed his legs and bowed his arms over his head to emphasise his penetrating speeches. Cartoonists revelled in caricaturing him, his features were the butt of innumerable working class jokes and he was nicknamed “the Little Dictator”.
Massive support was accorded to Hughes by the establishment. Leading artists drew blood-chilling pictures of the “Huns”. There was a famous poster showing an embarrassed middle-aged man being quizzed by his son: “What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?” A popular type of pro-war cartoon was one that incorporated a caricature of the German Crown Prince, who was nicknamed "Little Willie". The Crown Prince was in charge of a section of the German Army that invaded the Champagne district of France, and the Germans were supposed to have missed out on the capture of Paris because “Little Willie” and his soldiers spent too much time getting drunk on champagne. Then, of course, there were an unprecedented number of wartime songs — Tipperary, Pack Up Your Troubles, Keep the Home Fires Burning, The Long, Long Trail, Over There, The Light That’s Burning in the Windows, in addition to traditional patriotic songs such as Three Cheers for the Red, White and Blue, Rule Britannia, and La Marseillaise. Sousa’s marches enlivened the processions, while certain easily sung hymns helped to ease the pangs of the bereaved. On the wall that once surrounded Government House in Adelaide was painted in huge while letters: “Enlist! We are in grave danger. Enlist! Enlist! Enlist!”
Due to the development of high-speed newspaper presses, the war was justified every day by an avalanche of printed propaganda. The Germans were particularly vulnerable to this new mass weapon, for the strategy and tactics of the German general staff were modelled on the writings of Clausewitz, who codified the military principles of Napoleon Bonaparte. Put briefly, Clausewitz claimed that a sudden attack and a quick victory were more humane than a war of attrition. Bismarck always used the strategy of quick victory, followed by a peace of reconciliation. In this way he defeated both Austria and France, in two decisive wars. The commander who uses such strategy must, however, “emulate the tiger” and in so doing in 1914 the German general staff laid itself open to a charge of “frightfulness” in its methods of waging war. This was seized on by the newspapers, and also by the latest form of mass entertainment, the motion pictures. Mary Pickford made The Little American, a film story that featured submarine warfare; Charlie Chaplin produced Shoulder Arms, which ridiculed the German soldier, and a former US ambassador in Germany, James Watson Gerard, wrote a book called My Four Years in Germany, which was filmed and suggested that the Kaiser and his staff were crazy megalomaniacs. The United States floated into the war on a sea of anti-German propaganda. In 1917 British Prime Minister Lloyd George summoned the US ambassador to Downing Street and informed him that the Entente Allies were facing defeat by Germany’s Triple Alliance. He said that as the USA had backed the Entente Allies financially with loans the US was in danger of losing its investment if Germany won. Soon after this interview there was the Lusitania affair,[1] a controversial question to this day, which was used to inflame American public opinion and to pass a declaration of war through Congress.
The flood of propaganda in Australia served only to arouse bitter passions on both sides of the controversy on the question of conscription. The Industrial Workers of the World led the anti-conscriptionist cause, and this brought it to the peak of its influence, but by October 1917 the organization, faced with sustained persecution, was in decline. Their propaganda was seized on by Hughes, Holman and conscriptionist Labor politicians to make virulent attacks. In May 1916 Tom Barker published an antiwar cartoon in the IWW’ newspaper, Direct Action, showing the capitalists nailing workers to the cross on top of their war machine, and was sentenced for it to a year’s hard labour.[2] Brookfield was highly indignant on Barker's behalf.
Barrier anti-conscriptionists opened their campaign in the Central Reserve in Broken Hill on Sunday, July 16, 1916. Brookfield chaired the meeting. He opened it with a vigorous warning to his audience that conscription would strip them of all freedom and open the door to industrial conscription. Those present must have read, he said, of how the military authorities had abused the privilege in England, of the methods they used to suppress labour disputes, of the boys who had been forced from home and into the trenches. Conscription would likewise strip them of freedom in Australia and would rob them of whatever industrial progress had been made as well as of the right to free opinion. It would place the workers in industrial servitude for all time. The people behind the Northcliffe press in England were barracking for conscription, but how much, he asked, would be expected from that class?
Brookfield’s attacks on the British class system were relevant to the Broken Hill miners because it had been during their fight for the forty-four hour week that Prime Minister Hughes had been in England hobnobbing with the British aristocracy and financiers and by them influenced to introduce conscription to Australia. Brookfield, reflecting bitterly on Hughes’s treachery to his class, pointed out how he had been rejected by the British Labour leader Ramsay Macdonald. Brookfield wanted his fellow miners to know that the wonderful Mother Country for which Hughes urged them to sacrifice themselves had an arrogant master class that had exploited the working people for generations, and a current twelve million workers living in harsh poverty. The miners of Broken Hill had a solidarity with English workers but owed no loyalty to the British financier class who profiled from the war and did not even care for their own people, let alone Australians.
This first meeting in the Reserve was followed by a miners’ meeting in the Trades Hall the next Sunday. There Mick Considine, the president of the Amalgamated Miners Association and a close friend of Brookfield since the forty-four hour week struggle, launched the campaign to organise Labor’s Volunteer Army to fight against conscription. The aim was to raise an army of “eligibles” dedicated to resist any form of military or industrial conscription. Considine read out the proposed pledge of the Labor Army:
“I … being fully convinced that conscription of life and labour in Australia will be a death blow to organised labour and will result in the workers of this land crushed into subjection by a capitalist military oligarchy, do hereby pledge myself to the working class of Australia that I will not serve as a conscript (industrial or military) and that I will resist by every means in my power any attempt to compel me or any of my comrades in this organisation to break this pledge, even though it may mean my imprisonment or death, and I take this pledge voluntarily and freely, knowing that if I break it I will be branded as a traitor to my class.[3]
Then he called on all those present who were of military age and were not prepared to take such a pledge at that stage to leave the hall as they would a thousand limes over prefer the man who would refuse the pledge to him who would sign on and at a later date refuse to keep it. Of the hundreds of eligibles present only thirteen left the hall. Brookfield was made chairman of the Labor Volunteer Army Committee set up that night.
As George Dale relates in his Industrial History of Broken Hill:
The anti-conscription propaganda was now carried on every evening around the Trades Hall, and on the Central Reserve each Sunday afternoon, with large numbers of recruits enlisting each day under the Red Flag of working class revolt.”[4]
On the next Sunday, July 30, Brookfield again opened a meeting in Central Reserve with a blistering attack on what he believed to be the underlying political and industrial purposes of Hughes’s attempt to bring in conscription. Military conscription was the forerunner of industrial conscription. It meant industrial slavery for the workers and commercial supremacy for the victors. He said that Labor’s Volunteer Army had been formed to protest in a practical manner against the conscription of life and labour and appealed to all workers to join it: “If you do not do something to resist conscription,” he said, “your children will live to curse you for the slavery into which they were born because of your apathy.”[5]
The Barrier Empire Loyalists, or “soolers-on” as George Dale called them, were not slow to attack these “traitors to King and country”. They struck first on Friday evening, August 4, when a combined meeting of Labor’s Volunteer Army and the Amalgamated Miners Association was held at the corner of Argent and Sulphide Streets between the Don corner and the Grand Hotel. George Dale narrates how:
President Brookfield, of Labor“s Volunteer Army, mounted the table, but even before he had opened his mouth, he was met with “Come down off that table, you cold-footed, big bastard,” and “You are rotten to the core, and have no manhood in you!” This was the signal for a series of yells and foul words from what it afterwards transpired was an organised band of ruffians got together for the purpose by the Barrier Empire League.
Brookfield persisted in speaking for some moments, and was treated to a shower of rotten tomatoes, followed by a sudden surging forward by the crowd, when the table was overturned, and together with the chairs, broken into fragments, while books and other propaganda literature were torn up and thrown in the air. There was a hooting and scuffling overture for a few minutes (while little Ted Sinclair was in mortal combat with a big, pot-bellied parson) when the police, who had witnessed the whole of the disturbance without any endeavor to quell it, seeing that the LVA secretary carried too many guns for the “follower of the Lowly Nazarene” promptly arrested Sinclair on a charge of riotous behaviour, though they had seen him attacked and knew that he had first acted in self-defence.
Sinclair was escorted across the road to the police station, followed by a hooting crowd, who, having tired of gazing at the bolted doors of the prison cell, responded to the cry of: “To the IWW rooms.” These rooms were situated some quarter of a mile further up the street, and although the IWW were in no way connected with the evening’s anti-conscription meeting, this howling bourgeoise mob rushed madly on singing the while Britons Never Shall be Slaves. Arrived outside the rooms, one young empty-head yelled: “This is direct action,” and immediately commenced throwing stones through the windows.
The police did here endeavour to prevent the mob from raiding the premises, ably aided by Jack Brookfield, who had followed the crowd there, and having pushed his way through to the front, manfully took up a position with the police, and as first one and then another attempted to pass into the rooms, they were promptly floored by Brookfield after he had warned them to stand back. And having rendered such valuable service to the law-and-order brigade, when the disturbance had been quelled the police calmly arrested Brookfield, charging him with riotous behaviour. In giving evidence the following morning, Inspector Miller said:
I saw that Brookfield was not the aggressor; he did not strike the first blow; he did his best to assist the police in keeping the crowd back from the IWW Hall at great personal risk.
The stipendiary magistrate, after hearing the inspector, said:
Brookfield, you were struck and apparently were not the aggressor, but you foolishly struck back, which may have caused serious riots. Still, you have my sympathy and there is no necessity for a fine. I will bind you over to be of good behaviour for twelve months in the sum of £5.
In fining Ted Sinclair £l for riotous behaviour, the magistrate said: “That when one man struck at another the latter had the right to defend himself and strike one blow in return, but he had no right to avenge himself, and Sinclair had appeared to have gone beyond reasonable self-defence.”
The news of the cowardly assaults of the Empire Leaguers and their hangers-on having become well known to the working class per medium of Barrier Truth, there was seen in Broken Hill, on the following evening, Saturday, 5th, a truly magnificent display of solidarity. From every direction, men began to pour into the main portion of the city at an early hour, until at 8 o’clock there were fully 10,000 people assembled at the exact spot where the assaults had taken place the previous evening. The enemy, however, did not reappear; an address from Peter Larkin was listened to by the vast assemblage, and enthusiastically received.
The following afternoon being Sunday, another huge meeting took place on the same corner — under the auspices of the IWW this time — and when Brookfield rose to speak the cheers were deafening. The AMA had met in the mass earlier in the day and carried the following resolution:
That the AMA reaffirms its previous resolution against conscription, and duly takes cognisance of the hostile attitude of certain business people who participated in the cowardly attack on Friday night.
Brookfield announced the fact of this motion having been carried, and it was received with much cheering and calls for the Empire League and their minions to come out now and declare war on Labor’s Volunteer Army![6]
The arrest and punishment of Brookfield and Sinclair gave Labor’s Volunteer Army its first political martyrs. The brute violence of their opposition unified them as only persecution can unify those who see themselves as underdogs in society. From popular leader Brookfield became working class hero. His 6 foot 4 inch [2.9m] stature, his impressive diction, his physical power in a brawl, made him a “titan” among men. On Sunday, August 6, when he rose to address the street meeting conducted by Peter Larkin (a member of the Industrial Workers of the World) the crowd roared its support for Brookfield in cheer after cheer. “I am not an advocate of violence,” Brookfield told them, “but I am not going to allow any man or combination of men to molest me.[7]
Now, with the memory of street violence in their minds, and what they believed was the injustice they were likely to receive at the hands of the upper class and the supporters of the war in the courts, Brookfield’s comments on military autocracy in Britain had a more frightening reality to his audience. There, Brookfield told them:
Boys of eighteen years of age are taken from their homes despite their mothers’ tears and their fathers’ protests and driven into the hell of the death trap of the Western Front. There the military situation has reached a deadlock. Instead of our politicians crying ‘kill, kill’ it would be better for them to advocate fellowship and humanity among the nations: but no, they are howling for blood and yet more blood.
The maintenance of the commercial supremacy of England is more important to the plutocrats of the empire than the lives of the workers. And commercial supremacy means that England will be able to undersell any other country in the world’s markets. That will mean that the workers’ hours will be longer, their wages lower and their conditions of life and labour worse than in the rival country. England has wilfully neglected her working class for generations … in normal times thousands of infants die from ‘lack of nourishment’ as it is politely called … before they reach the age of six months.
Is this system to prevail? And on top of it all the master class want to be able to say: ‘We insist that you fight for us. I want you to go to the front and die for the system I have created and which I uphold.[8]
An angry meeting at the Trades Hall held also on this Sunday to support Brookfield, Sinclair and Labor’s Volunteer Army moved that details of Brookfield’s case be sent to the parliamentary members for the district and to the New South Wales attorney-general, and that the stipendiary magistrate, H. Giles Shaw, be removed. One member shouted from the floor that those who had instigated the attack were doubtless “publicans, parsons and scabs”.
Considine repeated Brookfield“s views on conscription in Britain or Australia as serving the purpose of British supremacy, and attacked the conscriptionists for their policy of suppression of anti-conscriptionists. “How dare these people talk about fair play and freedom,” he told his fulminating audience, “when they want to conscript a man to fight for a freedom in Europe which is denied him in his own home town.” J.J. O’Reilly, secretary of the Amalgamated Miners Association, who was to weep at Brookfield’s funeral a few short years later, supported his friend by stating that if the workers were to be called upon to defend their country then they were going to demand that the country was theirs to defend.
The meeting resolved that Brookfield and Sinclair should appeal against their sentences. No court in Australia, they believed, would uphold the decision of the stipendiary magistrate.
During these weeks and until October 28, when the referendum on conscription was held, the Barrier Daily Truth kept up a barrage of radical anti-conscriptionist editorials. These hammered that profits were being made from the war and that war was made so that some might get rich. Learned scholars were quoted, and writers who from classical times had called war “the needy bankrupt’s last resource”. “Who preacheth war,” they quoted, “was the Devil’s chaplain,” for “gold and power were the chief causes of war.”
They argued that Australia had borrowed money from England to conduct war, the debt would eventually have to be paid, and Australian workers were to be squeezed to produce more wealth to do so. Wages would be reduced, hours increased. Compulsory industrial service would follow compulsory military service. As in West Prussia, refusal to work under industrial conscription would be punishable by heavy fines or jail sentences. Tennyson“s first verse of The Charge of the Light Brigade was quoted:
Someone had blundered
Theirs not to make reply
Theirs not to reason why
Theirs but to do — or die
with the biting comment that Tennyson had managed to put all the murderous impudence of militarism into a few lines of verse. But readers were assured that although the illiterate members of the Light Brigade may have accepted the sentiments of Alfred Lord Tennyson they at the Barrier Daily Truth intended to reason why and make reply.
It was argued that while the masses lived in the darkness of the uneducated, the indictment of war by the historians had no effect. Only those who stood to make money out of the slaughter were capable of reading the protests and to them it was like water on a duck’s back. And blood could still be running off the oleaginous skunks of today with as little notice but that the reading community had been so vastly extended. The bulwark of international butchery was silence, which was the soul of war.
On August 16 a meeting of all citizens loyal to Australia and the British Empire was held in the Protestant Hall. According to George Dale thirty-nine people were present and amongst other business transacted the following motion was passed by a “large” majority: “That the mayor be instructed to wire the chief secretary and demand that the anti-conscription campaign, so far as Broken Hill is concerned, be at once stopped.”[9] They also penned a threatening letter to Labor’s Volunteer Army questioning their right to air their opinions in public places.
This attack only served to provide Brookfield with more fuel for the next Sunday meeting in the Reserve. There, not thirty-nine, but thousands of people again met. Brookfield read the threatening letter to the crowd and pointed out how already the conservative forces in the community were threatening the right of the workers to free speech. Labor’s Volunteer Army, he said, would continue its campaign against conscription and its fight to defend the rights of all citizens to free speech and opinion.
Tom Barker, the editor of the IWW paper Direct Action, who had been jailed for his anti-conscription cartoon “War. What for?” appropriately spoke on his life in jail, where he had been confined to quell his urge to express his opinion on war. Rousingly, he praised the miners of Broken Hill for continuing the fight. Although the dust storms of Broken Hill obscured many things, he said, they did not obscure the intelligence of the workers there.
The Barrier Empire League tried again on August 23 to crush the anti-conscription movement. George Dale narrates with some humour how this opposition simply added excitement and impetus to the anti-conscription campaign.
On Wednesday, August 23, the Empire League held its second annual meeting, and after the chairman (Mr Avery) had at length deprecated the attempt on the part of the LVA, IWW, and “other disloyal” associations, to stir up class bias and hatred, he moved:
“That this meeting, comprising the clergy of all denominations — both Protestant and Catholic — business people, unionists(?), and citizens generally, request the federal government to instruct the proper authorities to at once put a stop to anti-recruiting and anti-conscription and disloyal meetings, speeches, and publications in Broken Hill. Further, that this meeting of representative citizens reaffirms its active support and assistance to any measure the government may deem necessary for bringing the war to a victorious conclusion.”
The motion was seconded by Canon Pitt (Church of England), and supported by the Rev Father Watch (Roman Catholic), and the Rev R.G. McCarron (Presbyterian); the latter said he did not care to advocate violence, but if they set the ball rolling they should follow it, and if a strong bodyguard of loyalist women were formed, the LVA, he thought, would soon fizzle out of existence.
With so much hot air being blown off by big-bellied parsons, and by soldiers who have never smelt powder, the LVA became somewhat infected with the skite disease, and the following advert appeared in Barrier Truth:
LABOR’S VOLUNTEER ARMY. Monster demonstration in Central Reserve, on Sunday, at 3pm, Sections 1 and 2 will take up same positions as on Sunday last; while Sections 4, 5, and 6 will hold themselves in readiness to attend to their respective duties. — By Order[10]
However, a more serious and dangerous attempt was made to stifle the anti-conscription campaign when the military censor of South Australia wrote a series of letters to the Barrier Daily Truth forbidding the publication of any material “that will give anti-conscriptionists the least reason for making public demonstrations”. “You are also requested,” he wrote to the editor, “not to make any reference to meetings of unions or other bodies at which resolutions of an anti-conscriptionist nature are dealt with”. These letters arrived on August 28 and 29, and the Barrier Daily Truth published them in full on August 30 under a quotation from the Letters of Junius:
Let it be impressed on your minds: let it be instilled into your children, that the liberty of the press is the Palladium of all the civil, political and religious rights of an Englishman.
On Thursday, August 31, the Barrier Daily Truth again published an editorial describing the evils of conscription, and on Friday, September 1, it followed with another editorial attack satirically headed “The laws of the profits” under which were quoted at length Biblical statements against war.
At the meeting in the Reserve on the Sunday after this, Brookfield emphasised how delighted he was to see such a huge gathering. He pitied those poor, weak-kneed, spineless individuals who stood idly by and saw their fellow men putting up a fight against the tyranny of the master class. He went on to praise the solidarity of the unionists in Brisbane who had come out against conscription, demanding the conscription of wealth as well as of lives. They had recognised the risks they were running but these risks were as nothing to the risks they would have to face under conscription. Once again he pointed out the lesson to be learned from the terrible conditions prevailing in England, where he maintained, if Christ came to earth and witnessed how women and children lived, he would die of a broken heart. He warned his audience how the master class would try to divide the working class on racial or religious grounds and how they were being sold the lie that the war was to rid the world of Prussianism. The only way to beat down militarism, he said, was to establish a world confraternity of workers — a brotherhood in which each was loyal to his class. And this brotherhood must fight for what it wanted through direct action. Direct action had won what was worthwhile to the workers in the past and only direct action would win it for them in the future.
At the meeting on September 17 at the Central Reserve, which Brookfield chaired, Donald Grant was a guest speaker. He was a twenty-five year old Scotsman and a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World. He had come to Broken Hill for a week to help in the anti-conscription campaign. A fiery speaker, the theme of his address was “Organise, educate and slow down.” Grant emphasised again to the Broken Hill workers that conscription was being introduced for economic rather than military reasons. He raised the frightening spectre of the introduction of foreign labour to the workforce to replace those sent to the trenches. He even prophesied the introduction of child labour as a means of forcing down wages. The audience were receptive because this fear of the introduction of foreign non-union labour was constantly present in the minds of Broken Hill miners. Brookfield said that he had seen up to forty Maltese or Hungarian workers at a time in the mines who could not speak English and who did not have satisfactory contracts from the mining companies.[11]
On Monday, September 25, 1916, Brookfield, McLaughlin and Sinclair appeared before the court on trial for their offences under the War Precautions Act during the anti-conscription rally at Blend Street on September 10. Brookfield, who conducted his own defence, objected in the court to being tried by Stipendiary Magistrate Shaw because he was a member of the Barrier Empire League and therefore, Brookfield alleged, prejudiced against anti-conscriptionists. Shaw stated that Brookfield was charged with using abusive language and his membership of the Barrier Empire League had nothing to do with the case as his personal views did not interfere with his official position.
Inspector Miller, who was in charge of the Broken Hill police, claimed to have copied down Brookfield’s speech in longhand. He read out the abusive statement with which Brookfield was charged:
“We have to fight the curse of conscription that Billy Hughes, whom we placed in power, is trying to place on us. Good god almighty, men, don’t you realise what will happen if we allow conscription to be foisted on us? It is better to die in Argent Street than in the trenches. You are asked to sing God Save the King. Why doesn't he do a bit of praying himself? Why isn’t he asked to get down on his knees and pray for you? Why should Billy Hughes, the traitor, have power to foist conscription on us — the thing, the animal, the miserable little skunk? He’s a traitor and a viper.[12]
Brookfield questioned the accuracy of Miller’s account of his speech and various witnesses were called to testify to or object to its accuracy. Then the magistrate demanded that Brookfield confine himself to questioning Miller with regard to the charge of abusive language. Given Miller’s written statement, the climate in the country, and Shaw’s prejudices, Brookfield doubtless believed that the trial was bound to be a mockery of justice. He was obviously determined to make as much political mileage out of it as he could.
“Which part of the statement is abusive?” he asked Miller, “and to whom is it abusive?”
“The Right Honourable, the prime minister.”
“What part of the charge is abusive?”
“Why should Billy Hughes, the traitor, have power to foist conscription on us — the thing, the animal, the miserable little skunk? He's a traitor and a viper.”
“Which is the most grievous remark of the lot?”
Miller replied that he did not know.
“Is it traitor?” Brookfield questioned, edging for an opening to attack Hughes.
Miller side-stepped the question by stating that this was for the magistrate to decide. Brookfield, however, took what opening he could and launched into an attack on Hughes’s treachery to the labour movement. Shaw cut him short. He did not want a speech, he said. Brookfield resumed his needling of Miller.
“Are the words abusive to William Morris Hughes?”
“Yes,” replied Miller.
“You do not know whether Hughes would think so himself?”
Miller replied that he could not say.
“Is there any hope of meeting Mr Hughes to ascertain whether he considers this abusive or not?”
The magistrate did not appreciate Brookfield’s facetiousness for he snapped at him that the prime ,minister had nothing to do with the matter.
William Ivey, a witness on Brookfield’s behalf, capped the situation with a virtuous comment that if he had turned against his class he would not object to being called a skunk or a traitor. At this point the crowd that had gathered outside the court showed its scorn too, by singing The Red Flag.
Brookfield was fined £5 with six shillings costs, or six months jail, and bound over on a good behaviour bond for twelve months under a £50 surety. Sinclair was fined similarly, as also was McLaughlin, who had been charged with using profane language because he had sung the parody of Onward Christian Soldiers:
Onward Christian soldiers, duty’s way is plain
Slay your Christian neighbours, or by them be slain
Pulpiteers are sprouting effervescent swill
God above is calling you to rob and rape and kill.
The three each lodged an appeal against the severity of their sentence. While bondsmen were being found to permit their release they were held in the jail behind the court house. The crowd of supporters moved from outside the court into the police station yard, where they sang Should I Ever Be a Soldier, Solidarity Forever and other similar songs.
This proved more than the police could stand. Inspector Miller, who was probably thoroughly annoyed by Brookfield’s mockery in court, gave his men the order to make a baton charge. The resultant attack was described by George Dale with great indignation:
The inspector has stated that previous to the batoning he called upon the people to leave the yard. No doubt this statement is quite true, although it was not heard by those singing. There was considerable noise at the time and the inspector no doubt was somewhat excited with the morning’s happenings. It was rather an unusual experience to have to cope with about 1000 men and women immediately outside the court, cheering and shouting at a man’s every move, as was the case with Brookfield.
All this notwithstanding, there was no necessity for the brutal treatment dealt out to the women that day, and the occasion must go down into history as one of the most disgraceful and brutal acts known to any Australian force. A sudden rush was made, and in a twinkling all was confusion; women and men were rushing pell-mell to avoid the cruel batons, while those furthest back, not knowing just what was taking place, were attempting to force their way forward. Soon women and men were on the ground, some having been felled by the police batons, while others had been forced down by their comrades’ mad rush for safety. In the centre of the yard was a square hole about fourteen feet each way and about six feet in depth, and into this several persons were pushed by the police, including a woman over sixty years of age. The latter, eyewitnesses declare, was deliberately thrown in by a stalwart young constable. This hole was a rubbish receptacle and those who had been in it were in a fine state, and were jeered at by some of the younger police. Men were struck over the head and face with batons while endeavouring to retreat, and half-fainting women were pushed about in a most callous manner. Jimmy Oates was attacked by four police with batons and when battered almost to a state of insensibility, was arrested, while Claude Joyce, a reporter on Barrier Truth, received a whack on the back of the head from a young policeman who remarked: “Got you this time, you dirty bastard!” (Joyce had written a hot report on police tactics a few days previous.)
The back yard was soon cleared, and then a very large crowd soon assembled in front of the police station, when the police, numbering thirty, lined up grimly on the veranda, as if determined to do or die. Unfortunately, several women took up a place close to the gate; suddenly a shower of stones came from the rear of the crowd, causing the police to retreat into the station buildings, where they mobilised and soon came out and made a concerted charge at the crowd, which quickly scattered. As the crowd reformed, but now fairly orderly, the police again drew their batons, and this time forcing women in front of them as shields, they struck out whenever a head was visible, and having delivered a blow would duck down again behind their female shields: this continued for some time, when the cowardly rascals were called off by a superior officer.[13]
The next day the Barrier Daily Truth carried an urgent notice over Brookfield’s and Sinclair’s names:
Any men who witnessed the attack by the police behind the police station yesterday, Monday, morning are urgently requested to be at the BLF rooms Trades Hall at 9 o'clock today with the object of giving evidence on behalf of the arrested men.
Notwithstanding their defence efforts five men were later sentenced, two of them to three months jail. In another column of Barrier Daily Truth that morning there was an astonishing piece of news about Donald Grant. On the previous evening, some time after the so-called riot at the police station, Donald Grant and Victor Logan had boarded the Adelaide Express. When the train reached the Railway Town station, to Grant’s surprise Detective-Sergeant Gilson entered the carriage and said: “I want you on a charge of treason. I have received a wire from Sydney and the warrant will be here on Thursday.” He took both men from the station to the Broken Hill police station by cab. They were locked up and their effects searched.
Those who observed the incident quickly spread the news. Anti-conscriptionists, including a representative from the Barrier Daily Truth, confronted Inspector Miller at the police station. He would only state that Grant had been arrested. He refused the journalist a few words with Grant, refused to allow him to see Grant to arrange bail, refused to allow him see Grant to ask it he wanted his relatives informed and when asked if the charge was treason replied that he had no more to say. However Logan later came out of the charge room and told the anti-conscriptionists what had happened. The police, on receiving the warrant, took Grant by train to Sydney. The case that followed was, Brookfield told many audiences: “the most despicable and outrageous case that there has ever been in this country”. It became one of his consuming passions to rectify “the wrong done by the Crown” to Grant and eleven other of his friends in the Industrial Workers of the World organisation.
In June, August and September a number of Sydney shops had been the target of arsonists. Early in September a wharf labourer who attended Wobbly meetings, F.J. McAlister, told police he knew of a Wobbly plot to burn down the big Sydney stores. Following this, Louis and David Goldstein, who had been arrested on a forgery charge, had the charge withdrawn by telling police they had information about arson by the Wobblies. When accused by the police of supplying chemicals to the Wobblies for the fires, a Queensland pharmacist, Henry Scully, provided them with further evidence against the Wobblies on the understanding that he would not be charged.
Acting on this information concerning six of the Wobblies the police issued warrants on September 22 for them and for four other Wobbly organisers and propagandists, Fred Morgan, Peter Larkin, Charlie Reeve and Donald Grant. On September 23, the police raided the headquarters of the Wobblies. Bob Besant was arrested for vagrancy and Don McPherson for being in possession of two shirts suspected of being stolen.
On October 3, Donald Grant and the other ten arrested men, Tom Glynn, William Beatty, Tom Moore, Jack Hamilton, Joe Fagan, Bill Teen, Don McPherson, Peter Larkin, Charlie Reeve and Bob Besant were charged at the Sydney Central Police Court with treason (for which the penalty was hanging) but the charges were later modified. That day John King, a Canadian, was also arrested. It was alleged that the Wobblies had engaged in their criminal activities to effect the release of Tom Barker. Donald Grant had declaimed at the Sydney Domain: “For every day that Barker is in jail, it will cost the capitalists £10,000.”
The police had no evidence that any of the twelve Wobblies had lit any of Sydney’s fires, which occurred before they began their investigations. The proof consisted of alleged admissions the Wobblies had made to the four police informers, some cotton waste and a bottle of fire-dope.
Wherever there was a local of the Industrial Workers of the World one of its speakers appealed for funds or stopwork support, on street corners, in halls or in public parks. In the cities and in Broken Hill a Workers’ Defence Committee was formed. Brookfield became President of this committee.
Political passions ran high up to the opening of the trial of the twelve on October 10, “hurried on” Brookfield believed, to sway voters to say yes to conscription in the impending referendum on October 28. As it suited Prime Minister Hughes to smear the anti-conscriptionists with criminality, he did his utmost in his public speeches to pre-judge the men and arouse hatred against them, calling them “saboteurs”, and smearing the Labor Party and all anti-conscriptionists as pro-German. A vote for no, he said, was a vote for Germany. Complaints from unions against his contempt of court were to no avail.
As the referendum day approached, persecution of anti-conscriptionists hotted up. Jailings for breaches of the War Precautions Act increased. The membership lists seized by police from the Wobbly headquarters were used by employers to sack Wobblies. The lists went too from the government to the commissioners of the New South Wales Railways, where sackings of those who would not sign a pledge that they were not Wobblies were particularly prevalent. These actions drew working class protests.
In his forthright way, Brookfield was in no doubt that an injustice was being done to the IWW men.
“The newspapers prejudged and prejudiced the minds of the people,” he declared.
“We have had many instances of politicians condemning these men and inflaming the public mind before they have been tried at all. There is hardly a newspaper in New South Wales which has not condemned these men before they have been tried, and the public mind has been so inflamed against them that it is absolutely impossible for any jury to give an unbiased opinion. There is consternation, dismay and unrest in the public mind.
“This great ‘National’ government has prolonged the life of parliament because it is thought that the people (of New South Wales) cannot correctly record their vote at this particular time. If there is so much unrest in the public mind that the government has to deliberately break the constitution in order to give the people an opportunity to record their vote at a later date, how much more difficult must it be for a jury to record a correct verdict at such a time?”[14]
Most resented was the appointment of the extremely conservative Mr Justice Pring to try the case. There was especial anger at Broken Hill at this appointment, as he had been very harsh on their miners’ leaders in 1909. The Sydney Labor Council protested to the government against his appointment.
Crowds attended the trial at the Central Criminal Court. Donald Grant told the court quietly: “I am not guilty. I never saw this stuff [cotton waste and fire-dope] till I came into court.”
The campaign against conscription continued throughout Australia into October. In Broken Hill Brookfield was angered by the augmentation of the police force there and furiously attacked Hughes for his tyrannical statement that whether the referendum were successful or not Australia would have conscription.
“William Morris Hughes,” he declared on October 2 at the Reserve, “has written across the chest of every able-bodied man in Australia: Sold. To be delivered to the human slaughter house of Europe.”[15]
Brookfield spoke publicly at least twice a week. The efforts to silence the anti-conscriptionists also intensified. On October 16 the publisher of the Barrier Daily Truth was fined heavily in court and bound over in a surety of £100 to comply with the War Precautions Act for a year. Brookfield was again charged on the same day, under the War Precautions Act, that on September 10 he had made statements likely to cause disaffection to His Majesty. He was fined £50, in default three months imprisonment, and bound over for a year on a surety of £100 to comply with the act. Again he appealed against his conviction.
With the support of the conservative newspaper, the Barrier Miner, the Empire League and the military authorities redoubled their efforts to cajole single men to enlist. Brookfield warned miners: “It is not merely a question of signing the military forms and having your names put down as the Miner stated, for once you affix your signatures you are signing away your lives.[16]
To Brookfield’s satisfaction only one out of two thousand members of Labor’s Volunteer Army broke his solemn pledge not to enlist for the war. On Friday, October 27, the evening before the conscription referendum, the workers of Broken Hill took to the streets in probably the greatest mass political demonstration the Hill had ever witnessed. Nobody appeared to doubt what the outcome of the referendum would be and although excitement was intense an air of festivity pervaded the town. Twelve thousand joined in the massive torchlight procession. George Dale described it as a night never to be forgotten, while the very youngest of the present generation lived:
Men marching and shouting, women cheering, and hundreds of children waving flags — not symbolic of nationhood or nationality, but red, blood-red, every one of them, flags of the working class, waved on behalf of the working class, by the children of the working class.
The PLL, assisted by the LVA, had spent many days in preparing for this display; men and women — aye, and children, too — had spent much time in assisting those entrusted with the organisation of this pageant.
Trolleys, drays, and conveyances of every description had been decorated in a manner befitting the occasion. Hours before the appointed time of starting (seven o'clock) thousands of people had congregated around the Trades Hall, until it was difficult to move about. Being got into line punctually, the march started, headed by the aldermen of the city and executive officers of the PLL and LVA. The AMA band was followed by a coffin on a truck, drawn by a dozen sturdy unionists, and bearing the legend, “The Case for Yuse” — accompanied by an imitation wreath, inscribed “To Billy from John ’Enery — Oh, dear, what Cann the matter be?” The Ladies Corps of the LVA were there in hundreds, led by their choir. Amongst the banners carried by the women was one: “Vote No and Nark the Kaiser of West Sydney”, another read: “Australians not fools nor tools: never trust Billy; Vote No!”, Still another, “Don't Prussianise Australia, Vote No and keep your homeland white.”
Fifty boys, pupils of the LVA Sunday school, styling themselves “the rebel gang”, appropriately attired, were the outstanding feature of the whole procession.
No less than ten thousand persons marched. The IWW were well represented with an illuminated banner inscribed: “Down with militarism; Vote No, and to hell with traitors.”
Last but not least was a small boy with a goat, ridden by a large doll, labelled, “Billy and the Duchess.”
Five hundred torches were carried, giving the scene quite a gay appearance. The day had been a stopwork one, and so was the morrow to be; consequently the usual toil-stunned worker was on this occasion able to appreciate the celebration with some degree of pleasure.
Although so many marched there were numerous workers to be seen viewing the pageant from the footpath. They were subjected to a good deal of good-humoured barrack from those marching, and when passing the post office, a well-known unionist who observed an acquaintance on the sidewalk called out, “Get in here, Tom; your boss ain’t looking.”
Up Blende Street to Koalin into Argent and down to Oxide — up Oxide to Mica to Bromide — down Bromide to Argent once more — thence to the post office corner, where the procession dispersed, and where a trolley was in waiting with the usual piano on board, and from which the people present were to be addressed. However, it was soon apparent that with such a vast concourse present one platform would be useless, as the crowd extended fully 300 yards up and down Argent Street, while Chloride Street also was a seething mass of humanity. Two other trolleys that had taken part in the procession were soon pressed into service, and from all three platforms addresses were delivered until well after 11pm. Had the speakers cared to continue the audience would have been quite content to remain until daybreak.
The irrepressible lady members of the LVA were busily engaged with collection boxes, and a large sum of money was raised to assist in the defence of the persecuted members of their class who had dared to place the true facts of the situation before the populace.
The referendum ballot was carried out in Broken Hill on strictly party lines so far as canvassing for votes was concerned.
The full force of the party controlled by the mining companies for election purposes for over twenty-five years had for the nonce changed its name from the “Independent” party to the “Citizens’ National Service Association”, but the personnel was as of yore. F.G. White (local representative for Francis H. Snow) acted as captain, ably supported by Mr Barson (manager of the Broken Hill and Suburban Gas Company) and many other “citizens”, who were never known to support any movement unless in the interests of the mining companies.
Many public and private motor cars and other conveyances were in use carrying electors to the poll, while a personal canvass for Yes was made at the polling booth door of every person entering; yet after spending some thousands of pounds, in devious ways, the capitalists and their toadies had the mortification of reading the result of the poll, so far as the Barrier was concerned, thusly:
For YES 3854
For NO 8922
Majority for NO 5064
The “Cocky” vote in the outlying parts of the electorate reduced this majority slightly, but for the whole division the ultimate returns showed that the Noes had it by something over a five thousand majority.
Labor’s Volunteer Army, having been largely responsible for this fine result, did not cease its activities with the winning of the battle, as knowing the history of their class right through the ages those controlling the “Army” were well aware that capitalism could not and would not, allow the matter of shackling the workers to rest with this one defeat. Consequently, the LVA continued its propaganda, and has kept its membership intact till the present day.
Each Sunday evening well-attended meetings have been held in the Trades Hall, while the Saturday night dances for the younger members have been maintained: notwithstanding the filth and abuse thrown at these fixtures by the Barrier Miner, and the threats of the police to take action under the Public Halls and Theatres Act, the good work has lasted and so far as can be seen at present Labor’s Volunteer Army will continue to make famous history.[17]
The voting on the conscription referendum, which look place on October 28, 1916, resulted in Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia voting yes and New South Wales, South Australia and Queensland voting no. Out of 2,247,590 voters, conscription had been rejected by a majority of 72,476.
The trial of the twelve IWW men lasted ten days. It ended on December 1. While the jury was out the Twelve were allowed to chat with their optimistic relatives and friends in the court room. To their consternation the jury found all twelve men guilty. Wives, mothers and sisters of the accused cried so hysterically that Mr Justice Pring cleared the court of women. Outside the police held back a crowd of 2000.
Next day the twelve were permitted to comment before sentence was passed. They insisted they were innocent. Donald Grant said:
“The verdict of the jury was astounding because the verdict … was not in accordance with the evidence. I may have been guilty, individually, in my Domain speeches, but I have never acted in any way that could implicate me in seditious conspiracy … I feel my position keenly, because this jury has associated me with a crime I know nothing about. The people of Sydney know that Grant … and the rest of these men … do not believe in such a foully fiendish crime as is alleged to have been committed.”
Mr Justice Pring told them they were members of “an association of criminals of the very worst type and a hotbed of crime” and their crime was “the act of devils”. He suggested the Domain meetings should be stopped at once.
“I am going to pass sentence on you — a sentence which I do not think, personally, is really commensurate with the terrible crime you have committed, but I will lean rather to the side of mercy than to vengeance.”
To the dismay of the prisoners he ordered that Grant, Fagin, Teen, Glynn, Hamilton, McPherson and Beatty (whom he said the jury ‘ought not to convict’) do fifteen years hard labour. Besant, Larkin, Moore and Reeve were ordered ten years hard labour, and King five years hard labour.
The severity of the sentences shocked working people. Unions began to demand the release of the twelve men or a Royal Commission of Inquiry but had no enthusiasm for striking on the issue. On December 2, Mr Justice Bevan attended the quarter sessions in Broken Hill to deal largely with the number of appeals lodged by anti-conscriptionists convicted under the War Precautions Act by Magistrate Giles Shaw.
McLaughlin’s conviction for reciting the parody of Onward Christian Soldiers was sustained. Sinclair’s conviction was quashed. Oates, who had been convicted by Shaw to three months imprisonment for his alleged assault on police during their baton charge on September 25, had his sentence reduced to a £5 fine. Jewell’s conviction for similar riotous behaviour was upheld and he was also ordered to pay a fine of £5. In general Bevan’s decisions were more lenient than Shaw᾿s, although he drew the line at excusing F.J. Smith’s singing The Red Flag at South Broken Hill and fined Smith £10 or two months jail.
Brookfield had lodged appeals against two decisions by Shaw. One conviction was quashed but the charge of using abusive language against Hughes was sustained and Brookfield was ordered to pay the £5 fine.
Brookfield felt no respect for the law when he believed it was used to support militarism and he disagreed with the judge over the court’s symbols of “patriotism”. He demanded to know why the court had to be opened and closed with the words “God save the King” and Judge Bevan told him it meant “God save the country”. Brookfield replied that the workers were the country and he would do his best to save them from being used as cannon fodder to make capitalist profits. Afterwards Brookfield enjoyed humorously telling people of this exchange. Judge Bevan, in disallowing his appeal, apparently saw no irony in giving him an improving lecture on being British:
“The Industrial Workers of the World is of foreign origin, and some of the things suggested are repulsive to the British … This organisation is striving at the millennium, but does not go the right way about it. The man who aims at the millennium should start by doing to others as he would have them do unto him. I hope these decisions will be a lesson.”
According to Brookfield, Judge Bevan also advised him not to refer to Hughes as a “viper”, but to “wrap up his words”.
Brookfield, McLaughlin, Oates, Jewell and Smith were all held in the police station during Sunday while the Amalgamated Miners Association discussed the matter of paying the fines. However, when a mass meeting of the Amalgamated Miners Association and Labor’s Volunteer Army met that night a letter was to hand from the men in the jail and it was read to the gathering: “To our Fellow-workers. Men and women: We, the men in prison, consider that we have been unjustly punished, and ask you to pay no fines. We were convicted on various charges, all of which were the outcome of the attitude we took during the recent fight against conscription. We entered into it with our eyes open, thoroughly understanding the risk we were taking, and should the same struggle for liberty recur we would take the same stand. We won the main issue — defeated conscription — and we consider our penalisation a trifling matter in comparison with the great and momentous principle involved. The meeting agreed not to pay the fines and the five men were committed to one month’s imprisonment in Broken Hill’s torrid jail.
True to the Brookfield belief that industrial action was better than political action, the Broken Hill Miners Association appealed to all Australian unions to hold a general strike until Brookfield, McLaughlin, Oates, Jewell and Smith were released from the Broken Hill jail and the twelve Wobblies were released in Sydney. However, this found little support. Meanwhile, the editor of the Barrier Daily Truth told a mass meeting that if the Labor Party members of parliament did not attempt to release the twelve they would loss them out. As Brookfield was an ardent advocate of the release of the twelve, a number of unionists began to consider him as a possible candidate.
While Brookfield was in jail the allied powers rejected both a German and United States President Wilson’s peace proposals. War-weary labour organisations responded over the following months by demanding the allies enter peace negotiations. Brookfield exerted strong pressure on the New South Wales branch of the Labor Party, and in June, 1917, it demanded peace negotiations. The Victorian, Queensland and South Australian branches of the Party added their demand shortly afterwards.
Brookfield and his four friends were released at 6.30am on New Year’s Day, 1917. Three hundred supporters met them at the prison gates and later entertained them at breakfast at Peter Clarke's hotel. For those who have not endured the grisly experience of being political prisoners in New South Wales, it should perhaps be explained that a staple article of diet is porridge, known in prison terminology as hominy.[18] The word hominy means porridge made from ground maize, but in practice there is a rotation of maize, oats and wheat, served with brown sugar. Hominy is the one course for breakfast and “tea” while a serve of meat and vegetables, with bread, is provided for lunch. At Peter Clarke’s hotel the waitresses played a joke on the former political prisoners by first serving them with plates of dry porridge. A substantial meal followed, and afterwards Brookfield and his fellow-prisoners held a levee in Argent Street, which continued for hours.
During the afternoon of the same day a welcome-home demonstration was field in Central Reserve. Received with cheers, Brookfield spoke in acknowledgment:
“A man who is afraid to express his honest opinion is a waster … The judge has acted up to his class, and the best thing the workers can do is to act up to their class, too. In jail all sorts of men were met, and I can let I you that among all the criminals I saw there not one would stoop to the contemptible and despicable tactics of the Barrier Empire League … I have been asked what hominy is. As a food it is beneath contempt. The Barrier Empire League is the hominy of mankind. It represents the degree of humanity that hominy does in the tucker line … Men who will vote yes and then stay at home are the scum of society, liars to their own action. I say again this day that Hughes is a traitor to the labour movement, and a viper in the eyes of the toiling masses; his name will stink in the nostrils of every honest working man in Australia … You know in your own hearts that working men will always be in jail so long as you are in separate mobs, working against each other, instead of presenting a solid front to your common foe. The Broken Hill jail, instead of being a deterrent to crime, is a hotbed of iniquity; it is a devil incubator where criminals are bred … The prisoners go to their cells at 4 o'clock in the afternoon and remain there until 8 o'clock the next morning, in solitary confinement. The cells are ill-ventilated, and miniature Black Holes of Calcutta … It wrecks men physically and mentally. On holidays they are 22 hours in the cells during which time the door is closed. The cells are so hot that the perspiration simply pours out of them: the stench is damnable and the mosquitoes awful.[19]
Brookfield was especially indignant on behalf of his colleague McLaughlin, who had been subjected to the same inhuman treatment in jail as Brookfield, even though he — McLaughlin — was the holder of the medal of the Royal Humane Society and two certificates, having carried out three live and two dead miners when an explosion occurred in a mine at Collie, Western Australia, in 1910. Brookfield doubtless felt it ironic that such a brave man should be slandered by conscriptionists as a coward. His support for McLaughlin was characteristic of that warm, intense loyalty to his workmates he had that made him so trusted and loved.
Needless to say, Brookfield did not accept Judge Bevan’s advice and continued to call Hughes a viper.
1. Roper is apparently here alluding to the theory that the sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania was a “put-up job” to pull the United States into the war.
2. In 1918 William Morris Hughes had Tom Barker deported to Chile.
3. Barrier Daily Truth, July 2, 1916
4. Dale, op cit, 208
5. Barrier Daily Truth, July 31, 1916
6. Dale, op cit, 208-211
7. Barrier Daily Truth, August 7, 1916
8. loc cit
9. Dale, op cit, 212
10. Ibid 212-213
11. This fear of foreign labour rests uneasily with Brookfield’s dream of a “world confraternity”. Unfortunately, this glaring (to us) anomaly coloured much of the thinking of the early labour movement, and when reference was made to the international brotherhood of man, as like as not, the speaker would have in mind a brotherhood of European man only, and perhaps even within that some peoples were not considered acceptable.
12. Barrier Daily Truth, September 26, 1916
13. Dale, op cit, 214-215.
14. NSW Parliamentary Debates, Vol LXXI, 753
15. Barrier Daily Truth, October 3, 1916
16. Barrier Daily Truth, October 2, 1916
17. Dale, op cit, 220-223. PLL stands for Political Labor League. When Dale writes “the LVA … has kept its membership intact till the present day” he means, of course, 1918.
18. Roper’s account was written in the early 1950s. Prison fare has improved somewhat since then.
19. Barrier Daily Truth, January 2, 1917