by James Philip
Not everybody stood up in the body of the chamber.
But the majority, perhaps ninety percent, were on their feet. Even the great old man of Australian politics’ critics, many of whom were generational foes were caught up in the spirit of the moment. Their country was proclaiming its moral leadership, its right to be heard. Australia had come of age and they were witnessing its metamorphosis into a fully formed nation.
‘In this World Crisis it is not enough for us to simply combine and integrate our fighting forces, or to stand to the defence of our borders and our way of life. There is strength only in unity; we must strain every sinew to sustain the terribly wounded old country and draw closer to our friends in the Southern Hemisphere. We are one Commonwealth of peoples under the Crown. The road ahead is strewn with obstacles and pitfalls, if we have to fight to preserve our independence and in defence of our principles, so be it. If we have to beggar ourselves to stand by our friends we must do it in the sure and certain knowledge that they would do no less for us!’
There was less enthusiasm for this sentiment but nobody actually cried out against it.
‘The World has changed. The evidence of the recent war is stark. As our friends, our kith and kin in the old country have discovered there is no comfort to be found under the protection of the destroyers of nations!’
Chapter 17 | Not Cricket
Wednesday 13th February 1963
Sydney, New South Wales
Julian Christopher’s appointment diary for the rest of that week and the coming weekend was filled with a succession of public engagements – including attending at least two days play at the Sydney Cricket Ground during the forthcoming Fifth and final, deciding Test Match of the enthralling cricket series between Australia and a resurgent England eleven – and several rather more clandestine meetings with senior Australian Government ministers.
Sir Robert Menzies’s speech in mid-January had ‘set hares running’ but as yet nothing had actually happened to shift the logjam which had forestalled the imminent – albeit tentative – resumption of maritime trade in the Southern Hemisphere.
In the meantime Christopher had despatched a destroyer (HMS Cavalier), two frigates (Blackpool and Yarmouth) to join the Carysfort on the Aden-East Africa Station with orders to ‘do whatever needs to be done’ to restart the ‘tanker trade’ from Abadan to the United Kingdom the ‘long way’ around the Cape of Good Hope. He had ordered the ships based at Simonstown to ‘see the first tankers on their way north’ once they reached the South Atlantic and been pleasantly surprised when the South African High Commissioner and his Naval Attaché had volunteered the services of their own frigates to ‘help ease the burden’ in this endeavour. Nonetheless, the first fully laden ‘big tanker’ was not likely to berth in England for at least another month and, given the dreadful winter weather still holding the British Isles in its frozen embrace, and the fact American supplies – of anything – had yet to materialise, he knew the situation was already critical.
The Canadian High Commissioner had assured him that his country was despatching grain ships to ‘run the blockade as and when we can’, and that several small tankers had successfully made the passage from the St Lawrence to Scottish ports in the last month.
‘The blockade’ was coded language for the US Atlantic Fleet’s anti-submarine ‘cordon’ guarding the American east coast. Somebody in the US Navy was paranoid about the Soviets – who were supposed to have been ‘obliterated’ – seeking to smuggle nuclear warheads into New England ports to mount some kind of ‘revenge attack’.
Julian Christopher thought this was pure paranoia; disgracefully, the US Navy was using it as an excuse to harry and in some cases turn back Canadian ships bound for Europe. Moreover, despite Canadian, Australian, South African and British protests nothing had actually been done in Washington to ‘release’ the British registered merchantmen and tankers currently ‘held’ in many US ports. Elsewhere three vessels ‘impounded’ in Chile had been allowed to sail for New Zealand, and vessels from all over Asia were trickling into Australian harbours. As the merchantmen arrived another problem had surfaced; hardly any of them were in the right place. For example ore carriers were where refrigeration ships needed to be, and the idle vessels with no cargo as yet to be loaded, clogged ports and deep water channels, and many crews wanted nothing more than to pay off, leaving their ships as floating hulks.
Sir Robert Menzies’s speech might have galvanised the nation – with a vision of itself if nothing else – but it had done little to light any kind of fire under the governmental machinery of either Australia or New Zealand where civil servants, and the business community were rather more preoccupied by ‘where the money will come from’ than by existential exhortations of national identity and purpose. The Devil was always in the detail. Most Australians honestly believed that ‘something was being done’ to help the ‘old country’ and basked in the warm knowledge that they were ‘doing their bit’, regardless of the reality that very little had yet, or was about to be done to deliver the so-called ‘Canberra declaration’.
If no man was angrier about the situation than Sir Robert Menzies his room for manoeuvre was maddeningly limited because the one thing he could not afford was for the nascent splits within his own Cabinet to escape into the public domain.
Menzies’s vision had run into a partial roadblock almost as soon as he had stopped speaking in Parliament House. Problematically, his Liberal-Country coalition government had only a wafer-thin majority in Parliament and – in the way of all coalitions – it was not at all clear if his administration would ‘hang together’ now that the going was about to get ‘intolerably tough’.
There was a very real possibility that Menzies might be forced to dissolve Parliament and call an early General Election to seek a fresh mandate from the Australian people.
If that happened ‘all bets were off’; or that at least was what the Australian press was openly speculating and it was by no means clear if the Australian Labour Party, which in the most recent election in 1961 had decisively defeated the Liberals in terms of the ‘popular vote’, was in any way as committed to Menzies’s Commonwealth-centric vision.
Knowing this both Viscount De L’Isle and General Sir William Oliver had warned Julian Christopher that ‘Sir Robert’s clarion call’ was the first, not the last word on the matter. The fighting admiral had deferred to the Governor General and the High Commissioner in all things ‘political’ from the outset, never so much as whispering any manner of ‘partisan’ comment outside the closed circle of his own Staff.
However, by mid-February Julian Christopher was, according to his Flag Captain, Frank Maltravers, ‘very nearly incandescent with the goings on in Canberra’[63]. A marvellously forthright man, Ark Royal’s captain had no doubt that the ‘spanner in the works’ was Harold Holt.
Fifty-four year old Harold Edward Holt had been the Australian Minister for Immigration for seven years up until 1956, and Treasurer of Australia since 1958[64]. Elected Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party in 1956 he was universally regarded as Robert Menzies ‘natural successor.
But - there was always a ‘but’ when Harold Holt’s name was raised – at the time of the Cuban Missiles War Holt’s position was less than secure. Back in 1958, notwithstanding that he had little experience of financial policy making or any experience of, or interest in economics his assumption of the duties of Treasurer had cemented his place in the succession. At the time the Australian economy had been booming, pumped up by huge new iron ore and other mines ramping up to full production. However, worried by rising inflation – 4.5% in 1959 – in 1960 Holt had been talked into deliberately ‘deflating’ the economy. By increasing taxes and hiking the Reserve Bank Rate he had unleashed a credit squeeze that had very nearly lost the Liberals the 1961 election. Returned with a single vote majority many in the Party had wanted his head on a silver platter; and it was only Menzies’s apparently staunch support which had saved him albeit at the co
st of his having to perform a humiliating U-turn, reversing all the offending deflationary measures he had taken in the first part of 1962.
Holt, a man who stood squarely in the ‘future is American’ camp of Australian politics who viewed Menzies’s somewhat pathological attachment to the ‘old country’ with suspicion, far from being eternally grateful to his Party leader for saving his political career by sticking by him in 1961, still fulminated from the injustice of his near downfall.
Part of this stemmed from the legacy he had inherited at the Treasury. Because of the ‘credit squeeze’ interlude everybody forgot, and nobody gave him any credit for being the man who had overseen a raft of long overdue fiscal reforms. He was the man who had created the Reserve Bank[65]. He was the man who had started planning for the decimalisation of the Australian pound, and who was campaigning for the currency to be called the Australian ‘dollar’. He was the man who had picked up the pieces of years of complacency and neglect and begun to put the treasury on a modern, independent fiscal trajectory. And yet Menzies had let him take the slings and arrows alone...
The real power behind the throne was actually Sir Roland Wilson; since 1951 the Secretary of the Department of the Treasury[66]. Unlike Holt, Wilson was a professional statistician and economist.
Fifty-eight year old Wilson was a native of Ulverstone in northern Tasmania. He had studied economics at the University of Tasmania, and in 1925 gone as a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford to take a doctorate in philosophy. In 1936, aged thirty-two he had been appointed Commonwealth Statistician[67]. In 1940 under a war-time secondment Wilson became Secretary of the Department of Labour and National Service, reverting in 1946 to his previous role until he was summoned to the Treasury in 1951.
From the outset of his tenure as Treasurer Harold Holt had not so much relied upon Roland Wilson, as deferred to him – sooner or later – in all things fiscal. Thus, by 1962 Holt felt himself to be in something of a cleft stick. He could hardly say the ‘credit squeeze’ which had almost brought down the Liberal Government was ‘Sir Roland’s fault’ without admitting that he had been a passenger in his own ministry; nor could he shrug off the general impression that he owed everything to Menzies.
The recent war had ruptured the American-Australian axis he had seen as being the only long-term way ahead for his country; threatening practically all the vital ties he and others in the Party had been attempting to forge with possible ‘partners’ in Asia.
In Holt’s mind Robert Menzies was increasingly the cricket loving Anglo-centric figurehead of an Australia which no longer existed other than in the hearts of a dwindling number of diehards. The future prosperity of the nation lay in the Pacific; if the chains of Empire no longer clanked, the Commonwealth was a part, no more than a part, of Australia’s future.
All the talk about extending unlimited credit lines to the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration, of adopting ‘lend-lease’, or of ‘just giving away’ Australian agricultural surpluses and minerals seemed to Holt – and to Roland Wilson, a man the British Mission in Canberra regarded as Mephistopheles incarnate – reckless and positively dangerous. The only way to sustainably fund such a ‘hand out’ would be to tax Australians – and presumably, New Zealanders also – until ‘the pips squeaked’. And then what would become of the Liberal Party?
Holt was hardly alone in Canberra in believing that his Prime Minister’s speech at Parliament House the previous month had been – if not now, then sooner or later - the longest political suicide note in Australian political history.
Julian Christopher could not but have had a feel for the stresses and strains within the Australian Government. He must have been tearing his hair out by that stage. Every day’s delay in sending aid to the United Kingdom was costing lives and he was powerless to hasten matters.
He met regularly with the Governor General and in public he was unfailingly gracious and complementary to his hosts; the perfect diplomat. That week in Sydney he must have felt as if he was partially adrift in a city preoccupied with the coming clash of the English and the Australian cricket teams; nothing it seemed, was more important than the outcome of the deciding Test Match of the series, played for a tiny urn containing the ashes of a stump burned in the 1880s in memory of the death of English cricket following the home team’s first defeat by the touring Australians.
‘The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.’ So declared the Sporting Times back in 1882. Bizarrely, if it survived at all, that urn was now buried under the ruins of whatever remained of the pavilion at Lord’s Cricket Ground in St John’s Wood, London.
Julian Christopher was working in his cabin onboard the Ark Royal when the first cable arrived about an incident which had occurred in the Coral Sea west of New Caledonia.
Nobody was to know it but within days the political calculus and public consensus of Australasia would be decisively altered for a generation.
Historians of every ilk have pored over the events of the following seven days as if trawling through an infinite number of tea leaves trying to divine some greater, holistic meaning. Oddly, the only thing everybody can agree about is that, make no mistake, the World was in ferment that Wednesday in February 1963.
In the faraway Himalayas Indian and Chinese forces notwithstanding the devastation of much of northern China and the capital, Peking, in October, were still fighting for control of Rezang la and Tawang in the Ladakh – ‘land of high passes’ - region at altitudes of over fourteen thousand feet.
The United Kingdom was now known to be in the grip of what later generations would call a ‘Nuclear Winter’ and the dreadful rumours of starvation and disease ravaging the survivors of the recent war had begun to be whispered chillingly on the streets of the Australian cities.
European civilization, the cradle of Empire and now the Commonwealth from whence it had sprung, was devastated, hollowed out and in Australia there was a general feeling of sick unease, and emptiness whenever one risked a moment of quiet reflection.
In October 1962 the World had been beginning to be joined up, an increasingly noisy and smaller place, shrinking almost daily with new advances in communications, no longer connected at the speed of a steamer across its oceans, but at the speed of jet aircraft. All the technologies developed to fight Hitler and later to deter the Soviets had begun to revolutionise daily life in the advanced countries of the first world, and were starting to slowly ‘drip down’ to even the remotest corners of the globe. Television, international telephony, trade, the pace of scientific inquiry and research, and medical advances had all been galloping forward; the future had beckoned humanity with its promise of an ever better life for this and future generations. And then it had all suddenly come to a juddering halt...
TV and radio stations in Sydney broadcast twice daily State bulletins on radiation levels and the ‘prevalence of War Plague’ – in the big cities. Worst hit was still Brisbane, the Gold Coast and the Northern Territories where whole communities had been paralysed by sickness – and yet, bizarrely nothing warranted so many column inches or minutes, and hours, in the newspapers or on the radio or the TV as the forthcoming main event at the Sydney Cricket Ground due to get under way on Friday 15th February.
That Wednesday evening at the request of the Australian Government HMS Ark Royal, the cruiser Belfast and three escorting destroyers – the Barrosa, Cavendish and HMAS Vampire departed Sydney Harbour to confront a US Navy task force which had – it seemed - denied a New Zealand frigate[68] free navigation in the Coral Sea west of Nouméa, New Caledonia.
This obscure incident – glossed over in later years, and somewhat overshadowed by hugely more momentous subsequent Anglo-American ‘misunderstandings’ – had arisen out of a routine request for assistance by the embattled French colonial administration on the island of Grande Terre.
At the time everybody was still secretly terrified that there might easily be a second, even more terrible global war. In Australia it was the year of ‘living
On the Beach’ and it was not until the first anniversary of the World catastrophe approached that people began to get used to the idea that they were not all going to die of radiation poisoning.
Well, not soon, anyway...
Chapter 18 | Treading Water
Thursday 14th February 1963
Government House, Cheltenham
If the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration had had a Chancellor of its Exchequer – or rather, had had an ‘Exchequer’, that was – the man who had held the post of Economic Secretary to the Treasury[69] on the evening of Saturday 27th October 1962, might have been ‘it’. Might being the operative word because although the Economic Secretary was the man specifically responsible for the answering of written and oral Parliamentary questions, and theoretically, also for the drawing up of regulations, statutory orders, the probity of financial institutions, and for advising other Treasury Ministers on economic policy, he was not responsible for actually ‘making policy’. In other words the job of Economic Secretary was one of those jobs that ‘somebody had to do’, a rite of passage, a test a candidate for high office simply had to pass if he was ever to ascend the greasy pole of political life.
Edward Dillon Lott du Cann had not been the worst Economic Secretary in living memory in his relatively short – war-abbreviated – stint at the Treasury but neither had he set the world on fire. It did not help that all and sundry knew that he was a businessman first and politician second, and that Edward Heath had never really had a great deal of time for the man.
Du Cann was ‘slippery’, the Prime Minister had concluded years before when he was still Chief Whip, and even in the fifties he had suspected that sooner or later that the Honourable Member of Parliament for Taunton - with his large coterie of ‘City friends’ - would become a liability. Others found the thirty-eight year old Oxford educated friend of the author Kingsley Amis[70] and former Second World War motor torpedo boat commander a charming, accomplished ‘operator’.
