CHAPTER 4
There was something in the Lewis DNA that compelled its men to push themselves and their endeavours to the limit. And, over three generations, BHP played an ever-increasing part in those endeavours.
Essington’s grandfather, James Lewis, was a Welshman who arrived in South Australia on the brigantine Rapid in 1836 and eight years later joined Charles Sturt’s quixotic expedition in quest of the inland sea. Some members of Sturt’s party climbed the broken-backed hill to spy out the land ahead. While there, they collected mineral specimens to be sent back to Adelaide, where, amazingly, they were ignored, lost or both. Whether James Lewis was among them is not known, but on his return from Sturt’s tragic ordeal in the wilderness he took up farming and worked from dawn to dusk to clear the land and grow a crop to feed his family.
His eldest son, John, strong and wilful, struck out on his own at 14. He headed first to Victoria and then north and west, working on cattle stations and in mining camps as he made his way through the red heart of the country and into the Northern Territory. In the 1870s, he reached Vashon Head, which forms an arm of Port Essington, north of Darwin, having crossed the continent by stages from Melbourne – a feat that had ended in disaster for Burke and Wills a decade earlier. It remained a source of great pride throughout his life, and the naming of his third son would serve as a living reminder.
John Lewis pioneered the rough cattle country in the far north and gained a reputation for the kind of endurance and enterprise that the country demanded. He retained his pastoral interests when he returned south and settled at Burra, only 150 kilometres north of Adelaide. Copper had been discovered in the area in 1845 in two lodes, one of which returned massive fortunes to its owners – a group of Adelaide merchants known colloquially as The Snobs. A population of 5000 crowded into the area and stripped the trees from the surroundings to support the mining stopes. By the time the lode was exhausted, the whole area had been cleared for farming, and when John Lewis established a stock and station business in 1876 with local partners Liston and Shakes the community was thriving.
The same year, he married Martha Brook, the daughter of a respected Burra family, and soon fathered three sons. The eldest, James, was named for his grandfather and would become a doctor; the second, Gilbert, would be a soldier. Essington made his appearance on 13 January 1881 at Burra district hospital.
Like his father, he exhibited a wilful independence early in life, and their relationship would be never less than turbulent. Young Essington was sent to St Peter’s School in Adelaide, but at 13, shortly after his mother died, his father withdrew him and sent him for nine months to work on his cattle property, Dalhousie Springs, almost at the territory border. The youngster thrived in the outback, and his schooling would be interrupted several times by sojourns to the Springs. In Essington’s sixteenth year, an eccentric bush character, James J. Murif, provided the first public glimpse of the personality that would come to play an extraordinary part in his nation’s history.
In 1897, Murif set himself the task of riding his bicycle from Adelaide to Darwin dressed only in his pyjamas. In a concession to safety, he secured the flapping pants with bicycle clips and headed north. Some weeks later, he found himself beetling along the track between Dalhousie and Oodnadatta when a stationary horse team and dray hove into view. As he came closer, he saw that they had stopped for dinner. A fire was heating three quart pots for tea and a slim youth had arranged a rough tablecloth on the ground nearby. On it were a newly baked damper, corned beef, jam, a knife and fork and a pannikin. Two Aboriginal people sat in the shade of a nearby tree staring wide-eyed at the newcomer and his mode of transportation. Murif dismounted.
Recalling the event in his memoir, Murif says he and Essington swapped ‘g’days’ and the young man invited the traveller to share the tucker. Murif asked, ‘Where’s the boss?’
The youth smiled and replied, ‘I am the boss.’ 1 Essington reached out an arm towards a small linen tea bag, then stood up to throw a handful into each pot. Cutting off a few slices from the damper and sorting out the blacks’ favourite pieces of meat, he gave a short, low whistle and up came the Aboriginal people. To these, he handed each his share of tucker, which they received in silence. ‘You wantem more, you sing out,’ he added as, taking with them two of the quart pots, they returned to their tree.
‘I admired this manly child’s way exceedingly,’ Murif wrote. ‘In “bossing” them, he spoke very civilly ... in a quiet, cool, masterful manner. He offered to load me up with bread and meat but as I had resolved to break myself in to going on short commons, I would accept nothing more than a couple of apples. “It’s rough to Blood’s Creek. I don’t think you’ll get there tonight,” were Essington’s parting words. And he was right.’
Essington finally graduated from St Peter’s in 1900 aged 19 and with a reputation as a fine sportsman. He wanted to study law but his father had other ideas. ‘As you haven’t got the brain and I’m damned if I’ll give you the money, you’d better think again,’ he said. 2
His second choice – mining engineer – met paternal acceptance and he enrolled at the South Australian School of Mines and Industries. Part of the course involved practical work in a mine, and he chose BHP.
In the days following the federation of the Commonwealth of Australia on 1 January 1901, Essington Lewis reported for duty. He began quite literally at the bottom. Deep in the line of lode, the jut-jawed 19-year-old swung his pick with the hard men of Broken Hill. It was an invaluable experience, but he wouldn’t be there for long.
While Essington Lewis fed the maw of BHP’s never-ending appetite for ore and profits underground, his father made his own contribution in the genteel corridors of Adelaide’s power elite, the South Australian Parliament. By now a formidable member of the Legislative Council, John Lewis not only chaired the select committee investigating BHP’s acquisition of Iron Knob and Iron Monarch – and gave it the green light – but also sponsored a private member’s Bill to build a railway from the deposits to Hummock Hill. The Bill passed and Lewis became a substantial BHP shareholder at precisely that time. 3
By then, the interaction between politicians and The Proprietary already had a history. In 1888, BHP had engaged a lobbyist, T.F. DeCourcy Browne, to secure state-government funding of a dam on Stephens Creek. As negotiations dragged on, he targeted a former minister for mines, Joe Abbott, to press the case and met with him in the New South Wales Parliament’s smoking room. Abbott didn’t beat about the bush. According to the lobbyist, ‘He wanted to know how many paid-up shares he was to get. I explained that ... the few there were [would] not be distributed until the Bill passed into law.’ 4
BHP’s general manager, John Howell, applied public pressure with a warning that unless the Bill were passed, the mine might have to cease production in six weeks. In fact, it would not become law for almost two years, passing through all stages on 11 November 1890. Its sponsor was none other than the new Speaker, Joe Abbott. The following day, the parliament erupted with cries of scandal from the member for West Macquarie, William Crick. Bursting into the house, he confronted the Speaker: ‘You got £2000 for putting the Broken Hill Water Supply Bill through ... and the chairman of committees got £1000 ... you are both a pair of thieves and robbers!’
Crick later withdrew his accusations and was welcomed back into the parliamentary fold. He was appointed postmaster-general in 1899 and served as secretary of lands from 1901 to 1904. Joe Abbott was knighted in 1892 and, still Speaker, took part in the framing of the Commonwealth constitution.
At the same time, BHP director William Knox had secured election to the Victorian Legislative Council in 1898, where he championed the cause of free enterprise as the member for South-Eastern Province. After Federation, he was elected to the House of Representatives where, on his motion, it was decided that each day’s sitting would begin with prayers – a practice that continues to this day. Knox was the first member for the seat of Kooyong, whose most famous occupant, Robert Menzies, also had strong connections with the company.
Menzies’ father, James, is invariably portrayed as a mere country storekeeper from Jeparit in northern Victoria. In his memoir Afternoon Light, the long-serving prime minister provides only the briefest mention of his father’s subsequent career in Melbourne following James Menzies’ election to state parliament in 1911 as the member for Lowan (which incorporated Jeparit). His son wrote, ‘The nerves took charge when he made his maiden speech. After a few sentences, he paused, and collapsed. He made a good recovery, but it was an inauspicious beginning. He did not become a minister.’ 5
Nonetheless, he was re-elected twice, and though he lost his seat in 1920 he was sufficiently well regarded to attract the attention of BHP and worked as a consultant for them after he left the parliament. Then, in 1926, he joined the company fulltime as ‘statistical officer and tariff adviser’ – BHP jargon for political lobbyist. In this role, he was part of the team seeking special protection of government against cheaper steel imports. According to a Tariff Board report of the time, without such protection ‘the whole undertaking at Newcastle would not be a commercial proposition’.
The Bruce/Page government granted a tariff increase and in 1931 James Menzies spent much of his time in Canberra, where he enlisted Labor Party members to support further protection to ‘save jobs’. According to historian Geoffrey Blainey, ‘Some of the Labor Ministers unquestioningly accepted his advice and the speeches he helped them to compose.’ 6
As the younger Menzies rose to power and influence in conservative politics, becoming deputy premier of Victoria in 1932, the association between the family and the company became very close. Robert Menzies transferred to the House of Representatives in 1934 and was immediately appointed attorney-general and – happily for BHP – minister for industry. James Menzies was an active member behind the scenes in the Australian Industries Protection League from 1935 and remained a lobbyist for BHP until his death in 1945. The obvious conflict of ministerial interest has never been previously revealed.
Essington Lewis, who would become the enduring link between BHP and the Menzies family, rose steadily and inexorably through the ranks. From Broken Hill miner, he transferred in 1905 to the smelters at Port Pirie, and by 1909 he had charge of the wharf and stables there in addition to his duties as a shift superintendent.
The following year, he married Gladys Cowan, the daughter of a wealthy mining entrepreneur, but after the birth of their first child in 1911 she developed tuberculosis and lived in Adelaide. He would join her there two years later when Delprat, who sponsored his rise through the ranks, gave him key roles in preparing for the company’s transformation from miner to steelmaker.
Lewis expanded the output of ironstone from Iron Knob and opened a limestone quarry at Melrose, Tasmania. When the Newcastle steelworks opened in 1915, he spent much of his time there learning all there was to know about steelmaking and copying endless details into the notebooks he habitually carried in his coat pocket.
But while Lewis worked closely with Delprat – and would become assistant general manager under him in 1919 – he was already forging a close relationship with the youngest director on the board, Harold Gordon Darling, son of the man with whom Delprat had worked so closely until the elder Darling’s death in 1914. Remarkably, this new partnership would become even more significant to Australia’s industrial development than the earlier alliance. Lewis and Darling – the tireless engineer and the patrician director – complemented each other perfectly as they worked together to construct a massive steel business and lay the foundation for secondary industry throughout the young nation.
Their friendship was cemented during a world trip in 1920 after the board had decided on a big expansion program at the Newcastle steelworks. Delprat had favoured the introduction of an American system known as Duplex, in which the pig iron was melted and cleansed of some of its impurities before being refined in open-hearth furnaces without the usual addition of scrap steel. It was expensive but had proven effective during the war in the great American steelworks. The board endorsed Delprat’s recommendation.
However, when Lewis and Darling reached the US, Lewis quickly realised that the high cost of the process would be disastrous for Australia’s relatively small industry. From Ohio, he cabled Delprat setting out the issue in great detail and strongly recommending that the decision be suspended at least until his return. Delprat, by then 64 and increasingly unbending in his opinions, refused to accept Lewis’s view.
By nature a loyalist, Lewis was reluctant to oppose his mentor and patron. But when forced to choose between the man and the company, Lewis himself was unbending. Darling concurred and on 13 July he cabled the board:
In Melbourne, Delprat – backed by David Baker – mounted a rearguard action with the board and they responded that installation of the new system would proceed as planned. Lewis was incensed. When he and Darling reached Britain, steel executives there confirmed his view that Delprat’s bullheadedness was endangering the very existence of the company. He sent a series of urgent telegrams, endorsed by Darling, warning of a potential disaster unfolding. Finally, the board listened and suspended all further work until the travellers’ return.
On the journey home, Lewis composed a report that not only damned the Duplex decision but also Delprat’s choice of new coke ovens for the plant. Darling had it copied and circulated to all directors.
For some years, though not a director, Delprat had habitually attended board meetings. It was a mark of the esteem in which he was held, but it also reflected the ethos of the company, which relied heavily on the expertise of its top management. On this occasion, however, he was pointedly not invited, and with Darling leading the debate the board resolved to abandon the Duplex process. They would also have reversed the coke ovens decision but installation was too far advanced.
It was a humiliating blow for Delprat, who had given so much of his life to BHP, transforming it from the rough-and-ready miner to Australia’s leading company in metallurgy, mineral exploration and now steelmaking. He offered his immediate resignation to the chairman, Bowes Kelly.
His next meeting with Lewis must have been excruciating for both men, since each held the other in high regard and affection. But both understood that the interests of the company came first. Delprat addressed the board and recommended Lewis as his successor, and on 18 February 1921 they made the announcement: Lewis would take over immediately as general manager on a salary of £4000, while Delprat would continue as ‘consulting engineer’ at his old salary of £5500 for the next 18 months. It was a wise gesture. Until his death at 80 in 1937, the remarkable Dutch expatriate would continue to speak publicly in support of his protégé, and of BHP.
Lewis confronted an immediate crisis. British steelmakers were claiming British Preference under the trade agreement between the two countries for their exports to Australia, even though they were merely processing cheap steel bars from Germany. The Americans had the advantage of economies of scale; and both benefited from sharply reduced shipping costs. At the same time, the Australian economy was slowing. BHP was fast losing money and market share.
Lewis attacked on three fronts. He began a regular round of visits to every element of his far-flung organisation seeking cost-cutting efficiencies. He had a particular affinity for the men and yarned easily with them while keeping his association with his white-collar executives strictly formal. He filled his bulging notebooks with facts and figures that would lead to new and better work practices.
He also confronted the unions demanding a deal that would staunch the flow of red ink. And to drive home his point, he closed the steelworks and threw 5000 workers on to the breadline. The lockout would last for nine months, and while he secured some reductions in the award, the benefit to the company’s bottom line was in no way commensurate with the terrible pain and hardship caused to the working men and their families.
Thirdly, he opened talks with political parties and right-wing movements such as the Save Australia League, which wanted to destroy the Australian arbitration system. Indeed, BHP became one of the League’s main financial supporters. And while Essington Lewis’s venture into the political realm was not new to BHP, he expanded the process of government lobbying substantially. Subsequent top BHP executives would follow his lead. In the years ahead, their efforts would pay huge dividends to company shareholders.
It was Lewis himself who engaged James Menzies as in-house lobbyist in 1926, shortly after he was promoted to managing director. They would establish such a close relationship that on his death Lewis would write to Menzies’ widow, ‘Your husband was the finest and grandest man I have known.’ 7
Meanwhile, Lewis’s efficiency, drive and his willingness to acquire new businesses that used BHP steel saw a massive expansion of company activity – and profits – in the late 1920s. So when the Depression struck in 1930, BHP was well placed to turn the crisis to its advantage. Indeed, Lewis would call the Depression a ‘fiery furnace’ that would ‘purify’ the economy from the ‘false values’ that had applied since the Great War. In words that would find an echo 60 years later when Paul Keating welcomed ‘the recession we had to have’, Lewis declared in the company’s annual report, ‘This period of adversity, although very unwelcome and unpleasant, is necessary to put us on a proper economic basis.’
With Harold Darling, who had risen quickly to the chairmanship, he planned a series of takeovers. Collieries, wire-makers, engineering companies and fabricators such as Lysaght Brothers all fell into the BHP cauldron. The only other steelmaker in the country, the Hoskins family’s Australian Iron & Steel Limited at Lithgow and Port Kembla, gave up the fight and ‘merged’ with BHP in 1935.
The merger sparked cries of ‘monopoly’ from some politicians – notably Jack Beasley, who sat in federal parliament as the member for West Sydney alongside the former New South Wales premier Jack Lang. Together, they were known as Lang Labor and voted independently of the party then led by John Curtin. In parliament, Beasley accused BHP – with some justification – of creating ‘a steel trust embracing the whole of the Commonwealth’ and called for the company to be nationalised.
Beasley trumpeted the names of its major Australian shareholders, which included the Fairfax and Syme families, and claimed that this compromised their treatment of BHP in the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, respectively. However, the share register did not reveal the kind of political involvement he clearly craved. 8 The Menzies family, for example, was not represented, though Robert Menzies – now attorney-general and industry minister in Joseph Lyons’ United Australia Party/Country Party coalition government – heaped his special brand of withering scorn upon the member for West Sydney in the debate. The motion for nationalisation was easily defeated.
At the time, Lewis had returned from one of his regular international fact-finding missions to stay abreast of industry and political developments. In Japan, he had been shocked to discover a nation in ferment. He wrote immediately to Darling: ‘Japan may be described as a big gun-powder magazine and the people as fanatics; and any day the two might connect and there will be an explosion.’ Indeed, from his subsequent actions it is clear that Lewis, well ahead of his contemporaries, saw Japan as a rising military threat to Australia. 9
As soon as he left the country, he sketched out plans to fight back against possible invasion. BHP should immediately retool for the manufacture of munitions; and it should begin to build up massive stocks of raw materials. It should plan to build warships – minelayers, torpedo boats and small destroyers – at Newcastle and Whyalla, and make a start on an aircraft industry. ‘[The Japanese] are armed to the teeth,’ he said, ‘and I was informed that in emergency they could build 100 [fighter planes] a day.’ 10
In a meeting with Darling and W.S. Robinson, the early pioneer of Broken Hill mining companies now heading an international mining conglomerate, he secured agreement for a syndicate that would soon become the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation. Its plant at Victoria’s Fishermen’s Bend would in time produce the Australian-designed Wirraway aircraft. But when he took his concerns to the political arena, he was initially regarded as an alarmist. Whatever Japan’s intentions, he was told, Australia was safe behind the impregnable fortress of Singapore. So he visited Singapore in 1937. He was not convinced: for one thing, Singapore had no battle fleet of its own. Behind the scenes, he continued to urge preparations for war.
Nevertheless, he authorised the sale of BHP iron ore and pig iron (the raw product of Newcastle’s blast furnaces) to both Germany and Japan, reasoning that he was funding an Australian steel industry that provided the bulwark against military aggression. It was a self-serving argument, and it became untenable in 1938 when the Japanese secured the West Australian Government’s approval to ship one million tons of iron ore a year from Yampi Sound in the north of the state to fuel Japan’s furnaces. 11 Protests erupted and the federal government quickly responded. Prime Minister Lyons himself met with Lewis to warn him that his government was about to ban all iron-ore exports. They would give a ‘diplomatic’ reason – that Australia had barely enough for its own needs. Lewis accepted the decision without public demur. In return, Lyons agreed that BHP would continue to export pig iron to Japan from the Newcastle plant. The result was a political time-bomb.
The Port Kembla wharfies lit the fuse when they refused to load the freighter Dalfram with a shipment of pig iron in November 1938 on grounds that it would be used in the undeclared Japanese war against China. And when Menzies as attorney-general stepped in with the so-called ‘dog-collar act’ that allowed strike-breakers on the wharves, it exploded in wild controversy across the nation. By January 1939, 7000 wharfies and BHP workers were either on strike or locked out.
To his credit, Menzies confronted a mass demonstration at Port Kembla and put his case to union officials face to face. In the event, the unionists gave ground and loaded the ship. But Menzies’ reputation would be forever tarnished with the soubriquet ‘Pig Iron Bob’.
Coincidentally, as the BHP employees returned to work on 28 January, their colleagues at Broken Hill left the Big Mine for the last time. When they finally downed tools on that last shift, the company had extracted 12.3 million tons of ore, produced £54 million worth of metals and paid £14.8 million in wages. In the 56 years since Charles Rasp had pegged his claim on the ancient line of lode, BHP had become the largest corporation in the nation.
Meanwhile, the political scene was becoming increasingly chaotic, as Menzies broke with Lyons over a proposed national medical-insurance scheme and resigned from the ministry. Then, in April, the prime minister suffered a sudden, fatal heart attack. The Country Party leader, Earle Page, became caretaker prime minister until the senior partner in the coalition chose its new leader. But when Menzies was elected on 26 April, Page, a highly strung individual from a family with a distinguished military background, accused him of cowardice in not volunteering for service in the First World War and refused to serve under him. It was an outrageous charge, and Menzies was deeply offended. However, he did not allow it to divert him from the main game and accepted Governor-General Sir Isaac Isaacs’ commission to head a minority government. He re-formed the coalition later that year when Page was replaced.
Back in 1938, as industry minister, Menzies had selected Essington Lewis to be chairman of the Commonwealth’s advisory panel on industrial organisation. Now, one of his first acts as head of the new coalition government was to appoint him ‘business consultant to the Department of Defence’. His task was to advise on the development of the industrial arrangements needed to fight a defensive war.
Lewis was happy to serve but frustrated by the indecisiveness within the upper echelons of government. When the ‘Phoney War’ finally ended in May 1940 with the German invasion of the Low Countries, Menzies at last grasped the nettle. On 21 May, Lewis flew secretly to Canberra in response to his summons. After brief amenities, Menzies said, ‘Will you come and help the country by becoming director-general of munitions with a charter as wide as the seas and as high as the sky?’
Lewis: ‘Yes, I will.’
Menzies: ‘Can you gather about you all the best men in the industrial world in Australia?’
Lewis: ‘Yes, I can. If I am to have a clear and wide authority, then I can get other men to share it.’ 12
The appointment was made public by Menzies the following day. Lewis’s charter was indeed as far-reaching as the prime minister had promised. He controlled the production of all ordnance, explosives, ammunition, small arms, aircraft and vehicles, and all machinery and tools used in their production. He could acquire any building, issue contracts without calling tenders, delegate and revoke responsibilities at will, and spend up to £250,000 on any project without political approval. He would sit on the National Defence Committee and have the same access to the War Cabinet as the military chiefs of staff. And, though it was not mentioned formally, he would have unimpeded access to the prime minister.
Lewis, who abhorred publicity of all kinds, was not on hand to hear the announcement. He had returned to work in Melbourne. By now, he was 59 and had built a large home in Toorak, where he and Gladys – cured of her tuberculosis – raised their five children. He had also acquired a 3500-acre property, ‘Landscape’, in Tallarook, two hours’ drive north of the Victorian capital. But for the next four years – aside from Wednesday-afternoon tennis in his Toorak grounds – he would have little time to spend in either of his personal redoubts. He established headquarters at Western House in Melbourne’s CBD but spent most of his waking hours travelling to inspect munitions facilities or meeting with his board of fellow industrialists.
By common consent, he did a remarkable job. At its height, Lewis’s directorate employed 150,000 men and women. They built ships, aircraft, landing craft and artillery. They established 213 armament factories and produced millions of rounds of ammunition. They channelled more than £300 million into armament production without a single accusation of corruption or double-dealing.
However, by retaining his role as chief general manager of BHP, declining a government salary and employing BHP personnel as his principal assistants, Lewis attracted powerful critics. Chief among them in the early months was Labor’s H. V. ‘Doc’ Evatt, a former High Court judge, who accused him of a ‘conflict of duty’, thereby earning Lewis’s implacable and undying hatred. Labor leader John Curtin and his deputy Frank Forde also spoke in favour of nationalising BHP. But when the Menzies government fell in 1941 and Labor took the Treasury benches, their attitude changed almost overnight. One reason was the return to parliament of Ben Chifley, who had lost his seat in 1935 and had been a key figure in Lewis’s directorate of munitions as director of labour. He was unstinting in his praise of the BHP chief.
Indeed, by mid-1942 Prime Minister Curtin was so impressed with Lewis’s work that he offered him a knighthood, despite the fact that such imperial honours were against Labor policy. Lewis declined, but when Curtin persisted he accepted the Order of Companion of Honour, an award usually reserved for Dominion prime ministers.
By then, with Japan threatening Australia’s borders, unionists and industrialists had put aside their grievances and a new spirit of common purpose was sweeping the nation. Unfortunately, it didn’t last beyond the immediate crisis and, embarrassingly for Lewis, one of the most troubled areas was the BHP Newcastle plant. In December 1943, a demarcation dispute between workers and executives over who would run various elements of the process led to a company lockout and at Port Kembla there was a series of stoppages until Curtin himself stepped in and oversaw a conciliation agreement.
By mid-1944, most of Lewis’s war work was done. He had greatly expanded BHP’s coastal shipping fleet hauling ore to Newcastle and Port Kembla to feed the engine of war, and used BHP engineers to develop the nascent aircraft industry. His systems were running smoothly and the American industrial powerhouse was supplying materiel in an endless stream. He was able to turn more of his attention to BHP. Shortages of raw materials had cut into the company’s profits during the war, but at the same time it enjoyed a massive expansion, particularly of steelmaking in New South Wales. Now, he undertook a world tour to discover the great technological advances made in steelmaking and secondary manufacturing of a range of steel-based products under wartime pressures. His notebooks bulged.
In May 1945, at 64, Lewis officially relinquished his government post and Curtin, in his final illness, wrote of his extraordinary efforts in Australia’s time of peril, ‘at the expense of your own personal convenience and whatever leisure you might have expected to enjoy’. 13 In truth, leisure was never a priority for Lewis, and he returned to the BHP headquarters in Collins Street, Melbourne, the day after his release.
While he had retained overall control of the company during the war, he had stepped aside from the boardroom, where Harold Darling and deputy chairman Colin Syme had taken up the slack. Now, he resumed his role as managing director, hopeful that with its increased capacity BHP would roar ahead. It was not to be. The Chifley government moved slowly to lift wartime restrictions and red tape; manpower shortages encouraged industrial unrest inflamed by communist union leaders; striking coal miners cut supplies of an essential component; and a resurgent Japanese steel industry cut into overseas markets.
Remarkably, in view of later developments, BHP suffered the misapprehension that Australia had very limited iron-ore reserves. Indeed, Lewis negotiated options over deposits in New Caledonia before investigating the distant Yampi Sound, where he took control of the leases in a deal with the West Australian Government.
In 1949, Lewis’s longtime friend and ally Harold Darling began to suffer the debilitating effects of cancer. Gradually, Lewis took over his duties, and when Darling died on Australia Day, 1950, Lewis was formally elected chairman of the BHP board. His elevation coincided with the installation of a new government in Canberra, elected in the previous December. At the head of the coalition, and leading the Liberal Party of his own creation, was Robert Gordon Menzies, in power in Australia for the second time. Lewis cannot have been displeased with the result. In 1944, when Menzies was laying the foundation for his new party, Harold Darling worked closely with him to develop its industrial platform. And while this has remained beneath the public radar until now, the association between the company and the new prime minister was sufficiently well known for the university students of the 1950s to raise their voices in tuneful satire: ‘There’ll always be a Menzies/while there’s a BHP.’