With Mann gone from Melbourne to organise the miners of Broken Hill, some of the heat went out of the factional fighting within the Socialist Party. It had kept Curtin from writing to Jessie Gunn for some six months. But in late November 1908, he tried to resume his former relationship with her. Apologising profusely for his prolonged silence, he claimed to be ‘that much ashamed that it requires considerable courage to write after such a long delay’. He ascribed his tardiness to the political struggles within the VSP which had made ‘us feel so miserable – and very often so angry – that our friends have had to be forgotten while we engaged, shall I say, the enemy’. As he explained, they were the ‘very people’ who had ‘come in under the protection of a great principle only to damage it and incidentally blacken the fair name of those whose work is valuable’. They had foregone their right to be regarded as ‘co-believers’, and to be known as ‘Comrades’, since they were no longer deserving of that ‘sacred entitlement’.1 Later, he would be similarly disappointed with what he saw as a short-sighted Australian working class that did not fall in enthusiastically and en masse behind the unfurled banner of the socialist movement.
Despite the in-fighting and the depression, or perhaps to stave off the depression, Curtin still had time to spend most Saturday nights during the winter having ‘right royal card parties’ with the Bruce girls at their home in Richmond. He confided that he ‘used to derive more enjoyment out of those Saturday nights than anything else in my experience’. And he would continue the practice even as wartime prime minister, with an evening game of bridge with his old friends diverting him from his daytime worries. Despite not writing, he had also managed to attend two picnics at which he claimed to have excelled at rounders, which was his ‘masterpiece’. Indeed, he refused ‘to allow any games that I am not a champion at – Of course Jessie it is very mean; but how could I be expected to excell [sic] in “Thumbs Up” or “Wiggily Waggily”. The idea is preposterous.’2 Now, though, it was time to resume the more serious matter of politics as Melbourne’s weather improved and the VSP resumed its street corner meetings. But, with Mann gone and the party’s former unity fractured, Curtin’s heart was no longer in it. He had joined other leading VSP members in appealing in late November 1908 for Mann to return to Melbourne and reinvigorate the party’s activities.3
While conceding that the onset of summer left him with ‘no excuse for not talking in the streets’, Curtin confessed to Jessie that he would ‘far rather the society of kind friends and when they are not available the company of some great writer be he poet or essayist’. Complaining that ‘argument, argument, argument . . . wears one away’, he nevertheless conceded that he would again take up the cudgels of the struggle. ‘While the necessity remains for the performance of the work of agitation,’ declared Curtin, ‘we should feel our souls destroyed and our lives wasted in selfish vanities were we not contributing our little portion.’ Again he apologised for the delay in replying but hoped she would understand that ‘when we are in the work . . . there are periods when our friends are thrust aside’.4 But Jessie seemed not to understand and did not immediately reply.
After such a long gap in their correspondence, Curtin was afraid he had endangered their relationship. After not receiving a reply for two weeks, and conceding that he had ‘much to atone for’, a contrite Curtin sent a further letter to Rheola on 7 December 1908. He remained disenchanted with the political struggle and refused ‘to toil and moil for a whole week, even though Elections threaten and the Lord only knows what is about to take place’. So he had spent his spare time reading a book instead and proceeded to provide Jessie with a five-page summary of this ‘captivating’ novel – again a romantic adventure of desperate heroics, The Scarlet Pimpernel. Then he again appealed for her forgiveness: ‘I know ‘twas very very wrong to delay the time I did but really Jessie I could not help it. You must not be angry for I could not afford to suffer a punishment so terrible – we are badly off for good friends who are always constant, always true, and willing to be our friends for friendship sake’.5 The election that Curtin referred to was the Victorian State election which was set for the end of December 1908 and would see VSP and Labor Party candidates standing against each other.
Curtin had called at the annual meeting of the VSP in November 1908 for the party to cut its links with the Labor Party, despite him remaining an active member of the Brunswick branch.6 A meeting between the two parties in early December failed to resolve their differences. The socialists had wanted the Labor Party to ‘recommend that each candidate pledge the necessity of social revolution, to emancipate the working class, and that the “Labor Movement” rested on the class struggle’.7 This was an electorally poisonous pill that the Labor Party delegates declined to swallow. So the VSP went ahead with its plan to stand its own candidates in the forthcoming Victorian election while still supporting Labor Party candidates in all those seats where its own candidates were not standing.
Percy Laidler stood for the VSP in Collingwood and Angus McDonell in the inner-city seat of Melbourne. To emphasise its differences with the other parties, the party refused to make election promises of what it called palliative reforms. Instead, its candidates simply presented the electors with ‘a straight-out program for socialism’. Curtin spoke at meetings in support of both the candidates, with the Socialist reporting that he presented ‘a magnificent justification of separate socialist action’. The electors were not impressed. Around half of them did not bother to vote while the other half mostly voted against the socialist program. Laidler ended the short campaign with just 85 votes while McDonell had 82, out of more than two thousand votes in each electorate.8 This was probably little more than the sum of the Socialist Party members living in these electorates. It certainly was not a ringing endorsement for the radical line. Nor did it say much for the party’s street corner propaganda efforts, with more than two years of regular meetings reaping no benefit in the polling booth. The abysmal result helped to swing support back behind the VSP moderates.
At the same time as he was absorbing these disappointing results, Curtin was confronted with a most appalling tragedy when his aunt, 53-year-old Ellen O’Connell, who lived nearby in Brunswick, was killed. For the previous decade, the O’Connells had provided a comforting family web into which the Curtins were able to fit after their return to Melbourne in 1898. Now his aunt was dead and in the most awful of circumstances. She had been shopping for groceries in Sydney Road after the New Year holiday and, with her umbrella opened, had turned hurriedly for home to make dinner for her family of three children. It was already past six o’clock and she may have felt pressed for time as she waited at the railway line for the Melbourne-bound steam train to trundle past. There used to be a gatekeeper at the crossing to control the pedestrians but now there was only a warning sign. As well, the 17-year-old station porter who should have locked the gates was occupied instead manually operating a broken signal wire to allow the train to pass. As the train did so, and ignoring the shout of an onlooker, she walked straight into the front of a second train coming from the opposite direction, the 6.14 p.m. from Melbourne. The driver told the subsequent inquest that she seemed to see him but ‘looked confused’. Mercifully, her confusion was swiftly ended, with the train causing ‘fearful injuries’ to her head and almost totally severing her legs.9 For the second time in just over two years, Curtin was affected by the senseless death of someone close to him.
When she heard of it, Jessie resumed her correspondence with Curtin by sending him a kind letter of sympathy. Curtin quickly responded, clearly relieved that their relationship had been restored even if it had taken the death of his aunt to do it. Her death may have caused him to relive the death of Annie. But he made no direct reference to it in his letter, other than by allusion. He consoled himself and Jessie with the thought that ‘However much the world may thrust its iron hand and grip us with its fierce claws it cannot deprive us of the consolation of sweet sympathy’. Nevertheless, it was ‘very hard . . . to lose those whom we have loved for their sterling worth and their great goodness’. His aunt, he said, ‘was one of those women who are a glory and the inspiration of the labouring people’. Every day was ‘a day of service to those of her household, of good will to all she came in contact with and of a great example to follow for its goodness sake’. Then, in what was possibly a reference to Annie’s death, Curtin continued:
Ah well it is no use now to cry out. What is done can never be undone. You wrote once of ‘the vanished hands and the voice that was still’. It is very sad, and yet Jessie it is very good. For after all ’tis pleasant to know of a state of rest, of a time when the struggle of life will be over and the fighting and striving at an end.10
He clearly had not permitted himself to grieve the death of Annie but had thrown himself into his political mission as a way, at least partly, of forgetting his loss. And now, without Mann’s presence to inspire him, he was tiring of it all and seemed to be almost looking forward to the time ‘when the struggle of life will be over’. Although still committed to the socialist struggle, Curtin clearly had few illusions about the enormity of what he saw as a long and lonely task and seemed conscious of the toll it was already taking on him.
Curtin’s eagerness for the struggle was increasingly jaded as he balanced his work at the factory with his work for socialism. He confided to Jessie that he had ‘spent the last few weeks in work of a dry and of a dull character and now the reaction has set in and I’m so awfully lazy that I can’t and will not do anything. This week is to be a long loaf, that is of course at night only. No chance of leaving the factory for a spell.’ Despite his own admitted laziness, Curtin again exhorted Jessie to
employ time well for it never comes again . . . A day that is wasted is gone for ever. So I appeal to you to utilise every opportunity that offers in study, in preparation, in qualification for the serious work of life. All of us have our respective duties to perform. We owe it to the world and to ourselves to perform those duties well. Write frequently in old note books and exercises and read carefully and diligently.11
His comments could have come straight from the classes he gave to the Socialist Sunday school. But Jessie was more than just another cadet in the socialist contingent. She answered a deeply felt need in Curtin for the human companionship and love that he had lost with the death of Annie.
It seems that Curtin, like Churchill, was subject to bipolar disorder. His friends and family commented on his depression, as did Curtin himself. His daughter Elsie recalled how her father was ‘up and down’ emotionally, and would try to ease his depression by taking long walks at the beach. ‘He was coming to terms with the old bogey’, was how his wife explained it. Curtin’s publicity officer, Don Rodgers, also recalled how, during the war, Curtin would go into the ‘depths of black melancholia’ for two or three days at a time during which he would ‘either stay in his hotel room or at the Lodge or go for long walks’. But it was more than just prolonged bouts of deep and disabling depression because, when they were over, Curtin would return ‘super-charged with ideas’ and ‘link arms, smiling and joking, and pour out a flood of ideas and thoughts’.12
In his manic state, he was irrepressibly energetic, full of life and ideas. It was exciting to be in his company and he attracted friends like moths to a flame. But the flame could just as quickly be extinguished and Curtin become an orb of darkness and gloom. Fortunately for Curtin, and as he thankfully observed in his letters to Jessie, many of his friends stood by him during these dark periods and did what they could to lift him out of his depression. While the summer of 1908 and the death of his aunt had seen him depressed, by April 1909 he was elated and optimistic about life. There seem to be no letters from Curtin for the three months until 20 April when he suddenly sent an excited letter to Jessie about the doings of himself and his friends. Hyett had returned to Melbourne, the Bruce girls were getting older and Curtin had joined the executive of the VSP and put morbid thoughts of death to one side. He was determined for the moment to live life to the full:
We are living the life that thrills. Whether it be long or short one cannot tell, but it is indeed at once delightful and unpleasant. All things have their opposite compensations and if one goes fast then one must miss many pleasant views on the way and if we should ‘go slow’ then the pleasures of the wayside are outweighed by the discomforts of the train.
For Curtin and his friends there had been a succession of inspiring political events and fun outings. There had been, wrote Curtin, as he scratched away with his pen in the poor light of his Barry Street home, ‘a bazaar, a picnic – a row on the river with reckless and incapable oarsmen – dances, and meetings and lectures with vast audiences that rise up and face you like mighty waves of the boundless ocean.’13 His excitement was experienced against the background of Tom Mann’s arrest in Broken Hill and subsequent trial in Albury for sedition and unlawful assembly.
A march of Broken Hill miners on 9 January 1909 had been broken up by hundreds of police, many of them on horseback, who had been railed in from Sydney. Mann and other unionists were arrested amid violent and provocative action by the authorities. Because of the lack of a direct rail link from Sydney, the police had to take the circuitous route via Melbourne and Adelaide. To the frustration of Mann and other socialists, the police had managed to do so without interference from railway and other unionists. Moreover, the lockout of Broken Hill miners went for some twenty weeks without interference from the federal Labor Government and without the new federal Conciliation and Arbitration Court being able to provide a timely and just solution to the conflict. It proved to Mann the necessity of building strong industrial unions out of the old nineteenth-century craft unions that still dominated the labour movement. It also confirmed to Mann the futility of relying on either Labor governments or arbitration courts to win the workers’ struggles for them. It could only be done by the workers themselves organised into industrial unions.14 Curtin was similarly disenchanted with the Labor Party, describing the federal Labor Government of Andrew Fisher in February 1909 as ‘the Flunkey of the working class despoilers’ after it had announced it would create an Australian navy.15
After being bailed out of gaol and banned from Broken Hill, Mann returned to Melbourne on 25 February invigorated by the struggle, but dismayed by the action of the railway workers and by the inability or refusal of Labor MPs to win the conflict for the workers. In a pamphlet, The Way to Win, Mann now argued that ‘reliance upon parliamentary action would never bring freedom’, which would only come with greater industrial organisation.16 As he awaited his trial, set by the conservative NSW Government for the distant farming town of Albury, Mann was in his element, rousing an army of sympathisers to his cause. Defiantly proclaiming himself to be ‘a dangerous agitator’ and ‘an enemy to capitalism’, Mann hoped ‘to be increasingly dangerous as the years roll by’.17 Curtin was caught up by the righteous enthusiasm of the ageing activist. He told Jessie:
As I write the trials of Albury fill my mind so that to think of other things is impossible. Jessie you have never met that ‘man of men’ who is known as Tom Mann. Papers say of him all the wrong and nasty things imaginable – when the years pass and you know more of social affairs you will understand why it is so – but I want you to know that he and his good comrades are the purest and the best among many who are indeed worthy. It has ever been said that the pioneer of new and better days are persecuted and oppressed by the times in which they lived. To acclaim the future has incurred the odium of the present.18
While some of the unionists arrested in Broken Hill served lengthy gaol terms, the Albury jury found that Mann had no case to answer. He returned to Melbourne triumphant, proclaiming to the May Day crowd that the ‘revolution is upon us’ and warning with some degree of prescience that a ‘gigantic war [was] being engineered’ that would provide an opportunity for socialism.19 Curtin expressed his personal support for Mann, writing an impassioned article in the Socialist vigorously attacking detractors of Mann and the VSP, describing them as an ‘intellectual rabble’ who resorted to ‘mudslinging’ and ‘filthy weapons’.20
Although the Broken Hill conflict had not been a victory for the unionists, it had shown the need for working-class solidarity in such struggles. At the subsequent conference of the SFA, held in Broken Hill in June 1909, all the talk was of industrial rather than political organisation. With Mann attending as a representative of the South Australian Socialist Party, the conference backed ‘the broad principles of industrial unionism’. Under pressure from Mann, the delegates also agreed to push for so-called palliative reforms, such as a shorter working week, rather than simply going all-out to achieve the ‘complete overthrow of capitalism’. While the latter remained their ultimate objective, reforms would be pursued as a means of strengthening ‘the fighting capacity of organised labour’. To this end, the conference supported a VSP motion calling for the infiltration of ‘trade unions, councils and congresses’.21 In pursuit of this objective, both Curtin and Hyett would soon divert their energies to trade union organisation.
On 23 July 1909, Curtin wrote again to Jessie. Only one page seems to have survived of this letter. In it, he announces that his family has moved to 93 Barkly Street in Brunswick. It was still within the circumscribed square of Brunswick’s Irish town but it was a move up in the world to a larger house that was made possible by the continued security of his job at Titan. They had been thinking of ‘a change for a very long while and at last have done the deed’, declared Curtin. He also told her of a theatre party he had attended which ‘had a good muster and went off right merrily’ despite Curtin being disappointed by the performance. And, as usual, he reported on the doings of the Bruce girls, Jen and Yat, who had been attending nature study classes at the Socialist Sunday school where they appeared each week ‘armed with bottles or card-board boxes full with grubs, worms, moths, beetles, flies and something which looked much like a small alligator . . .’22
On 9 December 1909, Curtin was again apologising profusely to Jessie, conceding that he was ‘an awful criminal in not having replied sooner’ but claiming that his mind was ‘a desert waste’ with ‘not an idea of any sort . . . to relieve the situation’. He resorted to relating the plot of his latest read, ‘a real, everyday, silly, but wondrously interesting novel’, yet another romantic adventure, this time by Robert Buchanan. It was not just for Jessie that Curtin read such books. All his life, he would retain his taste for such light reading to while away the idle moments and, presumably, provide relief from Marx’s Das Kapital and other such tomes.23 Like his long walks they may also have served as a means to divert him from bouts of depression.
For nearly seven years, Curtin had been sustained in his ardent commitment to the socialist struggle by the inspiring presence of Tom Mann. However, Mann had set his sights on a wider field of struggle. Like many, he could sense the looming signs of war in Europe but saw such a climactic conflict as providing an opportunity for the workers to rise up and pursue the revolutionary road. Such a war, Mann confidently believed, would be the last gasp of capitalism. Tillett had pressed him to return to Britain in 1908 but Mann had gone instead to Broken Hill where the prospects for a working-class victory seemed good. Now, at the end of 1909, he was determined to be off, although he apparently had to beg his fare from sympathisers. The VSP organised a farewell concert for Mann at Melbourne Town Hall, but only one Labor MP bothered to join the crowd of well-wishers. Curtin was among the speakers, declaring that Mann ‘had made their socialist faith possible’.24
The historian of the Socialist Party has claimed that Mann left Victorian socialists ‘divided against each other and more intransigent in a variety of views than when he had arrived seven years earlier’, while the Socialist Party ‘had virtually destroyed its identity with the traditional bases of working class aspiration in that State, without offering a satisfactory solution’.25 This is rather harsh on Mann. He could hardly be expected to put aside his cosmopolitanism and opposition to militarism and embrace the Labor Party with its platform of racial purity, compulsory military training and its lukewarm support, at best, for socialist measures. From a different perspective, Bertha Walker concluded:
Tom had taught Australia a great deal. He had pioneered mass organisation, emphasised theory, showed that socialism was not purely ‘continental’ but applied to all countries; he broke down chauvinism and introduced internationalism; he taught them the necessity of militant class struggle in a class war. Above all he taught them not to fear the word ‘revolution’.26
These were certainly the lessons that Curtin had learnt from the man he called the ‘man of men’. Back in London, Mann would dedicate the remaining three decades of his life to the industrial organisation of the workers, both in Britain and elsewhere, and later as a high-profile committee member, to the work of the British Communist Party.27
On 30 December 1909, Elsie and Tom Mann and their children climbed aboard the steamship Commonwealth on the pier at Port Melbourne where he had made many a speech. Now the ardent addresses were for him as tearful friends and supporters, who had accompanied the couple aboard ship, returned to the wharf to sing his praises in speeches and songs.28 As the ship headed into the bay and the departing socialists straggled away, Curtin must have wondered what would become of the movement without the inspirational leadership of Mann. His own course, though, was clear. It was to pursue the new strategy of working mainly through the union movement to achieve socialism. Before long, both he and Hyett would be leading members of Melbourne’s trade union movement and Curtin would have found someone to replace Annie Gunn in his affections.