Tom Mann’s departure from Melbourne in December 1909 left a considerable void in Jack Curtin’s life, as well as in the life of the Socialist Party. There was no one of the stature of that great socialist showman to keep the increasingly factionalised party together and to excite wider public interest in its ambitious program. It was like a circus without a ringmaster. Keir Hardie had predicted as much after concluding his visit to Victoria in 1908, suggesting that Mann’s ‘withdrawal would lead to its practical collapse’.1 He was not far wrong. While the party continued in existence, it would face repeated financial crises, a dwindling membership and increasing political isolation from the wider labour movement.
Although Curtin would stay true to the VSP throughout its troubles, he was clearly depressed by Mann’s departure and unsure how to further the cause that he still held dear. While his days were taken up with calculating the profits that his employer would make on this or that piece of hardware, his nights were spent in the service of socialism, whether writing articles for the Socialist, lecturing to the party’s speakers’ class or supporting the electorate activities of Frank Anstey in the Brunswick branch of the Labor Party. But he was jaded by seven years of struggle without any notable achievement and without ultimate victory appearing to be any closer.
In a letter to Jessie Gunn at about this time,2 Curtin complained of being busy at work where he ‘had a lot of arrears and other stuff to fix up for the very fastidious gentleman who happens to command my services when so ever he feels disposed to require them’. At the same time, ‘the Socialist Party has got into a rather bad way financially and occasioned a little anxiety on our part’. More than both these things though, Curtin was tiring of the struggle, confessing to Jessie that he was ‘becoming indolent’, that he was often overcome by a ‘tired feeling’ since nothing he did seemed to have any effect and ‘consequently one feels the futility of doing and soon ceases to try. This is of course very wrong. But it is just what happens.’ Once again, Curtin was trying to explain his tardiness in writing to Jessie in distant Rheola. Apart from his exhaustion, Curtin excused himself by pointing to the presence in Melbourne of Jessie’s older sister, Gertie, who he presumed would have informed her ‘of everything we do and say as well as everything we shouldn’t do and say’. As well, he did not have anything interesting to relate, having ‘not read anything new for ages except bits of Tennyson’ which he had been ‘barracked’ into doing by the Bruce sisters. It was not that he regarded his correspondence with Jessie lightly. Indeed, with Jessie now about the age of the departed Annie, Curtin attempted to grasp her more firmly to him, imploring her to continue writing to him even if he was slow to reply. Reminding Jessie that ‘friendship is a sheltering tree’, and imploring her not to cut him off, Curtin begged her to ‘drop me a line even if I’ve not answered the last’. In return, he would ‘faithfully try to read something fresh and scribble about it to you if only you write oftener [sic]. How about a resolution; you write once a week and I’ll try to.’3 But his indolence continued, at least as far as letter-writing was concerned.
On 22 February 1910, Curtin finally dipped his nib to write again. Thanking Jessie for a ‘very kind and interesting letter’ he acknowledged that he had
failed to answer the previous one you sent along. ’Twas vile indeed for me to so misbehave. I told Gertie that we could spare a few moments now and again to write letters if we were only honest. I believe I’m somewhat dishonest. Take Sunday for instance. Went to hear Mr Sinclair[e] in the morning. Had dinner in town and spent the afternoon under a tree in the Treasury Gardens. Does not that prove me a loafer born and bred as they say? However Jessie I’ll never sin again.4
The ‘Mr Sinclair’ referred to by Curtin was the Reverend Frederick Sinclaire, a radical Unitarian pastor who had broken away from his church to form what he called the Free Religious Fellowship, which met at his house at Belgrave in the Dandenong Ranges and also in a room in Collins Street. Sinclaire, who also lectured on English literature for the VSP, was later appointed professor of English at Canterbury College in New Zealand after being refused appointment to the chair of English at Melbourne University. Yatala Bruce later claimed that she ‘learned more about rationalism from the Rev. Sinclaire than she ever learned from the fanatical rationalists’.5
Curtin was by now a convinced rationalist, but of a particular sort. His road to rationalism came by way of his state school education, particularly at Charlton under the influence of Frank Tate and Charles Phillips. Even though Tate was a committed Anglican, Curtin’s education had left him distrustful of dogma and of faith. Until he could be presented with evidence, Curtin would not be a believer. But there was more to it than that. Many children of Curtin’s generation passed through state schools without having their faith destroyed. The answer in Curtin’s case may lie in the church itself. It would appear that the embrace of the ‘mother of all churches’ had not been a warm one for young Jack. He developed such a strong aversion to the church of his birth that he rarely entered a Catholic church from the time he rejected it in his youth. Yet he had been attracted at one stage to the idea of being a priest.6 His rejection of Catholicism may have been a subconscious way of asserting independence from his parents but, if so, it continued well after their deaths, and even after his own when he was buried in the Presbyterian section of Perth’s cemetery.
Curtin did not swap Catholicism, and later Salvationism, for atheism. Rather than rejecting the notion of a Supreme Being, he rejected the churches which he saw as being unseemly supporters of capitalism. Certainly he was interested in rationalism, as he was in most new ideas. There was a local rationalist society in Melbourne of which the socialist poet Bernard O’Dowd was at one time the secretary. It may have been O’Dowd, whose poetry Curtin admired, who first drew him to society meetings. The rising lawyer and later conservative politician John Latham was also one of its prominent figures. It was Latham who Curtin would later claim to be responsible for leading him away from religion, something for which Curtin never forgave Latham.7 However, there is a sense in which Curtin never really abandoned his faith. It was just faith in a different kind of paradise, a paradise created in this world by the will of men and women sufficiently courageous to fight for it. As a socialist agitator, devoting his life to the cause, he saw himself in the manner of Christ’s disciples. And his language kept touch with his former religion, with his speeches and articles often draped in religious allusions. Much later in life, when the dogma of socialism was no longer sustaining him, he would seek some comfort in Christianity, although not the Catholic church. But he would find to his frustration that the spark of Christian faith was no longer there. For now, the comfort that he might have found in church was found in the Socialist Party and among his friends, which is partly why he valued his relationship with Jessie.
In her letter, Jessie had mentioned a whole list of books but Curtin had to confess that he had ‘not read hardly any of the books you mention and have never read any of Thackeray’s at all’. Again, he complained of being ‘just tired of dipping pens in inkwells. All day for Plutocracy. Then very often most of the night against the very objectionable Plutes. It is as hot as a certain place in the after life is said to be and as I write this I wonder whether I’ll last out the performance an entire human being.’ In her letter, Jessie had bet that Curtin would not know her when they met. Perhaps she was referring to the forthcoming marriage of her sister Ethel to Frank Hyett, which may have been announced by this time and which finally would draw Jessie to Melbourne. Curtin rose to the challenge: ‘You have bet me I shall not know you! won’t I just? I shall even venture to describe you; not now you know; you’re not going to have a good laugh this time anyway. In my next I shall state with some precision why I shall know you, and how I shall be able to do it successfully.’ Presumably, he was relying upon Jessie resembling the appearance of his departed Annie. He could also have had her described to him by her sister Ethel, Frank Hyett or one of the Bruce girls. For the moment, though, Curtin again implored her ‘mercy for the very grievous . . . sin of not writing to you long ago’, explaining that
the Lords of Bossdom come down on us pretty heavily at times, so I have had to forego [sic] many pleasures, the greatest and most treasured of all, being to scribble a few lines now and again, to a young lady who resides at Rheola and to whom I beg to subscribe myself
Ever and Always
her Friend
Jack.8
Despite his promises, it seems to have been the last letter that Curtin ever wrote to Jessie.
In between the sporadic letters that he wrote, Curtin also sent off several postcards to Jessie. To the frustration of the historian, they were all undated. One was in lieu of a letter and thanked Jessie for her ‘very kind note’. He apologised for being
very busy just now with the preparation of a few lectures and other things but will promise to write next week.
With Love to All
Jack
In a postscript he reminded her to write to him ‘even if you get tired of waiting for answers’. Other postcards were sent at Christmas or New Year. There was one wishing ‘Dear Jessie a very merry Xmas and a happy New Year, Jack’, while another New Year postcard also referred to Jessie’s sister Gertie: ‘May you both soon be married. May your husband have brains and money – particularly money. Last but not least may he be as handsome as JC.’ The manner of its writing suggests that Gertie’s name and the word ‘both’ may have been included as an afterthought. If so, it is the closest that Curtin seems to have come to expressing, albeit obliquely, a matrimonial interest in Jessie. At some stage, he also signed his name in Jessie’s and Gertie’s birthday books.9
These cards and letters to Jessie, and the insights they provide into Curtin’s enthusiasms, as well as his melancholy, suggest a man searching for domestic stability and happiness that he seemed not to be able to secure in his own impoverished home. Not that he ever criticised his family life. His troubled domestic experience is evidenced instead by the almost total lack of any comment on it. In all the letters to Jessie, there is not one mention of his father, while he makes the most glowing reference to one of his surrogate fathers, Tom Mann. Neither is there a reference to his younger brother, George, and there are only two glancing mentions of his mother and one of his sisters. He only mentions his mother to say that she has told him to go to bed. At another time, when Jessie wrote of having acted as a mother, Curtin wondered whether she had ‘looked old and wise and bossed everybody as mothers always do, to everybody’s advantage be it said’.10 At the same time, he never failed to ask Jessie to give his love to Mrs Gunn, who he referred to as ‘Mother’, a woman who he had probably only met once, by the deathbed of Annie. Apart from that, he gives only the barest detail of his domestic existence, though he does mention at one time that he had written the letter in the dark.
Curtin’s disenchantment with his lot in early 1910 would not have been helped by his friend Frank Hyett’s appointment in early 1910 as the organiser for the Amalgamated Society of Railway Employees (ASRE). While they were the closest of friends, and while their troubled backgrounds had many parallels,11 it was not a friendship of equals. Indeed, it would be unusual if there was not also a strong undercurrent of rivalry between the two. Hyett was not only three years older than Curtin but was better than Curtin in every field of endeavour that Curtin valued. Recalling their first meeting at a football match in Brunswick in 1903, Curtin observed how Hyett was
in every respect the counterpart of myself. He was very, very like me, indeed. I was strong but he was stronger; I was keen but he was keener; I was reading fairly deeply, he was reading more deeply; I was thoughtful, he was more thoughtful. Already I had developed the faculty of utterance, he had mastered it. My immediate purpose was to speak and write, he had already done both.12
Moreover, while Curtin was afflicted with a disconcerting cast in his eye, Hyett was taller and more handsome and unafflicted with any disability. What was worse, he had the comfort of Ethel while Curtin was left with just the fading memory of Annie. And now Hyett had a position in the railways union that Curtin would have wanted for himself. Indeed, he may well have been one of the seventeen unsuccessful applicants for the post. At times, it must have seemed to Curtin that he would always be working in his friend’s shadow.13
While Curtin had to spend his daylight hours pushing up the profits of his employer, his good friend was now able to pursue full-time the precepts of the Socialist Party. Indeed, Hyett had sought the position so that he could pursue the VSP’s new-found focus on promoting industrial unionism, which the party hoped would prove more fruitful than its former focus on trying to stiffen the socialist resolve of the pragmatic Labor Party. The railway union was seen as a particularly vital one to control if socialism were to succeed. It was the railway workers who had let the labour movement down by transporting police to Broken Hill. Many were non-unionists while the others were divided into small craft unions. Now that was about to change as the ASRE determined to bring them all under its aegis.
Hyett had won the position of secretary with the backing of Frank Anstey, and because of his reputation as a powerful orator and persuasive propagandist. Within weeks of his appointment as organiser, he was boosted into the vacant position of general secretary of the union, a post that he would fill with distinction, building the union into a strong and united organisation along industrial rather than craft lines, renamed as the Victorian Railways Union (VRU). From a union of about two thousand members, it would increase through amalgamations and recruitment during the nine years of Hyett’s leadership to above twelve thousand members. At the same time, as Hyett’s biographer acknowledged, he became more a creature of the VRU than the union became a creature of the Socialist Party and its policies.14
As well as securing a union position for himself, Hyett also finally married 22-year-old Ethel Gunn. The couple got hitched in true socialist style on 19 May 1910, with a service in the Socialist Hall in Elizabeth Street that began with a massed rendition of the ‘Red Flag’ by nearly two hundred friends and family. Tom Mann would have been proud of them. Curtin and Anstey were among those who witnessed the red-haired and black-suited Reverend Fred Sinclaire join Hyett and a pregnant Ethel Gunn in matrimony.15 In an impassioned speech afterwards, Hyett extolled ‘the experiences of himself and his wife in the Socialist party, how they had received intellectual freedom at its hands, and how they were pleased to be married “under the Red Flag”, that stood for the highest ideals life had to offer’.16
It is likely that the marriage brought Curtin and Jessie Gunn face to face for the first time, perhaps allowing Curtin to discover that they had less in common than he had imagined. Or it may have been due to Jessie passing through the stage when she could have innocent, girlish attachments to penfriends and now wanted something more serious. Not that she ever seems to have got much more. She remained a spinster all her long life. It may have been her plain appearance that stopped Curtin from trying to develop their relationship any further than the wistful flirting of his letters, even though Jessie was soon to move to Melbourne with her mother.17
Despite his new-found position with the union, Hyett and his new wife initially took up residence with Ethel’s uncle and aunt in Garton Street, North Carlton, where Hyett had sometimes stayed while wooing her. It was there in December that their first child was born, a daughter who they named Nancy in memory of Ethel’s dead sister.18 Frank Hyett’s marriage changed Curtin’s life. No longer would there be the carefree days and nights of friendship between this close trio. Ethel gradually gave up her activities with the Socialist Party and, with the birth of Nancy, took on the burdens of motherhood. Hyett too was less active in the party as the demands of his union job consumed his time and often saw him on recruitment trips around the State. Of course, Curtin still continued his close relationship with the Bruce girls, the flavour of which is captured in a New Year postcard that he sent to Yatala, wishing her ‘Happy Days, Sunshine, Songs and everything, may they come like Stars at night.’19
Apart from Hyett largely withdrawing from active involvement in the Socialist Party, the party lost a number of its former stalwarts during the course of 1910. Percy Jones resigned early in the year after accepting Labor Party endorsement for a seat in the Victorian Legislative Council. He was accepted by the party despite admitting to its selection committee that he had run foul of the union in his tailoring business and conceding that, while he was ‘a Socialist on the outside he was a Capitalist on the inside’. The Labor Party could hardly afford to snub him for this, as his capitalist activities provided it with important financial support. Although he did not cut off all his support for the Socialist Party, Jones’s departure was a signal for other Labor-leaning members to do likewise.20 They would have been strengthened in their resolve to resign by the move of the Trades Hall Council in February 1910, which called upon unions not to allow speakers critical of the Labor Party to address their members.21 This was a reference to the Socialist Party, which had begun spreading its message of industrial unionism by speaking to meetings of union members.
Radical members also continued to leave the party. Some followed the syndicalist line of the IWW, believing that one big union pursuing a general strike would be able to overthrow capitalism. This was opposed by Robert Ross, a socialist writer who had moved to Melbourne from Broken Hill in 1908 at Mann’s invitation, and who, supported by Curtin and Hyett, now largely controlled the party. Ross pushed for a policy of industrial unionism and continued Mann’s policy of permeating the Labor Party with socialist principles. Bertha Walker claims that her father, Percy Laidler, and other young men of the party left it in the wake of Mann, some joining the IWW, because Ross soon ‘emasculated [it] of its revolutionary content’.22 Another member left in May 1910 after unsuccessfully seeking to have Curtin condemned by the party for having spoken from a Labor platform.23
This was presumably a speech in support of Anstey during the federal election campaign that saw Labor succeed in April 1910 in gaining control of both Houses of Parliament, and Anstey elevated from the Victorian Assembly to the federal House of Representatives. It was a tremendous performance by the Labor Party, marking the first time since Federation that a single party had a majority in both Houses of the federal Parliament. It was made sweeter by a Labor victory in the South Australian election.24 But it would not have impressed Curtin, even with the elevation of Anstey. Nor would it have impressed many of the other members of the Socialist Party. They knew that the victories had been purchased at a price that the Socialist Party would not have been prepared to pay. Indeed, Curtin had marked the election with an article in the Socialist which suggested that voters faced a difficult choice between ‘Tory twaddle and Labor lies’.25
It was a pity that the Socialist Party largely sidelined itself within the labour movement at this time. There was a great need for a strong, principled party to keep politicians true to the optimistic egalitarianism of the early Federation days. There was also a need for a party to alert the Australian people to the growing danger of war and organise their public opposition to it. In January 1910, as Tom Mann steamed away from antipodean shores, Lord Kitchener arrived in Sydney to report on Australia’s defence preparedness. His real intention was to ensure that Australian forces were coordinated into the wider defence of the British Empire rather than concentrated on the defence of their own sparsely populated continent. There were many in Australia who had no problem with that. Kitchener, as the avenger of General Gordon’s death in the Sudan in 1885, was mobbed wherever he went. As the Sydney Morning Herald observed on the morning of his arrival, Kitchener’s inspection was being undertaken ‘for the good of the Empire’, with Australia being viewed by the distinguished soldier ‘as a detail in the great scheme of a coming world war’.26
As acting Prime Minister in the federal Labor Government, British-born Billy Hughes used Kitchener’s subsequent report to extend the period of compulsory military training for men until they reached the age of 25, an age that Curtin had now just passed. To critics on the Left like Curtin, who were implacably opposed to such military training in the belief that it was likely to lead to war rather than prevent it, Hughes had a simple response: ‘If the White Australia Policy is to be a permanence in this country, there must be behind it a sufficient force of white Australians ready, if necessary, to make good their claim’.27 Curtin rejected such reasoning. He saw, correctly as it happened, that Australia’s defence effort was being directed towards participation in a future European war rather than towards the local defence of the continent. Moreover, he and other socialists were suspicious of military preparations within the context of capitalism. As he argued in 1909, it was ‘part and parcel of the international war policy played by the international gang of capitalists for their own purposes’.28
This was the line of the Socialist Party, as laid down in December 1910 when it declared itself ‘uncompromisingly hostile to all forms of militarism’, arguing that ‘whilst the present class state exists the armed forces will be used to buttress up capitalism’.29 Rather than a conscript militia along the Swiss system, as favoured by Billy Hughes and a majority of the Labor Party, Curtin adopted the line of his mentor, Frank Anstey, arguing that the mobility of an air force provided the best defence for a continent as extensive and lightly populated as Australia. Anstey had put forward such an argument in Labor Call in December 1909, arguing that an air force was also more suited to defence rather than offence and was consequently ‘essentially and effectively Australian’, as if Australians were uniquely immune from harbouring notions of territorial aggrandisement.30 The coming war would quash that misguided notion.
At the 1911 Imperial Conference in London, the mild-mannered Labor Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher, and his Western Australian Minister for Defence, Senator George Pearce, were informed confidentially by the British Government to expect a war with Germany by 1915. To the delight of his British hosts who had feared the worst from their Labor visitors, Pearce promptly agreed in the light of this information surreptitiously to prepare Australian defence forces for the coming war in Europe rather than, as formerly, to concentrate on defending the Australian continent. Pearce returned to Australia by way of Russia and Japan, later justifying to Australian audiences the boosted defence budget by pointing to the supposed Japanese threat.31 It was especially galling to Curtin and his comrades in the Socialist Party that it should be the Labor Party that unleashed the dogs of militarism and would make attachment to the British Empire the litmus test for Australian patriotism. It was a test that many socialists refused to take, thereby sending them further out of the political mainstream. Socialism slipped off the national agenda and war marched on.
Although Percy Jones resigned from the Socialist Party, he continued as president of the party’s cricket club, which he had helped to form. The club was formed in September 1909, with Curtin and Hyett both being among the players. As in all things, Hyett was by far the better player of the two, later going on to play for the Victorian State team. The club was able to field two teams which initially played against each other before matches were organised with other teams. As president of the club, Jones indulged his admiration for the British social reformer, John Ruskin, by naming the team after him. But its exalted name failed to help out on the oval where the team lost the majority of its matches over the next five years. Still, this was better than the Ruskin football club which was set up by the party in early 1910 to ‘help the Party shed some of its scrawny character by becoming a bit more manly’. As Hewitt observed, the team ‘lost every match in its first season’, losing one match by seventeen goals.32 Perhaps it was fortunate that they never had to test their manliness on the barricades.
Despite occasional financial help from Percy Jones, the VSP faced straitened circumstances which caused it to make the position of assistant secretary an honorary one in March 1910. Two months later, the Socialist Savings Bank ceased business for want of support.33 In August 1910, Curtin took over as secretary of the party from Robert Ross while Ross continued as editor of the Socialist, the only paid position left in the party.34 Curtin did what he could to revive the fortunes of the party but it was a hopeless task and his heart was probably not in it. At the beginning of 1911, he tried to revive its strong presence on the street corners of inner Melbourne but the attempt proved unsuccessful. The party continued to haemorrhage, with Ross, having not long returned from Broken Hill, leaving the editorship of the Socialist in February 1911 to take over the Maoriland Worker in New Zealand. Curtin too resigned that month as secretary of the party. By this time, his sights were elsewhere.35