CHAPTER TWENTY

‘No Obligation at All to the National Party’:

Into parliament

JUNE 1919–JULY 1920

A PROFOUND READJUSTMENT was in store for Elliott. This was inevitable in view of his long absence, the severe cumulative strain of his experiences, the switch he would be making from soldier to solicitor, the chasm between army life and suburban domesticity, and the exponential development of the tiny toddlers he had left in 1914. Less obvious, but no less significant, was the fact that civilian life itself was going to be very different. Not only had Australia been transformed during the divisive war years; he himself had become a public figure. In August 1914 Harold Elliott was unknown to the general populace (apart, perhaps, from Essendon citizens interested in military affairs); five years later he was returning as the colourful and controversial General Pompey Elliott, a household name to tens of thousands of soldiers and their families, and one of the most renowned identities in the whole AIF. His imminent arrival on the Orontes generated lengthy profiles in the press and extensive excerpts from Fred Cutlack’s vivid portrait saluting the vibrant brigadier ‘of big burly build’, ‘immense’ jaw, and ‘tuft of iron grey hair’ sticking up ‘permanently on end with sheer energy’. He received numerous personal greetings on his return. Among them was a poignant letter from the mother of ‘a brave son’ who had served under him in the 58th Battalion but was ‘now in heaven’:

Welcome, welcome back to dear Australia … I cannot face any welcome homes now that my dear one will never return, but my heart is with all the brave ones who fought … They are going to give you a great welcome … I wish I could face it, but I am not brave enough. Yours, a proud but sorrowing mother.

The magnitude of the adjustment Elliott had to make was immediately apparent. After a tender reunion at the pier, he and Kate were on their way home in the car she had booked when they were stopped at an intersection near central Melbourne by a crowd of Pompey admirers. This special reception had been planned for the afternoon, but it was five hours later and well and truly dark by the time the brigadier’s vehicle materialised. Nevertheless hundreds of enthusiasts were still waiting to greet him. Amid fervent cheering, Elliott was presented with an address of welcome. He responded appreciatively. A reporter described him as ‘robust and cheerful’ but not overly talkative; hardly a surprise — all he wanted, of course, was to get home, especially at that hour. He confined himself to saying, in response to journalists’ questions, that Australia’s soldiers had performed outstandingly, demobilisation under Monash was progressing well, and he had certain ideas about the post-war organisation of Australia’s defence forces which he would submit later at an appropriate juncture.

This reception was the first of a series of welcome-home functions. Elliott was feted by Essendonians at their town hall on 24 July, where the returning hero was regaled with songs, poetry, and a performance by a ventriloquist and his partner Tommy the Nut. ‘Unfortunately’, the local paper reported, ‘persistent encores dragged out the first half of the programme’. After being presented with another illuminated address praising his leadership and gallantry, Elliott echoed its commendation of his wife and mother (both present at the function) when he began his reply with a warm tribute to them as part of a collective salute to

all those mothers, sisters and wives who so loyally gave their dear ones, and through the long years of the war worked for them, prayed for them and waited heroically for them to come back.

He then proceeded to outline the exceptional deeds of individual Essendon soldiers, including Cedric Permezel, Harry Webb, Bill Scurry, and Norman Dalgleish. Elliott was also guest of honour at a ‘Welcome Home and Presentation of Address’ arranged by the 15th Brigade Association in collaboration with the Boer War veterans’ organisation. Over 400 soldiers gathered at Melbourne Town Hall to acclaim him. There were also various receptions for certain categories of returned soldiers, such as the function honouring Melbourne University graduates, also at Melbourne Town Hall, where distinguished guests included the Governor-General, the Premier of Victoria, and Generals McCay and Legge.

Another such function attended by Elliott was particularly memorable. Footscray council organised a special welcome home to the returned men of their municipality. On 9 August 593 soldiers, accompanied by bands and carloads of incapacitated comrades, marched through the streets of Footscray to the drill hall for a civic dinner. The hall was ‘lavishly embellished’ with decorations, coloured lights, ‘flags, flowers and foliage’; the atmosphere was already vibrant when General Elliott arrived to take his seat at the top table. His appearance, reported the Footscray Independent,

was the signal for tumultuous cheering from the ‘Diggers’. Never was a leader more beloved by his men than is this gallant soldier … He appeared to know the name of every man in the ranks, and had a word and a hearty grip of the hand for each … Nearly every soldier handed up his menu card to be autographed by ‘Pompey’, and for nearly an hour the general was kept busy writing his name.

‘There was a hush throughout the building’ as the mayor referred poignantly to Footscray’s dead, but when he concluded his speech of welcome by calling on General Elliott to address the gathering there was pandemonium. The diggers greeted him with ‘a hurricane of cheers’, dozens rushing the platform to shake his hand; then, all standing, they launched with gusto into ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. It was several minutes before this wonderful ovation subsided. Eventually, with difficulty, order was restored sufficiently to enable him to speak. In a wide-ranging address Pompey recalled his visit to the hall five years earlier to enrol the recruits who became the E Company originals of the 7th Battalion, and emphasised how pleased he was to see so many of them again. He reminisced about the Gallipoli landing, Lone Pine, and Fromelles before urging the Footscray diggers to tackle peacetime problems with the same commitment and cohesion they had shown in the AIF:

[M]ake the name of Australia as respected in the time of peace as you made it respected in war. It can be done if we make the start precisely in the same way as in the old battalion. You started to make your battalion and your brigade the best in the AIF. Start right now and make your district the best in the State … Make your city the best suburb of Melbourne. You can do it if you make up your minds. (Great cheering.)

With Elliott’s reputation and influence among the men of the AIF so evident, his significance as a public figure was accentuated by the widespread perception that the returned soldiers were going to be a force to be reckoned with in post-war Australia. The possibility that they might not placidly revert to competitive, acquisitive civilian life was generating considerable apprehension and, in some quarters, profound anxiety. Most alarmed were the conservatives, now politically ascendant under the Nationalist Party banner following the seismic ALP schism of 1916-17. For these Nationalists, the prospect of unsettled warriors involving themselves alongside radical agitators in disruptive behaviour — perhaps even violent unrest — was nightmarish. If, however, the returned soldiers could be so harnessed or conditioned that most of them supported the Nationalists most of the time, they could prove an invaluable asset both socially and politically.

Influential conservatives were pulling out all stops to engineer the kind of soldiers’ transition they wanted. Various groups had emerged to represent ex-servicemen and their interests, but the federal Nationalist government had made a crucial deal with the most conservative of these organisations, the Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia (RSSILA). By anointing the League with ‘official’ status, the government endowed it with invaluable patronage and significantly disadvantaged rival associations. In return, the League’s leaders privately assured senior Nationalists that they would strive to minimise disruption by returned soldiers, and ‘avoid tactics which might embarrass the government’. Elliott’s potential role in this process of guiding the returned men along desirable paths had been recognised six months earlier, when he was still in France, by the ex-Essendon mayor J.F. Henderson:

Some one is needed to help direct the energies of the returned soldiers organisations, and I know of no one who appears to have such a hold on the affections of the men as you have, or whose advice they would be more likely to accept. The soldiers will of course be in a position to rule this country for some years to come if their energies are consolidated.

Within a month of Elliott’s return he found himself in the front line of these activities. Before July 1919 there had been a number of disturbing events involving returned soldiers — mutinous shipboard incidents, a major riot in Adelaide, mayhem in Brisbane streets. When the Nationalist Premier of West Australia led strikebreaking labour to Fremantle to smash a wharf labourers’ strike in May 1919, the willingness of returned soldiers aboard a passing troopship to aid the strikers was a particularly alarming development for the authorities. But until mid-1919 the most significant incidents of this kind had occurred outside Victoria. In July, however, there was serious trouble in Melbourne.

On Saturday 19 July there was a victory march through the city as the signing of peace was celebrated around Australia and beyond. About 7,000 soldiers and sailors participated, divided into eleven groups, with Elliott commanding one of them. The third anniversary of Fromelles — perhaps the greatest disaster the AIF ever experienced — was a peculiar day to celebrate victory, but there were plenty of onlookers and the mood was joyous. Afterwards, however, high spirits led to boisterousness, rebelliousness, and arrests. Some soldiers, resentful of what they considered excessive police heavy-handedness, decided to raid Victoria Barracks. In the ensuing skirmish one of the raiders was killed.

An urgent meeting of the RSSILA on the following Monday, 21 July, authorised the dispatch of a deputation forthwith to the Police Commissioner. He agreed to investigate the returned soldiers’ grievances. When this deputation reported back to another spirited RSSILA meeting, majority sentiment was strongly in favour of pursuing immediate redress rather than being fobbed off by the prospect of some inquiry. An estimated 3,000 demonstrators then marched to police headquarters. When the Police Commissioner refused to budge, they proceeded to Parliament House to submit their grievances directly to the Premier, H.S.W. Lawson. Cabinet was sitting at the time, but they burst in anyway and demanded the dismissal of an especially loathed senior constable, the release of soldiers arrested during the weekend, and an end to the wielding of police batons against returned servicemen. Lawson urged the intruders to listen to reason and to uphold law and order, but the leading dissidents refused to be mollified unless he acceded to their demands straightaway. Amid extraordinary scenes of escalating disorder, the Premier’s office was ransacked and an inkstand was hurled at Lawson, striking him heavily on the head. A police contingent was summoned to disperse the insurgents; after performing a baton charge, they succeeded in doing so. Later a violent melee erupted outside police headquarters, which resulted in protesters and policemen being hospitalised. There were further clashes the following day.

This sequence of events, in particular the culminating violence against the head of an elected government, seemed to embody the conservatives’ worst nightmares about rampaging returned soldiers. Similar unruliness in Brisbane could be characterised as well-intentioned attempts to deal with dastardly ‘Bolsheviks’ and their ‘disloyalist’ acolytes who had infiltrated the state Labor government, but in Melbourne there was a Nationalist premier with a sore head and an intense grievance with the RSSILA after a demonstration under its auspices had resulted in intruders assaulting him in his own office. Corrective intervention was clearly necessary.

A mass meeting of returned soldiers was convened in the Domain on 23 July. Thousands attended. They heard a selection of the best-known Melbourne-based AIF leaders provide a series of pep-talks on the need to curb disorderliness. Elliott was one of the speakers; they also included his old friends and fellow AIF brigadiers Smith and Bennett, together with the state commandant, General ‘Digger’ Brand. The gathering was chaired by the recently elected national president of the RSSILA, Gil Dyett, who had served briefly under Elliott at Gallipoli. On 6 August 1915 Dyett had shared a last meal with two other Bendigo-born lieutenants in the 7th Battalion who, like him, did not expect to be alive after the imminent offensive; ‘Curly’ Symons survived and won the VC at Lone Pine, Noel Edwards was killed and perhaps deserved that decoration as well, and Dyett was so severely wounded in the battle that he was reverently covered with a blanket on Anzac beach prior to burial. Pompey had not seen Dyett for four years until July 1919. Now here they were together at this important gathering, stepping up onto an improvised platform to proclaim their abhorrence of disorderliness.

When it was Elliott’s turn to speak he was again given a tremendous reception. ‘I want to say a few words about our conduct … in this city’, he began, associating himself directly with his audience right from the outset. The men of the AIF had enlisted voluntarily to overcome a brand of tyranny that aspired to world domination, he pointed out, yet a proportion of returned men were now associating themselves misguidedly with forces of disorder tainted by not dissimilar tyranny. Attempting to coerce an elected government with threats and violence was unjustifiable. Australia was a proud and free democracy, where rich and poor were equal before the law; its soldiers should appreciate and be prepared to uphold this democratic system of government. There was no place for unconstitutional methods; if they did not like what a particular government was doing, their remedy was to vote against it on election day. He urged soldiers to show restraint, while empathising with their frustration that

some, through no fault of their own, are out of employment and suffering hardship … First and foremost we must unite to defend the government of the State and maintain order. It is essential that we should not mix ourselves up in disturbances in the city. In the battles we fought in together it was possible that there were many Germans who were opposed utterly to German militarism and despotism, but it was impossible for us to discriminate in a bayonet charge. If only through motives of curiosity you join in the crowds in the city, it is equally impossible for those guarding the city to discriminate in carrying out their duty.

If, Elliott continued, some returned soldiers were being led so astray that they were threatening violence unless they were given what they wanted,

then, boys, I have to tell you that I myself would be one of the first to volunteer to stand as a guard to protect property and protect the government. I value your good opinion and respect …

Interjector: You’ve got that, Pompey! (Laughter and cheers.)

… But if my country calls in this matter, then I will serve even at the risk of sacrificing your friendship and respect.

Interjector: You can’t lose that! (Cheers.)

The ensuing decline in unruliness by returned soldiers in Melbourne indicates that this meeting was influential. After addresses by six generals, three colonels, two captains, and a corporal, Dyett called on all present to raise an arm if they supported the maintenance of law and order. The unanimous response was trumpeted by the press. In the Age it was proclaimed as a ‘TRIUMPH FOR LAW AND ORDER’, and the Argus account was headlined ‘UPHOLDING THE LAW: SOLDIERS WILL AID: EMPHATIC DECLARATION’. It was on the same day these reports appeared that Elliott was feted in the evening at Essendon Town Hall, where his speech included some observations about the returned soldiers’ adjustment to civilian life. Intriguingly, the report of his comments on this pivotal issue in the local paper was reproduced when its Footscray equivalent described his address to the returned men of that municipality sixteen days later. The identical accounts in the Essendon Gazette and Footscray Advertiser stated that Brigadier-General Elliott

made an appeal to everybody to be patient with men who had gone through so much. Government help could, after all, be only temporary, and if all the returned men were to be absorbed into ordinary life the task would rest largely with the private employer. “No one could be more down on lawlessness, even among these men, than I am”, he said. “We must, at all costs, maintain respect for law and order. Given that, we must make all possible allowances for these men, and try to realise how much they have done for us”. (Applause.)

The word-for-word duplication, extending even to punctuation and concluding applause, was surely no coincidence. At the very least it suggests that Elliott was acutely aware that the right message should be given to both returned men and civilians, and that he was prepared to ensure it was (from his wartime dealings with Australian correspondents Charles Bean, Keith Murdoch, and Fred Cutlack he might well have acquired some journalistic and publicity savvy). Whether he was acting of his own volition or at the instigation of others intent on quelling the dangerous restlessness of returned servicemen — establishment figures, perhaps, with influence in government, the military, the press, or conceivably all three — is hard to gauge.

What was clear, however, within a month of Elliott’s return, was that civilian life for him was going to be very different from pre-war days. He was not the only one who had to make a sizeable adjustment; his public prominence involved a big change for Kate as well. The main thing from her perspective was that he had managed to return home safely. As he became increasingly in demand on a variety of fronts, she remained the same accepting, unassuming, supportive ‘sunshine lady’ she had always been. Adjusting to his frequent absences owing to welcome-home functions, meetings, and various other events and engagements was relatively straightforward for her, after having had to cope with his complete absence for nearly five years. Belle remained in the household after her brother-in-law’s return, and continued to be an influential presence in it. The residence he came home to was located in the eastern suburb of Surrey Hills, a rented house at the eastern end of Prospect Hill Road.

Elliott’s most pressing personal concern since the Armistice, his future as a lawyer, was resolved satisfactorily soon after his return. A long-established Melbourne firm of solicitors, Lynch and MacDonald, had lost its senior partner when Hector MacDonald died in October 1917 (William Lynch, the founder of the firm, had died in 1901). The sole surviving partner, MacDonald’s son (also named Hector), carried on the practice, and in 1919 invited Elliott to join him. Partnership of a well-known, well-credentialled firm was just what Pompey was after, and he moved into an office at 360 Collins Street, the prestigious address of the renamed concern now known as Lynch, MacDonald and Elliott. His new partner’s brother, artist James MacDonald, had been severely wounded at Gallipoli and was to become a controversial art critic.

Pompey’s anxiety about being tainted by his former partner’s disgrace proved unfounded. He was fanatical about his professional integrity. Even the slightest hint of an unwarranted blot on his reputation, especially his financial probity, was intolerable. But there was no lingering slur to endure. The cause of his rupture with Glen Roberts was not widely known, and of course no-one aware of the circumstances could rationally blame Elliott in the slightest. In fact, far from being ostracised because of his former partner’s dishonesty, Elliott’s exalted reputation after his wartime accomplishments made him an attractive proposition for solicitors on the lookout for a partner. As Hector MacDonald realised, Elliott would bring valuable prestige to his firm as well as additional clients. Other offers accepted by Elliott confirmed that his concern about his reputation was groundless. With impeccable credentials a pre-requisite, he was invited to become a director of the National Trustees Executors and Agency Company Limited, a graduates’ representative on the Ormond College Council, and a member of the Victorian Law Institute’s Council.

Elliott’s obsessive worrying about the impact on his own financial circumstances of Glen Roberts’ defalcation also subsided once he became properly aware of the situation. The contribution of his ex-partner’s wife, Katie Roberts, had been crucial. Both she and her son Eric retained the utmost regard for Elliott, and were determined that he would not be financially disadvantaged by Glen’s disgrace. Eric, having joined the Australian Flying Corps after Elliott thwarted his intention to join the 7th Battalion because it would be ‘like taking my own son’, had seen Elliott occasionally during the war, and continued to do so subsequently. Reminiscing over 60 years later after a distinguished flying career which saw him reach the rank of wing commander, Eric was adamant that he and his mother had ensured that Pompey suffered no financial detriment at all as a result of the defalcation. Glen Roberts resumed as a lawyer, entering a partnership with another solicitor who eventually became a victim just like Elliott; Eric, then overseas, returned to find that he had to extricate his father from yet more financial embarrassment. After this episode he and his brothers insisted that Glen was never to practise again. At no stage, according to Eric, was there any contact between his father and Elliott after the war.

Someone who was in frequent contact with Elliott after the war was Charles Bean. Having made a research trip to Gallipoli after the Armistice, Bean had arrived back in Australia to embark on his magisterial history of the AIF. He was intent on writing a different kind of military history. Instead of the traditional focus on the highest commanders’ conceptions and dispatches, Bean had decided to concentrate on the action at the sharp end. Ascertaining and describing what front-line soldiers did would enable him to produce fresh, compelling history. This approach also appealed to him as an excellent way of ensuring that the AIF’s superb contribution was honoured and remembered. It would be a new type of history, then, for a special story, and the nationalistic idealism that inspired him and the determined persistence that sustained him enabled Bean to carry this vast project through to completion, even though his method involved the absorption of a dauntingly vast array of information.

In September 1919 Bean called at Elliott’s Melbourne office. He wanted to discuss Elliott’s daring encounter in a Gallipoli tunnel in July 1915 that exemplified the truism (repeated by his men forever afterwards) that Pompey would never send anyone where he was not prepared to go himself. It was typical of Bean’s diligence and commitment to novel military history from a front-line perspective that his notes of this conversation were extensively detailed; it was typical of Elliott’s keen interest in the subject matter that after seeing the historian he looked up the coverage of that incident in his diary, and sent Bean a three-page letter elaborating on the information he had provided in his office. That same month Elliott received from Wieck, then commanding a military school at Liverpool, New South Wales, the detailed reminiscences he had asked his former brigade major to provide concerning the advanced guard operations they had supervised together in March 1917.

For the rest of his life Elliott’s penetrating scrutiny of the progressive documentation of the AIF’s history never wavered. He became a frequent supplier of information and material to Bean, whose dedication, thoroughness, and integrity he admired (as did everyone who knew the AIF correspondent-turned-historian well). Elliott’s intense interest in Bean’s work was shaped by his lifelong fascination with military history, his familiarity with the leading actors in Bean’s great story, and his personal involvement in many of the engagements featured in it. Also influential, of course, was his yearning for vindication in relation to deeply felt grievances.

Bean’s admirable idealism was embodied in his tract entitled In Your Hands Australians. This short but passionate book urged its readers to live up to the ideals of the AIF by reproducing them in peacetime in order to make Australia a better place. Education and the need to guide Australian youth along the right lines was a prominent theme of In Your Hands Australians, as was another Bean initiative, the ‘Young Australia Force’. Bean’s aim was to inspire Australian children with a strong spirit of nationalistic idealism, inherited from the AIF, in a movement devoid of militaristic, political or sectarian overtones.

Letters inviting support for the establishment of this Young Australia Force were sent to influential AIF identities in each state, including Elliott. The suggestion that the scheme could be launched by Birdwood during his forthcoming tour of Australia received, not surprisingly, a frosty response from Pompey, who objected to this aspect of the proposal in a characteristically candid letter to Bean. The scheme failed to prosper, not as a result of Elliott’s antipathy to Birdwood, but because the Boy Scouts Association saw it as a threat and successfully lobbied both the Governor-General and Birdwood to withdraw their support. Bean, bitterly disappointed that his heart-and-soul commitment to a worthy ideal had been stymied, maintained that the Young Australia movement, unlike the Scouts, would be open to girls as well as boys, was non-militaristic in character, and was uniquely Australian rather than something initiated in England and reproduced elsewhere. Still, if the essence of his proposed organisation — its inspiration, appeal, and pulse — was, as he envisaged, fervent national pride and idealism, it was perfectly appropriate for Elliott to affirm that an Australian (Monash, for example) should be launching it rather than Birdwood.

Elliott’s significance as a public figure was consolidated by the announcement on 29 October that he would be a Nationalist candidate in the imminent federal election. During the war the Nationalists had presented themselves assiduously as the natural party of allegiance for the men of the AIF and Australians at home who had someone precious in the trenches. These endeavours were successful enough to make the maintenance of this allegiance a top priority for the Nationalists, who endorsed well-known AIF identities for the Senate in four states.

An obvious potential candidate for them to approach was Brigadier-General Elliott CB, CMG, DSO, DCM, Croix de Guerre, Order of St Anne (Russia), who had been repeatedly mentioned in dispatches. First and foremost he was tremendously popular. By placing him at the top of their Senate ticket, the Nationalists could expect to reinforce their existing support and attract additional electors who otherwise would not necessarily vote Nationalist. Furthermore, Elliott had demonstrated his capacity to influence the men of the AIF, both during the war and afterwards (especially at the important July meeting in the Domain), with a virtuosity admired by those conservative powerbrokers who were apprehensive about the unruly tendencies of returned soldiers. Moreover, his distinguished scholastic record demonstrated that he was equipped to be much more than a vote-getter on polling day; he could make a genuine contribution as a law-maker through his ability to scrutinise parliamentary legislation effectively.

Of the available prospective candidates who could be used by Victorian Nationalists to secure the AIF constituency in their state, Elliott stood out clearly. Monash had misgivings not only about aligning himself with the Nationalists but with the political process as a whole. He also had an awkward relationship, characterised by mutual wariness and friction, with Prime Minister Hughes, who feared him as a potential rival for national leadership. Besides, Monash did not return to Australia until the election was over. The most famous Victorian AIF identity besides Monash and Elliott was Albert Jacka, the first Australian to win the VC in the Great War; but he was shy and, in addition, disagreed with the Nationalists’ advocacy of conscription (according to his father, a Labor activist). Elliott’s friend Bennett was invited by Hughes to stand for the Senate in New South Wales (having moved there since his return), but declined.

Elliott, on the other hand, was willing to have a crack at politics. His decision to stand was primarily prompted not by overtures from senior Nationalist strategists — in fact at one stage he declined a personal approach from Prime Minister Hughes — but by persistent entreaties from returned soldiers. ‘We won’t be looked after properly unless you get in there and straighten things out for us poor buggers, general’ was the gist of numerous appeals he received. It was the cumulative impact of these requests that was decisive.

The idea of being a representative of returned soldiers appealed to Pompey, who retained a strong sense of comradeship, loyalty, and obligation to the men he had commanded. They had served him well during the war; he felt impelled to keep doing whatever he could for them in peacetime. For the rest of his life he was burdened by unceasing requests from ex-servicemen seeking assistance with various problems relating to post-war adjustment; always responsive, he did what he could to help. (Even before returning home Pompey had urged his men to be wary of affirming that they were 100 per cent fit, and to accept whatever pension entitlements they were offered.) As a member of federal parliament, Elliott reasoned, he would be better able to look after returned soldiers and their interests.

Moreover, as someone with strong views about certain issues which did not relate particularly to ex-servicemen, he felt he could make a contribution in a more general political context. And, following the offer to join Hector MacDonald’s firm, accepting the invitation to stand for parliament would further assuage the profound insecurity about his post-war future that had tormented him during the immediate post-Armistice period. The £600 parliamentary salary would help to allay his concern about his financial circumstances as well.

Two months earlier Elliott had touched on the subject of politics in the course of his speech at the celebrated civic dinner for Footscray’s returned men, asserting (according to the Footscray Independent) that he ‘never was a politician, and never would be’. He elaborated a few days later in a letter to a 7th Battalion original, Dan Toohey:

In regard to my remark about Parliament I said that I had declined to be a ‘Party’ Candidate. Both parties want you to bind yourself body and soul to some platform or other, and then they proceed to go into details which often pan out unexpectedly and by signing the platform you are precluded from any form of criticism of the platform. This will never suit me at all, and if any one wants me to stand for Parliament they must have sufficient confidence in me as an honest man to trust me to run straight without binding me or attempting to bind me body and soul.

The Nationalists evidently decided that Pompey’s popularity was such a sure-fire vote-winner that they ought to utilise and benefit from it on polling day, despite the risk that his independent inclinations might cause problems afterwards. For his part, Elliott detected no fundamental personal incompatibility with the Nationalist platform that would prevent him from giving the party his broad support.

He was an instinctive conservative. Like many others who overcome unpropitious origins and attain conspicuous accomplishment through determination, drive, and self-discipline, Elliott tended to believe that others could emulate his success if they emulated his dedication (a perception that conveniently ignored the impact of the Londonderry golden hole). It was not for governments to nurse the improvident with a generosity the state or nation could not afford, especially if one held — as Pompey did — an essentially pessimistic view about human nature and the community’s collective capacity to achieve good works. Elliott’s insecurity about his own financial circumstances was mirrored by his hostility to unsound governmental finance. He had first-hand experience of the dreadful 1890s depression in Victoria, which had demonstrated the disastrous potential consequences of imprudent administration.

During the war he had predicted that the immediate post-war period would be a daunting challenge for governments. It would involve considerable dislocation, upheaval, and readjustment, and the public funds available to ameliorate these unsettled conditions would be limited after the immense expenditure and debt accumulated during the war. To Pompey, the returned soldiers would clearly be the most deserving of the various claimants pursuing a share of the public purse, but in the circumstances there would be precious little the government could afford or be expected to do even for them.

Elliott was a committed conservative, then, but whether he was temperamentally suited to politics was another matter. Although he had been persuaded to stand by the numerous requests he received from returned soldiers, some of the men he commanded felt that the forthrightness and uncompromising candour he had displayed as a military commander would prove incompatible with the slippery deviousness of political combat. ‘For God’s sake don’t go into Parliament’, one pleaded. ‘It is no place for an honest man’.

It was not as if the idea of standing for parliament was a novel proposition for Elliott. From time to time, even before returning home, he had acknowledged that politics was a post-war possibility for him. Early in 1917 he was being urged to consider standing for parliament: ‘they said the Returned Soldiers’ vote alone would put me in’, he told Kate. He laughed off the idea at that stage, but a letter he sent Belle immediately after the Armistice indicated that he was considering standing for Ballarat. While he had ‘received good encouragement’ in AIF circles, his primary motivation was the decidedly hostile impression he had formed of the wartime activities of the sitting Labor member, D.C. McGrath, who had campaigned actively against conscription within the AIF. ‘I regard it as a disgrace to Ballarat that she should be represented in the national Parliament by such a man’, he fumed. However, senior Nationalist tacticians evidently preferred to maximise the fruits of Elliott’s popularity by endorsing him as a state-wide Senate candidate rather than confining him to a particular lower house electorate; and from his own perspective, winning a Senate seat would be easier than dislodging a sitting Labor member of the House of Representatives (MHR). All the same, he was particularly looking forward to making his presence felt in Ballarat during the campaign.

There was perhaps another motivation influencing Elliott’s decision to stand. Decades later a friend of his, returned soldier and parliamentary official Frank Green, recalled an intriguing conversation in which Elliott said he had entered parliament to support an alternative to Hughes as prime minister. It is certainly plausible that Elliott preferred someone else to Hughes; as far as Pompey was concerned, Hughes was forever tainted by his Labor origins. In his wartime correspondence Elliott had been as scathing about Hughes as he had been about anti-conscriptionists such as Archbishop Mannix and the ALP leader chosen after the party’s great 1916-17 rupture, Frank Tudor. Also significant was the fact that Elliott had rejected an approach from Hughes, but had been more responsive to the overtures of another Nationalist powerbroker, W.A. Watt, who was, unlike Hughes, a Victorian with no ALP background. Watt had been premier in Elliott’s home state for two years before transferring to federal politics; in that sphere he became Treasurer and, in Hughes’s absence, acting prime minister for sixteen months. A close friendship developed between Elliott and Watt. While Hughes was away, Watt had organised a deal with one of the organisations behind the emerging political force that was to become known as the Country Party; this involved its representative withdrawing from the Flinders by-election in May 1918 — thereby ensuring the election of the Nationalist candidate, S.M. Bruce — in exchange for an undertaking from Watt that preferential voting would be introduced before the next federal election.

According to Frank Green, Elliott later recalled that he had agreed to stand for the Senate partly to increase the proportion of Nationalist MPs in favour of replacing Hughes as leader and prime minister. Pompey added, Green claimed, that the successor he and others had in mind was Bruce. Green’s memory of this conversation decades later, long after Elliott’s death, may not have been accurate. Elliott may well have been keen to see Hughes replaced, but it is unlikely that he and others were envisaging Bruce as the most appropriate and probable successor to Hughes as early as October 1919. Bruce was a political novice when he won Flinders, and had spent most of the ensuing months overseas. A more likely alternative Nationalist leader to Hughes towards the end of 1919 was a prominent minister whose dislike of Hughes had by this time become intense — Watt himself.

The bitter divisiveness that had convulsed Australia during the war made a lively election campaign in 1919 inevitable, but the Nationalists held all the aces politically. Labor’s devastating wartime rupture had left the party in disarray. In 1915 Labor had been in government federally and in five of the six states; now, only four years later, the exact opposite was the case — the party was in opposition federally and in five of the six states. Tudor was decent and likeable, but troubled by ill-health. He was no match for his wily, mercurial former chief, Prime Minister Hughes, who had led a capable and experienced ex-ALP contingent into a merger with the conservatives. The only Labor leader who had proved more than a match for Hughes since the split, talented Queensland Premier T.J. Ryan, was in the process of transferring to federal politics. He was appointed campaign director for the 1919 election, handed a safe Sydney seat, and expected to take over the leadership in the not-too-distant future.

Discrediting Ryan was the paramount campaign objective as far as Labor’s opponents were concerned. Another priority for the Nationalists was to emphasise their party’s claim to exclusive affinity with the AIF. Accordingly, the military credentials of Labor MPs who had enlisted — those in federal parliament included McGrath, A.T. Ozanne and ‘Gunner’ Yates — were belittled and besmirched at every opportunity. Also prominent in the campaign were certain home front issues that had exacerbated the searing divisiveness occasioned by the conscription referenda and heightened sectarianism. The relentless tension that afflicted so many families with someone in the trenches was intensified by economic hardship arising from severe inflation (the cost of food had almost doubled during the war) and the failure of wage increases to keep pace with soaring prices. Such grievances produced an outcry about ‘profiteering’, and contributed to unprecedented industrial unrest: the amount of working days lost in 1919 remained the highest in any year for over half a century.

In his policy speech Hughes contended that his government’s vigorous prosecution of the war had been in the national interest, opposed by post-split Labor, and ultimately vindicated. He proposed to encourage local industry by overhauling and strengthening tariffs, and promised to tackle profiteering by establishing a royal commission and holding a referendum seeking enhanced powers for the national government. Labor, in turn, promised to increase pensions, tax the rich more heavily, and introduce a national health scheme; the AIF constituency was wooed with the promise of generous repatriation benefits, including free housing for life for incapacitated returned soldiers and the widows and children of deceased servicemen.

Another prominent political issue was preference in employment for returned soldiers. The Hughes government claimed to have already fulfilled its commitment to this policy (which had featured in wartime recruiting campaigns), particularly in relation to public service employment. But the RSSILA contended that so many employers were evading their obligations that the principle was being honoured more in the breach than the observance.

Elliott was personally and publicly involved in the preference issue himself as the federal election campaign was getting under way. The Melbourne City Council’s solicitor having died, the council decided in October to appoint a well-known firm of lawyers to take over its legal work. But none of this firm’s senior solicitors was a returned soldier, and preference activists were soon up in arms: this was a semi-public position with a lucrative salary of £250, ex-AIF lawyers could do the work satisfactorily, and it was precisely the kind of appointment where the preference principle should apply if it meant anything at all. RSSILA pressure, protest meetings, and the airing of discontent in the press culminated in a deputation to the council, which agreed to reconsider its decision at its quarterly meeting on 10 November. A letter was submitted to that meeting from Hector MacDonald confirming that Elliott had become a partner in his firm. After considerable discussion the council agreed to rescind its previous appointment, and a ballot was held to determine whether Elliott or two other ex-AIF applicants would become the city solicitor. Pompey won the ballot easily.

Later that same day, however, Elliott was less successful when he turned to electioneering. He had meetings in familiar territory, the suburbs of Newmarket and Moonee Ponds. The Newmarket meeting was so rowdy that Pompey struggled to make himself heard as his numerous supporters in the Essendon district tried to drown out Labor devotees intent on giving him a hard time. There was much less disruption at Moonee Ponds, where he declared himself in favour of the foreshadowed new tariff, and advocated more industrial co-operation to reduce industrial unrest. Devising appropriate policies to help returned soldiers readjust was not easy, he asserted, but ‘the Prime Minister has made an honest attempt to grasp the situation …’ (Interjection: ‘He was never honest in his life!’ Cheers and dissent.) Elliott ploughed on resolutely, of course — determination might have been his middle name — but it was clear that he was confronted by a steep learning curve. Even at an overwhelmingly supportive meeting like Moonee Ponds there would be hostile interjectors to deal with. He did what he could to improve his platform skills, and became more comfortable and effective as the campaign progressed; but as a political spruiker he was more workmanlike than rapier-like, persistent rather than adroit.

After his challenging ordeal at Newmarket, Elliott was, for the rest of the campaign, usually accompanied by another Nationalist speaker, often a Queenslander imported to discredit Ryan. On 12 November he and Nationalist MHR George Maxwell addressed a joint meeting at Prahran. Pompey then had a daunting engagement at Richmond, Tudor’s home turf and a traditional Labor stronghold; he withdrew owing to ill-health, which was just as well — the Richmond Guardian described the meeting as ‘disorderly from beginning to end’. Elliott was still ill the following week, when he was scheduled to tour south-east Victoria. At Leongatha his replacement apologised to all the returned soldiers of the district who had come to hear Pompey, but his doctor had forbidden him to attend. Within 48 hours, however, the patient had recovered sufficiently to address a meeting at Korumburra. Two days later he transferred his attentions to the west of the state, beginning at Geelong (where he scored a good write-up by none other than Roy Gollan, his former brigade major, who had returned to the Geelong Advertiser). He spent the rest of the campaign outside Melbourne; Kate travelled with him.

To help with organisational details, Elliott engaged as his ‘secretary’ the 15th Brigade’s VC winner, ‘Mick’ Moon. Like many ex-comrades, Moon was unemployed and finding the adjustment to civilian life difficult. Moon appreciated this offer of a job, while sensing that Pompey had concluded that travelling around with a VC winner would do his campaigning no harm. And so it proved — they had rapturous receptions throughout country Victoria. In some centres, as well as the political meeting Elliott was there to address, a separate function was arranged just to welcome them. Perhaps never in the entire history of Portland, gushed its local paper, had ‘two more distinguished persons visited the town’. Shops were closed, the main streets were decorated with bunting and flags, the waiting crowd cheered loudly when their car arrived, and the local schoolchildren ‘showed no small amount of excitement at viewing for themselves the idol of most young people’s worship — a real Victoria Cross winner, and a Brigadier-General whose name is a household one with them all’. At these functions Pompey met up with numerous men who had served under him, reunions that were relished on both sides. Another feature of these functions was the surprised reactions of civic office-bearers when this beefy, red-cheeked, ‘man of action’ brigadier they had heard so much about politely declined a beer — he was an unlikely looking teetotaller. When Bean described Pompey’s post-war appearance, he highlighted ‘that sturdy figure, the bluff red cheeks, almost without a line, the twinkling, knowing eyes, the confident smile … that iron grip of a handshake [and] that decisive voice’.

The content of the campaign speeches Elliott delivered while travelling around Victoria with Moon and Kate did not vary much. He tended to begin with a plug for his Nationalist Senate colleagues, wool expert Frank Guthrie and talented ex-Labor renegade Ted Russell, before pointing out, apropos of his own candidature, that he was a political novice and only standing because he had been repeatedly pressed to do so. The Nationalists, keen to endorse for the Senate a representative of returned soldiers, had insisted that he was the best available Victorian. Whether or not that was correct, he added modestly, that was what they were saying, and it was to their credit that they were prepared — unlike any other party — to endorse someone specifically for the soldiers. He had not, however, committed himself to toe some party line willy-nilly:

I am under no obligation at all to the National Party, rather the other way. I have signed no platform, nor been asked to sign one. I am therefore free to advocate or oppose whatever measures I deem fit.

All the same, Elliott praised the Nationalist government’s record and commended its main policies for the future, associating himself firmly with its stance in four spheres he characterised as fundamental. He and the Nationalists, he affirmed, were in favour of national cohesion, and against disunity and ‘class hatred’; in favour of constitutional government, and against revolution and Bolshevism; in favour of conciliation and arbitration, and against strikes and disruption; and in favour of imperial unity and patriotism, and against disloyalty. Hughes and his government had much to be proud of, Elliott reiterated at meeting after meeting. Organising and maintaining the AIF, capably protecting Australia’s primary produce (wool, wheat, butter, metals) amid wartime upheaval in international markets, vigorously safeguarding Australia’s national security at the Versailles peace conference — these were all, Pompey contended, outstanding achievements.

Elliott left anti-Ryan propaganda largely to others, but participated wholeheartedly in the Nationalists’ attacks on Labor’s credentials concerning the AIF constituency. As well as regularly denouncing McGrath, Ozanne, and other ALP diggers in his campaigning, Pompey associated himself with a shabby stunt involving a poem written during the Boer War by a former Labor MP, J.K. McDougall. The Nationalists distortedly trumpeted McDougall’s satirical anti-war adaptation of a Kipling battle-hymn of Empire, concealing its Boer War origins and context, and pretended that it represented contemporary ALP policy. McDougall was not even a candidate in 1919 — he was living near Ararat with his young family, working his farm — but that did not stop Hughes and other Nationalist candidates demonising him. At Horsham on 4 December, for example, Elliott recited the most controversial portion of McDougall’s poem. It was the rowdiest part of his whole speech. Amid uproar, he claimed not only that this verse embodied official Labor policy, but also that he particularly resented the aspersions McDougall cast on fallen Australian soldiers because his own brother and brother-in-law were among them. Hughes and other Nationalists campaigned in similar vein. The conservative press, the Argus in particular, fanned rancour rankly with inflammatory reports of angry meetings of ex-servicemen, including the Essendon branch of the RSSILA.

This unsavoury campaigning led to a sensational culmination. Two nights after Elliott’s Horsham speech McDougall was assaulted and kidnapped, then tarred and feathered. He was lured away from his isolated farmhouse by a request for assistance with car trouble before being waylaid by numerous assailants in the dark. Labor spokesmen were furious. McGrath accused Hughes of inciting the incident, and warned that if there was any more violence perpetrated against Labor individuals the labour movement would retaliate with force. There was further indignation when the Argus published a detailed account of the incident, which was so remarkably informative that it invited suspicion about the paper’s complicity. When half a dozen returned soldiers (including three officers) were arrested in due course, it became evident that the enterprise had been a combined initiative of returned soldiers from Essendon and Ararat. Among the ringleaders was an ex-officer who had driven himself and others up from Essendon, knocked on McDougall’s door, and told the Argus all about it afterwards. One of Pompey’s original ‘Essendon boys’, he had performed so superbly as a young lance-corporal at the Anzac landing, taking over the leadership of the depleted 7th Battalion machine-gun section after all his superiors had been put out of action, that he became one of the first Australians to receive the DCM at Gallipoli.

It was three days after the McDougall incident, with polling day four days ahead, when Elliott’s roving electioneering brought him to Ballarat. The campaign temperature there was particularly high. McGrath, the local Labor MHR, had coupled his angry response to the tarring and feathering of McDougall with a sensational retort to a platform utterance by W.K. Bolton, a sitting Nationalist senator. Bolton had commanded the Ballarat-based 8th AIF Battalion and served as the inaugural RSSILA president before being replaced by Dyett amid criticism that he was too deferential to the government. Campaigning in support of E.T.J. Kerby — who had served under him in the 8th Battalion and was McGrath’s Nationalist opponent in Ballarat — Bolton had publicly compared McGrath’s AIF service unflatteringly with Kerby’s. Stung by this remark and still fuming about the assault on McDougall, McGrath went after Bolton with a vengeance.

At a public meeting called to reveal ‘hidden facts about Gallipoli’ relating to Senator Bolton, McGrath revealed that Bolton had sought his assistance after returning to Australia in 1915, having left Gallipoli early in the campaign in the wake of the disastrous charge at Krithia (where Bolton had been promoted to acting brigadier when McCay was hit). According to McGrath, Bolton was feeling unappreciated and underemployed following his early return, and was critical of the capacity and courage of McCay and the 6th Battalion commander, McNicoll (both severely wounded at Krithia). McGrath went into bat for Bolton with the AIF authorities as requested by the colonel, but received a disconcerting reply to the effect that Bolton’s record with the AIF was undistinguished and he was no longer wanted.

Having revealed all this to the special Ballarat meeting on 7 December 1919, McGrath asserted that he, unlike Bolton, had no tickets on himself as a soldier. He had enlisted at the age of 43 to do what he could to make a contribution, having had no previous military training, and he had not intended to descend to personal allegations about individuals’ AIF service. If, however, Bolton was going to pose as a gallant commander and then sneer at McGrath’s soldiering, it was time to reveal the truth. McGrath’s allegations were not without substance. Bolton’s early return from Gallipoli was not unrelated to adverse impressions his superiors had formed about the 54-year-old colonel’s capacity to provide energetic and inspiring leadership. However, Bolton was able to repudiate McGrath’s damning revelations in December 1919 by citing a supportive letter from Birdwood which gave the impression that Bolton’s early return was solely due to ill-health.

Elliott involved himself in this venomous controversy by launching a counter-attack against McGrath. On the day after reporting Bolton’s repudiation of McGrath’s allegations, the Ballarat Star published an anti-McGrath blast from Pompey. ‘Mr McGrath knows nothing of war, and in particular knows nothing of the AIF’, Pompey declared. He was only in the AIF ‘for a short time’ while he had ‘a safe and cushy job’ in London at its Horseferry Road headquarters. Elliott then alleged that McGrath had pulled strings to look after his son:

This young man enlisted and proceeded to England at the Government expense … On arrival there Mr McGrath, having apparently in the meantime looked up the lad’s birth certificate and discovered that he was under age, objected to allowing him to go to France, and the boy was returned home. Mr McGrath then used all his influence to have his son sent to Duntroon school as an officer, apparently on the ground that he had been on active service.

McGrath’s response was to reaffirm his allegations about Bolton, and to foreshadow a defamation writ against Elliott. He had neither avoided Western Front service himself, he insisted, nor had he arranged to have his son sent home. That son had in fact served in France (including at the battle of Fromelles) before going home to Australia in 1917 under the impression that he was, like other under-age AIF youths, being given a furlough before returning to the Western Front when older. Instead he arrived home to find the Nationalists claiming that his father had insisted on his discharge, the same furphy Pompey was propagating in 1919. Meanwhile McGrath senior, who was keen to get to the front, felt convinced that devious influences were preventing him from doing so, in order to enable the Nationalists to sneer that he had done no real soldiering. He did eventually manage to cross to France for some perilous experiences, but his political opponents repeatedly claimed that he had performed no front-line service.

Pompey’s resentment of McGrath was genuinely deep, but the elaborate Nationalist endeavours to discredit the Labor MPs who had enlisted are among the most murky and sordid episodes in Australian political history. And Elliott was aligning himself with some unlikely allies in this controversy. Not only had he been contemptuous of Bolton’s early return to Australia at the time; the Nationalist candidate for Ballarat Pompey was doing his utmost to assist, the 8th Battalion officer he was sharing platforms with to help unseat McGrath, was none other than the same Captain Kerby he had paraded and humiliated at Gallipoli for casting aspersions on his own 7th Battalion. McGrath had dropped a bombshell into the campaign with his allegations about Bolton, but if he had been aware of Pompey’s scathing 1915 criticism of both Bolton and Kerby he would have had even more sensational revelations to divulge.

The election results were very satisfying for Elliott. The Nationalists were returned to office, he topped the Senate poll himself in Victoria, and McGrath lost in Ballarat by one vote. As the top Senate candidate on the Nationalist how-to-vote card, Elliott’s success at a time when Labor was in disarray was hardly a surprise, but it was gratifying all the same to record more than twice the votes attained by any other Victorian Senate candidate. ‘Of course I voted you first’, enthused an admirer, ‘and it looks as if everyone in Victoria did the same’. Among numerous messages of congratulation Elliott received, the most notable was a postcard from a group of Gippsland returned soldiers who sent it simply to ‘Pompey’ without, except for that single word, specifying any name or address. Thanks to an enterprising postal clerk who endorsed it ‘Try Brigadier-General “Pompey” Elliott, Melbourne’, the postcard reached its intended recipient. More than 14,000 Victorians who gave him their number one vote gave their second vote to a non-Nationalist candidate. Not even the emergence of the country political organisations as a national force (eleven country candidates won seats in the House of Representatives) deprived the Hughes government of a working majority in both houses. Labor won only a third of the lower house seats and only one of the nineteen vacancies in the Senate.

When Elliott had time to take stock early in 1920, he was able to reflect that his first half-year back home had gone quite well, certainly better than he had feared in his black moods of foreboding about his post-war prospects. He had extricated himself from Roberts satisfactorily and joined an established solicitors’ practice as a partner; his awesome popularity, confirmed at a series of welcome-home functions, had resulted in his election to federal parliament with a resounding personal endorsement; and further distinctions, professional and personal, had also come his way. His reintroduction to family life had been highly satisfactory as well. Kate was not intrinsically interested in politics at all, but she had devotedly accompanied her husband on the campaign trail (even though he was so busy and preoccupied with electioneering that he sometimes forgot where he had arranged to meet her). Before the campaign Elliott had been reunited with his brother when he and Kate went up to Tocumwal and stayed with Rod and Liz, the sister-in-law Harold had never met. Belle took Violet and Neil there for the Christmas holidays while Harold opted to unwind with Kate in Melbourne after his electioneering exertions.

Even with the election decided, though, he still had too much on his plate for a prolonged rest. Monash’s return to Australia was a notable event. Elliott was among numerous dignitaries assembled at the pier when the ‘boss digger’ landed in Melbourne; he attended some of the various functions in Monash’s honour, including a civic reception at Melbourne Town Hall. In January 1920 Birdwood arrived in Melbourne as part of a national tour marked by extraordinary fanfare, publicity and red carpet treatment. Swank and formality were hardly Pompey’s cup of tea, especially to acclaim Birdwood of all people, but he swallowed his resentment and endured the charade. He and Kate donned their glad rags for the Governor-General’s dinner party and, a week later, afternoon tea at General Chauvel’s; Elliott, like other senior AIF generals, also attended a grand dinner at Parliament House. Birdwood’s tour, like the visits of Lord Jellicoe previously and the Prince of Wales later on, were intended by their imperial-minded instigators to enhance cohesive pro-British sentiment in Australia after such a divisive and traumatic war.

At least, now the election was over, Elliott did not have daily political gatherings to address. But there were frequent meetings in connection with his various other commitments, and numerous AIF-related requests ranging from memorial unveilings to the foreword he wrote for a book of impressive anecdotal reminiscences, To The Last Ridge, by ‘Jimmy’ Downing of the 57th Battalion. ‘I have read this little book with deep interest’, Elliott’s foreword began. He considered that Downing’s vivid description of ‘the thoughts and sensations of the soldier in battle’ should be ‘welcomed as a valuable addition to our literature’; his accounts of Fromelles, the 1916-17 Somme winter, Polygon Wood, and Villers-Bretonneux ‘are, in my opinion, by far the truest and best I have read’. As well as ‘commending this book to the public’, Pompey’s wide-ranging foreword praised Monash’s custom of issuing orders well in advance so that they could be properly explained and understood, and pointedly contrasted this with Birdwood’s approach: ‘Under our previous commander this was not the case’. Downing was thrilled: he ‘had scarcely dared hope’ for such a glowing and influential endorsement.

He was not the only 15th Brigade soldier to appreciate the brigadier’s post-war comradeship. Captain J.D. Schroder, who had spent much of the war at brigade headquarters, returned to Australia after Elliott:

as the ‘Ypiranga’ pulled into the pier at Melbourne I could see a familiar figure on the wharf waiting to meet me. Yes it was Pompey. He never forgot his officers or men, and on the way to Menzies [Hotel] where he took me to lunch we must have been stopped twenty times by diggers who wanted to shake his hand and tell him where they had served under him.

In February 1920 verdicts acceptable to Elliott were delivered in two court cases arising from the election campaign. At Ararat the culprits in the tarring and feathering of McDougall (including the ringleader who had served under Pompey) were, in effect, flogged with a damp lettuce. The partisan judge was openly scornful about the charge of grievous bodily harm, decreed that a gaol sentence was out of the question, and imposed a paltry fine for the lesser offence of common assault. On the following day a Supreme Court judge dismissed the libel action brought against Elliott concerning his allegations against the McGraths. Six weeks later this verdict was confirmed on appeal by the full court, which comprised the chief justice (and former prominent conservative politician) W.H. Irvine and two notable Ormond identities known to Elliott. There was, however, better news for McGrath when a hearing in a different jurisdiction upheld his claim that electoral irregularities had tainted Kerby’s knife-edge victory in Ballarat; it was accordingly declared void, and a by-election became necessary. At that by-election, in July 1920, McGrath defeated Kerby and regained his seat. That same month Elliott made his parliamentary debut in the Senate.