Lobbyist and Political Activist
‘I’m so busy now paddling my own frail and leaky canoe that I’ve no time or energy for national causes. Indeed I bid fair to become a back number and remain one. I’m sorry in a way because I am so interested in public questions but I recognise my limitations.’—Guy Russell writes to his sister Milly in 1927 as he struggles to stay solvent.
By the late 1920s, Guy Russell’s life had settled into a discernible pattern—RSA lobbyist, defence activist and struggling farmer. At the 1924 council meeting of the National Defence League, he revisited his familiar themes: continued support for universal military training; the proper equipment of New Zealand’s defence forces; and closer defence links with Australia.268
The command of the Pacific Ocean and the security of its trade routes, Russell warned, were no longer in the safekeeping of the British Navy. Australia and New Zealand were ‘two dangerously isolated outposts of Western civilisation’ and vulnerable to threats from other nations in the region. New Zealand therefore had three options: an ‘understanding’ with the United States, whose navy could provide the shield that the British fleet had provided until now; an alliance with an Asiatic power, possibly China; or self-reliance, based on cooperation between the two countries most affected—Australia and New Zealand.
The first of these options—an ‘understanding’ with the United States—was not practical, he concluded, because of the limited range of the American fleet without a base at Guam. The second—an alliance with China—was ruled out in the short term because of the ‘political chaos’ in that country and its distrust of foreigners. The third recommendation—self-reliance supported by defence links with Australia—made better strategic sense. In cooperation with the British Admiralty, the two countries could pool their naval resources and establish a naval base in Australasian waters. Aircraft and submarines, combined with artillery batteries at selected ports, would be New Zealand’s best defence against raids, which were more likely than armed occupation of the country by an enemy force.
Universal military training should be maintained, Russell argued, not only for defence but for social reasons. It would teach discipline and self-control, ‘encourage national corporate feeling, good citizenship, and inculcate in youth the ideals of devotion, self-forgetfulness and ungrudging service not measured by pecuniary reward’. These recommendations—like similar ones from the RSA—for the most part fell on deaf ears.
In 1924, Russell’s Uncle William died, bringing to an end the opening chapter of the Russell family’s New Zealand story. It was William and Guy’s father ‘Ham’ who had broken in the first scrub-covered acres that became the Tunanui and Flaxmere stations, living rough and borrowing heavily. It was they who then battled through the courts for nearly 15 years to have their freehold purchase properly legalised. When Ham deserted New Zealand for the comforts of Europe in 1879, it was William who managed the Russell estates while in the first years of a distinguished 30-year career in colonial politics.
That year, Guy and Gertrude Russell sailed to England to visit family, including their sons—John, now at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and Andy, now studying at Oxford. On the itinerary of a planned ‘Grand Tour’ was business connected with the British Empire Service League; a visit to the former family seat at Lausanne in Switzerland—where he introduced his sons to mountaineering, as his father had earlier done for him—and a tour of old battlefields at Gallipoli and on the Western Front. They would be away from New Zealand for over a year.
In May 1925, Guy and Gertrude, along with 450 other ex-soldiers and dignitaries, visited Gallipoli for the unveiling of the New Zealand memorial on Chunuk Bair. Together with his former commander, General Godley, Guy tramped across the old battlegrounds where over 10,000 Anzacs had died just 10 years before. The original tracks and trenches, however, were by now much weathered and overgrown. Russell’s diary noted: ‘I climbed to my old HQ on Walker’s Ridge. Barely recognisable, though I guessed its position. Here and there a clip [ammunition], a bit of mess tin etc, still showed in the scrub. I expect plenty remains hidden.’
Although he was not a British citizen, Russell was invited to take an active part in the 1924 British general election on the side of the Conservatives. He was not averse to the idea; as he told his sisters, he considered the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin to be a man ‘prepared to stand or fall by what he considers good for the country . . . So different from old Massey.’
The result was some campaigning on behalf of Conservative candidates, including the prominent MP Leo Amery, who was then Secretary of State for the Colonies and Dominion Affairs. Russell spoke before audiences in Birmingham and Uxbridge and to 1000 people at a political meeting at Bow. His speech—to Labour and Communist party supporters in the main—was drowned out by a mass singing of ‘The Red Flag’. ‘A queer lot,’ Russell noted in his diary, ‘but not ugly.’ The Conservatives won a landslide victory that election, taking nearly 70 percent of the seats at Westminster.
Frequent illness dogged the Russells on their trip through Europe. Family letters covering their tour of Belgium, France and Turkey are a litany of sicknesses suffered en route, with one or the other of the family bedridden in hotels with heavy colds, flu, bronchitis and other ailments. Gertrude, prone to depression and a range of minor illnesses, seemed the worst affected.
In July 1925, their daughter Jan married Royal Navy officer Vero Kemball at Holy Trinity Church in London. The congregation included two former governors-general of New Zealand—Jellicoe and Liverpool—Lady Birdwood, the wife of Russell’s commander at Gallipoli, former defence minister Sir James Allen, and former NZMR Brigade commander Brigadier-General Edward Chaytor.
Returning home that year meant a return to the demands of station management in hard times. In September 1926, Guy wrote to his sisters: ‘Last year’s balance sheet appalling. Loss on Tunanui 3000 pounds, so with my own savings am 4000 pounds poorer than I was this time last year.’ The year 1927 he rated his ‘worst ever’ because of reduced carrying capacity, very low lambing, a poor wool clip, and losses in cattle.
Gertrude, with her own sources of income and much better off financially than her husband, was still able to indulge her love of gambling—on horse racing and also on the stock exchange. The year before, Russell noted with some unease that she had ‘£700–£800 out at present in wild gambles’. He himself did not mind spending 200 pounds on artificial fertiliser, where the results could be seen, but he did not enjoy risking money on what he could not control.
On the morning of 3 February 1931, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake—New Zealand’s most destructive—struck Hawke’s Bay. Napier and Hastings were hard hit; more than 250 people were killed and many thousands more were injured. Tunanui got off comparatively lightly: chimneys on the station, including those of the homestead itself, came crashing down and some damage was done to workers’ cottages. Riders along the ridge above the homestead saw great clouds of dust, shaken loose by the tremors, rising out of the deep gorges on the station.
Tunanui was now feeling the impact of a drought that had started the year before. Russell’s accounts for 1930/31 recorded another ‘devastating loss’, and those for the following year were not much better. Conditions had become so bad by November 1932 that Guy suggested to his sisters that they might have to take over Tunanui, presumably because he was finding it difficult to service their mortgages over the run: ‘Indeed I am beginning to look at it as yours already, and to resign myself to taking orders.’ By now, he was only just holding his own, cashing up a 3000-pound life insurance policy and making further cuts to staff wages. Guy told his sisters that he could reduce costs still further, but did not want to sack any of his staff as that would only add to nationwide unemployment. ‘Although I’ve made a 40% cut in wages, it now costs me 5 sheep per week per man, while 3 years ago it only cost me 3 sheep. We can’t go on for long on this scale. Something must and will crack.’
With the Government proposing to double taxation on large properties like Tunanui, Guy told his family in England that his options were to sell some more of the station and so get out of the class of ‘big’ landowner, or to simply ‘grin and bear it’: ‘The place can just about stand it as it is getting into a good payable state, but wool and meat are both falling.’
By this time, Russell’s sons, Andrew and John, were moving in a similar direction to their father’s from 40 years earlier. Andrew, now a successful Gisborne farmer after buying a 4000-acre (1619-hectare) property in a mortgagee sale in 1928, had joined a mounted rifles unit and now held a commission. John had completed officer training at Sandhurst and had been posted to the 1st Battalion of the Border Regiment, his father’s old unit, and was serving with the British Army in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq).
John’s lust for active soldiering in the Middle East rather than the life of a garrison soldier in England mirrored that of his father in the 1890s. He differed from his father, however, in his impatience with military history and theory—perhaps a reflection of the difference in their intellectual interests and capabilities. An active life in the open, doing things, had far more appeal for John. Russell was confident that this ‘rascal’ and ‘irresponsible youth’ would make a good soldier, but was worried that John’s unwillingness to study the theoretical side of his profession might limit his prospects of promotion.
At the end of the 1920s, Russell was still actively involved with the RSA, attending council meetings, leading delegations, visiting branch associations and generally advancing the interests of its members. Among the initiatives he proposed was a scheme to settle returned soldiers and British migrants on volcanic pumice country between Rotorua and Taupo. He envisaged that the scheme would be financed jointly by the New Zealand and British governments, on condition that 60 percent of the required labour would be admitted from ‘overseas’.269 Russell discussed the proposal personally with Prime Minister Gordon Coates in August 1928, but what happened to it subsequently is unclear.
By now, however, Guy Russell was growing tired of the relentless round of public activities; he complained to his sisters that he was attending too many public functions and making too many speeches. ‘They are a nuisance. I am not an orator and would fain avoid limelight and publicity.’ As always, the life of the mind was not neglected in the hectic round of farm management and public activities: ‘I’ve a host of good books in hand, and read them several at a time. Sir Edward Grey we’re reading, when the family will listen after dinner. I’m determined that tho’ Andy has to lead a strenuous outdoor life, his mind shall not starve for want of good reading and food for thought.’270