‘God grant Australia never will have mothers
Like Pankhurst, Goldstein, John and all their crew
Our boys must fight today
And never will I say
I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier.’

– Quoted in the Woman Voter, 23 December 1915

In August 1914 thousands of young Australian men had gone off to war with the cheering of crowds, fervent speeches and the pomp of brass bands ringing in their ears. So many had enlisted that the government could not control troop numbers, and from January to April 1915 an average of 8000 per month enlisted.¹

And then came Gallipoli, the campaign to carry out an amphibious landing on the Gallipoli peninsula to open up a second front and a passage through the Dardanelles. In the weeks following the landing, Australians gloried in the exploits of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps; the French, British and other allies were given only a cursory mention, though their numbers, and losses, turned out to be much greater. In July and August, when the Anzacs were under siege from Turkish forces, enduring a brutal and costly war of attrition with heavy casualties, thousands of Australian men – who had been told nothing of this, thanks to war censorship – enlisted.

The losses continued, and Hughes decided to act. Under the War Census Act in September 1915, Australian citizens were required to complete a Wealth and Income Card, stating their assets. Hughes said he was ordering this not to introduce conscription but to gain a clear idea of ‘our resources both in men and material’. His denial that it was a step towards introducing conscription was greeted with scepticism in many quarters: conscription had been a possibility for a long time, and Hughes strongly favoured it.

Vida flew into a fury at what she considered yet one more example of government control. ‘I furnish this information under protest because it is asked for in the interests of war,’ she wrote in the Woman Voter. ‘I believe the war should be fought and paid for by those who, believing in war, have incomes over and above £300 per annum. Those who have less are engaged in one long war against unjust social conditions, and I believe they should be exempt from any other compulsory national service than that of trying to obtain for themselves and their children the bare necessities of life.’²

Australian soldiers had been evacuated from the Gallipoli peninsula by December 1915, and in March 1916 the government decided that the infantry divisions would be sent to France. In July 1916, when the 1st Division of the AIF took part in the first assault on Pozières on the Somme, trying to force a breach in the German lines, more than 5000 Australians were killed. The tally of dead and wounded rose remorselessly, and as the killing went on people in the streets of Melbourne, Sydney, the other capital cities and small towns all across Australia began learning the names of places in northern France and Belgium they had never known existed. Thiepval. Mouquet Farm. Fromelles. Flers. Municipal noticeboards in towns and cities bore the names of young men, often from the same family, printed in fresh gold paint. Families all over the country came to dread the sight of a telegram boy cycling towards their home.

Recruitment was down and faltering: the eager rush to war had stalled. And as the killing increased, pro- and anti-pacifist attitudes were hardening. Pro-war lobbyists, abetted by the papers, were calling for Australian losses to be avenged; pacifists pleaded for an end to the carnage.

Vida’s only brother, Selwyn, whom she had visited in England in 1911, had been commissioned lieutenant into the British Army’s Royal Engineers in October 1915. Now a rather heavy-jawed man with his sister’s level glance and dark eyes, Selwyn was older, at forty-two, than many others who had joined up, but as an engineer and a worker behind the lines he was unlikely to be cannon fodder in Belgium. However fond of him Vida might have been, in her public speeches she never mentioned having a brother at the front. She could only continue her work for peace in Melbourne and hope that he survived.

As the news from the front became increasingly grim, Vida and her colleagues who were speaking, writing and handing out pamphlets were sometimes in actual physical danger from threatening crowds. They chose to ignore this for the most part, and Cecilia John and Adela Pankhurst were especially dauntless. When the Women’s Peace Army was refused the use of the Mechanics’ Hall in Sunbury for a pacifist meeting, John clambered on top of her car parked outside and used it as her platform. On another occasion, she was charged with obstruction, taken to court and fined £1 with 10 shillings costs. She refused to pay the fine and asked for the case to be reviewed in chambers, where it was quashed.

Adela, a ‘small modish lady with an English complexion’, and John, described as having a strength of character ‘rare in a member of the fair sex’, were an intrepid duo. They embarked on a peace mission to Brisbane and Sydney, partially funded by donations to the Woman Voter. Adela in particular became notorious for leading audiences in singing the banned song ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier’, knowing she was likely to be arrested:

I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier

I brought him up to be my pride and joy

Who dares to put a musket on his shoulder

To kill some other mother’s darling boy?

The nations ought to arbitrate their quarrels

It’s time to put the sword and gun away

There’d be no war today

If mothers all would say

I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier.

Under her spirited conducting, the whole audience would sing along with gusto. The military authorities were helpless – they couldn’t arrest everybody in the hall.³

At one Socialist Party gathering at the Bijou Theatre, Melbourne, Adela was billed to speak on ‘Shall Men Enlist? The Woman’s Answer’. The hall was packed with soldiers who had decided to take revenge on another speaker who had criticised the army. As soon as this man began speaking, the soldiers began singing and shouting, drowning him out; he persevered, leading the audience in a chorus of ‘The Red Flag’.

When John rose to sing ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier’, the soldiers in the hall chanted numbers to drown her out. Adela, who was sitting on the stage, was next to speak, but when she began, she could not be heard over the jeering and catcalling of the crowd. One soldier climbed onto the stage and made a deal with the other soldiers that they would remain quiet for Adela if he was allowed to speak for five minutes afterwards. This was agreed. So one soldier was listened to, while two women were not. The truce lasted for only a few minutes, and Adela was interrupted when soldiers rushed the platform.⁴

Mabel Singleton, who was in the audience, then climbed onto the stage, and she and John stood on either side of Adela to protect her. According to newspaper accounts, some of the soldiers used ‘the filthiest language’ to the women. There were military and civilian police in the crowd but they refused to intervene: their view was that the Socialist Party had called the meeting and it was up to them to control it.

Adela finished speaking and the soldier began his five-minute speech. But the level of noise and abuse did not diminish, and at this point Vida, who had come to support her friends, decided to act. Climbing onto a chair on the stage – helped by two soldiers who supported and defended her – she pleaded for order, her voice evidently carrying above the noise. The crowd eventually subsided.

After the meeting, one Major Macinerney from the military police bustled into the hall and ordered the civilians out. The non-soldiers became aggressive, making plain that they resented his order. Vida said calmly, ‘You are making a mistake in ordering the audience to go. It is likely to cause trouble. If you ask them to leave, quietly and courteously, they will go.’

Whether the major resented being told what to do by a woman or genuinely felt he was in the right, he wasn’t giving in just yet. ‘If you say I have spoken discourteously, I beg to join issue with you, madam,’ he replied.

Vida just said, ‘You have done so, and you are making a mistake.’

Aware that the feeling of the meeting was swinging in Vida’s favour, Macinerney capitulated with very bad grace. He marched his men out, joking as he did so, while Vida, Cecilia John and Adela looked on.

A few days later one of Macinerney’s men boasted to a grinning crowd outside The Age office that he had helped stop ‘the Pankhurst meeting’ at the Bijou. He then led the crowd in a different version of ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier’:

I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier

But as a soldier he’s my pride and joy

I’d have him bear a musket on his shoulder

Like every patriot mother’s darling boy.

God grant Australia never will have mothers

Like Pankhurst, Goldstein, John and all their crew;

Our boys must fight today

And never will I say

I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier.

Naturally the press gave Pankhurst, Goldstein, John and all their crew no credit for their efforts in preventing a riot at the Bijou. As usual The Argus led the pack, accusing them of having ‘an unbalanced mind, a glib tongue, an absolute lack of self-restraint, and a wanton delight in giving offence’, with no mention of the soldiers and their actions. ‘In normal times the vapourings of socialists, feminists and pacifists can be tolerated without much risk of harm resulting. But in a period of national crisis no one should be permitted to outrage the sensibilities of a loyal community.’⁵

Just before Christmas 1915 Fred Katz, the secretary of the Federated Clerks’ Union, who had spoken against the government’s issue of recruitment cards, was attacked in his office by about fifty returned soldiers, largely because of his German name. They poured hot tar over his head, scattered feathers all over his body, and pushed him down a flight of stairs. A woman journalist who ‘remonstrated with them for their cowardly attack’ was rolled in tar on the floor. Vida and John reported the affair in the Woman Voter and complained about the treatment of Katz and the journalist to the head of the local militia, who ignored it. Given that Vida also had a family name that was assumed to be German, it was courageous of her to make a fuss, little good though it did. Her action in reporting the incident was described by The Argus as ‘premature and unnecessary, not to say theatrical’. All Vida could do was assure the readers of the Woman Voter that ‘the facts are as we have related them’.⁶

These events, and others, had their effect. The Women’s Peace Army had to cancel a Christmas peace service at which the children of the members had been scheduled to sing: they decided they could not guarantee the children’s safety. It was clear, Vida thought, that the civil and military authorities could not be depended upon to maintain law and order when they had decided they didn’t want to do so.

After the Bijou Theatre incident, civic authorities moved to ban the use of licensed halls for Sunday meetings, so the WPA moved its rallies to the banks of the Yarra. Since the 1890s the south bank of the river near the present-day Alexandra Gardens had been Melbourne’s equivalent of Sydney’s Domain or London’s Hyde Park: an open-air meeting place for argument and discussion. Having also been a casual-labour marketplace and gathering spot for unionists, it had gradually evolved – not without council and government opposition – into a people’s forum. Generally speaking the city council discouraged preaching and public argument in city parks and gardens, but they continued to allow it at Yarra Bank, presumably as some kind of safety valve. (Yarra Bank holds an honoured place in Australian labour history. Prime Minister John Curtin later referred to it as his university, and James Scullin, also a prime minister, had introduced Ramsay MacDonald to a crowd there in 1906.)

Now the bank was the scene of riotous behaviour and concentrated aggression towards supporters of pacifism. Some anti-conscription speakers untied their shoelaces before they addressed the crowd so they could kick off their shoes if they were thrown into the Yarra. At one meeting Vida, John and Adela were due to speak and two soldiers jumped onto the improvised platform and stood in front of the women, using ‘vile language’. One of them said, ‘If anyone here would do to these women what the Germans did to the women of Belgium, I’d stand by and watch them do it with pleasure.’

Fred Riley, secretary of the APA, climbed up beside Vida to protect her. One soldier shouted, ‘Let’s get this [expletive] mongrel out of the way, then we’ll get her!’ Another struck Riley violently on the head, and about thirty men decided to throw him into the river. He hit out in self-defence, the police came and he was arrested for ‘riotous behaviour’. The meeting broke up and Vida, John and Adela, all shaken, went to the police station to bail out Riley. At the City Court he was fined £2 or fourteen days’ gaol. He refused to pay the fine on principle, but the Women’s Peace Army paid it for him. He had chivalrously defended them, they said, and they would not let him suffer any more on their account.⁷