N.009
Daily Telegraph Sydney Tuesday December 23, 1941
The best man Australia can spare must be sent to the Empire's war council at Singapore.
He must have as much authority on the council as Britain's Far Eastern Minister, Mr Duff Cooper.
He must be empowered to make instant decisions on behalf of the Commonwealth.
The job calls for a man with an Australian and Pacific outlook-a big Australian who won't allow himself to be pushed around by Brass Hats or talked down by persuasive apologists who want to justify their own incompetence.
This isn't crying out because we think we might be hurt.
For more than two years Australia has ungrudgingly sent men and equipment to far-off theatres of war.
She has done this because she believes that the defence of the Empire is one and indivisible.
But the tragic revelations of unpreparedness in Malaya suggest that some people in Britain are less concerned about the Empire's security in the Pacific than we are.
Monday's London Daily Mail said: "There is a growing tendency in certain quarters to pretend that the Japanese war does not really matter and can be safely left for attention after Germany is finished."
That's why we must have a representative in Singapore who won't be afraid to talk straight.
The men we generally send abroad to represent us are not distinguished by the gift for straight talking.
Too many of them are retired or by-passed politicians, lazy rather than guilty men.
They are overawed by the company in which they find themselves abroad.
The idea of arguing in season and out of season for a project that Australia might consider important, but the poohbahs of Whitehall might not like, would never occur to them.
They have been encouraged in this supine attitude by their own Governments, which have always been ready to swallow endless quantities of soothing but profitless pap from abroad.
"Reactionary politicians of the British Empire, including Australia, are responsible for a great deal that all of us are now sorry for, and unfortunately suffer for," said the Prime Minister (Mr Curtin) yesterday.
He is right.
And our representatives abroad have generally been the kind of men to tune their ears eagerly to the admonishing "nays" of conservative British politicians.
For this reason they must take a fair share of the blame for the lack of fighter planes and other equipment in Malaya today.
Mr Stanley Melbourne Bruce, for example, is an ineffectual Elder Statesman, a discredited Chamberlainite.
How can such a man be expected to talk convincingly or passionately for Australia?
The most to be said for Sir Earle Page is that he is full of good intentions.
He was pushed off to London as a stopgap when Mr Menzies declined to go except as Prime Minister.
Political convenience gave one of the most urgent missions in Australia's history to a mediocrity.
Both Mr Bruce and Sir Earle Page should be replaced.
A strong Australian representative at Singapore must be backed up by equally insistent and effective London representation.
Not by party "friends" or political misfits.
Not by simple-minded gentlemen who can be back-slapped into any policy which suits Whitehall, but may not help the Empire.
Once upon a time Mr Menzies told us that we were a principal in the Pacific, a nation with primary responsibilities in this part of the world.
We can best serve the Empire and ourselves by acting like a principal.
Federal Government plans to send an Australian with drive and imagination to Singapore put our views with appropriate bluntness in the Singapore War Council.
The Government makes no secret that it disapproves the way its predecessors declined to set an Australian foreign policy to force any Australian outlook into Empire policy, and piously endorsed all assurances from Whitehall that all was for the best in the best of conservative worlds.
Members of the present Government said plainly while they were in Opposition that they hadn't any faith in some of the pensioned-off politicians appointed to represent us abroad.
But you can't put the Australian Government representative in Singapore, Mr Vivian G. Bowden, in this class.
In fact you can only call him Australian by courtesy of his birth certificate.
Mr Bowden is 57. He last lived in Australia as a schoolboy at Sydney Church of England Grammar School.
His education was finished in England, at Bedford School.
His first public appointment was as a silk inspector in China at the age of 21. He held that job for two years. In 1908 he went to a job in Japan, held it for six more years.
He enlisted in 1915. He was in France for four years, the last two as Deputy Assistant Director of Works.
Two years after the war he was appointed managing director of a British firm trading in Shanghai. That job held him until 1935 when the Lyons Government appointed him Australian Trade Commissioner in Shanghai.
On August 31 this year the UAP Government appointed him Government Representative in Singapore.
It might have been a good appointment if the Australian Government hadn't got the impression from its army chiefs and from England that all it required in Singapore was a man to answer letters about the possibility of selling butter and such like in Malaya.
The dean of our overseas representatives is Mr Stanley Melbourne Bruce, 58, a man of infinite polish, appreciation of the niceties of British official life, and of the arduous business of doing nothing in particular, but doing it very well.
He was a handsome youth, fairly tall, impeccably dressed. Naturally, he became captain of Melbourne Grammar School, the most fashionable public school in Melbourne at the beginning of the century.
He makes an especial note of that in his autobiography in "Who's Who".
From Melbourne Grammar School, Mr Bruce went to Cambridge and took an Arts degree. In 1908 he was called to the English Bar.
In the last war he enlisted in England, and was wounded at Gallipoli and in France. In 1917 he was invalided out of the army and went back to Melbourne.
His polish and his record as a gallant young officer won him the Federal seat of Flinders in the 1918 elections.
Two years later he was Federal Treasurer. In 1923 he was Prime Minister.
The post-war boom was beginning. Mr Bruce had the easiest job that ever a Prime Minister had and he did it with graceful assurance.
Then the depression came. Mr Bruce led his party into the 1929 elections with a plan to put the Arbitration Court under political control. Labor won. In his own previously Tory seat of Flinders Mr Bruce was defeated by the present Social Services Minister, Mr EJ Holloway.
For two years Mr Bruce spent most of his time playing golf near his Flinders mansion at a secluded little course run by a little syndicate and vulgarly known to the inhabitants as the "Millionaire's".
In 1931 Labor was defeated. Mr Bruce stood again for Flinders and won. But the late Mr Joseph Lyons crossed the floor of the House and his colleagues looked for a job for Mr Bruce out of Australia.
In 1932 they sent him to London as Resident Minister. The following year his position was reviewed and he resigned from the Government to become Australian High Commissioner in London.
That was the last we saw of Mr Bruce, except for a short visit at the end of 1938.
He had greyed. He remarked, cheerfully enough, on the number of "new faces" he met here.
At public banquets he told us that the late Mr Chamberlain could not be criticised as a leader; that Munich was the only possible solution to German aggression; and that anybody who said anything different did not know what he was talking about.
On January 26, 1939, a Daily Telegraph editorial said that Mr Bruce spoke more like an emissary of Chamberlain than an Australian High Commissioner.
When the war started, the Australian Government could not locate Mr Bruce. Finally he was found golfing in the South of France.
His job, theoretically, is to tell the British War Cabinet what Australia thinks should be done.
British convention demands him to go and tell the Dominions Office. The Dominions Office is not represented in War Cabinet.
Helping Mr Bruce in London is Sir Earle Page, 61, with title of special envoy.
He reached there at the end of October, under instructions from the Fadden Government and confirmation from the Curtin Government.
Choice of Sir Earle Page to go to London had a political string.
Mr Menzies had gone earlier in the year as Prime Minister. He had come back to defeat, but before he gave place to Mr Fadden, many members of his own party had tried to wrangle him away, back to London.
Mr Menzies wanted to go to London, but he wanted to go as Prime Minister.
When Mr Menzies fell, Sir Earle Page was chosen.
So away went Sir Earle Page.
He was no polished Bruce. He was a country doctor, who, having made good in Macquarie Street as a very fine surgeon, got into politics and stayed there by a remarkable shrewdness in anticipating which way the cat was going to jump, and jumping before it.
He went into Federal politics just after the war, and became leader of the Country Party in 1920. He held the job until 1939 with spells as Acting Prime Minister in 1926-27, 1935 and 1937, and as Prime Minister for a fortnight after the death of Mr Lyons in 1939.
His views on Empire strategy have frequently coincided with those of Labor leaders in Australia. At the beginning of last year, he said over and over that he did not think Australian troops should go west of Suez; that if troops were sent out of the country they should be stationed where they could easily be recalled.
He was at his best, though, as Commerce Minister, dealing with crops and sheep and all the things that still appealed to a countryman even after 20 years in Parliament.
Now the British chiefs in Singapore are accused of having misled Sir Earle Page about Pacific strength when he passed through the base on his way to London.
He said that Pacific defences had improved to an almost inconceivable degree during the last 12 months, but when he reached London, he was going to ask for them to be strengthened still more.
The third important man in Australia's foreign representation is the Minister to Washington, Mr R G Casey.
In the reference books he reads rather like Mr S M Bruce.
Melbourne Church of England Grammar School led to Cambridge. Instead of law, he took engineering. He fought last war, and worked as an engineer in various firms until 1924.
He really had plenty of money, but Mr Casey is a serious man with a lot of application.
In 1924, he was appointed political liaison officer in London between the Australian and British Governments.
The job didn't matter two hoots, considering that the Australian Government had nothing to say on political matters to the British Governments, but Mr Casey worked at it very hard.
Mr Casey was well thought of in London.
In 1931 he became Federal member for Corio, a seat just over Melbourne Bay from Mr Bruce's. (It's Labor, now, with growing industries).
Mr Casey took only two years to become Treasurer. He held ministerial office almost continually until he was sent to Washington in February, 1940.
He made a very good first impression on America. He bought an aeroplane, and set out to see America and learn the job.
He has had an astonishingly good press.
He looked very like Mr Anthony Eden, and Americans had always thought fairly well of Mr Eden, and, anyway, as a British diplomat, he has been a pleasant change from Britain's Lord Halifax.
Another Australian holding an important job is the Minister to China, Sir Frederick Eggleston.
He was a Nationalist MLA in Victoria from 1920-27, holding the portfolios of Water Supply, Railways, Attorney-General, and Solicitor-General.
He is a solicitor by profession.
He was known in Melbourne as a keen student of Pacific and of international affairs.
"We must not be pessimistic about the Pacific problem," he explained before he left for Chungking. "With patience, care, and the spirit of mutual goodwill, it will be possible to arrive at peace in the Pacific."
However, he was able to foresee one thing:-
"The problems of Britain are in the Atlantic; the problems of Australia are in the Pacific," he said. "It is likely, therefore, that different points of view may arise."
Chungking so far hasn't honored [sic] Australia with any important communication through him. It has talked direct with London.
Sir Bertram Stevens (52) has been Australian representative, Eastern Group Supply Council, Delhi, since January, 1941.
He is the man who contracted for Australia to supply about £20,000,000 worth of supplies and munitions to the Council, including boots and blankets, the export of which created an acute shortage here.
The Supply Minister (Mr Beasley) was an especially keen critic of Sir Bertram before Labor took office.
Sir Bertram wrote to Mr Beasley promising co-operation.
Mr Beasley and his colleagues confirmed the appointment.
Sir Bertram was UAP Premier of New South Wales between 1932 and 1939. He lost the Premiership after a party revolt against his leadership.
Australia's High Commissioner in Canada, Major-General Sir Thomas Glasgow, completes the list. He was appointed a year ago, at the age of 65.
News editors all over Australia urgently rang Queensland to find out what was known of the Major-General since he left Federal politics in 1929.
The Major-General had been out on his station at Dingo.
He fought in the South African war and the 1914 war. He became a Queensland Senator in 1920, Home Defence Minister in 1926 and 1927, and Defence Minister between 1927 and 1929.
Cabled news has contained no recent references to his activities.