by James Philip
The Country Party had no direct analogue in the British Parliament. Formed as long ago as 1913 in Western Australia it had become a national entity after the First World War by dint of the amalgamation of the Victorian Farmers’ Union, and the Farmers and Settlers Party of New South Wales, winning its first seat in the House of Representatives in December 1918.
As its name inferred it was the party of the ‘country’ or the outback which harked back to ‘old fashioned’ and ‘settler’ values and resented the growing power of the privileged urban majority. The preoccupations of farmers and sheep men and the innumerable far flung small communities very nearly lost in the vastness of the continental interior were not those of the cities, and unsurprisingly the party had always reflected a natural political conservatism.
Throughout its history ‘countrymindedness’ was its enduring slogan. Unashamedly populist; concerned primarily with the inherent wealth of the land and innately decentralist its ideology sought to justify the establishment of, and to defend rural state and governmental subsidies. The Party feasted on the sense of injustice in ‘the country’, the sense that its constituency had been bypassed by the boom in the wealth and population of the cities starting in the 1890s. Later, as ‘country people’ were compelled to migrate into the cities in search of work they brought with them their ‘countrymindedness’ and thereafter the party was always a small but influential player on the national stage; as fate would have it frequently placed to play kingmaker when the major parties failed to secure outright majorities in Parliament[101].
In 1941 the withdrawal of the Country Party’s support for Robert Menzies’s United Australia Party – UAP - had ended his first two year spell as Prime Minister; in fact it had so disorientated an increasingly tired and directionless UAP that the Party had fragmented and been re-made as the Liberal Party of Australia under Menzies’s leadership in 1944.
What goes around comes around; in 1949 Country Party disdain for Ben Chifley’s Labour Government had swept the Liberals and the Country Party back into power. John McEwen had ridden the rollercoaster of his Party’s changing fortunes and survived the schisms within it after Menzies’s wartime fall from grace. The Party, under the leadership of Arthur Fadden, had even briefly held power[102], quickly being forced out of office and two years later comprehensively rejected by the Australian electorate in 1943.
John McEwen, Fadden’s eventual successor had served as Robert Menzies’s loyal lieutenant – albeit one with an absolute veto, a true political ‘nuclear’ option if he chose to use it because its use was always likely to eject both parties from power – while developing and fighting for an essentially Country Party model to guide future Australian international trade. He was determined to pursue an Australia first policy which sought to protect home producers against outside fluctuations in the international trade cycle, and a move away from all the former Imperial legacy policies that successive British governments had sought to propagate throughout the post-1945 Commonwealth. Under ‘McEwenism’ a comprehensive trade deal with Japan, the emerging potential economic superpower of the Western Pacific, new agreements with New Zealand to strengthen and integrate their economies, a re-writing of the basis of ‘business as normal’ with the United Kingdom were all either done and dusted, or in the pipeline at the time of the Cuban Missiles Crisis[103]. The October War destroyed much of what he had been working for ever since 1949 in a single night.
At that time the Liberal-Country Party coalition had a wafer-thin one seat majority in the Australian House of Representatives[104]. Had not John McEwen stood solidly, defiantly behind Robert Menzies in the spring of 1963 there might not have been such a thing as Operation Manna, or the robust global alliance that the Commonwealth of Nations eventually became, and the history of the World, of us all, would have been very different.
Why John McEwen embraced, and subsequently supported Menzies’s grandiose ‘internationalist’ agenda – a decision that was to condemn the Country Party to the political wilderness within only a few years – is a thing which has baffled his biographers.
It might simply have been that all the alternatives to ditching his ‘Australia first’ beliefs were as disastrously bad as each other. In times of dire national crisis small political parties either blaze in the firmament like supernovas or perish like moths consumed by the fire.
Perhaps, when all was said and done it was his innate patriotism that forced him to confront the least of all the possible evils. How best was Australia to survive and flourish in the half-wrecked brave new World?
Possibly, he and the leadership of the Country Party was by then so much in Robert Menzies’s thrall that he and they were swept along by the euphoria of suddenly standing at the forefront of global affairs.
Or more prosaically, when the Australian Labour Party – at a special conference called in Canberra in the first week of March – offered to form a ‘National Government for the duration of the current emergency’, John McEwen saw the writing on the wall and decided – as politicians are wont to do – that being in opposition was a miserable prospect and therefore determined to postpone it a little while longer.[105]
Do John McEwen’s motives matter?
Perhaps, probably not in the broad sweep of history or in what we laughingly call the ‘long-term’; nothing is ‘long-term’ at the time and nobody can really predict how future generations will view one’s actions.
John McEwen could have delayed Operation Manna.
John McEwen could have undermined Menzies’s government.
He did neither and because he supported Robert Menzies in that critical hour countless people in the United Kingdom lived who might otherwise have starved to death.
So, when you remember the great heroes of this immediate post-cataclysm era by all means remember the names of Sir Robert Menzies and Julian Christopher, William Philip Sidney, Viscount De L'Isle, et al but please, spare a moment to remember John McEwen also.
Chapter 26 | The Abadan Pipeline
Wednesday 26th March 1963
HMS Centaur, Shatt al-Arab
Lord Home and the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir David Luce had flown into RAF Abadan some thirty-six hours ago before being transferred by helicopter to the aircraft carrier moored in the deep water channel some ten miles below the great refinery complex. Farther down the great waterway several loaded tankers lay awaiting the weekend high tides to negotiate the shifting sands across the mouth of the estuary carrying the waters of the Euphrates and the Tigris into the Persian Gulf.
The Centaur – by post-war standards a ‘light’ carrier of some twenty-two thousand tons capable of operating over thirty aircraft - and her screening destroyers and frigates would shepherd the small convoy south to Madagascar before handing them off to the South African Navy. The tankers were to stay far out to sea where the risk of piracy was minimal; but this restarting of the Abadan ‘pipeline’ was the symbol of things to come and nobody wanted anything to go wrong. Of course, had Colonel Nasser re-opened the Suez Canal life would have been much easier for all concerned but the Royal Navy had always prided itself on its ability to confront the challenges in front of it, rather than the ones it wished it was facing. Nasser, Egypt and the Canal were presently matters in the hands of the Foreign and Colonial Office, not the Ministry of Defence.[106]
The Foreign Secretary was still stinging with frustration that his latest overture to the Egyptian regime had been peremptorily dismissed, suspecting that the real problem was not the ‘old colonial power’ in the region but the meddling of the US State Department. Although man to man he had always got on well with Dean Rusk, his American counterpart, the trouble probably lay with the ‘middle east cabal’ in Washington; no more than an Ivy League proxy for the big American oil companies who clearly saw the present crisis as a marvellous opportunity to elbow their British rivals out of the region.
‘Do you think the Kennedy Administration is serious about its proposed Peace Dividend cutbacks, David?�
�� Home asked the elegant man in tropical whites standing beside him on the deck of the carrier.
The Foreign Secretary wore a lightweight lounge suit, a Panama crammed on his head as they watched the Westland Wessex helicopter bearing the freshly arrived VIPs from Australia over the blue-grey muddy waters swirling down towards the Gulf some thirty miles to the south.
When the subject of this conference had first been raised a fortnight ago the plan had been for the Prime Minister to lead the delegation from Cheltenham; then there had been renewed food riots in the north west, Washington had finally despatched an Ambassador to the United Kingdom, and the US Treasury had declared the British Government in default[107] over a wide range of debt instruments going back to 1945, and the pound sterling – previously holding at around $1.15 against the dollar, had briefly become virtually worthless overnight before creeping back up to $0.35 during March 1963.[108]
The Army had swiftly snuffed out the trouble around the wrecked city of Liverpool and in the inhabitable margins of Greater London but as ‘one thing after another’ beset the hard-pressed UKIEA Edward Heath had finally decided that his place was in England.
The Ministry of Supply had asked to be represented at the ‘Centaur talks’; but that also had fallen through much to the Foreign Secretary’s relief. The thought of spending several days travelling and cooped up onboard a warship with Margaret Thatcher had positively set his teeth on edge. The woman had a shrill, hectoring way about her that brought out the worst in him. He might have found a use for Airey Neave, the lady’s peripatetic chief of staff and deputy – some said ‘admirer’ – but the poor chap had recently gone down with dysentery on his travels.
‘To be blunt, sir,’ the First Sea Lord guffawed, ‘very little surprises me about the news coming out of Washington!’
Margaret Thatcher had not so much bent as metaphorically seized the nation’s senior military man’s ear the day before he left England for the Gulf. While Sir David found the woman’s manner ‘pushy’ and on occasions ‘less than collegiate’ he could not fault her tireless, ever methodical management of her department within the Emergency Administration. She was the national ‘rationing queen’ and if anybody got in her way then there was going to be trouble. That she had already earned the sobriquet of ‘the angry widow’ was a thing that she accepted with no little pride.
‘Somebody jolly well ought to be bloody angry!’ She had retorted in Cabinet when another minister had complained about her ‘enforcement and scavenging teams’ using ‘bully boy tactics’ and ignoring normal inter-departmental boundaries. ‘I am very angry about a lot of things. Especially, when I hear of other departments hoarding vital supplies because they believe it will enhance their bargaining position in this room!’
The Prime Minister had almost choked on his cup of tea.
He had, however, let the remarks go uncontested which spoke volumes for how impressed he was with his junior colleague’s achievements to date.
The approaching helicopter flared out and sank towards the deck, which was empty bar a pair of Westland Whirlwind helicopters parked near the stern. All the aircraft of Centaur’s fixed-wing air group had flown off to nearby RAF Abadan ahead of her navigating the Shatt al-Arab, and were not scheduled to rejoin the vessel until she was safely back in Gulf waters.
Sir Robert Menzies stepped stiffly down to the deck, a crewman hanging onto his right arm while he steadied on his feet. Next out of the cabin of the Wessex was the tall, patrician figure of Julian Christopher, who was immediately joined by Commodore Donald Gibson, and finally by a blinking, squinting, clearly disorientated Athol Townley, Menzies’s Minister of Defence.
Centaur’s commanding officer, Captain Philip Sharp stepped forward, saluted crisply and greeted his guests with a broad, welcoming smile. Although he knew the Foreign Secretary needed no introduction to the newcomers, David Luce did ‘the honours’ anyway.
‘Good to see you again, Julian,’ he chuckled finally, clasping the C-in-C British Pacific Fleet’s hand.
The old friends nodded tight-lipped one to the other.
A light lunch had been prepared in the Wardroom, after which the conference got under way with Captain Sharp’s secretary and a senior non-commissioned ‘writer’ taking verbatim notes of the discussions.
CINCBPACFLT began by summarising the tactical situation on the Far East Station and in the South Pacific including Australasian waters.
1. RN, RAN and RNZN ships are operating as a single operational fleet – this to continue to 31st August 1963 and thereafter to be reviewed on a month by month basis.
2. Insurgency in Borneo has worsened – ALBION task group currently deploying and supporting elements of 40 and 42 Commando and SBS operations in support of garrison infantry forces in situ. Casualties suffered since 1st January 1963 – 34 dead and 72 seriously injured (35 of these men have since returned to duty).
3. US Navy has ceased all surface operations below 10 degrees South in CINCBPACFLT theatre of operations.
Julian Christopher’s ships were spread far and wide across vast expanses of the South West Pacific. He had privately expected the Kennedy Administration to react with more than just stern – and sporadically intemperate - words to the Saint Paul Incident and he had deployed widely dispersed ‘pickets’ across the theatre to provide a ‘tripwire’ response in the event the US Navy was minded to exact revenge in kind in the form of another, possibly more forceful foray into his waters.
That the Americans had just announced deep cuts to all three of their armed services was the first piece of good news the C-in-C had heard in weeks.
Notwithstanding, he was having to rotate his frigates and destroyers through the Albion task group operating in the South China Sea north of Borneo, and in support of similar, albeit less intensive, counter-insurgency operations mounted by a flotilla in company with the small carrier HMAS Melbourne.
Given the intensity of operations since the October War the fact that many of his ships had been able to send fifteen to twenty percent of their men ashore – courtesy of his ‘general rotation policy’ - replaced by Australian and Kiwi reservists recovering their sea legs, had been a real boon.
Five weeks ago Julian Christopher has specifically requested Centaur be sent to reinforce his command. Sooner or later the big ships of the British Pacific Fleet were going to have to return to northern waters and he had promised Robert Menzies that at that time there would be at least one British carrier in Australasian waters, thereby ensuring that it or the Melbourne would always be available for operations.
4. CINCBPACFLT expressed his assessment of the likely effects of US retrenchment in the Western Pacific as ‘troubling’. He did not believe that China had been as badly damaged in the recent war as the Soviet Union. US weakness in the region threatened the security of Taiwan, re-awakened the possibility of Chinese territorial aggrandisement in the Korean peninsula and increased the likelihood of an intensified civil war in Vietnam.
5. CINCBPACFLT did not think Singapore was any less tenable as a Commonwealth base of operations at this time. However, he added the caveat that this presupposed that pressure was maintained on the rebels in Borneo to deter Indonesian territorial ambitions in the theatre.
6. CINCBPACFLT discounted fears that Argentina might seek to block UK trade via Cape Horn – Falklands but confided he planned to station at least two ‘gunboats’ at Port Stanley during the autumn phase of Operation Manna.[109]
It is hard nowadays to come to terms with the idea that in the aftermath of the October War practically everybody believed that the old World Order had broken down. In retrospect the notion that the high seas had suddenly turned into some kind of lawless oceanic Wild West is palpably ridiculous; but at the time no ship owner could insure his vessel – Lloyds of London no longer existed and nobody else immediately picked up the burden – and in the febrile, panicky mood of the times it was easy to imagine rogue Soviet submarines preying on the world’s sea lanes, and of disaffected and
embittered seafarers turning to piracy.
It was madness but we did not know it at the time.
Besides, in that atmosphere of fear and uncertainty it was as important to persuade merchant sea-goers that they were safe, as it was to actually physically protect them.
That was why Julian Christopher had dispersed his ships across the main Australasian harbours and the far flung islands and archipelagos of the South Western Pacific; not because he believed there was a genuine, real or immediate threat to be countered but because he understood that a part – perhaps, the greater part – of his job, his duty, was to offer the peoples of those lands whatever assurance it was within his gift to give.
The ‘Centaur Talks’ were about unlocking the logjam; re-opening global sea lanes and keeping them open. Merchant ships were still in the wrong places, or locked up in ports, and many vessels had paid off. The giant engine of oceanic trade had stalled and already it was rusting. It was a time for grand gestures and the promulgation of World-shaking plans.
The first grand gesture would be restarting the ‘Abadan pipeline’; safely despatching tankers from the Persian Gulf bearing Iranian and Saudi Arabian oil back to England where, despite the war, some seventy-five percent of refining capacity had survived undamaged. Problematically, all those refineries had been operating at minimal capacity since January for want of supplies of American and Middle Eastern crude. The United States had turned off the tap and it had taken the Royal Navy two months to collect, rescue and convoy half-a-dozen medium-sized to large tankers to Dammam and Abadan.