Tiberius with a Telephone

by Patrick Mullins

  As the year concluded so, too, did McMahon’s law studies. He finished the last of his exams in February 1933 and awaited his results. In March, there was news. ‘I notice the University Law examinations results are in the paper this morning,’ Arthur Allen recorded on 14 March. ‘McMahon, in our office, got through in all his subjects.’52

  McMahon was promoted to managing clerk soon afterwards.53 He talked in later life of acting for the Bank of New South Wales and the Commonwealth Bank, but his exact role is unclear. It is the familiar puzzle of legal biography: lawyers are shadows, mouthing words that are not theirs, acting for interests that are not their own. On the basis of McMahon’s presence at Allen Allen & Hemsley, it is reasonable to assume that he was good at the work. He would not have been kept around for long had he been anything else.

  Meanwhile, Norman Cowper began to shake at the foundations of Allen Allen & Hemsley. The gentleman solicitor’s concerns were initially personal. In 1933, he murmured discontentedly about his future.54 His efforts to break into politics had proved fruitless. He had considered going to the bar. He was agitated. Arthur Allen tried to assuage him, initially with success. ‘I had a very nice letter from Norman Cowper appreciating the suggestions made by us to him for the future,’ Allen wrote afterward.55 But two years later, Cowper’s concerns had resurfaced. He was a partner of the firm and the driver of much of its work. He had a good salary, more than £1,000 per annum. Yet he was souring and restless. Another firm had offered him a position; he had nothing to lose. Cowper demanded that his salary be doubled. When Allen demurred, Cowper asked why he received only a salary and not a share of the profits. Allen told Cowper that there were no profits. ‘No profits!’

  Cowper did not believe the misanthropic heritor, so he called his bluff. ‘If there are no profits, let’s share the losses.’56

  Cowper’s concerns were not entirely self-serving. He could foresee that the genteel and nepotistic inclinations rife among law firms would soon be replaced by a hard-nosed sense of business. For Allen Allen & Hemsley to survive, he believed, it needed to change. Training and retaining talent with the prospect of promotion and reward was the only way to ensure the firm did not ossify.

  His efforts to drive change were aided by upheaval within the firm. Taken ill in January 1936, Alfred Hemsley died in July the following year. In between, Allen Allen & Hemsley vacated its offices on Castlereagh Street and moved to the APA building in Martin Place.

  All this left Cowper the dominant figure. He used that dominance to pull Allen Allen & Hemsley into the future. He led efforts to recruit partners and poach people irrespective of the autobiography of a school tie. In doing so, he brought energy to Allen Allen & Hemsley, expanded the list of partners, and ensured opportunity was present.

  The effect was not lost on Arthur Allen. Early in 1939, as McMahon neared completion of his articles, Allen spoke with him about his future. It was a time for decisions.57

  Whether to confirm himself as a solicitor or go to the bar was a decision made at the end of a clerkship. McMahon had hoped to become a barrister for years. It may have stemmed from a desire to one-up his father, or to place himself in the most conspicuous place possible, at the centre of attention. He had the talents for it: he was able to speak to and charm different audiences, modulating his approach as needed; he was thorough in preparation and able to prosecute arguments.

  But it was not to be. McMahon had begun to go deaf. He found himself missing snatches of conversation, and unable to hear arguments. The realisation that this precluded him from becoming a barrister was stark. ‘I would have gone to the bar without any doubt had it not been for that difficulty,’ he lamented later.58

  He chose the only course open to him. On 10 March 1939, he was admitted as a solicitor.59 There was some consolation. Arthur Allen made the necessary arrangements for the newly admitted lawyer. A few weeks later, all was done. ‘I wrote a letter this morning to Bill McMahon confirming my promise to take him in as a partner now that he is a Solicitor,’ Allen wrote on 3 April, ‘the partnership to begin as from 1st instant.’60

  In accepting the offer, McMahon became only the eighteenth partner at Allen Allen & Hemsley.61 The offer would not have been made without Cowper’s efforts to shake up the firm and to modernise it. Nor would it have even been in prospect without the model of discipline and hard work that Cowper provided to his young clerk.

  Yet it is possible, for only the second time, to discern in the offer of the partnership some recognition of McMahon’s work and discipline. He had evidently worked well enough to earn the advancement. And he reaped its rewards for years.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Central Figure

  1984

  Bowman put his criticisms to McMahon at the end of January 1984. The autobiography’s structure was unsatisfactory, he said. There was no start, no end. The book jumped from point to point, and was written in a needlessly official manner, he said. It had a gaping hole at the centre. It needed to develop and unfold more naturally and more smoothly. It had to be coherent. It had to be a narrative, to tell a story.

  ‘The unifying factor,’ Bowman argued later, putting his concerns into writing, ‘is the central figure — what he does, what he knows, what he thinks — and only rarely should he step aside for some other character to dominate the stage.’1

  What was required was a nearly complete overhaul of the work. By Bowman’s reckoning, it was possible to get the whole thing done in six months. But for that to happen, Bowman’s role would have to change. He would now be a ghost: he would have to haunt McMahon’s past, investigate and document it, in order to write the book.2

  Bowman knew it was a change, and he knew it was a big job, especially with the urgency McMahon attached to finishing the book. He was undaunted. He was willing to take it on. But there was a condition, he told McMahon: George Campbell would have to be retained as a full-time researcher.

  This was a problem. McMahon’s entitlements as a former prime minister did not cover the employment of a third set of hands, and he did not want to pay for Campbell out of his own pocket.

  Bowman did not care for these concerns. ‘I said that the first priority was to get the book out quickly and to make it a first-class job,’ he wrote in his diary that night. ‘The profits were secondary.’3

  McMahon seemed to agree with that. Bowman left the meeting believing he had convinced McMahon. But that afternoon McMahon wanted to speak about it again. It remained important to him, McMahon said, to make some money out of the book. He wanted to discuss it with Richard Smart.

  One week later, Smart came to the office. Meeting the publisher for the first time, Bowman was reminded of a bird: ‘Smart looks like an emu, dresses like one too.’4 The encounter was short. What to do about Campbell was not Smart’s problem. The publisher averred from doing anything more than advancing money against royalties for a researcher.

  It took another week and a half to sort out Campbell’s fate. McMahon asked him to go part-time, but Bowman would have none of it. It would not be acceptable, he told McMahon. He needed Campbell’s research skills. McMahon received the ultimatum coolly. The atmosphere in the office was ‘a bit thick’ for a few days, thought Bowman, a bit tense, but then McMahon announced he would pay Campbell to stay on.5

  And then, suddenly, McMahon was back to his old self, ‘cheerful and forthcoming’, happy to recount stories and to gossip about personalities old and new. He chatted with Bowman about the turmoil at Fairfax and how he had just advised young Warwick Fairfax, working at Chase Manhattan, to defy his father’s wishes that he return home.

  But the good moods did not last. Joyce Cawthorn stormed into Bowman’s office one afternoon to complain about a booking she had arranged that McMahon had upset. ‘I told you,’ McMahon had said, to her protests. ‘I may hesitate and stammer at times, but I don’t get things like that wrong.’6

  ‘These people are i
mpossible,’ McMahon told Bowman the next morning on the phone,7 but Bowman was not convinced that Cawthorn and Campbell were at fault. In the short time he had worked for McMahon, Bowman had seen repeated lapses of memory, from the trivial and transient to the significant and problematic. ‘He confuses periods as well as forgetting names and places,’ Bowman observed. Aware of the effect it could have on the book, Bowman lamented that McMahon had left the job so late. ‘He should have written the book ten years ago.’8

  In mid-February, having trawled through Hansard and rewriting thoroughly, Bowman handed McMahon new drafts of the first two chapters. They were an early test of the relationship. Would McMahon like them? Would he find them satisfactory? They were returned three days later with substantial annotations and commentary. Friends had told him that his early life had to be in the book, McMahon wrote to his ghostwriter. Bowman was happy that these friends had echoed his recommendations, but disgruntled when he read McMahon’s edits. ‘I don’t mind having to work harder at his style,’ Bowman groused, ‘but [I] won’t accept this much alteration as a normal thing. His “style” is as dry and unimaginative as it could possibly be.’9

  More worryingly, the agreement they had made about the structure and the nature of the work seemed to be slipping. In a meeting, McMahon expressed second thoughts about the old draft. Daunted by the amount of work involved in producing a new draft, touchy about Bowman’s involvement, he talked of returning to the huge manuscript that had sent Bowman to sleep. He liked its limited scope, its fixation on the great and powerful he had known. Bowman tried to stop it. ‘I told him he should be the centre of it, not other political figures such as Menzies.’10 But the disagreement was more fundamental, and stemmed from a misunderstanding on the part of both men.

  Bowman’s understanding had always been that McMahon was producing an autobiography. Implicit in the drafts, it was the word McMahon had always used to describe the book in conversation and in the press. He had always spoken of the comprehensive, documented story of his life and the times he had lived through, of moving sequentially from youth to old age — from Menzies to McMahon, even. Was this not autobiography? Certainly he did not ever seem to mean a memoir, marked more by selection and whimsy than a sturdy, credible autobiographical tome.

  Bowman sought to clarify this. He asked McMahon whether he wanted to produce a political autobiography or political memoirs. The reply staggered him.

  ‘Memoirs,’ McMahon said.11

  CHAPTER SIX

  A Time of Transformation

  1939–1948

  In the same week that McMahon made partner at Allen Allen & Hemsley, the prime minister died. Joseph Lyons had been under immense strain for months. The ramshackle government that he had led for seven years was coming apart. The United Australia Party’s purpose had faded. The Depression had eased. Economic recovery was well underway. Yet war was looming, and the horrified Lyons seemed unwilling to confront its likelihood. His party began to whisper of casting him aside. Exhausted, isolated, bereft of direction, Lyons wondered if he should quit.1

  In January, as newspaper baron Keith Murdoch dismissed Lyons as ‘a born rail-sitter’ who had ‘lost his usefulness’, the prime minister tried to persuade S.M. Bruce, now high commissioner in London, to return to Australian politics.2 ‘Look here, you’ve got to come back,’ Lyons pleaded. ‘I can’t carry on, in view of the obviously difficult and threatening times ahead.’3

  Times were difficult: Labor was regrouping; Europe was rearming; and Japan was expanding. But Lyons was wavering. The next day, he returned to Bruce and told him he had changed his mind. By March he was contemplating retirement again. The UAP organisation pressed him to stay until the next election was won; they saw him as a winner, still popular in the country. But his parliamentary colleagues were less enamoured, more exasperated: Lyons’ longtime ally Henry Gullett had deserted him; Billy Hughes was white-anting him; and the lordly and immense Robert Menzies, the glittering star of Victorian politics and a senior minister since September 1934, had resigned from Lyons’ cabinet in a swirl of controversy barely three weeks earlier.

  Lyons was on the rack, pressed and harried. Over a drink on Wednesday 5 April, he told the clerk of the House of Representatives, Frank Green, that he should never have left his home state of Tasmania. ‘I had good mates there, and was happy,’ Lyons said to Green, ‘but this situation is killing me.’4

  He boarded a car bound for Sydney. He was to open the Royal Easter Show in a few days’ time. But somewhere along the road through the pale-khaki paddocks beyond Goulburn, the prime minister had a heart attack. He clung to life for two days, enough time for his wife to race to Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital to take his hand. She held it in the unfamiliar room until Good Friday came and he passed away.

  ‘It all seems so sudden,’ Arthur Allen commented, when news broke.5 He was not wrong. Many things were sudden. German troops were finalising their annexure of Czechoslovakia. Italy had invaded Albania. Europe’s shadows were growing darker and casting further, reaching to Australia.

  Sir Earle Page, the deputy prime minister and Country Party leader, crafty and temperamental, with a high-pitched voice and frequent chortle, was commissioned as prime minister until the UAP chose Lyons’ successor. He announced that neither he nor his party would serve under Menzies should he be chosen. It was an attempted reprise of tactics that Page had used to dislodge Billy Hughes from the prime ministership in the aftermath of the 1922 elections. Back then, Page’s motive had been to force a coalition between the Country Party and the Nationalists; this time, personal motivations outweighed any political ends.6

  He would not desist from his opposition to Menzies, even after Menzies was elected leader of the UAP. Speaking in an adjournment debate before Menzies was to be commissioned as prime minister, Page told the House of Representatives that the government needed a leader possessing ‘qualities of courage, loyalty, and judgment’. Finding the new UAP leader wanting on all fronts, Page accused Menzies of disloyalty to Lyons and cowardice for his resignation from the military during World War I:

  All I say is that if the right honourable gentleman cannot satisfactorily and publicly explain to a very great body of people in Australia who did participate in the war his failure to do so, he will not be able to get that maximum effort out of the people in the event of war.7

  Hoping that this had poisoned Menzies’ merits, Page announced that, like Lyons, he had entreated Bruce to return to Australia as the head of a government which he would happily serve in or make way for. For his part, Bruce would only agree to do so if it were a ‘nonparty’ government. Page’s high-minded, self-sacrificial proposal did not divert attention from the main content of his carefully prepared jeremiad.

  Inside the House, outraged interjections punctured the speech. ‘This is very cheap,’ muttered UAP member John Lawson.8 ‘That is dirt!’ shouted Rowland James, a Labor parliamentarian.9 Another Labor man, Gerald Mahony, was disgusted: ‘Nobody wants you. You have let your mates down, whatever else you have done.’10 The feeling was so vehement that four of Page’s colleagues in the Country Party, Arthur Fadden among them, moved to the crossbenches to protest their leader’s action.

  The speech was an act of inadvertent yet spectacular self-immolation. Menzies immediately denied Page’s claims; aware of Menzies’ flaws yet confident of his capacities, the UAP would not revisit his election as leader. Menzies went to the governor-general that afternoon. ‘If I commission you to form a government,’ the governor-general, Lord Gowrie, said to him, ‘how long do you think you will last?’

  ‘Six weeks, Your Excellency.’

  The governor-general smiled. ‘Well, that will do for a start.’11

  After accepting his commission, aware of the public support that he enjoyed in the wake of Page’s attack, Menzies drew up a ministry composed only of members of the UAP. He laid the responsibility for this squarely at Page’s feet:


  You remind me in your letter that my party has not a majority in either House … I am not prepared to purchase that security by inviting into my Cabinet, which is composed of men who have confidence in and loyalty to me, one who has repeatedly and bitterly (and I assume sincerely) charged me with a want of courage, loyalty and judgment.12

  Come September, Page had resigned as leader of the Country Party amid turmoil from his speech and the party’s ejection from government. In the ensuing contest for the leadership, the irascible wowser and croweater Archie Cameron managed to forestall, by seven votes to five, the ambitions of a craggy-faced, self-educated, and aloof backbencher from Victoria. The failure to win at this time meant that John McEwen had to wait almost twenty years to take the Country Party leadership. When he finally did take the leadership, however, he would exercise power with far greater shrewdness and determination than Page — and a very senior Liberal with whom he would deal would be William McMahon.

  BEING a partner at Allen Allen & Hemsley gave McMahon much to be concerned about. He was not an apprentice anymore: he had a direct stake in the work being produced. Many were surprised by the promotion. A student who had lived with McMahon at St Paul’s College was astonished that his ‘earlier diversions’ had not hampered his career.13 Richard Kirby was similarly amazed: ‘We never regarded him [McMahon] as having much brains at all,’ he said later. ‘… We laughed at the idea of him being a solicitor, and suddenly found him not only a solicitor but a partner in Allen Allen & Hemsley — a very big firm.’14