AN EXAMINATION OF HOW THE MILITARY, THE CONSERVATIVE PRESS AND MINISTERIALIST POLITICIANS GENERATED SUPPORT WITHIN QUEENSLAND FOR THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA IN 1899 AND 1900 Margaret Jean Klaassen ASDA, ATCL, LTCL, FTCL, BA 1988 Triple Majors: Education, English & History, University of Auckland. The University Prize in Education of Adults awarded by the Council of the University of Auckland, 1985. Submitted in full requirement for the degree of Master of Arts (Research) Division of Research & Commercialisation Queensland University of Technology 2014 Keywords Anglo-Boer War, Boer, Brisbane Courier, Dawson, Dickson, Kitchener, Kruger, Orange Free State, Philp, Queensland, Queenslander, Transvaal, War. ii Abstract This thesis examines the myth that Queensland was the first colonial government to offer troops to support England in the fight against the Boers in the Transvaal and Orange Free State in 1899. The offer was unconstitutional because on 10 July 1899, the Premier made it in response to a request from the Commandant and senior officers of the Queensland Defence Force that ‘in the event of war breaking out in South Africa the Colony of Queensland could send a contingent of troops and a machine gun’. War was not declared until 10 October 1899. Under Westminster government conventions, the Commandant’s request for military intervention in an overseas war should have been discussed by the elected legislators in the House. However, Parliament had gone into recess on 24 June following the Federation debate. During the critical 10-week period, the politicians were in their electorates preparing for the Federation Referendum on 2 September 1899, after which Parliament would resume. At this stage, the Premier should have presented the Commandant’s letter to the house for debate. He did not. This offer was made by one elected representative of the Queensland Legislative Assembly, and was therefore unconstitutional because it was not made by the Parliament. Five significant matters occurred as a result of Premier Dickson’s action, and are the focus of this thesis. The first is the response of the conservative newspapers to change the wording from a military request to the government’s offer of troops; thus began the myth. The second is the volatile debate that occurred when the democratically elected legislators returned to Parliament after the Federation Referendum in October 1899. The third event of this debate was that Parliament could not alter the Premier’s action, but moved a Vote of No Confidence in Premier Dickson and he had to stand down from the office of Premier. This led to the fourth outcome. The world’s first Labour Premier came to office on 1 December 1899 when the Lieutenant Governor, Sir Samuel Griffith, in iii the absence of the Governor, Lord Lamington, invited Anderson Dawson, leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party, to form government. Dawson did this having expected support from the dissident Ministerialists, who had voted Dickson out of office, but they refused to support a government with Labour members. The Labour Government resigned office at the end of that week and Samuel Griffith offered the pro-war Ministerialist Treasurer, Robert Philp, the office of Premier. Philp remained in office and organised two large contingents of troops, the Fifth and Sixth from Queensland, after Federation, when Defence became the responsibility of the newly established Federal Government. The fifth revelation came during Labour’s brief period in office when Treasurer, William Kidston, found that the Treasury was bankrupt and that Philp had confiscated taxpayers’ savings to equip the troops. This thesis explains how the conservative media failed its Fourth Estate role because of its links to senior members of Cabinet. It acted more as a government media outlet than an independent voice. The Queensland Parliamentary Debates of October 1899 reveal that politicians were well aware of their constitutional responsibilities and objected to the Premier acting unlawfully. Many of these men thought deeply about the morality and ethics of war. They expressed concerns for Queensland’s unguarded coastline in the absence of the taxpayer-funded Defence Force overseas. The colonial government was focussed on providing defence for the colony, not sending men overseas on an offensive manoeuvre. Amid the jingoist rhetoric of notions of Empire and supporting the mother country, right or wrong, some of these legislators expressed foreign policy concerns that this conflict could escalate into a wider war with European powers. They feared a war, but could not have anticipated the horrors and high death toll of civilians and combatants in the Great War, 1914–1918, in which thousands of young Australian volunteer soldiers died on the killing fields of Europe. Professor Rune Ottosen, a Norwegian journalist and academic, has developed a four-stage theory on how the media builds up a war mentality in communities. This thesis uses Ottosen’s theoretical model to show the steps taken by the conservative iv newspapers, chiefly the Brisbane Courier and The Queenslander, to manufacture consent for the Premier’s decision to send contingents to overrun the Boers and gain control of the gold and diamond mines in the Transvaal and Orange Free State. These conservative Queensland newspapers used cabled information from the Rhodes-owned newspapers and the pro-war British newspapers. Reports are cited from the anti-war newspapers circulating in Queensland, such as The Worker and The Bulletin, to show how media information in the hands of editors with different political biases presented information to the public. This thesis uses the theories of the late S. E. Finer, who wrote that ‘the military seeks to exercise the right to govern, or as the expression goes, to legitimise themselves. When the military breaches the existing order it will be forced to claim a moral authority for its actions’.1 The military’s moral authority received endorsement from the conservative newspaper in the form of propaganda disguised as patriotic support for the Empire. The argument followed in this thesis demonstrates Finer’s claim that ‘[m]ilitary intervention is, clearly, a product of two sets of forces — the capacity and propensity of the military to intervene and conditions in the society in which it operates’.2 The first force occurred when the military intervened with their offer to send troops and received support from the second force, the coalition of conservative politicians and conservative media in Queensland. 1 S.E. Finer, The Man on Horseback, The Role of the Military in Politics, London, Pall Mall Press, 1962:16‒17; S.E. Finer, The Man on Horseback, The Role of the Military in Politics, London, Pall Mall Press, 1988: 4. 2 Ibid, 1988: 230. v Table of Contents Keywords ii Abstract iii Table of Contents vi Statement of Original Authorship vii Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Commitment to War 12 Chapter 2: Uproar in the House 49 Chapter 3: Queensland Goes to War 82 Conclusion 143 Bibliography 158 vi Statement of Original Authorship The work contained in this thesis has not been submitted previously to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference and acknowledgement is made. QUT Verified Signature Signature: Margaret Jean Klaassen Date: 4 April 2014 vii Acknowledgements I owe the choice of this research topic to my maternal Grandparents, the late Jim and Jeanie Howe. Private Jim Howe enlisted with the Fourth Queensland Imperial Bushmen, No 176, G. Coy, and sailed to South Africa on 18 May 1900 on the Manchester Port. He died in 1943, just before my fourth birthday, so my earliest memories are of his accoutrements of war: his slouch hat with emu feathers, his army jacket and bandoleer slung from a set of antlers on a wall in his office in my Grandparents’ home, Frimley, Kiel Mountain Road, Woombye. He had brought them home in August 1901 as a souvenir of his year on the veldt. I have no idea where those items are now, but I possess the diary he wrote as a Soldier of the Queen. My Grandmother, Jeanie Howe, hooked me on history. She lived alone during her long widowhood at Devonleigh, River Esplanade, Mooloolaba. I was her eldest granddaughter and spent many weekends helping her. When we sat together at night and heard the surf pounding on the beach, Grandma told me stories that took me back two generations to her parents and their parents in Scotland. When Grandma told me of her beloved Jim, she lifted a box from her red cedar chest, carefully untied the ribbons and gently unfolded the brittle paper; then she read them to me. From time to time, she wiped her eyes and said, ‘oh Margie, I could write a book about it all, waiting for Jim and worrying if he’d survive the war and come home safely. And when he did come home he had horrible dreams of houses burning down and women screaming’. My Grandmother never did write that book, but the combination of her oral history and my Grandfather’s diary inspired me to write this thesis. Their spirits have guided me in the most trying times when trauma and tragedy kept me occupied with family survival and away from tertiary studies. I exemplify what I learned in viii Education of Adults. A mature-age learner has a deeply held motivation to achieve and will struggle with obstacles to achieve their goal. My story of that struggle would make a thesis, but it is not the one I present here and dedicate to my Grandparents, Jim and Jeanie Howe, who, during the financial Depression of the 1890s in Queensland had to leave primary school at 13 years of age and work long hours.