citizen-cam:

Here are my favourite parts:

And then there was the day on which he appeared on parade carrying an umbrella, a mortal sin in any army. When asked by the battalion adjutant what he meant by such outlandish behavior, Churchill replied “because it’s raining, sir,” an answer not calculated to endear him to the frozen soul of any battalion adjutant. 

Churchill made it to Dunkirk, allegedly by bicycle, his bow and arrows hanging from the frame. From that terrible beach he was lifted back to England—so was his Manchester friend—courtesy of the gallantry of the Royal Navy and a horde of civilian boats and ships, and it was there he heard of a new organization being formed. It sounded like precisely the sort of outfit Churchill was cut out for. Requests for volunteers for this new duty were somewhat vague, but they promised aggressive service at least, and that was good enough for Churchill. Whatever a commando was, he would be one.

In vintage Churchill fashion, he stood in the lead landing craft as it forged in toward the shore, his pipes screaming The March of the Cameron Men.

He then waded ashore at the head of his men, sword in hand, and charged ahead, as one account put it, “into the thick smoke, uttering warlike cries.”

For a warrior like Churchill, the end of the fighting was bittersweet. “You know,” he said to a friend only half joking, “if it hadn’t been for those damned Yanks we could have kept the war going for another 10 years.”

Jack Churchill never changed, never lost his flair for the unusual, not to say the flamboyant. In his later years, passengers on a London commuter train were often startled by seeing an older male passenger rise, open a window, and hurl his briefcase out into the night. The passenger would then leave the car and wait by the train’s door until it stopped at the next station. It was Churchill, of course, enjoying his little gesture and reasonably sure that his fellow passengers could not know he had thrown the case into the garden of his house. It saved him carrying it home from the station.

I think I’m right in saying that Jack Churchill is possibly one of the most amazing people who ever lived.

citizen-cam:

Things I learned that I didn’t know:

1. Though he was a Jagera man (a Brisbane region people), he was actually born in New South Wales.
2. He had a white father.
3. He ended up on Palm Island because that was where they send “recalitrant aborigines”. His wife was shipped there for hitting a white man…

citizen-cam:

Words can not express how much I love this photograph.

(Source: National Archives of Australia)

And here’s Ben Chifley reading a tacky detective novel.

Chifley loved detective pulp novels and read them constantly. It was what he did to relax and he plowed through them. Indeed, he and Menzies shared that love. Menzies was in many ways Chif’s opposite, with different tastes in the arts and even in dress sense (Chif’s cheap lounge suits vs the Ming double breasted), but they both had a fondness for tacky detective stories. This is at odds with Menzies’ reputation as a bit of a toff, but there you are. Menzies and Chifley used to swap novels all the time - for all we know that’s one of Menzies’ Chifley is reading above.

This was in the days when it was okay for politicians to like one another.

It was October 1928. The federal election was looming, being fought against the background of rising unemployment and industrial unrest. Parliament had moved to Canberra seventeen months before, and the governance of Australia was now being conducted from the cold, lonely outpost of the Provisional Parliament House.

Robert Cook was the serving Member for Indi, a large rural electorate in north-eastern Victoria, stretching from Wodonga and Wangaratta as far south as Yarra Glen. Cook had been the local member for nine years, being elected in 1919 as the candidate of the Victorian Farmers Union; the sitting member he defeated, John Leckie, was the father of Dame Pattie Menzies and would later serve as a minister in his son-in-law’s government. Cook had joined the new Country Party when it was formed in 1920 and had been re-elected as Member for Indi twice. At the previous election, in 1925, Cook had defeated his Labor challenger with a seventeen per cent swing. His hold on the seat was considered rock-solid. As a strong local member and a seasoned campaigner, Cook should have won re-election in a walk. But unfortunately, Cook was to make an error which would not only cost him his seat, but cost the government power.

Nominations for the poll closed on October 19, just under a month before the election. Cook had been vigorously campaigning in his electorate for weeks. At the time, nominations were opened and closed on the same day – you got your papers in by noon on nomination day, or you missed out. Cook, however, had misunderstood. He had filed his nomination papers at 3pm, thinking the deadline was actually 6pm that evening. His papers were three hours too late, and the Commonwealth Electoral Office ruled his nomination invalid. Only one other candidate, Labor’s Paul Jones, had nominated for the seat. Jones was declared elected unopposed, probably the only way in which he could ever have been expected to win the seat.

We can only guess how Cook would have felt. Devastated at losing his seat, probably. Very foolish, certainly. Angry at the system, very likely. We know he attempted to regain his seat in 1929, but we also know that had he lodged his papers three hours earlier, there might not have even been an election in 1929, or a Scullin government, or a Lyons government.

Cook’s failure to lodge gave Labor an extra seat in the House of Representatives, giving them 31 out of 75, a gain of eight. The governing Nationalist/Country Party coalition, led by Stanley Bruce, lost nine seats, giving them 42. With a majority of nine, it was a comfortable victory, but Bruce’s problems lay not with the Opposition, but with his own side. The unexpected loss of Robert Cook was probably not considered terribly important, but it would turn out to be the most significant seat loss of the election.

Almost a year later, in August 1922, Bruce introduced the Maritime Industries Bill, which proposed to abolish all federal arbitration awards except those for maritime industries (dockworkers, mariners, shipwrights and so forth). Bruce’s government had been trying for some time to get stronger industrial relations powers for the Commonwealth – the most notable attempt was in 1926, when the issue was defeated at a referendum. By 1929, Bruce had either had a change of heart or a vindictive streak, and tabled legislation to remove the Commonwealth from industrial relations almost entirely.

The bill was highly controversial. Labor believed, probably correctly, that the bill was aimed at destroying trade unions, and some within Bruce’s own Nationalist Party believed the government had no mandate for such a dramatic and potentially damaging change to labour laws. One of the people opposed within Bruce’s party was Billy Hughes, whom Bruce had replaced as leader in 1923 in order to form the coalition with the Country Party and who’s own streak of vindictiveness was legendary (though, as an ex-Labor man, he might also have had reservations about the bill’s content).

On 10 September, the bill was debated in the Committee of the Whole. This wasn’t technically a sitting of the chamber but a committee, but was still presided over by the Speaker and for all intents and purposes counted as a meeting of the House of Representatives. Billy Hughes moved an amendment that the Act should not take effect until after “its submission to the people, either at a referendum or at a general election”. The Committee of the Whole voted, and the amendment was carried when Hughes and SSS others voted with Labor. The others were Walter Marks, Edward Mann, George Maxwell, Percy Stewart and William McWilliams. Only Marks and Maxwell were official Nationalists, the others having been elected as “independent Nationalists” or independents. The result of the vote was 35 for and 34 against. The Speaker, Sir Littleton Groom, refused to vote on the matter, insisting the Speaker’s job required him to be neutral. Hughes believed Groom would have opposed the bill if he’d voted, but Groom was still a Nationalist and had not been expected to bring the government down. If Groom had voted with the government, using his casting vote, the vote would have been tied at 35-35 and under standing orders, Hughes’ amendment would have been defeated. As it was, the government had lost a vote in the House of Representatives. Bruce called a general election for 12 October, which he lost in a landslide, even losing his own seat.

Which brings us back to the absent Robert Cook of Indi. If Cook had been elected as Member for Indi in 1928, as he almost certainly would have been had he lodged his papers, the amendment would have been lost by one vote instead of won by one vote. Rebels led by Hughes would have been a thorn in Bruce’s side, but the government would have survived. There would have been no election in 1929, and possibly not until 1931. If there had been a Scullin government, it would have been quite different. The shape of politics in the Depression would have been altered – there may have been no United Australia Party or Lyons government. Of course, this is speculation.

Robert Cook never regained Indi. At the 1929 poll he was overseas, but having learned from the past, he made sure his supporters filed nomination papers in time. However, the Country Party also nominated another candidate, and Cook could not be persuaded to withdraw. The split Country vote, along with the Nationalist vote, cost the party the seat and Paul Jones was re-elected.

Even if Cook had won his seat in 1928 or 1929, he wouldn’t have enjoyed it for long. His health was deteriorating, and he died of cancer on 21 May 1930 at the age of 63.

Cook’s role in the downfall of the Bruce government is rarely mentioned, because he wasn’t there. But by not being there, by having failed to nominate, he changed the shape of Australian politics.

One mistake, simply embarrassing at the time, turned out to have repercussions that were felt for decades.

“For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost.”

Sources

• Carboch, D. (1958), The fall of the Bruce-Page Government, ‘Studies in Australian Politics’, Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire
• Cumpston, I.W. (1989), Lord Bruce of Melbourne, Melbourne: Longman Cheshire ‘
• Federal Elections’, Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday 20 October 1928 (p. 17)
• Smith, A. O., ‘Cook, Robert (1867–1930)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cook-robert-5764/text9767

fuckyeahhistorycrushes:

I have always found Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and King George V of England in many ways similar when it comes to physical features.  Well, I just found out they are first cousins actually.  I am quite amazed at this photo, they both look very much alike I can hardly tell which is which.

(via the-metres-gained)

If you missed it, this is the video I made out of my “incestous history” blog post of yesterday.

I’m really proud of it and might do a series of these. I really enjoyed making it.

In 1683 a fellow named Algernon Sidney was executed in England for his role in a plot against King Charles II. Sidney had been implicated in an attempt to assassinate Charles and his brother James, but was well-known for his revolutionary works such as Court Maxims and Discourses Concerning Government, in which he attacked monarchy, particularly absolute monarchy, as a great evil and promoted the continuation of the English republic. Sidney’s work is now considered among the great democratic texts and he is considered as one of the key developers of modern democratic rights in the West. Indeed, his language about “self-evident truths” and “all men are created equal” was borrowd (read: ripped off) by Thomas Jefferson when he wrote the Declaration of Independence.

Sidney’s father was Robert Sidney, 2nd Earl of Leicester. Robert’s grandmother had been the sister of another Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley, well-known as the favourite of Queen Elizabeth I. The first Earl, also Robert, was the brother of Sir Philip Sidney, another very prominent Elizabethan.

Algernon died childless, but his brother, the 3rd Earl, went on to sire a family lasting until the present day. The 4th Earl’s son, Algernon’s great-nephew Thomas, had a granddaughter who married Sir Bysshe Shelley. Sir Bysshe’s grandson, from another marriage, was Percy Bysshe Shelley, the famed Romantic poet. Percy’s wife Mary Shelley wrote the great horror novel Frankenstein in 1818. Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote perhaps the greatest work of feminist literature ever, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Returning to Sir Bysshe, his first marriage produced a line of Sidneys that eventually became peers once again, when Sir Philip Sidney became the 1st Baron De L’Isle and Dudley (there’s Dudley again). Several generations of Sidneys later came the 6th Baron, William Sidney, who in 1961 was appointed Governor-General of Australia. De L’Isle was the last Briton to hold the post - another blow struck for the anti-monarchists; from this point on the Australian viceroy would be an Australian. De L’Isle himself was descended, albeit illegitimately, from King William IV, whose daughter by Dorothea Bland, his mistress, married the 1st Baron De L’Isle, the 6th Baron’s great grandfather.

But we’re not done yet with this story. Another line of the family, descended from the 2nd Earl, spawned Thomas Townshend, who in 1783 was created Viscount Sydney. Sydney took his peerage name from his antecedent, Algernon Sidney. In 1788, when the First Fleet brought a load of convicts to Port Jackson and founded a penal colony, it was named Sydney after Lord Sydney, Home Secretary at the time. It was Sydney’s orders that not only created the colony but gave Governor Phillip the right to emancipate convicts and turn them into free settlers, thus establishing some of the fundamental rights of early Australian colonies. Algernon would have been very proud.

But just when you think it’s over, there’s even more. Sydney’s family, the Townshends, were ironically a strongly pro-Royalist family during the English Civil War (perhaps Algernon wouldn’t have liked that quite so much). Lord Sydney’s grandfather had married the sister of Sir Robert Walpole, considered Britain’s first modern Prime Minister and one of the founders of the principles of modern Westminster government. The 2nd Earl’s daughter had married Sir John Pelham, whose son Thomas had two sons who became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; Henry Pelham and the Duke of Newcastle. Newcastle’s son, Henry Pelham-Clinton, 2nd Duke of Newcastle, had a daughter, Arabella, who married Charles Spencer, later the Earl of Sunderland. Arabella died two years later and Charles remarried, to Anne Churchill, daughter of the Duke of Marlborough.

For those slow, you guessed it. These are the same two families, the Spencers and the Churchills, that eventually produced Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, and had in the past produced John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough who had fought for the Royalists during the Civil War and then finally switched sides to William III, in the Glorious Revolution which had been predicted by…Algernon Sidney!

And, of course (well I mean of course) the 1st Duke’s great-grandson John Spencer was created Earl Spencer in 1734. His descendent, Edward, was the father of Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales.

So, this one family contained:

1. Two courtiers of Elizabeth I
2. A man executed for trying to overthrow Elizabeth’s descendent Charles II
3. A man who fought for Charles’ brother James II AND the man who overthrew him, William III.
4. A famous romantic poet
5. A woman who wrote one of the greatest works of feminism in history
6. A woman who wrote one of the greatest horror novels in history
7. A Governor-General of Australia
8. William IV, King of Great Britain
9. Three British Prime Ministers, including Winston Churchill
10. The man for whom Australia’s largest city is named and whose influence created many of our early colonial rights.

Phew.

If you can get through all that and decipher it, what a ride. What a family.

It just goes to show you how deeply incestuous history is.

Partly because the British aristocracy are, also, quite incestous.

congressarchives:

As you can imagine, we make a big deal about celebrating the Bill of Rights here at the National Archives. Most people are awed by what the Bill of Rights says and what it means to our country, but they often forget that the Bill of Rights was created by Congress through the same legislative process used to create thousands of other pieces of legislation.

Here is the story behind today’s document:

Just after the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1789, Congress began considering a series of amendments introduced by Representative James Madison of Virginia. The House debated his proposal during the summer of 1789, and on August 24 the House passed seventeen amendments to be added to the Constitution. The Senate then deliberated over the amendments, suggesting revisions to, or marking-up, the House-passed amendments. The documents above reflect the Senate’s changes to the amendments. Notes written in pen as the Senate deliberated show a series of revisions that included consolidating some amendments and rejecting others, changes that reduced the overall list to twelve amendments. Once both houses of Congress reached an agreement about the final text of the amendments through a conference committee, the Bill of Rights was sent to the states for ratification. On December 15, 1791, the Bill of Rights was ratified by Virginia. Virginia’s ratification was the eleventh and final state needed for articles three through twelve to be officially added to the Constitution. Happy Bill of Rights day, everyone!

Senate revisions of the House proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution, 9/9/1789, SEN 1A-C2, Records of the U.S. Senate (NAID 3535588)

(via tobiasziegler)

todaysdocument:

In 1806, the third vice president of the United States was indicted for treason against his own country. Aaron Burr, vice president under Thomas Jefferson, was a political adventurer who allegedly schemed to form a new nation out of the West. The indictment, dated November 25, 1806, notes that “Aaron Burr, late of the City of New York and vice president of the said United States did … prepare for a military expedition against the dominions of the King of Spain…”

(via tobiasziegler)

historicaustralia:

Whitford theatre advertisement for Canberra [picture]

between 1901-1948

- Mildenhall, William James 1891-1962.

(via monsterpussy)