The Little Digger

Three generations of Australians have been delighted and appalled by the salty character of a tiny, terrible-tempered politician whose rallying cry, "What the blithering blazes!", once tinkled the glass chandeliers of Versailles, made Lloyd George blanch, Woodrow Wilson freeze, and Clemenceau laugh. William Morris ("Billy") Hughes was born a Welshman, but ten years as a knockabout laborer in Australia had made him as indigenous as a kangaroo. When he became Australia's World War I Prime Minister, the Anzacs draped a big slouch hat around his pint-sized head, dubbed him "Little Digger."

He had been a sheep drover, navvy, gold prospector, ship's cook, waiter, locksmith, umbrella mender, a seller of fried fish, and a spear-carrier in a touring production of Shakespeare's Henry V when, some time in the 1880s he decided to "emerge from the murk and chaos and leap up on the stage of human affairs." His stage was the toughest strip of the Sydney waterfront. He organized a wharf laborers' union. Hobo life had given him chronic dyspepsia and affected his hearing, but he discovered a powerful voice, tuneless, yet penetrating enough, as he himself said, "to peel the bark off a gum tree," or "galvanize ten dead bullocks to a trot." A gnomelike figure (5 ft. tall, under 100 lbs.), among the muscular wharf lumpers he was said to be "too deaf to listen to reason, too loud to be ignored, and too small to hit." He was soon representing the waterfront in the New South Wales Parliament.

Fire & Comprehension. Colonial Australia, aspiring to nationhood, was full of political slogans, such as "One man, one vote." Billy improved on this: "One bloody man, one bloody vote," he told his electors. He wrote a pamphlet, The Case for Labor, and rode with the Labor Party into the first Federal Parliament in 1901.

To improve his parliamentary technique, he traveled everywhere with a phonograph on which he played records of the speeches of Britain's Victorian Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, was soon throwing such high-caliber cliches at the Opposition as "Sword of Damocles" and "Bed of Procrustes." On one such occasion the Speaker of the House, a sensitive man, collapsed, crying with his dying breath: "Dreadful, dreadful!"

Billy was national head of three trade unions: the wharf laborers, the transport workers and the seamen. He talked like a radical, but by 1910 he was already demanding that Australia should have its own army & navy, and making speeches about the menace of Japan. That year, the Labor Party formed its first majority government, a cabinet consisting of two miners, a wharf lumper, a building worker, a hatter, a compositor, an engine driver and, of course, Billy Hughes. The cabinet split over World War I, and Hughes formed a national coalition government, pledged to aid Britain "to the last man and the last shilling."

Invited to sit at War Cabinet meetings in London, he swore and hammered the table for more action. When Prime Minister Herbert Asquith demurred, Hughes shouted: "I have a policy! You don't! If you expect me to sit like a stuffed dummy while there's a war to be won, you've picked the wrong man." Said Earl Balfour: "How I detest him!" But young Winston Churchill called him "a man of fire and comprehension, head and shoulders above his fellows."

Play It on the Piano. By war's end the Anzacs had suffered 68 1/2% battle casualties, and this gave Billy a voice in the Versailles Peace Conference. On the boundaries commission, Billy listened to Ignace Jan Paderewski, Pianist-Premier of Poland, explain a problem which has confused a generation of diplomats: Poland's eastern border. Said Billy, after studying the mass of demographic symbols that Paderewski had chalked on the blackboard: "Listen, Mr. President, the best thing you can do is take that home and play it on your piano."

Hughes fell out with Woodrow Wilson on the disposal of German New Guinea, which the Anzacs had captured. Said the President, eying the little man solemnly: "Mr. Prime Minister of Australia, do I understand your attitude aright? If I do, it is this: that the opinion of the whole civilized world is to be set at naught. This conference, fraught with such infinite consequences to mankind for good and evil, is to break up, with results that might be disastrous to the future happiness of 1,800 million of the human race, in order to satisfy the whim of 5,000,000 people in the remote southern continent you claim to represent." Replied Billy, brightly: "Yes. Very well put. That's just about the size of it, Mr. President."

When Wilson asked if Australia would agree to religious freedom in New Guinea and accept missionaries of every denomination, Hughes replied: "Of course . . . The natives are very short of food, and for some time past have not had enough missionary." By irreverence, Hughes won world attention for a problem which he knew to be "very small potatoes and not many to the row." His point: to secure New Guinea as a strategic outpost of Australia's defense. He won it.

The Hughes government went out in 1923, but Billy came within two votes of returning as Prime Minister in World War II, served instead as Navy Minister, then as a member of the War Advisory Council, where he recaptured some of his old voice. Said he to a delegation of war manufacturers who complained of the shortage of copper wire: "What do you want me to do about it? Spin it out of my tail like a spider?" He saw his New Guinea policy vindicated, and lived on to witness the collapse of world relations more threatening than that following Versailles.

The Press Is Notified. A few months ago, when he fell ill of pneumonia, he had his secretary reply to pressmen: "Mister Hughes says you're not to worry. He says that as soon as he's died he'll notify the press."

Last week the press was notified, but not by Billy. He was already dead. At 88, the eldest of the Commonwealth's statesmen, the last surviving signatory of the Versailles Treaty, and a man who held a remarkable record for parliamentary longevity--58 years--Billy finally capitulated. Said Prime Minister Robert Menzies, who had often suffered from Billy's taunts: "Of all the lives we have seen in Australia, his was the most astonishing."

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