Agerian dagoen genero komertziala: gangsterra

Within seventeen years of the proclamation of a crowned federation of the colonies in Australia in lavish ceremonies in Sydney’s Centennial Park in 1901, the Crown had passed firstly from Victoria to her son Edward VII and then to his son George V.

King Edward had taken the title ‘By the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas King, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India’. For his regnal number he chose VII, a number meaningful in English history but not in Scottish, where the number was sometimes omitted since no preceding King Edward of Scotland was recognized in Scotland.³⁸³ This was the first occasion the regnal numbering had differed in the two kingdoms since the unfortunate reign of James II and VII had ended in 1688.³⁸⁴

George V acceded to the throne in 1910 with the same titles and no variation in his regnal numbering as all the preceding Georges had been kings of Great Britain, never separately of England or Scotland or Ireland. The seemingly arcane matter of regnal numbering points to the historical capacity for one body natural to represent several bodies corporate, or put another way, for one king to be wearing several crowns in separate kingdoms. The idea, whether in 1901 or 1910, was not new. The new twentieth-century title ‘King of the British Dominions beyond the Seas’ points to the capacity for one body natural to be imagined as containing many possibilities for representing future new bodies politic.

One matter, however, had not changed during the royal accessions. The name of the Royal House remained constant. But the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha dynasty was about to be recast in a new mould, with old bodies politic being shed as new ones were brought into

383 Matthew, H. C. G., ‘Edward VII (1841–1910)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004

384 I have not found any examples of the title Edward VII and I (or I and VII) being used. When Scottish titles differ, all the examples I have located, such as on statue inscriptions, make the distinction by referring to him as King Edward, with no regnal number.

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existence. In August 1914 war broke out in Europe, pitting the Allies of the British Empire, France and Russia against the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The dynastic element of the war aligned the principal protagonists George V (House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha) and Nicholas II (House of Romanov) against Wilhelm II (house of Hohenzollern) (all grandsons of Queen Victoria) and his more distant cousin Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary (House of Hapsburg). These alignments were reflected in every ruling house across the continent, which was effectively a single extended dynasty.³⁸⁵

The Saxe-Coburg-Gotha dynasty, in its own right and as a cadet dynasty of the House of Wettin, was a European dynasty. Its intermarriages, like those of the Hapsburgs, remained within the European dynastic network, but unlike the Hapsburgs they were not attached to particular territories until the dynastic realignments required by the Great War also required the changing of dynastic names. The Saxe-Coburg-Gothas in Belgium became the House of Belgium (van België, de Belgique, or von Belgien), but the most spectacular change was the transformation of the Anglo-German Saxe-Coburg-Gothas into British Windsors.

385 In the smaller states ruled by Saxe-Coburg cadet branches were King Albert I in Belgium and King Ferdinand I in Rumania aligned with the Allies, and King Ferdinand in Bulgaria with the Central Powers.

Outside the Saxe-Coburg cadet dynasties, King Petar I in Serbia (House of Karadordevic, related to Petrovic-Njegos), King Nicholas I in Montenegro (House of Petrovic-Njegos, related to Savoy) and King Vittorio Emanuele III in Italy (House of Savoy, related to Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Hapsburg and Bourbon), all aligned with the Allies. Grand Duke Friedrich II of Baden (House of Baden), King Ludwig III of Bavaria (House of Wittelsbach), the Kaiser in his capacity as King of Prussia (House of Hohenzollern), King Frederick Augustus III of Saxony (House of Wettin, of which Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was itself a cadet line) and King Wilhelm II of Württemberg (House of Württemberg), sovereigns in the five kingdoms federated as the German Empire were aligned with Germany. All of these sovereigns were related either through blood or marriage and formed, in effect, a single European royal family. There were also the family branches that did not participate in the war: King Constantine in Greece (House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg) until he abdicated in June 1917 in favour of his son Alexander who joined the Allied cause, Grand Duchess Marie Adelaide in German-occupied Luxembourg and Queen Wilhelmina in the neutral Netherlands, both branches of the House of Nassau (related to Hohenzollern);

King Christian X in Denmark and Iceland and his brother King Haakon VII in Norway (both of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, related to Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Romanov), King Gustav V in Sweden (House of Bernadotte, related to Nassau and Saxe-Coburg-Gotha), King Alfonso XIII in Spain (House of Bourbon, related to Saxe-Coburg-Gotha), Prince Franz Josef II in Liechtenstein (House of Liechtenstein, related to Hapsburg) and Prince Albert I in Monaco (House of Grimaldi, related to Bonaparte and Bourbon), all of which remained neutral. Among the protagonists, only republican France, Portugal and the United States, Mehmed V Sultan of the Ottomans and the Taisho Emperor of Japan stood outside this dynastic network.

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I | The Worst Year of the War

Joan Beaumont characterizes 1917 as ‘the worst year’ of the war, a time when it seemed conflict would never end, the Western Front was in stalemate and Russia was collapsing, although there were advances in the Middle East. On the home front in Australia the Federal government of former Labor Prime Minister Billy Hughes went through a long process of reformation as partisan groups re-formed in the wake of a failed conscription referendum in 1916 to produce, eventually, a coalition that became the National Party.³⁸⁶ Along with growing casualty lists published daily in newspapers, news of momentous battles such as Bullecourt, Passchendaele and Polygon Wood on the Western Front, bombing raids on London and southern England by Zeppelin airships and Gotha heavy bombers, and the effective withdrawal of Russia from the war, strains were evident in the fabric of civil life in Australia. Neville Meaney characterises the home front in 1917 as “increasingly troubled by political, industrial, communal and sectarian discord” that assumed a “vindictive and unforgiving character”.³⁸⁷ Following the failure of the 1916 referendum, conscriptionists became obsessed with controlling “the enemy within the gate”.³⁸⁸ Four factors combined by mid-1917 to create a perfect storm in Australia. A virulent and widespread anti-Germanism reached its apogée that year. Reactions to the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 merged with this anti-Germanism so that support for Irish nationalism and separatism became tarred as German-backed treachery. The referendum on conscription held in late 1916 unleashed passions that intensified once it became known that another referendum would be held later in 1917.

Meaney focuses on the attacks on the ‘disloyalty’ of organised labour and the Irish Catholic community, especially Archbishop Mannix, in the east coast states. This chapter focuses on another of the ‘inside enemies’, the German-Australian communities in South Australia. Meaney accepts a view of the Anti-German League in Sydney that the ‘German question’ was not the most important element in the problem of

386 Joan Beaumont, Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest 2013; pages 263-273

387 Neville Meaney, A History of Australian Defence and Foreign Policy 1901-1923, Volume 2 ‘Australia and the World Crisis 1914-1923’, Sydney University Press, Sydney 2009: page 204

388 Neville Meaney 2009: page 204

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disloyalty.³⁸⁹ However, away from the industrialised south-eastern cities a different perspective emerges. In South Australia, the vicious treatment of local Germans was vicariously extended to the ‘Germanism’ of the royal family, to which the dynastic response was to invoke a tradition of Britishness or ancient Briton-ness to which all loyalists could subscribe. As the conflation of anti-Germanism and anti-Irishness developed, a more insidious, less vocalised element was added to this mix that attributed an essential Germanness to the royal family, especially in its extended branches, that was subverting the Allies’ cause and repressing Ireland. The great dynastic network proudly evoked before the war became a distinct liability in 1917.

Germanism in an organized sense in Australia began early in the war. Anti-German Leagues formed in New South Wales, Victoria, New Zealand and England, a short-lived All-British Association in Western Australia, and a British Citizens League in South Africa, but attempts to establish such groups in Tasmania, Queensland and the Northern Territory came to naught.³⁹⁰ The formation of the All-British League in Port Adelaide in February 1915 provides both a microcosm of evolving anti-German sentiments and an example of one of the more virulent anti-German organizations.³⁹¹

Marilyn Lake has argued for a pre-war Anglo-Saxon ideology that posited a common

‘Teutonic’ racial heritage shared by Germany, the United States, Great Britain and the dominions that drew the intellectual elite in (especially) Melbourne into an American embrace.³⁹² This ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ collapsed with the outbreak of war, and German Australians were transformed into beastly Huns. Neville Meaney counters Lake by arguing that Australians did not think of themselves as Teutonic at all, which is why the supposed transformation occurred so rapidly and easily.³⁹³ He also disputes Lake’s claim of contending ‘orientations’ between a liberal Anglo-Saxonism and an oppressive

389 Neville Meaney 2009: page 214

390 Database of All British League branches in South Australia and contacts with similar groups outside South Australia, compiled by author. Generally, these groups seemed wary of each other, and attempts to form All British League branches in Victoria and Tasmania were stymied by the Anti-German League.

391 ‘All British League’, The Register (Adelaide), 4 February 1915, page 5

392 Marilyn Lake, ‘British world or new world?: Anglo-Saxonism and Australian engagement with America’, History Australia, Vol 10, No 3, December 2013: pages 36-50

393 Neville Meaney, ‘The problem of Nationalism and Transnationalism in Australian History: A reply to Marilyn Lake and Christopher Waters’, History Australia, Vol 12, No 2, August 2015: pages 209-231

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Britishness, especially her claim that Britishness was a political ideology for an imperial-state that demanded loyalty and provided privilege to white British subjects. Even if a shared Teutonic community of culture existed, he argues, it could not form a single nation-state, whereas a shared British culture did exist and constituted a potential imperial or national state.

The All-British League was ostensibly founded to promote unity between British peoples within the Empire, and the Governor and Chief Justice of South Australia readily agreed to be its patrons.³⁹⁴ A few weeks after its formation several additional objectives were added to the League’s aims, and these became its focus for the duration of the war. These ‘supplementary objects’ as they were sometimes called, were:

First, to advocate forever the shutting out of all foreigners from Government and municipal posts; secondly, to prevent foreigners from becoming members of Parliament or justices of the peace; and thirdly, to jealously guard against the ascendancy of any language over English in the curriculum of State-aided schools.³⁹⁵

It quickly became clear that ‘foreigner’ meant German.³⁹⁶ Over the next four years the League campaigned relentlessly, among other activities, to have Germans (by which it meant anyone of German birth, or German parentage or grand-parentage, wherever they were born) removed from the South Australia Parliament and magistracy, municipal councils and public employment, and to remove the franchise from all Germans in local, State and Federal elections. It also campaigned for all German or Lutheran schools to be closed or taken over by the State and to have all German-language publications suppressed. It wanted all land owned by Germans to be compulsorily acquired by the State and used for returned soldier settlements, and called for a boycott of all German businesses and products. The League also demanded that all German-origin place names be replaced by British or ‘Australian native’ names. By 1918 it was advocating the wholesale deportation of Germans.³⁹⁷

394 ‘Personal’, The Advertiser (Adelaide), 26 February 1915, page 6

395 ‘The All-British League | Important Additional Aims | Stirring Address by Mr Owen Smyth’, The Dailey Herald (Adelaide), 4 March 1915, page 6

396 ‘An Anti-German Movement’, The Mail, 19 February 1916, page 5

397 ‘All British League’, The Mail, 30 August 1918, page 17; ‘All British League’, Mount Barker Courier and Onkaparinga and Gumeracha Advertiser, 28 June 1918, page 4

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The League’s campaigns were visceral, bigoted, jingoistic and highly public, and they found strong support in The Mail newspaper.³⁹⁸ Branches of the League were established throughout the state and its activities were widely covered in the South Australian press.³⁹⁹ Among the League’s successes were the closure of all 48 Lutheran schools using German as the language of instruction, the closing of all the German-language newspapers in South Australia, and the removal of all Germans from the magistracy.⁴⁰⁰ Its campaigns also included ‘information’ programs, such as a 1917 three-part series in The Mail on ‘The Germans in Australia | Their Number and History’ that explained their surreptitious “peaceful penetration” of South Australia, Victoria and Queensland.⁴⁰¹

However, the League was not without its opponents, and an anonymous letter writer to the Advertiser, styled ‘A Woman’ put their principle arguments forward a few months after the League’s formation. She argued that old traditions of “personal honour, domestic fidelity, commercial integrity, political probity, reverence for the law, chivalry towards woman and the Anglo-Saxon love of truth” would send a cold shiver up the spines of the League. One of The League’s objectives, she argued, was to cultivate

‘race-hatred’, an objective that made the patronage of the Governor and the Chief Justice unacceptable. As the King’s representatives, they should not be taking sides and supporting ‘racialist distinctions’ between members of the community. A Woman

398 The Mail (published in Adelaide between 1912 and 1954) produced in 1917 three weekend editions, and claimed a circulation of 30,000 copies that were read by 120,000 people, or about a third of all South Australians: banner, The Mail, 4 August 1917, page 6. The 1911 census numbered the population of South Australia (excluding ‘full-blood Aborigines’) as 411,161.

399 The League was established in a meeting at Port Adelaide on 15 January 1915. By the end of 1915 it had 18 branches, by the end of 1916 24 branches, by the end of 1917 34 branches, and by the end of 1918 40 branches. None were operational by 1920. It also had a rifle club, which members were encouraged to join. It claimed to have ‘well over 5,000 members’ in March 1917 (about 1.2% of the South Australian population). Database of branches compiled by author.

400 On the closure of German language newspapers, see Miriam Gilson and Jerzy Zubrzycki, The Foreign-Language Press in Australia 1848-1964, ANU Press, Canberra 1967, pages 8-13

401 ‘The Germans in Australia | Their Number and History’, ‘Part I How Many Germans are There in Australia?’, The Mail, 14 April 1917, page 4; ‘Part II Religion’, The Mail 21 April 1917, page 8; ‘Part III Decrease’, The Mail 28 April 1917, page 6. During these period, the first battle of Bullecourt had been fought, at which the Germans took the greatest number of Australian prisoners in the whole war (https://www.awm.gov.au/units/event_110.asp, accessed 5 October 2014), the French campaign at Aisne had ended in disaster, and the Ottomans had successfully repelled British and Dominion forces in the second battle of Gaza (https://www.awm.gov.au/units/event_136.asp, accessed 5 October 2014).

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argued there were ‘enormous’ numbers of intermarriages between Briton and non-Brition in South Australia, including many leading citizens. Further, she said, the League’s own rules would exclude the King and royal household from membership because of their ‘mixed descent’. The French, the Russians, “our black subjects in India”, were all good enough to fight and die for us, she argued, but not good enough to be members. In contrast, the Governor of Western Australia had refused to attend meetings or patronize the League in Perth, and his example should be followed in Adelaide.⁴⁰² The League’s arguments, she concluded “are more fitting for a back-lane harangue, but most unsuitable for a meeting called to exhibit British fairplay”.⁴⁰³ A woman mixes ideas of Anglo-Saxon and British fairness in what Meaney would probably characterise as the ideal of ‘better Britons’ seeking to democratise British institutions and fulfil the promise of Britishness.⁴⁰⁴

Responses to A Woman revealed two opposing streams of thought. Captain Cromarty, secretary of the League, wrote that a Briton would never raise the issue of the King’s ineligibility for League membership and that dual citizenship (mixed marriage) was a menace.⁴⁰⁵ Another critic invited A Woman to join the League, but was sure she wouldn’t because the King and the royal household would be absent: “Membership is an honour reserved for people of British parentage, and there are some privileges that even the King cannot enjoy”.⁴⁰⁶ Still another critic answered that pointing to the German blood in the royal family was a ‘pitiable cry’ because they would not want to join the League anyway: the League had no fear of being disloyal to the British throne

402 see also ‘Letter to Major Summerhayes re: permission for All British League to Visit Rottnest’, 9 June 1915 - 17 June 1915, NAA Series PP14/1, Control 17/1/17, refusing permission for the League to visit Rottnest Island for a ‘curiosity visit’ on the basis of ‘absurd statements made by irresponsible persons’.

This is a WA Police report prepared at request of Military Intelligence. Rottnest Island at that time was an internment camp for enemy aliens.

403 ‘All British League | To the Editor’, The Advertiser, 18 June 1915, page 10. The Advertiser has been published in Adelaide since 1889, a daily newspaper circulating throughout the State with a daily sales in March 1915 of 57,255 copies: ‘Circulation’, Advertiser, 13 November 1915, page 18

404 Neville Meaney 2013: page 220

405 Captain Cromarty is rarely referred to in the press by any other form. Occasionally, he is ‘Capt D C Cromarty’ (‘Sea Scouts’, The Mail, 10 April 1915, page 8), and there is a single report of his 20 year old son (no name mentioned) being appointed a professor of architecture at Alberta University in Canada (‘Personal’, Advertiser, 6 September 1915, page 6). He has no entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, or any other biographical dictionary that I have consulted.

406 ‘All British League | From W R Butler’, The Register, 21 June 1915, page 3

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(as distinct from the German-blooded King).⁴⁰⁷ A Woman’s supporters, such as the influential Methodist preacher the Reverend Henry Howard, on the other hand, stated that the League’s rules were so ‘narrow and un-British’ that he would never join, would prevent “our own Governor’s Lady, the Prince of Wales, the Mother-Queen and even the King himself” from joining. Those with an ‘admixture of foreign blood’, he added, had a splendid record of citizenship.⁴⁰⁸

The responses to A Woman finally led the editor of The Register, the conservative newspaper in which the debate mainly took place, to close further correspondence on

The responses to A Woman finally led the editor of The Register, the conservative newspaper in which the debate mainly took place, to close further correspondence on