The Empire's Patriotic Fund : Public Benevolence and the Boer War in an Australian Colony

134 Pages·2017·1.769 MB·English

by  McQuilton, John

THE EMPIRE’S
PATRIOTIC FUND
Public Benevolence
and the Boer War in
an Australian Colony
John McQuilton
The Empire’s Patriotic Fund
John McQuilton
The Empire’s Patriotic
Fund
Public Benevolence and the Boer War
in an Australian Colony
John McQuilton
University of Wollongong
Wollongong
NSW, Australia
ISBN 978-3-319-61826-5 ISBN 978-3-319-61827-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-61827-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944595
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A
cknowledgements
Thank you to the staff at the Public Record Office of Victoria, the
National Archives of Australia, the National Library of Australia, the
State Library of Victoria, Emily Russell (along with the good folks at
Palgrave Macmillan), my sister Dawn (the Ancestry wiz), the folk at the
Gong and the Dong, and, in particular, the external reader whose sug-
gestions improved the original manuscript. This book is dedicated to the
students who went with me to Gallipoli and the Western Front for about
9 years, my honours and postgraduate students who enlivened my life
over 25 years and, above all, to the witches of Eastwick.
v
c
ontents
1 Introduction: Private Benevolence 1
2 The Empire’s Patriotic Fund 5
3 Assisting a “Noble Cause” 17
4 “Machinery and Methods” 29
5 A Changing Focus: The Invalided Men 41
6 Soldiers’ Wives Can Starve 61
7 Mothers, Sisters, Guardians and Fathers 77
8 Spite, Ire and A Sense of Entitlement 91
9 Taking Advantage of the Public’s Generosity? 105
10 Conclusion 117
Bibliography 121
Index 127
vii
A
bbreviAtions
AWM Australian War Memorial
EPF Empire’s Patriotic Fund
MLA Member of the Legislative Assembly
MLC Member of the Legislative Council
NAA National Archives of Australia
PROV Public Record Office Victoria
TPF Transvaal Patriotic Fund
VPD Victorian Parliamentary Debates
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Private Benevolence
Abstract In 1900, the Premier of Victoria was asked at a public meeting
what plans the government had for assisting the dependants of men
fighting in the Boer War and for men incapacitated by that war. The bulk
of any such assistance, he replied, would depend mainly on the support
provided by Britain and public benevolence.
Keywords Empire’s Patriotic Fund · Boer war Australia · Assistance for
soldiers and families
Today, the administration and costs of repatriation in Australia are gen-
erally seen as a government responsibility. Voluntary organisations such
as Legacy, informal groups set up to help veterans from specific conflicts
and the Returned and Services League play an important but smaller role.
That would have come as a genuine surprise to most Australian politicians
in 1899. When the Victorian Premier, Allan McLean, was asked at a pub-
lic meeting in January 1900 what responsibility the government had for
assisting the dependants of men fighting in the Boer War, the dependants
of those who would die in that war, for the men invalided home because
of wounds or illness and for the men incapacitated by war, he hedged.
Negotiations with insurance companies to secure death policies1 for the
men who had embarked were not progressing satisfactorily and the matter
would be referred to Parliament. But, he added, the government “could
not afford to be as generous as it would wish” and it had no intention
© The Author(s) 2017 1
J. McQuilton, The Empire’s Patriotic Fund,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-61827-2_1
2 J. MCQuILTON
of following the open-ended system of support developed in the united
States after the Civil War. Besides, ample assistance would be provided by
the British government with its provision of pensions and allowances for
those affected by the war, and by the “springs of private benevolence”.2
But what were McLean’s “springs of private benevolence”? Taking
their cue from Britain, between December 1899 and January 1900, the
Australian colonies launched major appeals to create patriotic funds to
help the dependants of the men at the front, widows and orphans, and
men incapacitated by war. Although they went by different names, their
basic purpose was the same. McLean was speaking at the launch of the
Empire’s Patriotic Fund3 (EPF) in Melbourne’s Town Hall. using the
fund’s only surviving records, its applications for assistance,4 this is an
exploratory work examining the workings, attitudes and decisions of the
EPF as its committee of middle class men attempted to come to grips
with assisting those who had served in war, and their dependants.
Apart from Melanie Oppenheimer,5 along with Clem Lloyd and
Jacqui Rees, Laurie Field and Craig Wilcox,6 historians have paid little
attention to how the patriotic funds worked, how they provided assis-
tance to those in need and the ideology that shaped their decisions.
Oppenheimer argues that the patriotic funds were a form of public phi-
lanthropy common in Victorian and Edwardian England where volun-
tary work, which included fund-raising, provided both social capital and
a system of social welfare, or charity, that pre-dated the welfare state. It
depended heavily on notions of civic pride and civic duty. Funds were
established to meet a wide range of causes, both domestic (such as bush-
fire relief and hospital appeals) and international (the Indian Famine
Relief funds for example). Domestic funds tended to operate indepen-
dently of government and, of course, were subject to the caveat that
public money was to be spent prudently. Patriotic funds followed these
principles, but had the additional cachet of being associated with war, the
men who were fighting it, their dependants at home and with the sense
of identity that war can promote.7 Fundraising for the Boer War elevated
notions of civic pride and duty to national and imperial levels.
The EPF matched these general principles. Like its equivalents in
other colonies, it was an autonomous body with control over how it dis-
tributed its funds and in what form.8 Operating out of the Melbourne
Town Hall, it kept its own records. It had little to do with government
departments overall, but did work with Defence that often referred
men invalided home to the EPF after they had been paraded at Victoria
1 INTRODuCTION: PRIVATE BENEVOLENCE 3
Barracks or had been conveyed to hospital for further treatment. A.W.
Ramsay in the Contingents Office was largely responsible for this pro-
cess. Members of the department also conducted some of the prelimi-
nary interviews for applications lodged with the fund.9
This book uses a thematic structure. The first two chapters exam-
ine the establishment of the EPF and the extraordinary response of
Victorians to the appeal for funds. Within three months, it had raised
more money than any other public appeal in Victoria’s history. Because,
as noted earlier, the fund’s only surviving records are the applications,
these chapters rely on newspaper reports. Chapter 4 examines the
broader context within which the fund operated with an overview of the
welfare system, and the assistance offered by the imperial and Victorian
governments to the dependants of the men at the front and the men
invalided home. The following three chapters examine those who applied
for assistance from the fund, the men, the wives and widows of the men
serving, and the family members of the men serving, noting the marked
disparity in the way the EPF approached applications from the men inva-
lided home and applications from their family members, and the con-
tradictory decisions made by the fund’s committee. Chapter 8 examines
the conflict between the fund and its applicants where some applicants
believed that they were entitled to assistance, rejecting the idea that they
were the recipients of charity. The final chapter suggests that, no matter
how careful a committee of middle class men may have been in its dis-
pensation of public funds, some applicants took advantage of a fund set
up to help those affected by the war.
Notes
1. Melanie Oppenheimer discusses this issue in her “Home Front Largesse:
Colonial Patriotic Funds and the Boer War” in The Boer War, Army,
Nation and Empire, ed. P. Dennis and J. Grey (Canberra: Army History
unit, 1999) 207.
2. Age 9 January 1899, 5.
3. Curiously enough, the title on the application form read “Empire Patriotic
Fund.”
4. The EPF received 381 formally numbered applications. Of these, 334
applications have survived.