Joseph Aloysius Lyons

Prime minister of Australia (1931-1939)

• Born: September 15, 1879
• Birthplace: Stanley, Tasmania, Australia
• Died: April 7, 1939
• Place of death: Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Winning a reputation as the “financial recovery” leader, first in the Tasmanian state parliament and then at the national level, Lyons broke away from the Australian Labor Party to lead the newly formed United Australia Party to victory in December, 1931, giving the Commonwealth seven years of stable government.

Early Life

Joseph Aloysius (ah-loh-IHSH-shuhs) Lyons was the son of Ellen (née Carroll) Lyons and Michael Henry Lyons, who both had been born in Ireland. One of eight children, Joseph attended St. Joseph’s convent school at Ulverstone. After his father’s health failed, he worked for three years to help support the family before resuming his education at the Stanley state school, from which he qualified as a teacher in 1901. He later (1907) achieved the second highest marks for the year among those awarded a certificate in teacher training at the Hobart Teachers’ Training College.

While teaching at Smithton in 1906, Lyons became active in the Workers’ Political League, the Tasmanian forerunner to the Australian Labor Party. As a member of the State School Teachers’ Union, he also publicly criticized the state education system. On March 12, 1909, he resigned from the teaching service to contest the state legislative seat of Wilmot. In October, he became minister for education in the first Labor government in Tasmania; it lasted only a week, but within five years he was again minister for education (as well as treasurer and minister for railways), after a no-confidence vote in April, 1914, brought down the existing government.

These were especially fiery years in Australian politics. Support for Great Britain in the war against Germany was strong, and volunteers of the Australian Imperial Force were fighting in Europe. Determined to bring in conscription for overseas service, however, Labor prime ministerWilliam Morris Hughes held a referendum and lost. The Labor Party expelled him and many other conscriptionists for contravening party policy opposing compulsory overseas military service. After elections on May 5, 1917, Hughes, now leader of the Nationalist Party, resumed the prime ministership, called another referendum, and again lost. Vice president of the Hobart United Irish League, Lyons vigorously campaigned for a no vote. Both times, however, Tasmanians supported conscription, although by a reduced margin the second time.

Labor lost the state election in April, 1916, and shortly afterward Lyons became leader of the opposition. In October, 1923, an internal dispute among the Nationalists resulted in Labor’s return, with Lyons as premier and treasurer. His efforts in reforming state finances were rewarded at the polls in 1925 but were not quite enough to retain government in 1928, on the eve of the Depression.

On April 28, 1915, Lyons married Enid Muriel Burnell, a trainee teacher almost eighteen years his junior. A “pretty, blue-eyed cheeky kid,” to use his words, she converted to her husband’s Roman Catholic faith, though he always liked to listen to her sing the hymns of her Methodist forebears. On November 13, 1916, the first of their twelve children, Gerald Desmond, was born.

A blond and blue-eyed man of amiable appearance, likened by some to a cuddly koala, who walked with a limp following an almost fatal car accident, Lyons was an effective speaker. His voice had a high, slightly nasal quality, more obvious on radio, a medium he soon learned to use skillfully. He was not at ease behind the wheel, preferring that his wife drive the car given to him by sympathetic admirers, though he later unhesitatingly took advantage of plane travel to cover Australia’s vast distances when electioneering. He liked people and, his wife said, enjoyed dropping in on friends unannounced.

Life’s Work

Although in December, 1919, Lyons failed in an attempt to win the federal seat of Darwin (later Braddon), he continued to find the idea of a larger stage attractive. At the request of the national leader, James H. Scullin, in 1929 he stood for Wilmot, which since 1906 had returned a non-Labor federal member. The people gave Labor the reins, ousting Hughes’s replacement, Stanley M. Bruce, for six and a half years leader of a Nationalist-Country Party coalition government. Lyons went to Canberra as a senior member of Scullin’s cabinet, having the trust of both the Labor caucus, which selected the ministers, and the prime minister, who allotted the portfolios.

Only prime ministers carried enough weight at imperial conferences, so in 1930 Scullin departed by ship for London, hoping to find the means for alleviating the effects on Australia of the worldwide depression. During his absence, Lyons served as acting treasurer, earning a national reputation for honesty and tenacity. The chair of the Commonwealth Bank, like Lyons a believer in balanced budgets, refused to extend credit unless government expenditure was also curbed. Unwilling to agree to the Tasmanian’s push for pension and other cuts, caucus radicals proposed legislation to postpone redemption of maturing Commonwealth bonds. Lyons threatened to resign. In frequent radio-telephone contact, Scullin supported him and the acting prime minister, James Fenton, accepting their argument for a conversion loan. That it was subscribed within a month was largely a result of the energy with which Lyons conducted the national appeal. On his return, however, Scullin reinstated as treasurer E. G. Theodore, who had temporarily stepped down while allegations of corruption were being investigated. Rather than resume the positions of postmaster general and minister of works and railways, an outraged Lyons resigned from the cabinet.

While the prime minister also instituted stringent financial measures and struggled to contain a party faction still favoring overseas debt repudiation, Lyons accepted leadership of the newly formed United Australia Party (UAP). Incorporating the Nationalists and other non-Labor groups, but excluding the Country Party, the UAP won an absolute majority in Australia’s national elections of December, 1931. For the next seven years, until his death, Lyons served as prime minister. It was his government that defused the debt-repudiation issue, bringing about the dismissal of its controversial leader, New South Wales premier John Thomas Lang.

Lyons was, as Bruce later said, somewhat disparagingly, “a wonderful election winner and a helluva nice bloke,” but he was more than that. He preferred to work as part of a team, delegating where necessary, loyally supporting his ministers in their decisions. When after the election in 1934 it became necessary to form a coalition with the Country Party, he worked well with its leader, Sir Earle Page, who admired him immensely.

Using the prime minister’s lodge in Canberra as a family residence, Mrs. Lyons (from 1937 Dame Enid and after his death the first woman elected to the House of Representatives) became a national mother figure to the people. To her husband she was much more: She became his closest adviser and shared election platforms with him.

Winning his third successive federal election on October 23, 1937, Lyons began to think seriously about retirement. His health was deteriorating, and he was unhappy about his long separations from Dame Enid, whose chronic ill health forced her to retire periodically from public life. The UAP rejected Robert Gordon Menzies as a candidate because he lacked Lyons’s appeal to the electorate as well as his ability as a conciliator. When Lyons died suddenly on April 7, 1939, however, it was Menzies who eventually succeeded him.

The Australian Broadcasting Commission broadcast nationally the Requiem Mass for the dead prime minister on April 11, 1939, afterward in a moving sequel transmitting the sounds of the horses’ hooves and the wheels of the gun carriage carrying his coffin through Sydney streets to the harbor, where HMAS Vendetta waited to carry it in state to Tasmania for burial at Devonport. Parliamentary tributes were many. Hughes, another man too big for the inflexible discipline of the Labor Party, captured the essence of the man: “He was a true patriot, he never posed nor boasted of his service. Not for him the tinsel and the glitter that served the pinchbeck patriot and poseur. He served his country zealously but without ostentation.” Lyons’s estate amounted to a mere œ344. After much petty bickering, Parliament provided for his widow and eleven surviving children.

Significance

Joseph Aloysius Lyons preferred to devote himself to domestic matters. However, he availed himself, during trips abroad in 1935 and 1937, of opportunities to promote the country’s trade and defense interests. He incurred the criticism of Jay Pierrepont Moffatt, United States consul general in Sydney, for permitting a trade diversion policy that during 1936-1937 restricted the importation of American goods through high tariffs and increased the margin of preference for British imports. This program was only announced when efforts, including personal representations to President Franklin D. Roosevelt by the prime minister, failed to bring about a reciprocal trade treaty with the United States. Lyons was ruled by the need to overcome a large trade imbalance, mostly in favor of the United States and Japan, both countries maintaining high tariffs against Australian goods.

Lyons and his minister for external affairs were inclined to leave foreign affairs to Bruce, from October, 1933, high commissioner in London and also principal representative at the League of Nations. In 1936, however, Lyons himself agreed that Australia should have its own representative in Washington, having discussed the possibility the year before with President Roosevelt while he and his wife were staying at the White House on their way home from the Royal Silver Jubilee. Furthermore, on March 30, 1939, he advised Great Britain of his decision to upgrade representation in Washington from counselor attached to the British Embassy to legation level, though it was Menzies who made the decision public.

Lyons also took the initiative at the Imperial Conference in London in 1937, personally proposing that a nonaggression pact be made among all the major powers of the Pacific. While appreciating that its neutrality policies precluded American participation, he had taken the idea up with President Roosevelt in 1935 and pursued it with the former Japanese ambassador to the United States during Katsuji Debuchi’s visit to Australia the same year. Only China showed enthusiasm. Lacking any positive response from Great Britain or Japan, the proposal lapsed.

After the 1937 elections, Lyons made Hughes minister for external affairs, a surprising choice for one whose religious beliefs inclined him to pacifism and who encouraged the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, to use the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as an intermediary with Adolf Hitler. Opposed to compulsory military training, Lyons instructed Hughes to double the strength of the volunteer militia and increased expenditure on defense. These actions suggest that he realized that Chamberlain’s appeasement policies were only delaying tactics. Death spared Lyons from another confrontation with the conscription issue. Instead, his reputation remains that of a popular peacetime leader who brought honesty, stability, and regularity to government in difficult economic times.

Bibliography

Brett, Judith. Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. This history of the liberal tradition in Australian politics includes information about Lyons.

Edwards, P. G. Prime Ministers and Diplomats: The Making of Australian Foreign Policy, 1901-1949. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1983. Discusses Lyons’s role in the opening of a diplomatic mission in the United States and includes a useful bibliography.

Esthus, Raymond A. From Enmity to Alliance: U.S.-Australian Relations, 1931-1941. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1965. Good coverage on Australia’s trade diversion policy and Lyons’s Pacific Pact.

Hart, P. R. “Lyons: Labor Minister, Leader of the U.A.P.” Labor History 17 (1970): 37-51. Based on Hart’s unpublished doctoral thesis, this article covers the period from Lyons’s move to Canberra in 1929 up to his becoming prime minister.

Hart, P. R., and C. J. Lloyd. “Joseph Aloysius Lyons.” In Vol. 10 of Australian Dictionary of Biography, edited by Bede Nairn et al. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1986. This article provides a brief summary of Lyons’s life and work.

Lake, Marilyn. A Divided Society: Tasmania During World War I. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1975. A competent study of the community’s attitude toward conscription.

Lyons, Dame Enid. So We Take Comfort. London: Heinemann, 1965. Described by Dame Enid as “the story of our marriage,” this book provides an important insight into Lyons the man.

McIntyre, Stuart. The Succeeding Age: 1901-1942. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1986. A good general account of the period.

Robertson, John. J. H. Scullin: A Political Biography. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1974. An important aid to understanding the role Lyons played in the Scullin cabinet.

White, Kate. A Political Love Story: Joe and Enid Lyons. Melbourne: Penguin Books, 1987. An interesting account for the general reader, concluding with Lyons’s death.