Top 10 astonishing facts about Robert Menzies

Top 10 astonishing facts about Robert Menzies

Rt Hon. Sir Robert Gordon Menzies, KT, AK, CH, QC, FAA, FRS was an Australian politician who served as the 12th prime minister of Australia, in office from 1939 to 1941 and again from 1949 to 1966.

Despite the failures of his first administration, his government is remembered for its development of Australia’s capital city of Canberra, its expanded post-war immigration scheme, emphasis on higher education, and national security policies, which saw Australia contribute troops to the Korean War, the Malayan Emergency, the Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation, and the Vietnam War.

Below, we discuss the top 10 interesting facts about Robert Menzies;

1. From a young age, Menzies has been described as an intelligent individual

Article in Melbourne Punch detailing Menzies’s feat of topping the state school examinations at the age of 13 – Wikipedia

Menzies began his formal education in 1899 at the Jeparit State School, a single-teacher one-room school. In 1906, Menzies began attending the Humffray Street State School in Bakery Hill. The following year, aged 13, he ranked first in the state-wide scholarship examinations.

This feat financed the entirety of his secondary education, which had to be undertaken at private schools. In 1910, he enrolled in Wesley College. Menzies was “not very interested in and certainly incompetent at sport”, but excelled academically. In his third and final year at Wesley, he won a £40 exhibition for university study, one of 25 awarded by the state government.

In 1913, Menzies entered the Melbourne Law School where he had “a reputation as an “unusually bright and articulate member of the undergraduate community”, and was known as a skillful debater.

2. Menzies gave up a saucerful career in law

University of Melbourne by Geoff Penaluna from Wikimedia Commons

After graduating from the University of Melbourne in 1916 with first-class honors in Law, Menzies was admitted to the Victorian Bar and to the High Court of Australia in 1918.

He established his own practice in Melbourne, where he specialized chiefly in constitutional law, which he had read with the leading Victorian jurist and future High Court judge, Sir Owen Dixon.

In 1920, Menzies served as an advocate for the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, which eventually took its appeal to the High Court of Australia. The case became a landmark authority for the positive reinterpretation of Commonwealth powers over those of the States.

The High Court’s verdict raised Menzies’s profile as a skilled advocate, and eventually he was appointed a King’s Counsel in 1929.

However, Menzies gave up his highly successful law practice in Victoria to serve in the state legislature, representing the Nationalist Party of Australia.

3. The first Australian prime minister to have two Australian-born parents

Roy Street, the main street of Jeparit, Victoria, Australia – Wikipedia

Robert Gordon Menzies was born on 20 December 1894 in Jeparit, Victoria. His father James Menzies was born in Ballarat and his mother Kate Sampson in Creswick.

James, of Scottish descent, had been a coach painter in Ballarat before opening a general store in Jeparit. Kate, of Cornish descent, was the daughter of a miners’ union leader.

4. Menzies political background

Sydney Sampson, Menzies uncle – Wikipedia

Menzies’s maternal grandfather John Sampson was active in the trade union movement. He was the inaugural president of the Creswick Miners’ Association, which he co-founded with future Labor MP William Spence, and was later prominent in the Amalgamated Miners’ Association.

During Menzies’s childhood, three of his close relatives were elected to parliament. His uncle Hugh was elected to the Victorian Legislative Assembly in 1902, followed by his father in 1911, while another uncle, Sydney Sampson, was elected to the federal House of Representatives in 1906.

Each of the three represented rural constituencies, and were defeated after a few terms.

5. He authorized Australia’s entry to World War II

Declaration of War Broadcast, September 1939 – Wikipedia

On 3 September 1939 Britain and France declared war on Germany due to its invasion of Poland on 1 September, leading to the start of World War II.

Menzies responded immediately by also declaring Australia to be at war in support of Britain, and delivered a radio broadcast to the nation on that same day.

It began, “Fellow Australians. It is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that in consequence of a persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her and that, as a result, Australia is also at war.”

Thus, Menzies at the age of 44 found himself a wartime leader of a small nation of 7 million people.

6. Potential candidate to replacing Winston Churchill

Robert Menzies and Winston Churchill, London 1941 – Wikipedia

It was rumored that Menzies’s real intention in joining the war was to launch a political career in Britain. Professor David Day, an Australian historian, has posited that Menzies might have replaced Churchill as British prime minister, and that he had some support in the UK for this.

Support came from Viscount Astor, Lord Beaverbrook and former WWI Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who were trenchant critics of Churchill’s purportedly autocratic style, and favored replacing him with Menzies.

Manzies had some public support for staying on in the War Cabinet for the duration, which was strongly backed by Sir Maurice Hankey, former WWI Colonel and member of both the WWI and WWII War Cabinets.

7. Menzies resigned as prime minister

Billy Hughes, 1919 – Wikipedai

From 24 January 1941, Menzies spent four months in Britain discussing war strategy with Churchill and other Empire leaders, while his position at home deteriorated. When Menzies finally came, he received a hero’s welcome.

However, his support in Parliament was less certain. Not only did some Coalition MPs doubt his popularity in the electorate, but they also believed that a national unity government was the only long-term solution.

On 9 October 1941, Menzies resigned as leader of the UAP after failing to convince his colleagues that he should become Leader of the Opposition. He was replaced as UAP leader by former prime minister Billy Hughes.

8. Menzies did not volunteer for overseas service

Australian 39th Battalion, 1942 – Wikipedia

During World War I, Menzies served his compulsory militia service in the Melbourne University Rifle from 1915 to 1919. This unit was not efficient, and Menzies noted in his diary that training in even basic skills such as rifle shooting was substandard.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Menzies did not volunteer for overseas service. This was used against him by political opponents; in 1939 he described it as “a stream of mud through which I have waded at every campaign in which I have participated”.

Menzies never publicly addressed the reasons for his decision not to enlist, stating only that they were “compelling” and related to his “intimate personal and family affairs”.

9. Menzies nickname

Portrait of Menzies, 1950s – Wikipedia

Robert Menzies had many nicknames, but the two that live on in popular memory are ‘Pig Iron Bob’ and ‘Ming’.

The first comes from a 1938 Lyons government decision to sell scrap iron, or ‘pig iron’, to Japan. At the time, Japan was seen as a potential military threat, and dockworkers refused to load the iron on grounds it could be made into weaponry and used to attack Australia.

A lockout and strike dragged on for weeks, and the epithet ‘Pig Iron Bob’ was levelled at Menzies for his role in the dispute as Attorney-General.

His second nickname, ‘Ming’, derives from the Scottish pronunciation of Menzies. Menzies was proud of his Scottish heritage, and preferred his surname to be pronounced in the traditional Scottish manner rather than as it is spelled. This gave rise to his nickname “Ming”, which was later expanded to “Ming the Merciless” after the comic strip character.

10. The longest serving prime minister

Robert Menzies, 1930s – Wikipedia

Menzies officially resigned as leader of the Liberal Party on 26^th January 1966 after serving 32 years in Parliament (most of them spent as either a cabinet minister or opposition frontbencher), a combined 25 years as leader of the non-Labor Coalition, and 38 years as an elected official.

Menzies’s farewell press conference was the first political press conference telecast live in Australia. He left office at the age of 71 years, 1 month and 6 days, making him the oldest person ever to be prime minister.