Labor’s Titan, Gilbert Giles Roper
Source: Warrnambool Institute Press, 1983, edited by Allan and Wendy Scarfe. Copyright Allan and Wendy Scarfe. This digital edition for Marxists
Internet Archive is published with the permission of the copyright holders. It may be used for private study but not for any commercial purpose.
Transcription, mark-up: Steve Painter
By Wendy and Allan Scarfe, 1982
To Gilbert Roper, Percy Brookfield was one of the great socialist heroes. He also saw himself as being in the same tradition. Although a generation separated them and they never met, they had the same roots in the labour movement — the books and songs that moved Brookfield moved Gilbert; both were first and foremost trade unionists who wanted to uplift the poor and exploited; both wanted to restructure society through direct action, with the factories owned and managed by the workers; both were passionately antiwar and for holding such “unpatriotic" views both were jailed. This is not, then, a dispassionate academic biography. It is a work of commitment, addressed to people of similar commitment, notably within the trade union movement, who have long been denied short, layman-oriented biographies of early socialist pioneers by the increasing tendency to prepare such undertakings for a highly specialised scholastic readership. (Though it is hoped that these latter will also find the present volume of interest).
Born in 1905, Gilbert Giles Roper was a descendent of the famous South Australian pioneer family the McFarlanes. His father died when Gil was three, leaving his two sons to be reared by their mother, grandmother and uncle, Edgar Giles, the Commissioner of Audit for South Australia. As a boy Gil experienced the glamour and flamboyance of the march-past of the first troops to leave Australia for the “Great” War and he was aware of the widespread grief when few of them returned. During the war years he also felt keenly the humiliations of the previously respected German community of South Australia.
At fourteen Gil began his working life as a printer at South Australia’s oldest newspaper, The Register. Here he experienced the extremes of the class system and gained a deep knowledge of union and labour philosophy. He also developed life-long antiwar attitudes.
At sixteen Gil became a Sunday orator at The Stump in Botanical Park for the Socialist Labor Party. In the following years he threw himself into the Free Speech conflicts, which the radical groups fought with the Adelaide City Council. In the split that occurred in the Socialist Labor Party, Gil became secretary of the leading faction while avoiding most of the violent fights, but dissatisfaction with the lack of support given to workers by the Socialist Labor Party led him to join in founding the Marx-Engels Club in 1928.
In 1928, Adelaide was rocked by the most memorable conflict of its history. The Waterside Workers strike against the degrading conditions imposed by the federal Arbitration Court. Shipowners were encouraged to employ scabs and the unemployed watersiders attacked them. Gil, who had won a reputation for his knowledge of Marxist-Leninist theory, was enlisted as a lecturer for the Port Adelaide Waterside Workers. He was very sympathetic to the beliefs in direct action propounded by the Industrial Workers of the World and was driven by compassion for the unemployed and exploited. Believing both the Australian Labor Party and the Adelaide Trades Hall Council had betrayed the workers in their struggle, Gil joined other radicals in reviving the South Australian Communist Party in 1929, aiming to rid Port Adelaide of the police patrols and the scabs.
As secretary of the South Australian branch of the Communist Party Gil was highly successful in building membership, influencing young people in the Communist Youth League, in organising the unemployed and in evading police persecution. His self-sacrifice made it financially possible for the party to field candidates in 1930 for the state elections, who stood, although unsuccessfully, for the right to strike, equal pay for women, workers’ compensation for sickness or accident, a forty-hour week, and two weeks paid annual holiday for all workers. In 1929, Gil assisted the Stalinists Herbert Moxon and Lance Sharkey to take control of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
He was later to regret this. He was co-opted himself in 1930 to the Central Committee of the party. In August 1930 when the shipowners destroyed what little hope of industrial peace remained in hungry Port Adelaide by replacing unionised wharfies to stack sugar at Glanville, there was a spontaneous upheaval. The Port streets became pandemonium. Gil was a delegate to the Adelaide Trades and Labor Council but he scorned it for its treachery to the watersiders in 1928. He and his comrades through euphoric public meetings organised workers into a general strike, co-ordinated by a Rank and File Council of Action, which bypassed the Combined Adelaide and Port Adelaide Trades and Labor Councils Disputes Committee. Gil hoped this was the beginning of the revolution in Australia for the overthrow of capitalism. However the strike only lasted two weeks until Labor Premier Lionel Hill revealed to parliament the evil conspiracy of Gil’s Council of Action. Police raids were followed by Hill rushing through parliament in a record twenty-six hours a hysterical Public Safety Act, which beat the strikers back to work under even worse conditions.
The failure of direct action and the use of parliament against the workers only spurred Gil to increase his efforts for party demonstrations, enlistments, ideological education of party members, assistance to the unemployed and the training of a Workers’ Defence Corps. In 1931 the Hill government reduced its help to the South Australian unemployed, replacing beef with cheaper mutton chops on the ration for the unemployed. Gil was active in organising the Beef March, the greatest protest march Adelaide had seen. But police viciously attacked the marchers and the court meted out severe punishments to the march leaders. As a consequence of his involvement Gil was sacked from his job at the Advertiser newspaper, which had taken over The Register. Since he was unable to find work he and his mother tried to live by working a farm at Mitcham, an Adelaide suburb.
However farming was short-lived for Gil, for the state conference of the Communist Party at the end of 1931 sent him to Mildura to help reorganise the party there after most of its members had been assaulted or railroaded out of town. Gil had planned to marry Edna Sirius Lorence, whose father, a swashbuckling Norwegian sailor, had reared his two children on a coal hulk moored in the river at Port Adelaide to the songs of the Industrial Workers of the World and the struggles of the Waterside Workers’ Federation. Edna followed Gil to Mildura, where they lived temporarily with two other workers in an earth-floored tin and canvas humpy on the Murray River bank, and then in town. Taking a job on the Sunraysia Mail, Gil successfully revived the party in Mildura, leaving a branch of 48 members, but after his departure from Adelaide the South Australian Party fell into the doldrums.
Looking for work, he moved to Melbourne, to Castlemaine, where their only baby died, to Leongatha and back to Carlton, where Gil was active in party organisation and in public anti-fascist and antiwar meetings. In 1934 the party leaders asked Gil to take charge of their Sydney press and he agreed.
In Sydney, Gil was an important functionary of the central committee of the Australian Communist Party. He established Forward Press, a front that published 60,000 copies of the Workers’ Weekly, the paper later renamed Tribune. He was a member of the Glebe branch of the party and then of the Randwick branch. He was also elected to the board of management of the Printing Industries Employees (PIE) Union and as a delegate to the Sydney Labor Council. Edna worked daily with Gil at Forward Press as a copy holder. She also became business manager of the magazine Woman Today, the official organ of the Womens’ Committee of the Unemployed Workers' Union. However, it was a time of poverty and things going wrong for them. Gil’s mother and senile aunt, who lived with them, were difficult to get on with and Edna was ill and had to undergo major surgery. In addition Gil began to quarrel seriously with the party leaders, Sharkey and J.B. Miles. He was attracted to the Communist dissidents and Trotskyists of Nick Origlas’s Workers’ Party.
In 1937, Gil resigned from Forward Press and for some months tried to organise a campaign of Communist Party members to remove the undemocratic Stalinist leadership. He was subjected to unscrupulous character assassination by the party and left it. He joined the Trotskyist group, the Communist League of Australia, becoming their foremost Sunday orator at the Domain. His oral disputes with the Communist Party speakers drew thousands of listener to the Domain in 1939 and 1940 but his antiwar views and world proletarian revolution notions provoked mobs of soldiers and pro-war citizens to attack his meetings. His bitter criticisms of the Menzies government led to the Trotskyist league being declared illegal. However, Gil defied the ban and continued to publish and distribute antiwar pamphlets until in 1941 his house was searched, he was arrested, bashed by the police and offered a choice in court of signing a bond to renounce his antiwar views, paying a fine or going to jail. On principle he chose jail and was sentenced to hard labour in Long Bay Penitentiary. When he became seriously ill in jail Edna managed to collect his fine and have him released. It was this experience that caused him to write so feelingly in his Brookfield manuscript:
“For those who have not endured the grisly experience of being political prisoners in New South Wales, it should perhaps be explained that a staple article of diet is porridge, known in prison terminology as hominy.
During the subsequent years of World War II Gil found at the Sydney Labor Council and in his PIE Union that nationalistic loyalty was far stronger than class loyalty. As Japanese troops advanced south in the Pacific he saw the disintegration of the old socialist beliefs that workers would combine throughout the world to resist capitalistic wars. Regretfully he abandoned his emotional belief in a workers’ antiwar world revolution. Brookfield had died holding this absolute view: he was not faced with the intellectual complexities and controversies aroused when the Bolshevik regime was required to fight a national war of survival against fascism. Unlike Gil, Brookfield drew his strength from the militant, unified working class of isolated inland Broken Hill: he was not faced with the necessity of conducting his political campaign in a changing world where the working class was not unified in its reaction to war or to the labour movement.
In 1941 Gil saw the Australian Labor Party as reflecting the majority attitudes of the Australian workers and since it was consistent with Trotsky’s political tactics to serve the working class by recognising what the majority wanted, Gil joined the Labor Party. Eventually he persuaded his Trotskyist comrades to do so also.
In 1942 Gil found his first permanent employment since he had left Forward Press. He was employed as a printer by the New South Wales Railways. Before long, his printer workmates elected him father of their chapel, the traditional job organisation of their craft, which was independent of their union and within months, because of his integrity, he was setting up the type for the highly secret schedules of troop train movements. He was passed fit for military service but because he was in a reserved occupation he was not drafted into the army. When the Japanese air force bombed Darwin, Prime Minister Curtin jettisoned the Labor Party’s long opposition to conscription for overseas service. Gil threw himself into the struggle in the Labor Party against conscription, becoming secretary of the anti-conscription movement in Sydney. In 1916 and 1917 Brookfield and the anti-conscriptionists had defeated Prime Minister William Morris Hughes’s conscription referendums. To Gil’s disappointment, Prime Minister Curtin won the support of the Labor Party.
However, Gil continued his opposition to other aspects of Curtin’s war policies, fighting a losing battle at the Sydney Labor Council for those planks in the Labor Party platform that would improve working conditions. From 1944 to 1946 he took an active part in the struggle for the forty-hour week for Australian workers, which was led by the Sydney printers. He seconded the original Labor Council motion, led his fellow railway printers on strike, and a mass meeting at the Sydney Town Hall on September 1, 1945, overwhelmingly passed his strike motion and elected him to the disputes committee. For his part in the forty-hour week campaign he was sacked from the railways.
When he later wrote his Brookfield manuscript Gil saw himself as having continued the struggle for shorter hours and industrial reforms that Brookfield had fought for and in similar circumstances, against the vituperative opposition of those war supporters who chose to represent concessions to working people as a threat to the national war effort.
In a number of the organisations of the Labor movement Gil played a prominent part, introducing many proposals that made the workingman’s life more pleasant and safe. He pioneered awareness of the problems of lead poisoning in the printing industry. His goals included a 36-hour week, a three-week paid annual holiday for all workers, and a Press Council to give the community control over press bias. His lifelong concern to educate workers found expression in his lecturing to the Workers’ Education Association, where he was the target of much Stalinist persecution.
Edna also joined the Australian Labor Party, and rose to prominence in the New South Wales branch, to membership of the state executive, and presidency of the Labor Women’s Central Organising Committee, largely through her vigorous campaigning for equal pay and equal rights for women. Gil had an influential part in 1945 in setting up the structures and policies of the Labor Party Industrial Groups, but after these were captured by Catholic Action, Edna, both at the Women’s Conference and on the state executive of the Labor Party, worked actively against the Groupers. For her loyal service to the Party during the split of 1955, Edna was nominated for a seat in the New South Wales Legislative Council. In 1958, at the opening of the New South Wales Parliament she was given the honour of moving the address-in-reply to the governor's speech, the first woman ever to do so in 134 years of the New South Wales parliament.
In 1959 it was suggested to Gil by a Labor Party colleague that he should stand as a candidate for the Sydney City Council. He hesitated because he had always seen himself as a trade unionist who believed in direct action and only sought positions to which his fellow unionists elected him. As Brookfield suspected that he might be betraying his class by becoming a member of parliament, so Gil also feared that he might be risking his integrity by becoming an alderman. However, he yielded to persuasion, was elected to the Sydney City Council from 1959 to 1967 and looked back on this as his golden period of achievement for the labour movement.
He introduced his fellow aldermen to many entirely new concepts in city planning. He established a reputation for being thoroughly prepared on any issue and tenaciously persuading those of differing belief to his own considered viewpoint, and was particularly sensitive to the problems of residents in his ward. Because of his visions for the redevelopment of inner-city slum areas, he became deputy chairman of the City Council Planning Committee. His proposal to rejuvenate areas of Wooloomooloo was carried out after the state Labor government passed the necessary legislation. He also made the proposal for developing the run-down area of The Rocks, nowadays visited by more than two million tourists annually.
He attempted to have the council apply stricter controls over “boarding houses” and took personal risks to inform the council of the situation and push it into action over a vice rings racket in Kings Cross. He was one of the first aldermen to be aware of the environmental problems of air and noise pollution and urged that more native trees be planted in city parks to provide food for native birds.
He believed that Sydney should have central points of beauty and interest, being one of the originators of the scheme for the development of Martin Place and Circular Quay and the zoning of building in harbour areas in the form of a theatre dress-circle to keep high-rise development from blocking the views and breezes of the harbour from the less fortunate residents behind them. He gained most press coverage not from the Council’s co-operative housing schemes but over the replacement of the GPO clock and tower. Partly through Edna’s influence the New South Wales Labor government took the decision to build the Opera House. He also won equal pay for the women employees of the Council — the rest-room attendants and library staff. When the Liberal Party won the 1965 state election the new government dismissed the Sydney City Council and replaced it in 1967 with three appointed commissioners. Gil’s subsequent efforts to stand for the City Council and the Randwick City Council proved unsuccessful.
In 1969 Edna was elected for a second term as a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council, and her career climaxed in 1979 when she received from the governor of New South Wales the Order of the British Empire.
After assisting in the 1972 federal election campaign, which brought the Whitlam Labor government to office, and still employed daily as a printer despite his sixty-nine years, Gil died on December 5, 1974 after a life of striving on behalf of Australian working people.
As for Percy Brookfield, who Gil Roper so greatly admired, there is no doubt that his life, death and beliefs had considerable importance in the second decade of this century. Brookfield was simultaneously one of the most hated and the most loved of men. Most of those who knew him personally are now dead. The day 15,000 workers of Broken Hill followed his coffin to the strains of The Red Flag has disappeared into history. But the passage of time does not destroy the remarkable nature of these events, nor the values that were affirmed by them. Because of the brevity of his political career it is hard to assess in political terms Brookfield’s influence on the mainstream of Australian political development. Certainly, he contributed to the struggle for shorter hours and to the stream of anti-militarist, anti-conscriptionist thinking that has punctuated Australian history since the upheavals of the “Great” War. He contributed his ideas and actions to the stream of socialist doctrine that believes in factories for the workers and soil for the tillers rather than a bureaucratised state ownership that merely replaces capitalist bosses with button-down officials.
Brookfield’s belief in the direct action of the working people is still valuable in the 1980s. Since World War II, capitalism has grown bigger and more powerful, and changing economic patterns have eroded much of the class loyally that was so strong among the miners of Broken Hill in 1921, but Brookfield’s belief in the right of people to control their workplaces and their government is a timely lesson to us that society can be organised on a different pattern from the prevailing power centralisation of today. Democracy can be more than a three-yearly marking of a ballot paper for candidates selected by a party machine. Those who make the goods society needs are entitled to more than the little they can wrest from the huge international juggernauts that take no social responsibility for the employment or non-employment of working men and women in any particular society.
But most of all Brookfield supplied a legend in leadership. He exuded a special personal attraction — a warmth, a kindness, a compassion, a directness, a courage, a personal commitment to others far removed from the bland, remote media image most politicians project today. There was a passion in the man, a capacity for involvement in causes that served people that made his four short political years more a crusade than a political career. He was physically tough. He was brave enough to confront crowds, to fight attackers and to confront an armed man who had run amok. He was morally tough: brave enough to confront bosses, political parties and established conservative prejudice. Time was kind to him: the years neither corrupted him nor threw him on the scrapheap, and so the legend remains in all its purity of a man who never twisted.
No Australian politician has ever received such a spontaneous tribute at his funeral. The crowd of mourners might only be compared with the huge emotional farewells the Irish have given their martyrs.
The value of his legend today is that the quality of the man as well as his beliefs set high standards for the Australian radical movement. Brookfield’s life challenges progressive people as it challenged Gil Roper to have courage and integrity, to live up to Brookfield’s self-sacrifice for the embattled and underprivileged people of this earth.