The Eviction at Newtown  19 June 1931

John Hood

Paper given at ISAA National Conference, 2014

 Read also Union Street, A novel of the Depression, by JCM.Hood

The aim of this presentation is to examine an incident that took place in Newtown, Sydney, in 1931. True to the theme of this conference, I will attempt to place this incident in a context that relates to some of Donald Horne’s key ideas in The Lucky Country. The research is derived particularly from material gathered in 1931 by Phil Thorne, whose collection is now held in the Noel Butlin Archives Centre at the ANU. (1) Phil Thorne was a member of the CPA and secretary of the Spanish Relief Committee. His collection of documents relating to the Newtown riot includes the case files of solicitor Miss Christian Jollie-Smith, who was acting for the International Class-War Prisoners' Aid Society. The material preserved by Phil Thorne enables a careful reconstruction of the events in Newtown, 19 June 1931.

Donald Horne was ten years old in December 1931. By way of sketching in a background to our Newtown incident, and to remind us of the importance of recognising the great complexity of the past, let us pause to consider what the world was like for ten year old Donald Horne.

The world seemed to be shrinking in 1931. It was an era of pioneering achievements in aviation and exploration. Charles Kingsford Smith flew across the Pacific in 1928, the British aviatrix Amy Johnson flew from London to Darwin in 1930, and US aviatrix Amelia Erhardt flew from New York to Southampton in 1928. The Australian scientist Douglas Mawson led scientific expeditions to Antarctica, the last unexplored continent.

This was also the Jazz age, with popular entertainers such as Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller. The cinema was immensely popular, fed by the output of US studios. 1931 saw the release of one of Charlie Chaplin’s most popular films, ‘City Lights’, a romantic story of a blind flower girl. Albert Einstein, already a world renowned scientist, attended the opening night and was soon to apply for US citizenship after the first of Hitler's race laws were passed. Laurel and Hardy and The Little Rascals both dominated movie going. The film Bad Girl was released in 1931 and won two oscars. A man and woman, skeptical about romance, nonetheless fall in love and are wed, but their lack of confidence in the opposite sex haunts their marriage.

The Australian company, Efftee Studios, founded by Frank Thring, produced the first commercially viable Australian made sound feature film, Diggers, a comedy about the adventures of three Australian soldiers in France in WW1.

Don Bradman was arguably at the height of his career in 1930,31. His batting achievements were to lead the English to develop the famous ‘bodyline’ strategy. This picture dates from 1928/9 match against Queensland, when Bradman retired with a score of 452 and was carried off the field in triumph by his opponents.The fortunes of a racehorse were eagerly followed. Phar Lap, born in Timaru, NZ, won 14 races in a row in the 1930/31 season.

Who were the political leaders of 1931? In the United States, the Republican candidate Herbert Hoover had been elected President in 1929, in the same year in which economic collapse that massive unemployment which led to global depression. In Europe, Ramsay McDonald had led the Labour Party to victory in 1929 and was due for defeat in 1931; Manuel Azana, President of the Republic of Spain, was soon to face a civil war; Paul von Hindenburg, President of the German Republic, was now, due to paralysis in the German Reichstag, ruling by decree.

The rejection of democracy and the rise of totalitarian government was a feature of the politics of many countries. Mussolini had already established totalitarian fascist government in Italy. Adolf Hitler was leader of the third largest party in the Reichstag but had not yet been appointed Chancellor. Stalin had consolidated his autocracy in the USSR and would soon embark on a massive purge of the Russian communist party. In Japan, PM Wakatsuki struggled to control the army, which would soon embark on the conquest of Manchuria, while, in China, Chiang Kai Shek, succeeding Sun Yat Sen in 1925, soon broke with the Chinese communist party led by Chou en lai and Mao Tse Tung.

Omar Muktah led an unsuccessful rebellion against Italian imperialism in Libya. Reza Shah Pavli was the ruler of Iran during the time of the Women's Awakening, which sought the elimination of the Islamic veil from Iranian working society. Mahatma Ghandi intrigued London society during his visit to discuss Indian self-rule;

In 1931 Australia was a self-governing dominion within the British Empire, owing allegiance to King George V. In December of that year the British government passed the Statute of Westminster, which made the Dominions legislatively independent of the UK. The Act was not, however, formally adopted by the Australian government until 1942.

The Prime Minister of Australia in 1931 was James Scullin, who had led the ALP to a landslide victory in the 1929 Federal election. Scullin attempted to solve Australia’s debt crisis in 1930 with a programme of stimulus spending and expansionist monetary policy.

In NSW, Jack Lang had become Premier of NSW for the second time in a landslide victory in late 1930. To cope with the economic difficulties of the time, he refused to cut government salaries and spending. Early in 1931 he produced the ‘Lang Plan’ in opposition to a Plan agreed to by the federal Labor government and the other state Premiers. The so-called 'Melbourne Plan' called for even more stringent cuts to government spending in order to balance the budget. In October 1931 Lang's followers in the federal House of Representatives crossed the floor to vote with the conservatives. The Scullin government lost the ensuing December election of 1931 by a huge swing to Joseph Lyons and the conservatives.

We can more fully visualise the background to the events of June 1931 from these images of Sydney. The city was about to be united by a steel bridge, begun in 1923 and soon to be completed in 1932. The busy streets of the city had no road markings, no traffic lights, and it seems only a loose idea of traffic order. The inner suburbs were characterised by narrow lanes and dilapidated houses, the homes of the poor. Sam Hood, a well known Sydney photographer of the era, has left some memorable images of relief workers, dole queues, and political rallies.

One of the most distressing aspects of the depressed economic climate was the growing incidence of evictions. This image of an evicted tenant in 1930 is entitled: William Roberts, a veteran of Gallipoli.

From the NSW parliamentary proceedings, 1930 - 33, we read:

“At present there are, I suppose, thousands of houses to let. Once cannot go into any suburb without finding the ‘To Let’ notice in, perhaps, one out of every five or six cases, in those cottages which are usually let to people of small means.. Men who have fought for their country have been ‘emptied out’ onto the street..”

Phyllis Acland recalled her family eviction:

“My father was an invalid pensioner and things were desperate at home. We’d come from Lismore to bring my brother down for treatment. He had polio. My mother went up to Newtown one day shopping and when she came home they’d come in and taken all the furniture for the twenty-two pound she owed. It was the law.”

There seems to have been many thousands of Orders to Quit during the course of 1930 onwards, but four Sydney evictions in particular have been remembered for the violence associated with them. These evictions occurred during the first half of 1931 at Douglas street, Redfern, Starling street Leichhardt, Brancourt avenue Bankstown and Union street Newtown, each of them opposed by the Unemployed Workers’ Movement, and each one increasingly more violent. These four eviction battles were all reported in the contemporary press and have attracted some attention from scholars and historians of the era. In an article for Twentieth Century Sydney: Studies in Urban and Social History, Nadia Wheatley gives a brief outline of the anti-eviction movement. Wheatley also undertook a study of the same topic in an unpublished thesis at Macquarie University. ( ). Another important study of this topic can be found in The December 2008 edition of the Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, which focuses on the eviction in Brancourt Avenue, Bankstown.

The last eviction, said to be the most violent, was the eviction at 143 Union Street Newtown. We can reconstruct this particular incident in some detail from three principal sources of material. First of all, of course, there are the newspapers. The Sydney Morning Herald published a detailed account on the day following the eviction, Saturday June 20, under the headline: Desperate Fighting: Communists and Police. It described the incident as 'the most sensational eviction battle Sydney has ever known.” This same account also appeared in metropolitan papers in other states. An alternative account, however, was given a week later, on Friday June 26, by the Workers' Weekly, the official organ of the Communist Party of Australia,. The Workers' Weekly referred to the incident as 'Bloody Friday at Newtown' and headlined the article with: Lang, at behest of Landlords, shoots Sydney workers.

The second source of information is the actual residence itself. Number 143 Union Street is still an inner city two storey semi-detached terrace building like some many others in Sydney. It is possible to walk through the scene of the eviction as it would have been in 1931.

The third source of information is quite unique. It consists of the case records of Christian. Jollie-Smith, the solicitor who represented the defendants arrested that day. These records are preserved in the Phil Thorne collection of the Noel Butlin Archives Centre at the ANU. The Thorne collection includes individual statements by each of the defendants, several witness statements by people who were in the crowd watching the action, and statements by prosecution witnesses. This presentation will confine itself to an examination of the statements of defendants Percy Riley, Leonard Emmerton, and John Stace, the evidence of witnesses Lucy De Sailly; Edward Mills, Jane Smith and William Hawkins, and statements by prosecution witnesses William Ryan (clerk) and Willliam Gibbons, PC.

The evidence reveals a number of contradictory or contentious issues, which can be summarised in two questions: 1) Who initiated the violence? 2) Did the police assault the defendants after arrest? No attempt is made to determine the actual events inside the house. As the Workers' Weekly stated: ‘What happened inside is known only to those who were there.’

The Sydney Morning Herald blames the defendants for the initial violence:‘Police cars drew up some distance from the house and 40 police and detectives, under Inspectors Farley and Smith, approached the building. When the police reached the pavement outside the front fence of the building, at a signal given by the leader of the defenders, a terrible shower of stones rained down on to their heads.’

The Workers Weekly, on the other hand, accuses the police of initiating the violence. 'The ‘bus drove straight at the crowd... As it came opposite 143 Union St the police jumped out with revolvers drawn and at once opened fire on the balcony of the house.... Murphy was shot before a stone was thrown or any resistance offered. It was after this that the defenders fought back.’

Clearly, the two accounts could hardly been more different. What does the evidence of the Phil Thorne collection tell us?

Riley, Emmerton and Stace all claim that police commenced firing on the house before any resistance was offered by the defenders. According to Leonard Emmerton: 'I was in the back room downstairs. I heard the shout “here they come” then I heard shooting in the front of the house.' John Stace testified: 'I was in the front room upstairs when I heard someone call out the police. I looked out and saw the street full of police with revolvers firing at the house. I did not see inspector Farley waving anything in his hand or hear him call out. Garbutt was near me when he said “I am hit”. I then dropped on my hands and knees to get out of the range of the bullets which were hitting the wall.'

Constable William Gibbon makes no mention of police fire in his statement, but the testimony of the defendants is confirmed by eyewitnesses and even by one of the witnesses for the prosecution.

Lucy deSailly, of 21 Iredale Street Newtown, stated: 'I was in the street listening to meeting. Edwards was speaking. ..Never saw a stone thrown but I saw the police fire up at balcony. Nothing had happened at house at all up to then.' In a handwritten addition to her testimony, we read: 'Rushed out of bus with their revolvers and commenced firing at the balcony before any stones were thrown at all.'

Jane Smith, of 22 Dixon Street Newtown, stated: I was away getting food for pickets.. Bus came round. I was standing inside garden. I saw the police shooting at the house..'

William Ryan, whose testimony was presumably offered by the prosecution, stated: 'I am a clerk employed by N.J. Buzzacott, estate agents at 47 Lord Street Newtown....The police went to go to the front door and some stones were thrown at the Police from the balcony. Some shots were fired.'

There is hardly any doubt that firearms were used in the eviction. A handwritten note in the collection states: 'A reporter – Monks by name of the “Truth” tells me that he personally picked up 14 (fourteen) empty shells at Union St after the fight.'

Constable Gibbons stated that the stones were thrown as soon as the police arrived at the house. His statement reads: 'I went to 143 Union Street Newtown and on arrival there there were a number of men on the front balcony and they commenced throwing stones and those stones hit several policemen. I left and went to the rear of 143 and assisted in breaking in the back door.'

Gibbons describes the back door attack but does not state that any shots were fired. According to Gibbons, it took a whole fifteen minutes to break in through the back door. He claims he was struck in the right eye then hit on the shoulder and back of the head by John Murphy, and he said there were only three police in the back room.

There is no doubt that the police used firearms in their attack on 143 Union street. It is not so certain, however, that they initiated the violence. Although defendants and witnesses testified to this effect, there are two problems with such a conclusion. First of all, it is quite plausible that the police would open fire in response to a show of resistance on the part of the occupiers. None of the defendants testified that any stones were thrown, but this is hardly surprising. However, even the witnesses support their testimony. William Hawkins, of 121 Rochford street Erskineville, an elderly man, stated: 'I did'nt see any stones thrown from the house.' Lucy Desailly's testimony supports this: “Never saw a stone thrown.'

These contradictions leave us with two possibilities: either the police fired in response to stones thrown by the occupiers, or that the police fire was intended to cover their entry into the house. Despite the evidence of the defendants and their witnesses, it is impossible to say whether any stones were thrown before the police began firing, so this is certainly a possibility. On the other hand, the fact that there were only two occupants who suffered gunshot wounds, neither wound of which was serious, suggests that the police were attempting to overawe the occupants to cover their entry into the house and had therefore initiated the violence. Circumstantial evidence also supports this latter interpretation. Two days earlier, an eviction at Bankstown had been more violent than previous evictions, giving the police an understandable motive for their actions.

Did the police assault the defendants after their arrest? This is certainly the account given by the Workers' Weekly: these workers were bashed after they were arrested and while in the police station. The Sydney Morning Herald makes no mention of this, presumably thus evidence that no such behaviour took place.

All defendants claim they were assaulted, and there is a consistent pattern to their evidence. Percy Riley, for example, stated: After awhile I was handcuffed, both hands behind the back. While being taken out to the back I was made a target of by the police. I was punched all over the face. One blow dropped me to my knees. I was jerked to my feet and taken out to the yard. After awhile were taken and put in the patrol van and taken to the station While in the charge room I received another blow on the jaw and was knocked down. I lay there until the ambulance came and we were taken to hospital and put to bed.'

John Stace testified: 'I was handcuffed and as soon as I was handcuffed I was hit on the jaw. Blood was everywhere I looked. Someone was being bashed with the batons on the floor and screaming. I was taken outside. The police kicked us when we were in the yard and several of them said Lang should pass a bill to shoot the lot of us at sight. I was taken to the Patrol and to the Charge room. We were all kicked and punched all the way from the patrol to the room. As I was walking through the charge room handcuffed I received a blow on the nose which half dazed me.'

Given that the witnesses were not in a position to observe what happened inside the police sttion, can the accusation of assault there be supported by examining the injuries treated at the hospital?

Amongst the papers in the Phil Thorne collection is a handwritten note on the back of an envelope, which lists the injuries to some of the defendants:

Emmerton: cerebral concussion. Fracture to back of skull; Joshua: Cerebral concussion; Fractured skull; Goldberg: cerebral concussion; Fractured jaw. Riley: Cerebral concussion. Ubransky: Cerebral concussion. Murphy: cerebral concussion and gunshot wound to the skull.

No mention is made of Garbutt (Gabriel), who is said to have been shot in the arm. Other defendants mentioned as injured also do not appear in this list. Storen, Clarke, Dare, Hawkins, Hayley are not listed on envelope).

The Sydney Morning Herald has a more extensive list: . Joe Gabriel, 36, of May street Newtown, gunshot wound in the left arm; Bruno Ubranski, 50, of Bourke street Surry Hills, head injuries; Patrick Storen, 26, of Fitzroy street Surry hills, fractured left hand; John Murphy, 39, of Phillip street Enmore, head injuries; Robert Clarke, 27 of Hynes street Darlington, head injuries; Percy Riley 33 of Victoria street Lewisham, concussion and lacerations to the head; Raymond Dare, 26 of Alice street Newtown, head injuries; Len Emmerton39 of Regent Street Newtown, head injuries; Reg Hawkins, 33, of Rochford street Erskineville, head injuries; Henry Hayley, 20, of Adelaide street Surry Hills, head injuries; Percy Joshua, 29, of Great Buckingham street Redfern, head injuries, Leslie Goldberg, 31, fractured skull.

The Herald also gives the names of injured police: 'Sergeant Phillips, Constables Knowes, Jenkins, Duncan, Gillmore, Patterson, Parsons, Stewart, Wilson, Toms, Jones and Hollier received injuries to practically every part of their bodies. Constables Kelly and Proud were taken to hospital in police motor cars.'

These injuries clearly prove that there was a good deal of violence on 19 Jun 1931. They do not, however, confirm subsequent police brutality after the arrests. For this we have only the testimonies of the accused. The Workers’ Weekly is right to claim that ‘What happened inside is known only to those who were there.’ The same could be said for subsequent events at Newtown police station. It is quite possible that the men arrested were assaulted after arrest, but there is no conclusive proof that this happened. The injuries could be explained as a result of the melee that took place at the time of arrest.

What was the result of these arrests? One of the most interesting items in the Phil Thorne collection is this letter to Christian Jollie-Smith from the Clerk of the Peace, which states that the Attorney-General ‘declined to proceed further against the accused.’ This seems very odd, given that the charge of Common Law Riot would seem to be easily proven. Why was the case dropped?

Before we attempt to answer this question, let us consider the relevance of this incident to Donald Horne's statement: “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck..”

Donald Horne is not alone in voicing this idea. Thirty years before, George Meudell, a banking and political figure, had written: “Australia is a good country badly managed.” Cannon, Michael, 1966, The Land Boomers, MUP Melbourne.

Meudell made his views clear: “Most of the heads of banks and alleged able leaders of finance and capitalists I have met or heard about are a pretty poor lot of ordinary men and very few of them are educated or intellectual.”

The interesting part of both these views is the assumption that Australia is ‘managed’ or ‘run’ by leaders. Their explanation for a perceived failure to achieve a notion of excellence in social life is due to the poor quality of this leadership. This notion was is echoed by A D Hope:

And since historical research

Has lost the name of noble action

Proved most ideas in state and church

Mere subterfuge of greed and faction

That great men do not lead: they lurch

Between rebellion and reaction

By documented texts it can

Abolish the uncommon man.

What does Hope mean by the ‘uncommon man’? More importantly, what is the role of the ‘common man’ in history? How do both notions apply to the events in Newtown in June 1931?

Who were the leaders in the events in Union street Newtown?

According to our documents, the police were led by Inspectors Farley and Hughes. Insofar as the occupiers of the house were concerned, there is no mention of any particular leader. In fact, Percy Riley’s testimony suggests that the nineteen men in the house were a loose group who came and went:

“About 11 o’clock on Friday June 19th I went to an eviction meeting in Union St Newtown. After listening to some of the speakers I climbed up on to the balcony of the house to see some of my mates who were inside.”

The defendants seem to have been united by a common desire to oppose the actions of the landlord, by a shared belief in the injustice and cruelty of evicting a tenant while the house promises to remain empty. Certainly, even today we can easily sympathise with the tenants who were evicted, and with those who were prepared to resist such evictions:

When arrears of rent caused the eviction yesterday of Mrs Jessie Compt and her four children from a house in Spring St, Fitzroy, her few pieces of furniture were piled in a back lane... There, huddled about a fire which burned in a dustbin, the family kept a cold and dreary vigil last night, while the thermometer dropped to a minimum of 41 degrees. .... To add to Mrs Compt’s distress she had the worry of nursing a child aged 18 months suffering from pneumonia.

Neither Horne nor Meudell seem interested in examining Australian life as anything other than the actions of individuals. Yet, what seems at work in the Newtown incident is something deeper than personal motivations or the actions of leaders. The issue has more to do with economic and social systems, as was clearly recognised at the time:

‘The first eviction I saw had a devastating effect on me, and I think probably it and a few other experiences then were what finished the capitalist system as far as I was concerned.’

Lowenstein, W, (ed) Weevils in the Flour,Neil Counihan

It is quite clear that, if housing is seen as a form of capital, in which private ownership controls tenancy, periods of economic stress will lead to evictions. The fundamental driving force behind the Newtown eviction was the economic system which allowed private ownership of housing. We can see this even today in the actions of governments who have progressively degraded the level and even the idea of ‘public housing,’ replacing the socialist view that government should provide shelter as a human right with a notion of 'welfare housing', in the same way that a guaranteed minimum income is seen as a 'dole'.

It is important to point out that a great many evictions were successfully prevented, and few involved the occupation of property. According to Wheatley (1) occupation and resistance was only one of the tactics employed by the UWM. She lists the following ascending order of action:

1. Deputations to the landlord or agent;

2. tactic 1, plus protest meetings at the landlord/agent’s premises;

3. direct action (interference in the process) plus protest meeting at the threatened premises;

4. large scale picketing for days or weeks outside the threatened house;

5. Occupation of the house plus mass meetings outside the house and resistance to the eviction.

Interference could include preventing or restoring the denial of gas services, social ostracism and abuse of small landlords, damage to landlord’s home or agent’s shop.

The resistance to evictions during 1930 and 1931, of which Newtown was the final act, seems to have been a mass movement, fed by the growing number of unemployed men and an increasing community sympathy for those evicted. In response, the forces of law and order responded with escalating levels of violence.

The most revealing aspect of the eviction incidents is the action of the crowds that gathered. This was particularly evident at Newtown, where the SMH reported:

‘A crowd, hostile to the police, numbering many thousands, gathered in Union Street. They filled the street for a quarter of a mile on each side of the building until squads of police drove them back about 200 yards, and police cordons were thrown across the roadway. At times the huge crowd threatened to get out of hand. It was definitely hostile to the police. When constables emerged from the back of the building with their faces covered in blood, the crowd hooted and shouted insulting remarks. When one patrol wagon .. was being driven away, people... hurled stones at the police driver.’

The crowd that gathered in Union street was perhaps the largest spontaneous demonstration in Sydney in the thirties. Wheatley regards it as ‘the most militant gathering of ordinary Sydney people in the decade.’ (p.228)

Strangely, it was also the last. Within a week of the Newtown riot, the NSW Attorney-General tabled a Fair Rents and Lessees’ Relief Bill. Public sympathy and mass action had convinced the Lang government to at least demonstrate a commitment to solving the problem of evictions.

In an 1891 essay entitled ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, Oscar Wilde argues that the true purpose of socialism is to provide all members of society with sufficient resources to enable them to realise their true individual potential, to achieve ‘individualism’ as opposed to ‘authoritarian socialism’. One could argue that Australians in the sixties had begun to approach that ideal, that what Horne sees as a ‘cultural wilderness’ was in fact the realization of that individualism applauded by Wilde. Even in 1931, these boys display some of the qualities Horne attributes to Australians of the sixties.

In the face of imminent invasion in 1941, Vance Palmer asked of Australian civilization: what have we done to deserve to survive the possible overthrow of our way of life? His answer, it seems to me, is perfectly relevant to our discussion today: Australia, he wrote “has something to contribute to the world. Not emphatically in the arts as yet, but ….

...in arenas of action, and in ideas for the creation of that egalitarian democracy that will have to be the basis for all civilized societies in the future...”

In summary, despite Donald Horne's misgivings over the quality of leadership in Australian public life, the resistance to evictions in 1931 can be seen as one expression of that instinct for egalitarianism and democratic decision-making that is so much a part of the Australian national character.

THE END

References

1. Phil Thorne Collection. Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU.

Also listed in: Symons, Beverley, 1999, Communism in Australia, A Resource Bibliography, Aust Nat Lib.

N. Wheatley, 'Meeting them at the door: radicalism, militancy, and the Sydney anti-eviction campaign of 1931', in J. Roe (ed.), Twentieth Century Sydney: Studies in urban and social history, Sydney, 1980 Douglas st Redfern.

N. Wheatley, The Unemployed Who Kicked: A Study of the Political Struggles and Organisations of the New South Wales Unemployed in the Great Depression, unpublished MA thesis, Macquarie University, 1975

Meudell, George, 1929, The Pleasant Career of a Spendthrift, Robertson & Mullen, Melbourne.

A.D. Hope, ‘Conversations with Calliope’, in Collected Poems, Sydney, 1966.

Labor Call, 6 Sep 1930.

Lowenstein, W, (ed) Weevils in the Flour, Neil Counihan

Cannon, Michael, 1966, The Land Boomers, MUP Melbourne.