When Mr Menzies Came to Our Place
Box Hill is the only electorate in Australia without a pub. For the last 60 years, Box Hill has not had a hotel.This is the result of many victorious campaigns by the churches and temperance organisations to keep alcohol out of my old home town. Today the electorate has the fancy name of Chisholm, named after an Australian woman who did a great deal for the early colony in Sydney but who never came to Melbourne. Box Hill is the centre of the electorate, which consists of Box Hill North, Box Hill South, Blackburn, Mt Waverley, and Surrey Hills.
It has been held by the narrowest margin of any seat in Australia. It is encircled by 5 Liberal seats and always in its history has been a Liberal seat until it was won by a Labor politician by only 96 votes.
For a number of years, Mr Tony Staley was our Federal Member of Parliament and for many years before him, Sir Wilfred Kent Hughes. Sir Wilfred Kent Hughes was a hero in World War I, an Olympic athlete and a great orator. He was elected on the Liberal Party program with help from the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Robert Gordon Menzies in 1949.
Now that was an election!
Between 1947 and 1949 Australia was gripped in a battle when our Prime Minister Mr Ben Chifley, the former steam train driver, planned to nationalise the banks. This became the rallying point against which conservative opposition members fought.
Robert Gordon Menzies campaigned up and down the country as the Leader of the Opposition promising to “put value back into the pound”. He spoke about the necessity of freedom of choice and competition between the banks. But nothing was more important to the ordinary voter than the ending of rationing. For some strange reason, Mr Chifley had announced the necessity of the continuation of rationing on petrol, tea and butter. The war time rationing was hard enough but to have rationing in peace time only angered the population. Sugar supplies were rationed until 1947. Clothing and meat were rationed until 1948.
In those days, petrol rationing was harsh upon ordinary people and was encouraging a flourishing black market. Mr Menzies proclaimed ” empty out the Government and fill up the bowsers”.
I remember well those little grey ration tickets, each one enabling the owner to purchase five gallons of petrol. That ration ticket had to be handed in at the local garage and endorsed in ink by the customer with his name, licence number and vehicle registration number. Those five gallons limited the distance any car owner could drive a week.
For many people, this meant the use of public transport with only one or two important trips in the car each week.
My father had a big, old, black car of uncertain pre-war vintage called a La Salle Continental. It had an enormous gas producer on the back. I think we used petrol to start the car and then switched on the gas producer. It meant that before we were able to go anywhere in the car, someone had to go out, clean out the ashes and charcoal from the previous trip, light a fire in the big gas producer and wait till it started to burn charcoal and produced the right kind of gas which would run the engine.
There were times when my Dad drove the car on petrol for some emergency, such as driving to Doncaster or Blackburn to get fresh supplies of bottled beer. Because we were a bakery, and were regarded during the war as an essential service, and because we had to saw timber to provide fuel for the bakery ovens, we had an additional allowance of 20 gallons of petrol a week for the petrol motor on the saw bench. However, my father adapted it to run on a mixture of paraffin oil and kerosene and kept the ration tickets to run the car.
We could buy petrol from our local garage which had a whole range of different shaped pumps in front. Each pump bore a different brand. There was Shell ICA, Vacuum, Plume, Atlantic Ethyl, Ampol, Golden Fleece and COR. Most of the pumps were cranked by hand. When the car pulled in to the petrol station an attendant pumped up 5 gallons into the glass container on top of the pump and then allowed it to run down the hose by gravity feed into the car petrol tank.
Mr Menzies promised not only to put value back into the pound but petrol into the bowsers. That was too good a promise to turn down.
Above my parents’ cake shop we had large tea rooms which were used for community gatherings of all kinds.
The new local branch of the Liberal Party decided that this would be the appropriate place for rallying the Liberal forces in Box Hill. My parents’ shop window was decorated in Liberal blue streamers and crepe paper with a picture of the Leader of the Opposition, Robert Gordon Menzies.
Mr Menzies came to Box Hill frequently but it never was his favourite place. For when he was Victoria’s Attorney General and Deputy Premier, he was our local member in State Parliament. But in one of those fits of local political pique, we had thrown him out in the only defeat of his life. So he switched from our electorate, centering at Box Hill and known as East Yarra, to the adjacent seat of Kooyong, and from a Victorian Parliament to a Federal Parliament. Of course, he held that seat for decades and became Australia’s longest serving Prime Minister. The turning point came in the 1949 election over rationing, value in the pound, and the nationalisation of the banks.
Bob Menzies came to our place to speak on behalf of Wilfred Kent Hughes.
How politicians were able to speak in those days! I have before me a copy of what he had to say. Listen to these two paragraphs as they were recorded in the “Box Hill Reporter” which was edited by Mr Sydney Samson, who was the uncle of Mr Menzies. As you might suspect, family ties coloured his reporting. He painted his nephew as Australia’s only hope.
Mr Samson reported he looked more like Winston Churchill than anyone else. Mr. Menzies thundered: “As Prime Minister, I announced Australia was at war with the German Fascist leaders. Today we are at war against the fascists of Australia. It will be a different kind of war, but defeat will be the same as if Hitler marched into this city and planted the Swastika on the Town Hall.”
Everybody cheered him with that. We did not want Ben Chifley planting a Swastika on the Box Hill Town Hall!
Mr Menzies went on: “Liberals stand for liberty and for the family which is Socialism’s Number 1 target. Overnight a triumphant Left Wing Government could change the whole pattern of our cherished family life, and take from us those vital rights for which our British forebears fought and toiled in 1,000 years of history.”
Well, we certainly were not going to have a Swastika on the Box Hill Town Hall, and we did not want anyone undermining the whole pattern of cherished family life, and we had not fought and toiled over 1,000 years of British history to have it all go down the drain for nothing.
No one at our place that night would have dreamed of voting for Ben Chifley.
When the votes were counted, Wilfred Kent Hughes had romped in and he stayed in that seat for the next 20 years.
And Mr Menzies romped in, winning 71 seats for the Liberal and Country Party to the Labor’s 46 seats. The following year, in 1950, rationing was ended. A new price war began in the petrol industries and the rationalisation of petrol stations began. The Menzies era had begun. And it all started in Box Hill, which refused to have a Swastika on the Town Hall, nor give way its family values, nor have 1,000 years of history ended by our thoughtless vote.
Well, at least that’s the way our family thought that night as we talked about the great evening we had had in our tea rooms when Mr Menzies came to our place, as we talked together, as we walked up Devon Street, opposite the cow paddock, to No.55 Birdwood Street, Box Hill, a great city which was only a village, where the adults were kind and the children grew up responsibly.
GORDON MOYES
