In all class struggles, treachery to the workers pays the traitor well.1

On 7 November 1890, William Campbell of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE) in Melbourne wrote to the British labour activist John Burns: ‘There is hardly a day elapses but what I have the pleasure of looking at your Photo … and comparing it with the original of Mr Champion’.2 In Campbell’s view, the photograph of the British socialist, Henry Hyde Champion, did not compare favourably with that of Burns. It showed the face of a man he could no longer trust: ‘the greatest curse and traitor that ever stood amongst the body of working men’.

Three months earlier, Campbell and his trade union colleagues had felt rather differently about Champion: ‘He came before us and was welcomed in the Trades Hall Council in a very cordial manner’. He soon wore this welcome out. Campbell continued:

Mr Champion pretended to have come to learn from us, but shortly after the mass meeting, he published a letter in the papers that damaged the cause here to a much larger extent than all the rest put together had done seeing as he was looked upon as one of the Leaders in the old country. He … has not been content with that but has now since the defeat of the unions practically crowed over the Leaders by publishing another letter in the press and holding the Leaders up to Ridicule.3

Campbell’s letter makes it clear that the Melbourne strike leaders had specific expectations of Champion, that they trusted the new arrival and were surprised by his betrayal. They had not done their homework. The British labour movement was already suspicious of Champion: in the tory gold scandal of 1885 he was accused of using tory money to stand socialist candidates in order to split the liberal vote, and these suspicions had never gone away.

Champion, then, might have the dubious honour of being the only labour activist suspected of betraying the labour movement on one continent and accused of betraying the labour movement on another. Whether or not he betrayed either movement is debatable; the point is that some activists believed he did. The issues raised by the accusations of betrayal against Champion bear more generally on the role of betrayal — as suspicion, accusation and established fact — in the life-cycle of radical organisations. This article will examine a number of issues that, though firmly anchored in the historical experience of Champion and his contemporaries, might be useful for developing a broader understanding of the roles played by betrayal and fear of betrayal in radical organisations. It will examine the role of class differences in the accusations against Champion, explore the significance of parochialism, discuss the importance of the context of conflict in the development and consolidation of these accusations, and ask what purpose, if any, such accusations served.

The sociologist Malin Åkerstrom places trust and distrust at the centre of human experience.4 This centrality makes these emotions a powerful tool for the analysis of radical organisations, especially in forming an understanding of the shared values that bond such organisations. It also explains, in Åkerstrom’s view, why the theme of treachery or betrayal has, until recently, received limited attention from social scientists: although we understand intuitively the important role they play in our lives, we find these emotions difficult to define objectively.5 In the past few years, however, there has been a renewal of interest in the issue of trust. As the idea of a social contract is challenged by the demands of economic rationalism, the theme has received increasing attention from sociologists, ethicists, philosophers and political scientists.6 The analytical tools they employ may prove useful for an examination of trust and distrust in radical organisations. The philosopher Martin Hollis argues for two kinds of trust. The first he calls predictive trust — or expecting that someone will behave in a certain way because of previous experience. The second is normative trust — or expecting of someone a certain standard of behaviour because of the demands or restraints provided by a prevailing moral or ethical code.7

In 1966 Champion’s niece by marriage, L M Henderson, lamented that although ‘His name crops up in numerous books and articles dealing with the 1880s, he was only ever a minor character’. She pointed out that no one had seen fit to publish a full-length study of him.8 This remains true. Considering his participation in some of the major events in the formation of the early labour movement, including the first meeting of the British Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in 1883, it is surprising that there is yet no published biography of Champion.9 He features prominently in most texts dealing with the formation and first decade of the SDF, and in many texts on the formation of the Labour Party.10 Henry Pelling’s article ‘H H Champion: pioneer of labour representation’ contains an insightful assessment of his character and the problems this gave him in Australia. Overall though, little has been written about his thirty years in Australia. There are brief but useful sections on his influence on Victorian socialism in Verity Burgmann’s In Our Time and Race Matthews’s Australia’s First Fabians.11 L E Fredman’s 1966 article ‘A Note on Henry Hyde Champion and the Maritime Strike of 1890’ offered a brief but tantalising glimpse of the unusual circumstances of his first visit to Australia in 1890.12 In 1983 the Bulletin of the Society of Labour History reproduced the rather self-serving ‘Quorum Pars Fui: The Autobiography of H H Champion’ with a useful introduction by Andrew Whitehead.13 The autobiography had been published in the Melbourne journal Trident over seven months in 1908. The chief sources for this article are Champion’s own writings, especially his Age articles, his ‘Autobiographical Sketch’ and his 1895 novel The Root of the Matter; John Burns’s correspondence; and contemporary newspaper reports.

For much of 1890 the Australian trade unions had been moving towards confrontation with employers. In support of the Shearers’ Union, waterside workers had refused to load wool that had been shorn by non-union labour. In July employers combined against this alliance of rural and urban unions, and in August, shipowners told the Marine Officers association that their wage claims would not be considered unless they disaffiliated from the Melbourne Trades Hall Council (THC).14 The maritime strike was officially declared on 15 August 1890, three days after Champion arrived in the colony. The accusation against Champion was straightforward: from his arrival he behaved like an enemy of labour rather than the friend the Australian labour movement had expected him to be.15 The visit began well. On 23 August he addressed the THC on the labour movement in England, telling the meeting that he was in Australia to study the results of trade unionism there. Mr Bennet, he said, had informed him of the situation in regards to the strike, but ‘it would be impertinent of him to offer them any criticism or advice respecting what they were about to do’. He told the crowd that it was the ‘view in England that those who lived in a country were the best judges of what it was necessary should be done in that particular country’. This announcement of neutrality, as Rickard puts it, might be seen as Champion’s first betrayal of the movement as the strike leaders must surely have expected advice, at least, from the famous British strike leader.16

Champion went on to discuss new unionism and Karl Marx’s ideas on political economy, then called for the education of working men. He mentioned, not for the last time, his close relationship with the revered John Burns and Tom Mann. Burns, he pointed out, was no longer the firebrand he had once been. In the past, the labour leader had used ‘language which was held to convey all sorts of threats to violence and revolutionary ideas but Mr Burns knows now, and indeed thought that there was ample room to bring about all sorts of reform purely by constitutional methods’. Champion also said, significantly in retrospect, that ‘A man should bow down to a superior as he would a nobleman, and not say he was as good as his superior when, as a matter of fact, he was not’. All men were not equal, but all men deserved equal opportunities. He finished by calling for international trades unionism that reached from Siberia to San Francisco. The MLA William Trenwith moved a vote of thanks and there were great cheers for Burns, Mann and Champion as well as cries of ‘hands across the sea’.17

On 24 August, Champion ‘figured conspicuously on the wharf’, and the Age commended him for the moderate and dignified language he employed in putting forward his economic ideas, although it did point out that few people in the colony would agree with those ideas. He addressed 40,000 men at the mass meeting on 31 August, and was greeted with ‘waving hats and cheering throats’. According to the Age, although the ‘slight well-dressed figure’ spoke cleverly and forcibly, his lack of local knowledge meant his speech addressed only the broad principles and did not stir the crowd to any great degree. It remained silent throughout his speech.18

Champion had received a warm welcome from the strikers and their leaders, but it did not take him long to jeopardise this new friendship. On 6 September, the Age published a long article entitled ‘The Labour crisis: Mr Champion speaks’. The article contained three arguments with which the strike leaders were bound to take issue. The first concerned the use of non-union labour. Champion had heard that the Shearers’ Union was claiming the right to dictate what men should be employed: that they were refusing to work with non-union labour. ‘I say such a claim is quite wrong, and can hardly believe that any responsible trade unionist can ever put it forward’, he wrote. The freedom of the worker to withdraw his labour, he argued, must be balanced with the freedom of the employer to employ non-union labour. The second issue was the treatment of blacklegs. The Age had reported increasing violence towards non-union labour on the wharfs over the previous week.19 In a paragraph entitled ‘Blacklegs are yet brothers’ Champion told the strikers that the worst way to make these men fellow unionists was to bully them. The strikers should start acting as men of honour, he admonished, and refuse to treat opponents as anything but brothers. Change, he declared, should be won through moral not physical force. The third issue that was guaranteed to irritate many of the strike leaders was his insistence that most of the employers had good intentions. He put their case as ‘We do not object to trades unions. We are in favour of them. But we do object to an arbitrary and unfair use of the power of unions’.20 It cannot have helped Champion’s relationship with the THC when the Age reported that ‘Several prominent employers of labour expressed themselves in sympathy with the views expressed in the article’.21

On 8 September David Bennet, the secretary of the THC, replied to Champion’s observations and suggestions. He agreed that employers had the right to use non-union labour but with five riders:

1. That a union should be able to request the removal of a troublemaker.
2. That a man should not be asked before he was employed whether he intended joining the union.
3. That a union has the right to say that its members shall not work with nonunionists.
4. That everyone should contribute to the union if they are to benefit from improvements in wages and conditions gained by the union.
5. That non-unionists working on less favourable conditions than unionists are a danger to the latter.22

Other unionists were more supportive of Champion. The union leader John Hancock, for example, told the Age that he agreed with ‘many portions’ of Champion’s article, ‘and as far as he had gone he considered that it was an able contribution to the literature on the subject’.23

Though lukewarm, Hancock’s support raises two features of the response to Champion by the labour movement. Firstly, the movement was far from united concerning his villainy. Secondly, a gap developed between their public vilification of the British activist and their private communications with him on the issue of mediation. In an Age article on 9 September Champion proposed travelling to Sydney to attend a conference on the strike and to offer his services as a mediator between employers and the strike organisers.24 When he left for Sydney a few days later, F H Bromley of the THC accompanied him, and Trenwith and F J Hall of the Wharf Laborer’s Union greeted him on his arrival. Despite this apparent support, the THC had sent a message to the conference warning it that he came without credentials. The conference consequently disclaimed all recognition of Champion as a mediator: Trenwith, Hall and Bromley were consulting with Champion as private individuals, not as representatives of the trades organisations.25

A report from Sydney on 15 September pointed out the ambivalence of the trades organisations towards Champion and his proposals, propagating a Sydney/Melbourne divide on the issue. The report detailed the appearance in Sydney of ‘long articles’ claiming Champion was a ‘young man of surprising ambition and self conceit’ and a ‘political agent of the Tories’. Strike leaders derided Champion at mass meetings, and were conducting an ‘exceedingly active campaign’ against him. Meanwhile, the Victorians Trenwith, Hall and Bromley held ‘daily interviews’ with Champion and were said to be ‘disposed to look upon his views as being very reasonable’. The Sydney strike leaders were ‘guided a good deal more by impulse than by common sense’. In contrast, the Melbourne delegates were ‘more keenly sensitive to the magnitude of the interests involved in the struggle’.26 After a few days, Champion returned to Melbourne. He appears to have lain low for some weeks until, on 17 October, he committed perhaps his greatest crime in the eyes of the Australian labour movement. He wrote to the Age admitting proudly that he had sent a telegram to ‘my friend Mr John Burns’ telling Burns that the strike had been grossly mismanaged and that the £20,000 loan he had been asked to raise in London could not prevent its ‘absolute failure’.27

This episode raises two issues worthy of further examination. The role of the Age is especially intriguing. Champion’s interference provided the newspaper with an original and unexpected angle on the strike. Given the situation on the wharves, the amount of space made for Champion’s pontifications, the reactions of the strike leaders to these, and his repudiation by both Burns and Mann are surprising: between 23 August and 17 November, these three issues led the strike news on at least fifteen occasions. Colonial inferiority might have played some part in this obsession with the opinions of a man who admitted to knowing little about the Australian industrial situation and to the reactions his opinions caused, but it is more likely that the drama of the situation was simply irresistible. Champion’s willingness to make his suggestions publicly instead of simply discussing them privately with the unionists is also surprising. In February 1891, Champion published a defence of his actions entitled ‘The crushing defeat of trade unionism in Australia’.28 John Fitzgerald, the Sydney delegate to the strike committee, replied to this defence in the same journal the following month. Fitzgerald made it plain that Champion’s use of the press to air his views on the conduct of the strike contributed to the degree of betrayal felt by the strike leaders at his actions.29 In some of the Age articles Champion seemed almost to be goading the unionists. He acknowledged their criticisms of his suggestions but continued to pontificate anyway. It is hard not to conclude that he acted from egotism: he appears to have enjoyed the attention he received even if it was negative. Moreover, Champion seems to have developed a professional relationship with the newspaper during the episode. Despite his anti-liberalism, he had no qualms about writing regularly for the Age after he settled permanently in Australia in 1894, although he did, of course, share with the paper’s owner a strong commitment to protection.30

The strike leaders’ surprise and anger at Champion’s behaviour raises the question of what kind of behaviour they had expected from a British labour leader in general, and Champion in particular, based on their previous experience. Certainly, William Campbell considered it reasonable that a British labour activist should visit Melbourne in order to learn from its labour leaders. This indicates a degree of pride in the achievements of the labour movement here, and a willingness to embrace the exchange of ideas, strategies and tactics between the Australian and British labour movements. Campbell trusted that the two movements shared values and aims, and that their leaders would employ the same or similar tactics. He took at face value Champion’s claim that he was in Australia to learn and he expected him to behave in the best interests of the Australian labour movement. In short, he appears to have trusted Champion. But on what evidence did Campbell base this trust?

The colonial labour movement had maintained links with British labour from the 1830s. Initially, its chief concern had been to counter the rosy portraits of life in Australia painted by emigration agents, warning workers of the problems they might encounter here in a bid to restrict immigration and preserve Australian jobs.31 Over the years, however, Australian labour repeatedly looked to Britain for ideas, inspiration and support. It based its calls for legislative change in Australia on the gains made by unions in Britain, especially the British Trades Union Act of 1871, which gave unions legal recognition under certain conditions, and it tracked the British Trades Union Council (TUC) closely as it moved towards formal political activity.32 In its turn, British labour used the achievements of Australian labour (notably the eight-hour day) to point to what life might be like for labour in a less class-conscious society. The two movements shared experiences, aims and objectives. In his rebuttal of Champion’s defence of his actions, Fitzgerald was able to use a Scottish analogy to help the British readership understand exactly what had happened in Australia. The common issues he chose to highlight were concerns about the safety of the public due to the long working hours and absence of a family life of the marine officers.33

Some Australian unionists even belonged to British trade unions:34 William Campbell and John Burns were members of the British-based ASE. Campbell’s letter to Burns, however, implied a rather unequal relationship between the two labour movements. His request for a photograph highlights the esteem in which British labour leaders were held: some appear to have acquired a kind of celebrity status with colonial labour. It is unlikely that a similar request was ever made from Britain for an inspirational photograph of Campbell or David Bennet. Nevertheless, the links between the two movements were active, friendly, and based on mutual trust: they shared a common enemy in capital, after all. The importance of these links was demonstrated by Champion’s repeated resort to name-dropping in order to add weight to his calls for compromise and moderation. In an article entitled ‘What would Burns and Mann say?’ Champion exaggerated the closeness of his relationship with the pair, given the circumstances of his leaving Britain and his consequent repudiation by both Burns and Mann. He wrote:

My position is … a peculiar one of being the only person whom they know and trust who can, in this crisis, convey to them a trustworthy account of affairs here, I have not yet communicated with them. They know I am here, and are undoubtedly amazed at my silence.35

Champion continued with a long anecdote that was designed to prove that Burns would support his approach to the strike. He was wrong. Both Burns and Mann discredited Champion’s request not to send money and urged British workers not to abandon the Australian workers.36 When Fitzgerald arrived in London in late October seeking financial aid for the strikers, his report of Champion’s behaviour caused consternation amongst some of the British leaders. The Scottish socialist Robert Cunninghame Graham wrote to Burns requesting information on Fitzgerald’s accusations against Champion.37 When he received copies of Champion’s Age articles, he concluded that they did not ‘deserve the censure they have attracted’.38

The ties between the British and Australian labour movements must have made Champion’s behaviour all the more difficult to understand. The last thing the Australian strike leaders would have expected from a British activist, especially one with the reputation of Champion, was that he would act as though he held a brief for the employers.39 Champion’s achievements as ‘one of the Leaders in the old country’ were well known in the colony. Particularly impressive was his arrest, along with H H Hyndman, John Burns and Jack Williams, after the Trafalgar Square riot in 1886. The group was acquitted in January 1887. His active role in the successful London Dock strike of 1889 gave him the air of a recent winner. Campbell might have been aware of Champion’s anti-liberalism, although, given his surprise at his behaviour, it seems unlikely Burns had told him much about the tory gold accusations.40

With a strike imminent, the arrival of such an experienced campaigner bearing a letter of recommendation from Burns must have been reassuring to the Melbourne leaders.41 During the debacle that followed Champion’s first letter to the Age, it was rumoured that Burns had only furnished Champion with the letter of recommendation in order to encourage him to leave Britain. By 1890 Champion was running out of friends in the British labour movement. He had been expelled from the SDF having earned a reputation for freelance activities, erratic behaviour and dubious connections.42 His former colleagues in the SDF bemoaned his penchant for political intrigue, which Ernest Belfort Bax believed had its roots in boredom.43 His anti-liberalism had led him to a compromising connection with the tory sympathiser Michael Maltman Barry; a connection which seemed to result in the mysterious funding of labour candidates, though the money appears to have come from R W Hudson, a wealthy soap manufacturer who was an old friend of Champion’s.44 Although he was never openly accused of betraying the movement, those who believed the future of labour representation lay within the Liberal Party were especially inclined to consider Champion untrustworthy. Some suspected him of running the Labour Elector as a tool of the conservatives in order to split the liberal vote.45 Henry Broadhurst, the secretary of the British Trade Union Congress (TUC), alluded to Champion’s connection with Barry. Mr Champion, he said, was not his instructor or political director, and had no more to do with him than the man in the moon, which was a common euphemism for an agent of political bribery at the time.46

Champion never denied his commitment to tory socialism and his antipathy towards the Liberal Party. He expressed his tory socialist version of marxism in his 1895 novel The Root of the Matter: Being a Series of Dialogues in Social Questions.47 The novel’s almost non-existent plot allows for a number of set political speeches. Ida Burton, an idealistic young woman, meets the infamous socialist George Blake at a dance. She challenges him to convert her and her brother, the radical liberal Dr Fred Burton, to the socialist cause. Converting the well-to-do will do less harm than preaching to the poor, she argues. Blake suggests that he visits the Burton family home over a number of weeks to argue the case for socialism with Fred, Ida and their friend Mortimer, a staunch tory.

Each chapter contains a fresh visit from Blake to the Burton home, and each character represents an argument either for or against socialism. Blake (representing Champion) is the acceptable socialist. He is no mad revolutionary: dapper and well educated, he personifies rational and scientific socialism. Ida Burton’s role is to argue for the ‘nobler’ side of life. Her position is that man does not live by bread alone, that beauty and nobility of character matter.48 She argues that you cannot appeal to the individual on low mean grounds like money and expect any good to come out of it. Freedom, she asserts, consists not in the absence of prohibition but in the presence of opportunity. Fred Burton’s friend Mortimer is included in the novel to demonstrate the relationship of toryism with socialism. He presents the case for the importance of noblesse oblige in improving the condition of the working class, claiming that the tories have done more for labour in the last fifty years than the liberals.49 By reducing rents, he argues, landlords help the poor far more than capitalists do. An example of this was the change of property rights in Irish land legislation: the world, he says, did not collapse consequently. He accuses Blake of wanting to control change through the expansion of the state but Blake tells him ‘You are more of a Socialist than you thought’.50 Fred Burton’s role in the story is to expound the standard liberal arguments: socialists are ignorant and coarse, and regulation will have a negative effect on character. Champion warns liberals not to judge socialism by its most ignorant advocates.51 The newspapers have helped to form Burton’s prejudiced view of socialists.52 When he meets one in the flesh, he is surprised: George Blake is slender, soft-voiced and smartly dressed. Champion makes use of his experience during the maritime strike. Blake describes his experience during a recent strike: he developed a good relationship with the best employers and the union leaders accused him of being ‘got at’. They are, he says, ‘a mass of very ignorant illiterate men’,53 but this is not their fault as character is ‘much influenced by circumstance’.54 The triumph of socialism is only a matter of time, and when it arrives everyone will be a gentleman. Mortimer proclaims this to be ‘excellent Tory doctrine’.55

Underpinning this demystification of the evil socialist is an exposition of scientific socialism.56 Blake argues that socialists do not propose to initiate change, that talk of revolution is ‘hideous nonsense’.57 He favours a scientific explanation of the development of human society. Change is occurring all the time, though the tendency is not generally recognised.58 The working class is clearly moving into the ascendancy: the facts simply cannot be denied. The working class, though, is not a class at all, according to Blake: it includes all men and women. No wealth or privilege is required to belong. It is open to all who work: ‘The triumph of labour is the triumph of man’.59 Society is flexible, but there is pressure from within. He likens it to a chicken’s egg: you cannot see it developing inside but suddenly the shell cracks. Tories like Mortimer are the weights and safety-valves that ensure change occurs as a gradual evolution rather than revolution.60 Man, Blake argues, is more influenced by the way he makes his living than by anything else: notions of property, law, sexual morality and civic virtue are the direct outcome of material modes of living.61 No thinker destroyed feudalism, it came from altered external circumstances: as feudalism became inadequate, the changes in the method of production caused social change.62 The schemes of socialists are nothing more than the recognition of change.

The interests of labour and capital are directly opposed.63 Despite capitalists’ warnings that such changes are ‘impossible’, the world survives improvements in the condition of labour. Labour tries for collective bargaining and apprenticeships to restrict competition; with the dominance of the working class, such restrictions are necessary. Protection would be unnecessary if an item could be produced in Britain and if the British workforce were skilled enough, but when the cost of British labour is greater than in competing countries, protection is essential. Cheap foreign labour means starvation for British workers, and all democratic countries are highly protectionist. Blake calls for a Customs Union of the Empire, for a ring fence inside which, where there are fair conditions of labour, there is free trade.64 Outside, where labour is oppressed, tariffs must apply. A minimum wage is necessary to shift the burden of competition from employed to employer. Blake calls for the nationalisation of land and property if an owner refuses to use it for the benefit of all. He takes a swipe at the trade union movement: their methods are often weak, foolish and mistaken. Despite this, its members are the only true working class and their principles are true.65

Champion was the scion of a minor aristocratic family. He had been educated at Marlborough before taking a commission in the army and serving in India.66 He had been raised to lead the lower orders and the manner in which he carried himself reflected this. Contemporary observers noted Champion’s aristocratic appearance, his monocle and his silk top hat.67 To Burns’s biographer, Joseph Burgess, he was ‘the artillery officer in mufti’.68 Despite Campbell’s surprise at Champion’s betrayal, the strike leaders were likely to have been ambivalent in their expectations of someone looking this way. On one hand, seeing a gentleman they would expect the new arrival to be bound to behave like a gentleman; that is, to act openly and to deal honestly with them. Seeing an artillery officer in mufti, they would expect strong and decisive leadership, order, and steady behaviour. Seeing an educated gentleman, they would expect clear thinking, strong polemic skills, and an ability to negotiate with the capitalists. On the other hand, they might have seen someone from an opposing class, a near-aristocrat (and a British one, at that) with an overbearing and patronising manner. In relation to the British labour movement, Burgess identified Champion’s ‘one defect’ as his inability to temper his ‘dragooning spirit’ in the doggedly democratic socialist movement.69 The Australian labour movement was no less democratic and would have felt instinctively wary of someone with the superior manner which Burgess described. This wariness might have led the strike leaders to react more sensitively to Champion’s behaviour than if he had been a working man.70

The Polish sociologist Piotr Sztompka provides a useful analysis of the complexities of trust and distrust in revolutionary movements that can easily be applied to any organisation or group attempting to achieve social change, including the Australian labour movement in this period.71 Sztompka points out that a limited culture of distrust is actually required to bring about social change; distrust is built into the formation of radical movements. Revolutionaries must distrust political authorities and class enemies or they will not form a grouping in the first place. At the same time, a strong culture of trust must exist within the ranks of the revolutionaries.72 The strike leaders expected a British gentleman like Champion to act honourably, to lead decisively and intelligently and to behave, ultimately, in the interests of his own class. They also expected a debt to be honoured. Australian labour had contributed greatly to the success of the London Dock strike the previous year, sending £36,000 to aid the British dockers.73 The strike leaders felt that British labour owed them help, not criticism and betrayal. Champion excused his letter to Burns advising him to ignore the request for a loan arguing that the money sent in 1889 had been from the general public, not the trade unions.74 In this matter, by deciding unilaterally that the Australian strikers were undeserving of help, Champion appeared to behave rather less than honourably.

In his view, he acted with honour throughout the episode. After reading up on the dispute during his first weeks in the colony, Champion decided in early September that ‘if the working class in Australia were to be saved from a crushing defeat that would surely have disastrous effects in Great Britain, some one must speak out very plainly’.75 It was, then, his duty to intervene in order to end the strike. It had also been his duty, he wrote, to advise Burns to ignore the strike leaders’ request for a loan as it ‘could by no possibility repair the effects of the wanton mismanagement of the strike’. Whether he was honourable enough to warn the strike leaders that his first Age article was about to appear is difficult to establish. He claimed that he warned them of his view that the strike was already lost, but there was a great difference between doing this privately and in a published article, as Fitzgerald’s assessment made clear.

His behaviour raises the issue of what Sztompka calls ‘us’ categories, and Champion’s ambivalent position in relation to the ‘us’ category of Victorian labour in this period. Sztompka suggests that three moral obligations define the parameter of an ‘us’ category. The first of these obligations is mutual trust, the second is loyalty, and the third, solidarity.76 Defining the ‘us’ parameter for Victorian labour is difficult. Even the most perfunctory examination of local and colonial elections in the period reveals a fluid identification. A candidate could stand as a socialist at one election, for labour at the next, and then reappear as a liberal at the following, as Champion did during the second half of the 1890s. In Victoria, the clearest political ‘us’ parameters were those around the supporters and opponents of protection. The former included the Liberal Party, farmers, manufacturers and their employees, the representatives of labour, the THC, and the most influential newspaper, David Syme’s Age. The latter included the conservatives, squatters and importers.77 Obviously, the capital/labour dichotomy cut across these allegiances, with the Liberal Party and organised labour on opposing sides of that particular divide. The extent to which this dichotomy had developed by this period has been the subject of much debate. Some see the strikes of the late 1880s and early 1890s as the great turning point in the development of a separate labour identity and the corresponding emergence of capital as the organised opponent to labour. Others prefer to trace a continuous line of radical resistance to capital from the earliest days of the colonies.78 Either way, it is clear from primary sources that the language expressing this dichotomy was in use at this period (if only to be ridiculed), that ‘us’ parameters had developed around the two groups: capital and labour, employers and employees.79

Champion walked into an ‘us’ looking and acting more like one of ‘them’. In Britain, he had never pretended to be one of the workers, calling himself and other upper middle-class labour activists such as Hyndman, Burrows, and Hunter Watts ‘the top hat brigade’.80 Champion wrote and spoke about workers in patronising generalities: ‘The reader may find some difficulty in understanding why I should be blamed for having caused the failure of the strike. Those who have experience of working men may enlighten him’.81 He clearly did not trust them. Thus, mutual trust, Sztompka’s first moral obligation for defining an ‘us’ parameter, was absent in Champion’s relationship with the labour movement. He did not belong to the group. This failure to identify fully with Australian labour might explain his decision to publish his critique of the strike. From his point of view, his behaviour was not treacherous because he was outside of the group; you cannot betray something to which you do not belong. Champion was the exemplary freelance, perhaps the only group to which he truly belonged was the upper middle-class.

Australian labour’s anger with Champion was remarkably resilient. In 1895 the THC refused to participate in the May Day march because he was on the organising committee.82 In 1900 when the Tocsin supported his candidacy for election in Albert Park (because there was no labor candidate standing), the paper acknowledged that there existed ‘some insensate hatred of H H Champion’. He had ‘of course made enemies’ after showing a ‘fault in judgement during the Maritime Strike’.83 Some in the movement were still unable to forgive him.84 This resilience is partly explained by the context of conflict in which the betrayal occurred; the magnitude of the defeat; and the difficulties of the years that followed. It might be too much to claim that Champion’s actions provided the movement with a scapegoat, although that is exactly what he argued in 1891:

Since the strike leaders have, for want of a better means of diverting attention from their blunders, accused me of being the cause of their failure, it is clear that I must have been a factor in the result, and I have no desire to evade any responsibility for what I did.85

Had the leaders not been forced to abandon the strike, however, had they been able to fight on and win, Champion’s betrayal would have disappeared more quickly from their collective memory. Instead, retelling the story of his betrayal, drawing attention to it whenever his name came up, served two purposes. Firstly, Champion became a handy explanation for the difficulties encountered by labour because of the defeat. A newly organised opposition combined with a severe economic depression weakened the unions considerably, and the 1890s were hard years for labour. Secondly, Champion’s story served as a warning about the importance of solidarity for success. In the move towards direct representation for labour, freelance behaviour would become increasingly sidelined resulting eventually in the introduction of procedural trust, the Labor Party pledge. Indeed, the story of Champion’s betrayal appears as another, albeit minor, chapter in the on-going rejection of individualism by labour as it embraced collective action and moved towards democratic organisational procedures. The movement used Champion as it has used many labour ‘rats’ — to facilitate changes in strategy and to help redefine objectives and values. In the future, the story of his treachery would show loyal labour women and men how not to behave.

It is difficult to see how Champion’s first encounter with Australian labour could have ended any way but badly. For more than half a decade he had belonged to a radical organisation while acting outside of it whenever he considered it expedient. Driven by a desire to see labour represented in parliament independently of the liberals, he was prepared to do almost anything in order to achieve his goal. He was hardly likely to change this independent attitude on arrival in Australia. Social class played a part in this episode in two ways. Firstly, the Marlborough-educated Champion had been born and raised to lead men of a lower station. Even in his altruism, this inculcation did not wane. Champion could never be a ‘joiner’. He could never accept the consensus view if it did not tally with his own. Secondly, his military bearing and patronising attitude towards workers made the strike leaders more willing to believe that his actions were treacherous. Parochialism only became significant when Champion began to act independently from the strike leaders. British labour activists, with all their valuable experience, were clearly welcome — as long as they acted in the best interests of Australian labour as Australian labour saw it. Fitzgerald was adamant that Champion did not have a clear understanding of the issues of the strike, that he had a too-rosy view of the lot of the Australian worker, although in his first letter to the Age, Champion made it clear that he understood Australia was no workman’s paradise.86 The context of conflict was crucial to the formation of the accusations and the length of time they remained in labour folklore. For a few months, capital and labour were polarised for the first time. There were violent confrontations between unionists and non-unionists around the country, although Melbourne was relatively peaceful in comparison to other areas.87 Still, it was a time of heightened emotions when it becomes more difficult for members of a group to trust one another. In such fluid situations, every action, positive or negative, appears to have been crucial to the outcome. If that outcome is defeat then the losers will concentrate on the negative aspects of the events in an attempt to understand and explain it. Australian labour was defeated and endured ten difficult years. The story of Champion’s treachery became one explanation of that defeat, a warning about the importance of solidarity, and, by demonising individualistic behaviour, helped to pave the way for the Labor Party pledge.

The Australian labour movement might have put his betrayal to good use, but for Champion it only consolidated his problems in Britain. When he returned in January 1891, the labour press refused to let him forget his Australian adventure. Abandoned by Burns and by Keir Hardie, Champion was humiliated at the second conference of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and returned to Australia soon after, his political career in Britain over once and for all.88 In Melbourne, despite the most energetic efforts, he failed repeatedly to be elected to parliament.89 Champion spent the rest of his life in that city, dying in relative obscurity in April 1928.90 Clearly, when H M Hyndman suggested that traitors to the movement were well rewarded, he did not have H H Champion in mind. The only person the ‘greatest curse and traitor’ seems to have harmed with his behaviour was himself.

Notes

1 Joseph Burgess, John Burns: The Rise and Progress of a Right Honourable, Glasgow, 1911, p vii. Hyndman was referring to John Burns.
2 William Campbell to Burns, John Burns’s Correspondence, BL Add MSS 46287, 7 November 1890, f10. It is ironic that Campbell was writing to a man who would, soon after, become one of British labour’s most vilified traitors. See note 1 above.
3 ibid., f7.
4 Malin Åkerstrom, Betrayal and Betrayers, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, USA, 1991, p ix.
5 ibid., p x.
6 See, for example, Diego Gambetta (ed.), Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, Blackwell, Oxford, 1988; Robert D Putnam, Bowling Alone, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2001; Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, Free Press, New York, 1995.
7 Martin Hollis, Trust Within Reason, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, pp 10–14.
8 Leslie M Henderson, The Goldstein Family, Melbourne, 1965, p131.
9 Henry Hyde Champion, ‘Quorum pars fui: an unconventional autobiography’, Trident, vol 2, nos 1–7, May–November, 1908.
10 See Chushichi Tsuzuki, H M Hyndman and British Socialism, Oxford, 1961, p 79, for example.
11 Verity Burgmann, In Our Time: Socialism and the Rise of Labour, 1885–1905, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1985, pp 117–20, Race Mathews, Australia’s First Fabians, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993. See also Peter Kellock, B A Hons Thesis, ‘H H Champion: the failure of Victorian socialism’, Monash, 1971.
12 L E Fredman, ‘A note on Henry Hyde Champion and the Maritime Strike of 1890’, Labour History, no 11, November 1966.
13 The title means ‘I was one of them’, Henderson, op. cit., p 99.
14 Stuart Svensen, Industrial War: The Great Strikes, 1890–1894, Wollongong, NSW, 1995, p 16.
15 Age, 23 October 1890.
16 The strike leaders were so demoralised they were happy to take support from anywhere. John Rickard, Class and Politics: New South Wales, Victoria and the Early Commonwealth, 1890–1910, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1976, p.34.
17 Age, 23 August 1890
18 Age, 25 September 1890
19 Age, 27 August 1890, 28 August 1890.
20 Age, 6 September 1890.
21 Age, 8 September 1890.
22 ibid.
23 ibid..
24 Age, 9 September 1890.
25 The Age reported that the conference never received a telegram telling it to keep Champion ‘in tow’ because he was in the pay of the capitalists. The telegram was sent, ‘by some peculiar chance’, to the employers’ conference, read and returned to the dead-letter office. Age, 13 September 1890.
26 Age, 15 September 1890.
27 Age, 17 October 1890.
28 Henry Hyde Champion, ‘The crushing defeat of trade unionism in Australia’, Nineteenth Century, vol 29, no 168, 1891.
29 John Fitzgerald, ‘Mr H H Champion on the Australian strike’, Nineteenth Century, vol 29, no 169, 1891, p 44.
30 Champion was employed as a leader writer for the Melbourne Age after his return despite attacking David Syme for his conservatism, Champion, ‘Autobiographical sketch’, Henderson, op. cit., p 146.
31 Ian Turner and L Sandercock, In Union is Strength: A History of Trade Unions in Australia, 1788–1983, Nelson, 1976, p 15.
32 ibid., pp 37–8.
33 Fitzgerald, op. cit., p 447.
34 Turner, op. cit., p. 34.
35 Age, 9 September 1890.
36 Age, 21 October, 22 October, 6 November 1890. Age, 5 November 1890, 7 November 1890.
37 Cunninghame Graham to Burns, John Burns’s Correspondence, BL Add MSS 46284, 5 November, 1890, ff61, 62, 7 November, 1890, f64
38 ibid., 22 December 1890, f76. Burns was kept informed of events in the colony by Samuel Smith who was not sure whether H H Champion had been ‘wilfully indiscreet’ or ‘nobbled by Press interviews’, Samuel Smith to John Burns, John Burns’s Correspondence, BL Add MSS 46289, 22 September 1890, f194.
39 Fitzgerald, op. cit., p 445.
40 Fitzgerald implies that he only learned about some of the more negative aspects of Champion’s British career after his arrival in Britain, p 445.
41 It started three days later. Champion, ‘Crushing defeat’, op. cit., p 225.
42 Champion wrote that he narrowly escaped expulsion by resigning, H H Champion, ‘Autobiographical sketch’, 9 pp, typescript, Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, p 5.
43 Ernest Belfort Bax, Reminiscences and Reflexions of a Mid and Late Victorian [1918], A M Kelley, New York, 1967, pp 101–2.
44 Richard Condon, ‘The political career of Michael Maltman Barry’, B Litt Thesis, Oxford 1972. Condon identifies this friend as R WHudson, p 114, but Burgess calls him Barlow and claims to have met him in 1885, pp 17–9.
45 Mann called the accusations ‘puritanical nonsense’, Condon, op. cit., p115.
46 Henry Pelling, Origins of the British Labour Party, London, 1954, p 73.
47 Henry Hyde Champion, The Root of the Matter: Being a Series of Dialogues on Social Questions, E W Cole, Melbourne, 1895.
48 ibid., p 37.
49 ibid., pp 38, 46-7.
50 ibid., p 60.
51 ibid., p 50.
52 ibid., pp 10–11.
53 ibid., p14.
54 ibid., p15.
55 ibid., p16.
56 ibid., p 50.
57 ibid, pp 22–4. At this, Ida Burton exclaims ‘Oh you take my breath away’!
58 ibid., p 51.
59 ibid., p 44.
60 ibid., pp 26–8.
61 ibid., p 31.
62 ibid., p 34.
63 ibid., p 74.
64 ibid., p106.
65 ibid., p 72.
66 Champion, ‘Quorum pars fui’, Trident, vol 2, no 1, 1908, p 11; Champion, ‘Autobiographical Sketch’, op. cit., pp 1–3.
67 In Trust: A Sociological Theory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, Piotr Sztompka emphasises the importance of appearance and demeanour in influencing trust or distrust, p 68.
68 Burgess, op. cit., p 13.
69 ibid., p 71.
70 In a speech against Champion, Fitzgerald said ‘[Champion] was a middle-class gentleman, while he [Fitzgerald] was a working man. Mr Champion claimed to be an advocate of trades unionism and a saviour of it, but they did not want any middle-class gentleman to descend from his heaven to save the working men, who were able to save themselves in this country and every country in the world’. Rickard, op. cit., p 34.
71 Sztompka, op. cit., p 113.
72 ibid.
73 Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p 125.
74 Champion, ‘Crushing defeat’, op. cit., p 235.
75 ibid.
76 Sztompka, op. cit., p 5.
77 Alfred Deakin, The Crisis in Victorian Politics, 1879–1881: a personal retrospect, J A La Nauze and R M Crawford (eds), Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic, 1957, pp 11–12.
78 John Rickard argues that the events of 1890 have some importance as a turning point, that they heralded the beginning of defeats and the end of mounting confidence, op. cit., p 7.
79 ibid., p 8.
80 Burgess, op. cit., p 15.
81 Champion, ‘Crushing defeat’, op. cit., pp 233–4. He called the British dockers ‘untutored barbarians’, Champion, ‘Quorum pars fui’, op. cit., p 126.
82 Minutes of the Melbourne Trades Hall Council, 19 April 1895, 10 April 1896.
83 Tocsin, 18 October 1900.
84 He had ‘earned the lasting enmity of the THC leaders’, Tocsin, 18 December 1902.
85 Champion, ‘Crushing defeat’, op. cit., p 232.
86 Age, 6 September 1890.
87 Frank Bongiorno, The People’s Party: Victorian Labor and the radical tradition, 1875–1914, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic, 1996, p 32.
88 Champion, ‘Autobiographical sketch’, op. cit.
89 The Champion, 30 May 1896; Age, 13 November, 1900.
90 Age, 1 May 1928. There was no mention of Champion’s activities during the 1890 strike in the obituary.


Originally published in Write/Up, Elizabeth Hartrick, Robert Hogg, Sian Supski (ed.), St Lucia, API Network and UQP, 2004.