George Wells SMAILES

SMAILES, George Wells (1862-1934), coal miner, Primitive Methodist Minister, NSW Parliamentarian, Returned Servicemen's activist, insurance and real estate broker.

Smailes was born in at Harelaw, near Tanfield, Co. Durham, England, c. 11 April 1862, the son of William Smailes (Coal Miner) and his wife Elizabeth. George was the third child, and second son, of five children. He commenced work in the mines at the age of 10, studying at night to join the Methodist ministry. He migrated to Australia in 1883, arriving on 4 November in Sydney on the Orient line steamer Sorata. In 1897, he married Agnes Jones in Burwood, NSW.

As a self-improver following Wesley’s injunctions to his preachers to read widely, Smailes was familiar with the economic and social literature on the ‘Labor Question’ facing the churches of the day. More importantly, as a former miner, poverty was a lived reality for him, and socialism an element of the air that he breathed – at no stage in the available sources is Smailes seen to hold to any simplistic view about the connection between public holiness and economic status. He undertook much of his training, however, in the Forest Lodge, Annandale and Leichhardt Primitive Methodist circuit, where, in 1887-1889 he is recorded as in attendance at the anniversary tea and public meetings of the Forest Lodge, Dulwich Hill, Annandale and Leichhardt Primitive Methodist Churches. With J. W. Holden he was the preacher at the Dulwich Hill Methodist Church Anniversary meeting, followed by Tea and a meeting in the Athenaeum Hall, at which he (along with Revs. M’Callum, Holden and James) gave ‘pleasing addresses’.[1] In August, he and Rev. J. W. Leadley laid the foundation stones for the Annandale Methodist School. In October 1888 and February 1889, Smailes again preached at the Forest Lodge and Annandale church anniversary meetings, which reported removals of members due to the ‘depression in trade’. Nevertheless, the church continued to grow slowly. In 1889, Smailes completed his probation, passing the examination with 87%. When, in February 1889, the PM Annual Assembly decided the divide the inner city circuit he had served, he took advantage of the creation of a new district (entitled ‘Newcastle’) out of the Newcastle, Wallsend, Burwood, Morpeth, Nundle, and Macleay River stations. Receiving reports from his previous circuit, the PM Annual Assembly were pleased to find that the inner-city circuit reported very favourably of his attention to duties and his ministerial ability. They inspected his journal and sermons, and ‘unanimously granted’ his application.[2]

His association with Newcastle mining quickly brought him into connection with the radical mining traditions emerging around Lithgow. He was formally appointed there in 1890, but seems to have been active there prior to this. It was an amenable town for PM work, having expanded rapidly through the migration of particularly Protestant miner from Cornwall, Wales, northern England and Scotland. Just as Bathurst was a Catholic Labor stronghold, Lithgow was its Protestant Labor alternate. A former miner himself, Smailes was attracted to the teachings of socialism among his colleagues, but wary that it would not be able to achieve its aims without revolution.[3] Ministering to inner city workers in Sydney, where economic downturn was already evident in 1888, and among the miners in the Hunter Valley, the London Dock Strike of 1889 brought into focus the inequalities even in Australian society. Poverty was not something to be idly accepted. Rather, as had been seen in the French Revolution, it was like ‘those insiduous diseases in the human frame, which developed beneath many a fair exterior the decay and corruption that terminated in death.’[4] He was not, he said, a socialist of the materialist type, but ‘a Socialist after the type of Christ, the grandest social reformer the world had ever seen’. Biblical text was not a recipe for passivity:

He did not believe that Christ meant that some men should have all and others nothing; that the bitterness of extreme deprivation should be felt by some, while others revelled in satiety; that wealth and want should be always closely allied to each other. Did he believe such interpretations he should for sake the standard of Christ, and brand the God he now so much loved as the essence of cruelty and vindictiveness. ... Some men in His earthly kingdom had stolen the birthright of others, and then used His words as a covering for a multitude of sins.

Likewise, though temperance was a great thing – and he was himself a ‘consistent total abstainer’— he ‘could not-believe that the destruction of intemperance would annihilate poverty.’

If every brewery were to be closed to-morrow, we would still have the social wound open and unhealed.

When later he had the opportunity, Smailes would inject into Primitive Methodist counsels the economic view, that it was not ‘infidelity, drunkenness and immorality’ which caused poverty (‘the alarming distress and positive starvation’) as a condition (as opposed to a personal choice) but the need to ‘purify political life’.[5] With Henry George, he also rejected the theory of overproduction as a cause of poverty. These were symptoms, not causes.[6] For causes, he sought inspiration in the economic writing of the time, particularly the Liberal Cobdenite social justice advocate J. E. Thorold Rogers’ Six Centuries of Work and Wages, and Henry George’s The Crime of Poverty (1885). The problem was landlordism, ‘the curse which is destroying the harmony of the social order’, in which the use of accumulated wealth to monopolise the necessities of life and the means of production (ie. land) consigned those without such wealth into poverty and dependence. Poverty and industrial strife would continue, he thought, ‘whilever land was treated as private property’. Like his fellow coal miner and Lithgow Methodist preacher, Joseph Cook, Smailes was an Orangeman and a single taxer: Henry George’s conceit of the bounty of nature belonging equally to all men spoke powerfully to their Methodist sense of the immanence and yet transcendent justice of the Creator God. Without the class consequences of Irish landlordism in the pot, their Orangeism took more the form of British loyalism than anti-Catholicism: reports of the time identify Cook and Smailes speaking at Orange Lodge functions in Lithgow, though the events were ‘social’ and ‘subdued in tone.’[7] Smailes was treasurer of the Lithgow Single Tax association, an organisation which also featured Cook, James Ryan, W. H. Teague, and George Donald (mayor of Lithgow and later Cook’s running mate in Labor preselection for the seat of Hartley) in the year that George planned to visit Australia 1889.[8] In response to the rolling strikes which afflicted the coal industry from 1889 onwards, he called for the nationalisation of land, so that all would receive a fair share of what they produced.[9]

These lessons bore heavily on Smailes’ sense of his role as a clergyman. At one meeting in 1890, he expressed his hope that:

his presence might go towards refuting the popular error that clergymen were on the side of capital and opposed to labor. If this were true he (the speaker) would unfrock himself, preferring to be with miners than amongst men with principles unsound, with lives a lie, and characters opposed to that of the Founder of Christianity. There are few bodies more democratic than dissenting ministers, and he regarded this breadth of sentiment as a most healthy sign.[10]

By 1890, Smailes’ (along with Cook and others) were agitating for change within the system –that Labor Electoral Councils should be established by the mining unions in order to ensure ‘the proper representation of labour in conducting the political affairs of the colony’.[11] With his preaching training behind him, Smailes was an ‘effective’ public speaker – and could regularly be found at miners’ demonstrations and functions promoting Georgism, unionism, the Eight Hour Day, and peaceful political action. At a meeting in February 1890, he can be found to the fore, moving the first resolution:-"That in the opinion of this meeting the time has arrived when it is imperative that the workingmen of the colony be directly represented in parliament by men selected from their own ranks."[12] Parliamentary representation should not be left to ‘brewers, landlords and lawyers but with men sprung from the ranks of labor.’ It was a view sharpened when the NSW government sent the military in to protect non-union labour at the Vale colliery in October that year. Smailes, and most of the other clergymen in town, publicly decried the step as unnecessary: indeed, he was ‘boiling over with indignation’ at what he considered undue capitalist influence on an immoral government.

He had been called a demagogue because he had taken an active part in trying to bring about a true feeling, and endeavouring to persuade the men to stand for right and justice. But he believed justice was on his side. He had been and was a hearty sympathiser with labour, and although a minister, he was also a man, and his desire would always be to do what he could towards ameliorating the conditions of the working classes. The action of the Government was a direct insult not only to those present to the whole community.[13]

The feeling against the sitting member was running high, and both Cook and Smailes knew that for the miners to obtain proper representation, they would need to put up their own people for election. As Murdoch notes, the ability to obtain support beyond the 400 voters who were miners to the 3000 voters in the Hartley electorate, depended heavily on the respectability and verbal skills brought to the process by the Methodist preachers, Smailes and Cook. In May 1891, Cook was elected president of the first labour electoral league to be formed in Lithgow, and when Sir Henry Parkes called a snap election on 28 May, Smailes received 398 votes, and Cook 395, ‘ the rest of the candidates being nowhere’.[14] Unfortunately, Smailes was struck down with influenza which grew gradually worse, until 11 June ‘he announced that he would not be able to face the strenuous speaking of an election campaign’. Cook was selected his place, and so began a stellar political career which eventually ended up in Cook becoming the first Labor member of Parliament to hold a ministerial position anywhere in the world, and eventually to the Prime Minister’s Lodge. It was a choice which Smailes would make again -- even after he was eventually elected to Parliament, he would retire after several years in order to concentrate on the needs of the Primitive Methodist Church. In consequence, he has largely been forgotten by Australian history, while Cook carried forward their common platform: the eight hour day, abolition of plural voting for men of property, the enfranchisement of women, shearers and migratory workers, a land tax, conciliation and arbitration, universal education up to the age of 15, and reforms to working conditions.[15]

He was not forgotten, however, by his church, and his fateful decision to permit Cook to run in his place for the seat of Hartley was not the end of his political career. In January 1892, the PM Conference confirmed him to the circuit of Parramatta, as well as appointing him as one of its ‘reporters’. At various times, he would also be appointed regional missioner in places such as Penrith, indicating a high view of his evangelistic work, and he was active in the Evangelical Alliance. One of the larger themes under consideration at the time was the issue of Methodist re-union. Smailes again threw himself energetically into organising social outreach in his new circuit of Parramatta. Joining the local Single Tax League, he featured in a number of public debates to raise the economic argument for the basis of poverty. At one of these, the whole audience, save five, voted in support of his Georgeist position as the most equitable.[16] He was host, later that year to temperance campaign in the Parramatta Town Hall by Betsy Lee (Mrs Harrison Lee), an early pioneer of the WCTU in Victoria, and a campaigner for the Victorian Alliance for the Suppression of the Liquor Traffic.[17] He would himself speak on such topics as the influence of alcohol on the brain in PM circles, so it may be presumed that, like most Methodist ministers of the time, he knit temperance into his platform practice.[18] Again, however, his refusal to limit his social action to strictly moral engagements caused some tension within the Primitive Methodist Church. Lecturing at Annandale in 1893, the middle of the great Depression of the 1890s, Smailes chose the topic "Social distress, its cause and cure". He noted that

some people and some statesman held that the clergyman, like the Civil servant, should be a mute as regarded politics; that he should get into the pulpit and stop there, closing his eyes to the sorrow around him," and, generally speaking, be what the Americans call a sky-pilot. For himself, he could not keep quiet, although he was aware that for some years he had been to certain people what he might term a little Ireland, and they had tried to coerce him into silence. He found however, that he must use his tongue to express the thoughts of his mind.[19]

Smailes was on firmer ground with his support of women’s suffrage, which he did through assisting the activities of the Womanhood Suffrage League. While many of his PM colleagues would not have agreed with his stances on Women’s labouring conditions, there was reasonable consensus that women having the vote would lead to ‘more wholesome and humane legislation’.[20] ‘He considered they were asking for an absolute right, and not a privilege,’[21] and would ‘purify politics’.[22] There was less consensus about his active part in the politics of the Left. When the Granville Labour League was formed in 1893, Smailes’ local prominence in Labour circles made him a natural leader (he was elected Vice President). The League was expressive as to the problems of capitalism and in defence of the local unemployed, to the extent that Granville Council refused to be associated with it in a deputation to the Minister. It would become, in short order, the source of J. T. Lang’s rise to power in NSW Labor politics. When pre-selections were called in April 1894, Smailes put his name forward, defending his position at a public meeting in the Albert Hall on 17 April against the other nominees (Withington, Williamson, Windsor, and Fairweather). The next week he won preselection ‘by a substantial majority,’[23] resigning his position with Parramatta PM Church in order to contest the election. As a central figure among the Christian churches in Parramatta, there was considerable regret (from his parishioners, local alderman T. Moxham, and from the local Presbyterian and Congregational ministers, John Paterson and Henry Gainford) that the region would be losing him ‘from the ranks of the ministry’. As a whole, however, they shared Smailes’ view that Parliament was as much the call of God as ‘anything in the Church’, and that his intention was now to test that call.[24] He would not be the only minister of religion contesting the election – there were 5 ex-clerics, and 2 current: E. G. Moberley (Anglican) stood on an independent Free Trade ticket for Uralla, while William Hessel Hall (Wesleyan) stood for the Free Traders in Albury. While Hall gave the incumbent a run for his money, Moberley attracted only 7 votes, leaving Smailes as the only successful ‘clerical candidate’ in the 1894 election.[25] He continued preaching on Sundays until replaced by Rev. Mr. Pettinger from the North Coast,[26] but weekdays were now given over to the looming general election. A number of public meetings were held—at one, Smailes spoke for nearly two hours on political questions— in order to rally support and give Smailes a hearing. James Davidson, his campaign secretary, organised rallies at Hyde Park and the Railway gates at Rookwood; Cumberland Hall in Auburn; and Martineer’s Hotel (now the Royal Oak, in Lidcombe). Early reports from the League’s canvassing committees indicated positive signs from several ridings in the electorate, and come election day, Smailes squeaked home with 38% of the vote against six other contestants, including the incumbent Free Trader, George McCredie (a Presbyterian engineer). He was in Parliament rather less than a year when an unstable government sent them back to the polls again. This time, he stood only against two free traders. Less divided, the Free Traders got within 120 votes (out of the 1472 cast) of Smailes, but the outcome was really a confirmation of his candidature (with 54% of the vote). Labor won additional seats over the 15 previously held, though the Reid Government was returned comfortably.

During his time in Parliament, Smailes supported works of both general and local reform interest. When Cook, now Post Master General, moved four bills essentially giving legislative form to their common Lithgow reform platform, Smailes supported him, despite the fact that the two of them ended up on different sides over the issue of the Caucus Pledge. As someone who promoted ‘united action’ for everyone from the Womanhood Suffrage League to the local Council, Smailes obviously did not scruple at the Pledge in the way that Cook did. It was an important issue, however, as with the defeat of the Dibbs government, the Reid government held power after 1894 on the basis of a Labour vote. The 1894 ‘fighting platform’ included such issues as (in the words of W. G. Spence):

(1) Land Value Taxation; (2) Mining on Private Property; (3) Abolition of the Legislative Council and the substitution of the Initiative and Referendum; (4) Local Government; (5) the establishment of a National Bank; (6) Compulsory Eight Hours Legislation.[27]

In local issues, Smailes supported schemes to improve the lot of those in his electorate, such as C. E. Jeanneret’s plan to bridge and insert locks into the Parramatta River, and (perhaps through his familiarity with Cook) a new Town Hall and Post Office at Rookwood.[28] He remained involved with the many religious and other institutions which had previously taken up his time as a clergyman, and added more (such as the Sisters of Mercy’s St Joseph’s Sanatorium in Rookwood, the Granville Royal Football Club, the Parramatta and District Junior Cricket Association—he seems to have been a reasonable bowler[29]—and the Liberty Plains Horticultural Show) on a non-partisan basis. ‘He urged that every man who had it should give a part of his money to institutions such as St Joseph’s, which could get beyond creeds and treat all alike.’[30] He continued to argue for unemployment relief among the many railway and industrial workers in his electorate. He was, however, not happy with developments inside his own party, and in June 1898 resigned. He did not stand in the state election of that year, preferring instead to return to private life. There is a brief and mystifying reference to Smailes running a private detective office for “SHADDO” in the Royal Arcade, City, but his later involvement in selling insurance etc., might indicate that he was simply a commission agent and representative for a number of companies.[31] He writes on an op-ed basis for journals such as Max Keeley’s Southern Cross (to which he submitted a series on ‘Ladies of Parliament’ from 1899)

In 1900 Smailes may be found in Melbourne. In 1902 he arrives in New Zealand, where in 1903 he was inducted into the PM Conference in Ashburton, ministering in Auckland /Mt Eden. In 1905 he was living in Grey Lynn, New Zealand. On 24 Feb 1907 he was ordained Deacon in Auckland, after which he served as curate in the parochial district of Hamilton. From March 1908 he was ordained Priest, and made curate of Holy Sepulchre, Auckland. In 1909, the Bishop of Auckland noted that Smailes had taught himself Greek, and was doing well. From 1912-1913 he was Vicar of Waihi, before his appointment to Te Aroha later in 1913. All through this time, Smailes saw his major job as arguing for various types of social reform. His name was tossed around during the ‘No Licence’ debates at Waihi, for example, a speech of his at Cambridge being taken by proponents on both sides of the debate. The aptly named Poverty Bay Herald got to the bottom of the issue by telegramming Smailes and asking for clarification. He replied that he did not think ‘No License’ was an adequate remedy, and that Prohibition was the only logical position for temperance reformers.[32] His economic arguments for the causes of poverty, strongly put, aroused reaction from people like W. E. Parry of the Waihi Amalgamated Miners' and Workers' Union, and resulted in a tour of Waihi in the presence of the press to determine the real causes of poverty.[33] Ironically, Parry was the son of a miner in Orange, who had educated himself in socialist thought by reading. In his confrontation with Smailes at Waihi, NZ, therefore, one might see replicated both the Lithgow-Orange tensions, and the Georgeist/ Socialist tensions, of the formation of the NSW Labour Party in the early 1890s. While at Te Aroha, Smailes arranged an exchange of parishes with the Vicar of Opotiki, on the Bay of Plenty, on medical advice that a sea board location would help with the delicate state of his wife’s health.[34] (Agnes would outlive him by two years, dying 28 Apr 1936). 1914-1916, he was technically at Opotiki, but the electoral roll shows him as living in the Vicarage on Gilmour St., Waihi. His wife is not mentioned.

There is some evidence that, when war broke out, Smailes volunteered and spent at least some of the First World War as a chaplain with New Zealand forces who had been sent to occupy German Samoa. On enlistment, his next of kin (his wife) was living in St Heliers Bay, Auckland. With the support of the Japanese Navy, the New Zealand forces had landed in Apia uncontested on 29 August, 1914. Smailes is not on the embarkation roll for the original force: he seems to have embarked with the Samoan Relief Force on 27 March 1915, aboard the Talune. He returned on the Talune later in the year to receive ‘orders’.[35] In 1917, he was running the Anzac Recorder out of the Soldier’s Club in Wellesley Street, Auckland, for the New Zealand Returned Soldiers Association.[36] Again, his activism is to the fore, the Recorder put itself forward as a representative of those who had been injured or had claims which required State recognition. Behind the scenes, ‘reforms have been won, abuses have been exposed and killed; concessions of importance have been secured’. Now, with the Recorder, the NZRSA would be able to appeal to a sympathetic public: ‘For political parties it has no place. With creeds and churches and phases of religious thought it has no concern. For the doings of social sinners and saints it has not even a word...’ It would represent returned soldiers in a period of economic poverty, but also shortage of labour: ‘Cooperation is the key to success.’[37] The rhetoric of the coal union organiser and circuit preacher, the fusion of the social and the spiritual oriented towards an economic righteousness, are still there in his promotion of soldier’s rights in 1918:

The soldier's voice in the land can be as the sound of many waters. It has the right to be heard and has the power to make itself heard, and feared and felt. Now, when manpower is at a premium we can speak, and if speaking in unity we must be listened to and heeded. Soldiers, shall we so speak and speak so wisely that, when peace has spread its white wing over the race, the old order will change and out of it will come an economic system, in which spoliation and the tyranny of might will be unknown; brotherhood reign; equality endure and the guardianship of the weak and helpless be at once our duty and joy.[38]

This sort of aggressive language was not typical of Anglican ministers, and the Auckland diocese must have wondered whether ordaining him was such a good idea after all. By 1823, at least, he is not regularly in clerical employment. A case of assault in that year, when he was mistaken for someone else because of his clerical garb, tells something of the story. Standing on a corner in St Heliers, he was approached by Thomas George Vincent, an unemployed person slightly the worse for liquor. Vincent accused him of having him sacked from a position at Holy Sepulchre church, Auckland, to which Smailes replied that he must be mistaken, as he had always made a practice of getting men work. Vincent was not assuaged, and hit Smailes several times and pushed him. At the resultant court case, the defense worked to undermine Smailes’ reputation, referring to his work as an insurance and real estate agent, suggesting that he couldn’t ‘get a church’ posting, and that he was reported to be ‘prone to abusive language’. All of which had a germ of truth – clearly, however, Smailes was exposed without church or Party protection, and very much a lesser character in New Zealand than he had been in Sydney. For the record, the judge assessed Vincent as delusional, and locked him up for 14 days.

Smailes died in Auckland on 9 Jan, 1934, and was buried at the Soldiers Cemetery, Waikumete.

Mark Hutchinson

Footnotes:

1. Sydney Morning Herald, 27 July 1888, p. 9

2. Sydney Morning Herald, 12 February 1889, p. 3.

3. ‘The Church and Labor’, Star, 18 October 1907, p. 4.

4. ‘The Labor Question’, Windsor and Richmond Gazette, 5 October 1889, p. 6.

5. Sydney Morning Herald, 26 January 1894, p. 3.

6. Henry George, Social Problems, Chicago, New York: Belford, Clarke & Co., 1883.

7. Sydney Morning Herald, 31 August 1891, p. 5.

8. Sydney Morning Herald, 9 November 1889, p. 14.

9. Sydney Morning Herald, 2 October 1890, p. 5.

10. ‘A Clergyman speaks out,’ Windsor and Richmond Gazette, 22 February 1890, p. 2.

11. Sydney Morning Herald, 10 February 1890, p. 8.

12. Windsor and Richmond Gazette, 22 February 1890, p. 2.

13. Sydney Morning Herald, 14 October 1890, p. 5.

14. John Murdoch, Joseph Cook in Lithgow, Lithgow District Historical Society Occasional Papers, no. 1, Lithgow, N.S.W.: Lithgow District Historical Society, 1966,

15. Robert D Linder, ‘The Methodist Love Affair With the Australian Labor Party, 1891-1929’, Lucas 23 & 24 (1997-1998) 35-61.

16. Sydney Morning Herald, 24 June 1893, p. 10.

17. Ann M. Mitchell, 'Lee, Betsy (Bessie) (1860–1950)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/lee-betsy-bessie-7144/text12331, accessed 1 April 2012

18. Sydney Morning Herald, 23 January 1893, p. 5.

19. The Mercury, 20 April 1893, p. 2.

20. Sydney Morning Herald, 10 May 1894, p. 6.

21. Sydney Morning Herald, 7 August 1894, p.6.

22. Sydney Morning Herald, 29 July 1895, p. 6.

23. Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April 1894, p. 6.

24. Sydney Morning Herald, 4 June 1894, p 4

25. http://www.scribd.com/barrpete/d/14097072-William-Hessel-Hall-early-Blue-Mountains-beekeeper

26. Sydney Morning Herald, 10 May 1894, p 4

27. Quoted in the Brisbane Worker, 15 March 1938, p. 25.

28. Sydney Morning Herald, 17 October 1895, p. 6; 30 November 1896, p. 4.

29. Viz. Australian Town and Country Journal, 28 November 1896, p.40.

30. Sydney Morning Herald, 28 October 1895, p.5.

31. Sydney Morning Herald, 25 January 1899, p. 12.

32. ‘What about Waihi Now?’, Poverty Bay Herald, vol. XXXVIII, no. 12615, 18 November 1911, p. 3.

33. Thames Star, vol. XLVII, no. 10386, 7 June 1911, p. 2.

34. Ohinemuri Gazette, Rōrahi XXIV, Putanga 3153, 10 Whiringa-ā-nuku 1913, p. 2.

35. Auckland Weekly News, 11 Nov 1915.

36. New Zealand Observer, 2 June 1917, p. 15.

37. http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=TO19170602.1.15&e=-------10--1----0--.

38. New Zealand Observer, vol. XXXVII, no. 39 (2 June 1917), p. 15.