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Member Number: 10826
Robert Gordon Menzies was Australia’s longest serving Prime Minister. He held the office twice, from 1939 to 1941 and from 1949 to 1966. Altogether he was Prime Minister for over 18 years – still the record term for an Australian Prime Minister.
 | Prime Minister Robert Menzies escorts Queen Elizabeth II at the State banquet at Parliament House, Canberra on 16 February 1954, with Pattie Menzies and the Duke of Edinburgh following. NAA: A1773, RV490 |
Born into humble circumstances, Menzies obtained a first-class secondary and university education by winning a series of scholarships. He established himself as one of Australia’s leading constitutional lawyers, then entered the Victorian parliament in 1928. He won a seat in the federal parliament in 1934 and served as Attorney-General and Minister for Industry in the United Australia Party government of Joseph Lyons.
Menzies was Prime Minister when World War II began in 1939. In 1941 he lost the confidence of members of Cabinet and his party and was forced to resign. As an Opposition backbencher during the war years, he helped create the Liberal Party and became Leader of the Opposition in 1946. At the 1949 federal election, he defeated Ben Chifley’s Labor Party and once again became Australia’s Prime Minister.
Menzies’ second period as Prime Minister laid the foundations for 22 consecutive years in government for the Liberal–Country Party Coalition.
Menzies was often characterised as an extreme monarchist and ‘British to his bootstraps’, but as Prime Minister he maintained Australia’s strong defence alliance with the United States. During his second period in office the ANZUS and SEATO treaties were signed, Australian troops were sent to support US-led forces in Korea, and Australia made its first commitment of combat forces to Vietnam.
Menzies retired as Prime Minister and from parliament in 1966. Knighted in 1963, he was further honoured in 1965 by being appointed Constable of Dover Castle and Warden of the Cinque Ports.
Early life
Robert Gordon Menzies was born to James Menzies and Kate Menzies (nee Sampson) in Jeparit, a small town in the Wimmera region of western Victoria, on 20 December 1894. His father James was a storekeeper, the son of Scottish crofters who had immigrated to Australia in the mid-1850s in the wake of the Victorian gold rush. His maternal grandfather, John Sampson, was a miner from Penzance who also came to seek his fortune on the gold-fields, in Ballarat, Victoria. Both his father and one of his uncles had been members of the Victorian parliament, while another uncle had represented Wimmera in the House of Representatives. He was proud of his Highland ancestry - his enduring nick-name, Ming, came from "Mingus," the Scots — and his own preferred — pronunciation of "Menzies".
Menzies was first educated at a one-room school, then later at private schools in Ballarat and Melbourne, and read law at the University of Melbourne.
When World War I began Menzies was 19 and held a commission in the university's militia unit. Menzies resigned his commission at the very time others of his age and class clamoured to be allowed to enlist. It was later stated that since the family has made enough of a sacrifice to the war with the enlistment of these brothers, Menzies should stay to finish his studies. However, Menzies himself never explained the reason why he chose not to enlist. Subsequently he was prominent in undergraduate activities and won academic prizes and declared himself to be a patriotic supporter of the war and conscription. He graduated in law in 1918. He soon became one of Melbourne's leading lawyers and began to acquire a considerable fortune. In 1920 he married Pattie Leckie, the daughter of a federal Nationalist Party MP, who was reputedly a moderating influence on him.
Rise to power
In 1928, Menzies gave up his law practice to enter state parliament as a member of the Victorian Legislative Council representing the Nationalist Party of Australia. His candidacy was nearly defeated when a group of ex-servicemen attacked him in the press for not having enlisted, but he survived this crisis. The following year he shifted to the Legislative Assembly, and was a minister in the conservative Victorian government from 1932 to 1934, and became Deputy Premier of Victoria in 1932.
Menzies entered federal politics in 1934, representing the United Australia Party (UAP) in the upper-class Melbourne electorate of Kooyong. He was immediately appointed Attorney-General and Minister for Industry in the Joseph Lyons government, and soon became deputy leader of the UAP. He was seen as Lyons's natural successor and was accused of wanting to push Lyons out, a charge he denied. In 1938 he was given the pejorative nickname "Pig Iron Bob", the result of his industrial battle with waterside workers who refused to load scrap iron being sold to Imperial Japan. In 1939, however, he resigned from the Cabinet in protest at what he saw as the government's inaction. Shortly afterwards, on 7 April 1939, Lyons died.
First term as Prime Minister
On 26 April 1939, following a period during which the Country Party leader, Sir Earle Page, was caretaker Prime Minister, Menzies was elected Leader of the UAP and was sworn in as Prime Minister. But a crisis arose when Page refused to serve under him. In an extraordinary personal attack in the House, Page accused Menzies of cowardice for not having enlisted in the War, and of treachery to Lyons. Menzies then formed a minority government. When Page was deposed as Country Party leader a few months later, Menzies reformed the Coalition with Page's successor, Archie Cameron. (Menzies later forgave Page, but Pattie Menzies never spoke to him again.)
In September 1939, with Britain's declaration of war against Nazi Germany, Menzies found himself a wartime Prime Minister. He did his best to rally the country, but the bitter memories of the disillusionment which followed the First World War made this difficult, and the fact that Menzies had not served in that war and that as Attorney General and Deputy Prime Minister, Menzies had made an official visit to Germany in 1938 and had expressed his admiration for the regime undermined his credibility. At the 1940 election, the UAP was nearly defeated, and Menzies' government survived only thanks to the support of two independent MPs. The Australian Labor Party, under John Curtin, refused Menzies's offer to form a war coalition.
In 1941 Menzies spent months in Britain discussing war strategy with Winston Churchill and other leaders, while his position at home deteriorated. The Australian historian David Day has suggested that Menzies hoped to replace Churchill as British Prime Minister, and that he had some support in Britain for this. Other Australian writers, such as Gerard Henderson, have rejected this theory. When Menzies came home, he found he had lost all support, and was forced to resign, first, on 28 August, as Prime Minister, and then as UAP leader. The Country Party leader, Arthur Fadden, became Prime Minister. Menzies was very bitter about what he saw as this betrayal by his colleagues, and almost left politics.
Return to power
Labor came to power later in October 1941 under John Curtin, following the defeat of the Fadden government in Parliament. In 1943 Curtin won a huge election victory. During 1944 Menzies held a series of meetings at 'Ravenscraig' an old homestead in Aspley to discuss forming a new anti-Labor party to replace the moribund UAP. This was the Liberal Party, which was launched in early 1945 with Menzies as leader. But Labor was firmly entrenched in power and in 1946 Curtin's successor, Ben Chifley, was comfortably re-elected. Comments that "we can't win with Menzies" began to circulate in the conservative press.
Over the next few years, however, the anti-communist atmosphere of the early Cold War began to erode Labor's support. In 1947, Chifley announced that he intended to nationalise Australia's private banks, arousing intense middle-class opposition which Menzies successfully exploited. In 1949 a bitter coal-strike, engineered by the Communist Party, also played into Menzies's hands. In December 1949 he won the election and again became Prime Minister.
The ALP retained control of the Senate, however, and made Menzies's life very difficult. In 1951 Menzies introduced legislation to ban the Communist Party, hoping that the Senate would reject it and give him an excuse for a double dissolution election, but Labor let the bill pass. It was subsequently ruled unconstitutional by the High Court. But when the Senate rejected his banking bill, he called a double dissolution and won control of both Houses.
Later in 1951 Menzies decided to hold a referendum to change the Constitution to permit him to ban the Communist Party. The new Labor leader, Dr H.V. Evatt, campaigned against the referendum on civil liberties grounds, and it was narrowly defeated. This was one of Menzies's few electoral miscalculations. He sent Australian troops to the Korean War and maintained a close alliance with the United States.
Economic conditions, however, deteriorated, and Evatt was confident of winning the 1954 elections. Shortly before the elections, Menzies announced that a Soviet diplomat in Australia Vladimir Petrov (see Petrov affair), had defected, and that there was evidence of a Soviet spy ring in Australia, including members of Evatt's staff. This Cold War scare enabled Menzies to win the election. Labor accused Menzies of arranging Petrov's defection, but this has since been disproved: he had simply taken advantage of it.
The aftermath of the 1954 election caused a split in the Labor Party, and Menzies was comfortably re-elected over Evatt in 1955 and 1958. By this time the post-war economic boom was in full swing, fuelled by massive immigration and the growth in housing and manufacturing that this produced. Prices for Australia's agricultural exports were also high, ensuring rising incomes. Labor's rather old-fashioned socialist rhetoric was no match for Menzies and his promise of stability and prosperity for all.
Labor's new leader, Arthur Calwell, gave Menzies a scare after an ill-judged squeeze on credit - an effort to restrain inflation - caused a rise in unemployment. At the 1961 election Menzies was returned with a majority of only two seats. But Menzies was able to exploit Labor's divisions over the Cold War and the American alliance, and win an increased majority in the 1963 elections. An incident in which Calwell was photographed standing outside a South Canberra hotel while the ALP Federal Executive (dubbed by Menzies the "36 faceless men") was determining policy also contributed to the 1963 victory. This was the first "television election," and Menzies, although nearly 70, proved a master of the new medium. He was created a Knight of the Thistle in the same year.
In 1965 Menzies made the fateful decision to commit Australian troops to the Vietnam War, and also to reintroduce conscription. These moves were initially popular, but later became a problem for his successors. Despite his pragmatic acceptance of the new power balance in the Pacific after World War II and his strong support for the American alliance, he publicly professed continued admiration for links with Britain, exemplified by his admiration for Queen Elizabeth II, and famously described himself as "British to the bootstraps". Over the decade, Australia's ardour for Britain and the monarchy faded somewhat, but Menzies' had not. At a function attended by Queen Elizabeth II at Parliament House, Canberra, in 1963, Menzies quoted the Elizabethan poet Thomas Ford, "I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die". (This poem has often since been misattributed to Barnabe Googe.)
Robert Gordon Menzies died on 15 May 1978.
Links- Robert Menzies - Australia's Prime Ministers / National Archives of Australia
- The Menzies Foundation
- Robert Menzies College
- The Menzies Virtual Museum
- The Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, London
- The Liberal Party's Robert Menzies website
- The Legacy of Sir Robert Menzies National Library of Australia
- Australia's Prime Ministers - Meet A PM: Robert Menzies
- Sir Robert Menzies at the National Film and Sound Archive
Actors who have played Menzies
* In the 1984 mini series The Last Bastion, Menzies was portrayed by John Wood.
* In the 1987 mini series Vietnam, he was portrayed by Noel Ferrier.
* In the 1988 mini series True Believers, he was portrayed by John Bonney.
* In the 2007 film Curtin, he was portrayed by Bille Brown.
* Max Gillies has caricatured Menzies on stage and in the comedy satire series The Gillies Report.
| Political offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by John Latham | Minister for Industry 1934 – 1939 | Succeeded by Billy Hughes |
| Preceded by Earle Page | Prime Minister of Australia 1939 – 1941 | Succeeded by Arthur Fadden |
| Preceded by Richard Casey | Treasurer of Australia 1940 – 1941 | Succeeded by Percy Spender |
| Preceded by Arthur Fadden | Leader of the Opposition 1943 – 1949 | Succeeded by Ben Chifley |
| Preceded by Ben Chifley | Prime Minister of Australia 1949 – 1966 | Succeeded by Harold Holt |
| Preceded by Richard Casey | Minister for Foreign Affairs 1960 – 1961 | Succeeded by Garfield Barwick |
| Legal offices | ||
| Preceded by John Latham | Attorney General of Australia 1934 – 1938 | Succeeded by Billy Hughes |
| Parliament of Australia | ||
| Preceded by John Latham | Member for Kooyong 1934 – 1966 | Succeeded by Andrew Peacock |
| Party political offices | ||
| Preceded by Joseph Lyons | Leader of the United Australia Party 1939 – 1941 | Succeeded by Billy Hughes |
| Preceded by Billy Hughes | Leader of the United Australia Party 1943 – 1945 | Succeeded by Party dissolved |
| New political party | Leader of the Liberal Party 1945 – 1966 | Succeeded by Harold Holt |
| Honorary titles | ||
| Preceded by Sir Winston Churchill | Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports 1966 – 1978 | Succeeded by Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother |
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 Sydney Morning Herald | History says blocking doesn't work Sydney Morning Herald, Australia - The Liberal Party was formed in 1944 with Robert Menzies as its leader. Under the electoral system at the time, the party which controlled the House of ... |
Menzies the top Bob amid the greats The Australian, Australia - And Robert Menzies was Australia's greatest prime minister. These are the conclusions to which I have come after studying a great amount of the relevant ... |
 Sydney Morning Herald | Not quite the match Menzies had in mind The Australian, Australia - ON Saturday, Lawrence Springborg, leader of the new Liberal National Party in Queensland, invoked Robert Menzies' goal of uniting the conservative forces. ... Libs, Nats approve northern merger Lawrie's springboard to gain power LNP a win for 'grass roots democracy' |
National Library building turns 40 ABC Online, Australia - In March 1966, Sir Robert Menzies laid the foundation stone for the building on the southern shore of Lake Burley Griffin. Two-and-a-half years later Prime ... |
Gold medal for hypocrisy Melbourne Herald Sun, Australia - Robert Menzies, cynically seeking to manipulate early Cold War anti-communist feelings, introduced a Bill to outlaw Australia's Communist Party. ... |
Great white lie about our US ties The Australian, Australia - And surely the Britannia in the Antipodes is Robert Menzies at his most sycophantically imperial? If you made those guesses, you were wrong on both counts. ... |
Brendan Nelson heading for a fight over Liberal Party reforms Courier Mail, Australia - Liberal chiefs also faced a grassroots revolt, with some MPs claiming the reforms would change forever the "psyche" of the party formed by Robert Menzies 44 ... |
Special coin released to mark Sir Don Bradman's 100th Adelaidenow, Australia - Bradman played his final match at the oval in 1963 after accepting an invitation from Prime Minister Robert Menzies to captain the first Prime Minister's XI ... |
Sweeping reforms aim to revive ailing Libs The Australian, Australia - The party's membership has declined from a peak of 45000 when Robert Menzies was elected in 1949, to just 13000, who have a median age of 62 and are ... Liberal Party plans reform as members age Major shake-up for Libs in choosing candidates |
State Libs urge Baillieu to back 'crucial' reforms The Age, Australia - The Liberal Renewal paper, obtained by The Age, says membership has plummeted from more than 45000 in 1949, when party founder Sir Robert Menzies won ... |
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