The Little Digger

Three generations of Australians have been delighted and appalled by the salty character of a tiny, terrible-tempered politician whose rallying cry, "What the blithering blazes!", once tinkled the glass chandeliers of Versailles, made Lloyd George blanch, Woodrow Wilson freeze, and Clemenceau laugh. William Morris ("Billy") Hughes was born a Welshman, but ten years as a knockabout laborer in Australia had made him as indigenous as a kangaroo. When he became Australia's World War I Prime Minister, the Anzacs draped a big slouch hat around his pint-sized head, dubbed him "Little Digger."

He had been a sheep drover, navvy, gold prospector, ship's cook, waiter, locksmith, umbrella mender, a seller of fried fish, and a spear-carrier in a touring production of Shakespeare's Henry V when, some time in the 1880s he decided to "emerge from the murk and chaos and leap up on the stage of human affairs." His stage was the toughest strip of the Sydney waterfront. He organized a wharf laborers' union. Hobo life had given him chronic dyspepsia and affected his hearing, but he discovered a powerful voice, tuneless, yet penetrating enough, as he himself said, "to peel the bark off a gum tree," or "galvanize ten dead bullocks to a trot." A gnomelike figure (5 ft. tall, under 100 lbs.), among the muscular wharf lumpers he was said to be "too deaf to listen to reason, too loud to be ignored, and too small to hit." He was soon representing the waterfront in the New South Wales Parliament.

Fire & Comprehension. Colonial Australia, aspiring to nationhood, was full of political slogans, such as "One man, one vote." Billy improved on this: "One bloody man, one bloody vote," he told his electors. He wrote a pamphlet, The Case for Labor, and rode with the Labor Party into the first Federal Parliament in 1901.

To improve his parliamentary technique, he traveled everywhere with a phonograph on which he played records of the speeches of Britain's Victorian Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, was soon throwing such high-caliber cliches at the Opposition as "Sword of Damocles" and "Bed of Procrustes." On one such occasion the Speaker of the House, a sensitive man, collapsed, crying with his dying breath: "Dreadful, dreadful!"

Billy was national head of three trade unions: the wharf laborers, the transport workers and the seamen. He talked like a radical, but by 1910 he was already demanding that Australia should have its own army & navy, and making speeches about the menace of Japan. That year, the Labor Party formed its first majority government, a cabinet consisting of two miners, a wharf lumper, a building worker, a hatter, a compositor, an engine driver and, of course, Billy Hughes. The cabinet split over World War I, and Hughes formed a national coalition government, pledged to aid Britain "to the last man and the last shilling."