Bruce of Melbourne: Man of Two Worlds by Cecil Edwards (Secondhand Book)

SECONDHAND BOOK

Late in 1917, Captain Stanley Melbourne Bruce, M.C. and Croix de Guerre, disembarked at Melbourne from a P. & O. liner just arrived from England. Apart from one brief visit, he had not been in the land of his birth since 1902, and he did not intend to stay. Certainly nothing was farther from his mind than a political career. Yet within six years, and at the age of thirty-nine, this young London barrister and businessman, Cambridge rowing blue and veteran of Gallipoli was to become Australia’s Prime Minister and leader of a Government which would set a record for the length of time that it remained in power. His subsequent career was equally impressive: an aggressively Australian voice in international affairs, a President of the League of Nations Council, Chairman of the United Nations World Food Council and Chairman of the British Finance Corporation for Industry, designed to put the country’s industries back on thier feet after the ravages of war.

Cecil Edwards’s biography of Viscount Bruce of Melbourne falls naturally into two parts. It concerns not only the Australian political scene at a time when the centre of emphasis was shifting from the State Governments to the Federal One but deals also with the wider field of international affairs in the critical years immediately before, during and after World War II. S.M. Bruce was in power when the seat of Australian government was moved from Melbourne to the new capital at Canberra. His efforts to deal with the widespread industrial unrest of his country in the years before the Depression ended in his Government’s downfall and defeat at a subsequent election, in which, for the only time in Australian history, a ruling Prime Minister lost his own seat.

After a brief return to politics he became Australian High Commissioner in London in 1933 and later represented Australia in the War Cabinet. He crossed swords with Churchill on several occasions, perhaps most dramatically about his plans for invading Norway and over the defence of Singapore.

Fine sportsman and brilliant businessman, this ‘Englishman born in Australia’, as his old political sparring partner Frank Anstey summed him up, was considered too English by many Australians and too Australian by many Englishmen, yet he was peculiarly successful in both countries.

Cecil Edwards, who has known Lord Bruce for more than forty years and has had access to his private papers for this book, is a former editor of the Melbourne Herald. He has written a lively and intelligent study of an urbane but enigmatic figure, in every sense of the description: Man of Two Worlds.

Specifications:

Condition: Fair, fading and marks to spine, some dirt marks on dust jacket and to pages.

Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd

Year: 1965

Format: Hardback, with dustjacket

Pages: 475pp

ISBN: N/A

$18.00

1 in stock