While Major Giblin DSO, MC was recuperating in England, one Private Brigden was also recovering from a severe gunshot wound. The similarity ceases there.

James Bristock Brigden’s youth contrasts strongly with Giblin’s. Giblin was Cambridge-educated; a Premier’s son; a star of international rugby meets. Brigden was the son of a tram conductor. A primary education was his sole schooling. Sport was an indulgence he could not manage.

He was born 20 July 1887 in Maldon, a Victorian goldrush town that once boasted 60 hotels and three theatres, but whose seam of luck was fully exhausted by the time of James’s appearance. Restless and intelligent, Brigden left this small opportunityless town, but lacking skills he drifted. He became a cabin boy; the SS Wilcannia took him to London where he found himself ‘stranded in the east end of London in a bad winter, as one of the unemployed’ (JBB to DBC 26 September 1922).^[41] He suffered ‘a good deal of hardship’ (Hytten 1971).

‘Somewhat embittered’ by this experience, on his return to Australia he became one of the founders of the new Shop Assistants Union.^[42] After hearing Ramsay MacDonald speak in Melbourne in 1906, he devoted himself to ‘active participation in the vigorous political life of the time and to intensive reading in political and economic subjects’. He became a participant in Labor Party activities and a delegate to the State Conference of the Victorian Political Labor Council in 1914 and 1915.^[43] But his ideological affiliation was to ‘radicalism’ rather than ‘socialism’. Like Giblin he was drawn to equality, but not to the collective. Hope lay in the development of the individual potential and virtues – including ethical sensibilities – regardless of social background (Whitwell 1986, p. 76). He could have been described as a wage-earning ‘bourgeois radical’.

In order to ‘get way from wage earning’ he began poultry farming, although without leaving Labor politics.^[44] He subsequently entered the ice business and witnessed the monthly price-fixing meeting of the relevant combine, the Melbourne Ice Traders Association, who were themselves injured by the monopoly prices the ice manufacturers charged. Brigden became an enthusiastic advocate of the (unsuccessful) 1911 referendum to give the Commonwealth Parliament power to nationalise any industry considered a monopoly. He also supported the unsuccessful 1913 referendum to extend Commonwealth powers to industrial relations.

After a disastrous fire destroyed his business, he turned to ‘political journalism’ as his ‘enduring ambition’. Little came of the ambition apart from a few contributions to Labor Call (the organ of the Political Labor Council of Victoria). At the outbreak of war he was living with his parents, and ‘driving a team of horses around Melbourne’ (Hytten 1971).

It was a world war that shook society’s circumstances and presumptions sufficiently to loose Brigden from their constriction.

Brigden enlisted in the 29th Battalion in October 1915. This enlistment raises an interesting query. Not long before Sarajevo, Brigden had dismissed in print the struggle between the Entente and the Central Powers as no more than a British attempt to preserve a privileged position in world trade against a German resolve to break this ‘monopoly’ by force. Adopting the voice of some future historian chronicling events of the world war that already seemed inevitable, Brigden wrote: ‘And because Austrian success was intolerable, Russia intervened. Because Russia attacked, Germany fought. Because Germany fought, France also. Because German success would be dangerous to her interests. Each for himself, His Trade, His Markets, His Profits, His Vested Interests, His Country, Right or Wrong’ (Labor Call, 7 January 1912). Selfish capitalism, he believed, was the source of war and conflict.

Neither would Brigden have had any illusions about the conditions of battle. The Australian War Memorial writes of the recruits to the 29th battalion: ‘Having enlisted as part of the recruitment drive that followed the landing at Gallipoli, and having seen the casualty lists, these were men who had offered themselves in full knowledge of their potential fate’.

But the first year of the war saw broad solidarity in favour of the war. The Labor Party supported the war. The union press also supported it. So did the Bulletin. It appears that something like a remarkable 60 per cent of Australian males between 25 and 29-years-old volunteered.^[45]

Some years later Bridgen reflected on how joining up seemed to have changed his course of life for the better:

In August 1916 a less welcome piece of German lead had killed his younger brother, David, 19-years-old.^[46] James Brigden’s own fortunate ‘benefaction’ came on 23 March 1917. The 29th battalion had occupied the village of Baumetz in the wake of the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg line. At 4.30 am a German artillery barrage portended a counterattack. Brigden found himself on the crest of a sunken road with his comrades facing an advancing enemy encirclement. The Germans broke through the rear and reached the village. A message escaped from the embattled village: the ‘29th has been cut to pieces’ (Austin 1997). In fact, the battalion had survived. And so had Brigden. But a gunshot wound had ‘entered his chest and terminated his active career’.

By ‘the merest fluke in the drafting of stretcher cases at an English port’ Brigden spent his long convalescence in a hospital in Oxford. One of the volunteer assistants there was a Mrs Edwin Cannan, wife of the eminent economist Professor Edwin Cannan. Impressed by the ‘slant of his conversation and occasional writing’, Professor Cannan became a patron. So did another Goliath of Oxonian political economy, and another of Brigden’s eminent hospital visitors, Professor F. Y. Edgeworth. Edgeworth became, in Brigden’s words, one of his ‘academic foster parents’ (Brigden 1926), who (like Cannan) gave him personal tuition.^[47] Brigden later recalled that he ‘owed greatly’ to the theorist.

Brigden guessed that they had welcomed him as a ‘raw non-public school man in Oxford’. Brigden undervalued himself and his mentors. His value to them went much further than his being ‘non-public school’. The fluent, economical and orderly prose of this novice would have impressed any teacher. His sincerity and kindness would win many audiences over his life. And, perhaps, the fact that he was obviously a frustrated talent appealed to their sense of patronage.

Brigden ‘became and remained an enthusiastic Cannanite’. Cannan’s anomalous mixture of doctrinal conservatism and doctrinal criticism seems to have been a powerful example to the young Brigden. A similar example was provided by Edgeworth, an exponent of neoclassical economics, who (in Brigden’s words) ‘no heterodoxy could shock’ (Brigden 1926).

With the assistance of the dons, a Soldier’s Scholarship and Army leave, Brigden was admitted to Oriel College, Oxford, and obtained a diploma in political science, subsequently converted to a BA by a further year of study in law.

Oxford did not diminish his identification as a ‘Radical’ in politics. He attended a Labour Party rally of 12 000 people at the Albert Hall in London and appears to have gained the acquaintance of certain leading British Labour figures, including the pacifistically inclined Arthur Henderson, who had resigned his cabinet post in 1917 over Britain’s refusal to negotiate with Germany. ‘I spent the day of the famous 1918 election in his constituency, and his opponent romped home – with an effigy of the Kaiser hanging from the gallows of his motor car’ (Brigden 1924).

Brigden’s interests – reform, learning and labour – found an intersection in the Workers’ Education Association, which he joined ‘at once’ in Oxford, and this was to become a critical move for Brigden. In the short-term it would supply an income that was now especially needful: he had recently married Dorothy James, of Ide Hill, in the church of that picturesque village sitting at the highest point of Kent. It was perhaps with the assistance of Henry Clay of New College, whose experience in WEA classes had formed the basis of his incessantly reprinted text book, that secured for Brigden the appointment he needed. He would be the WEA Lecturer in the ‘industrial areas’ of Sheffield. It was presumably through this appointment that Brigden came to the attention of the founder and General Secretary of the WEA, Albert Mansbridge, a man who had already developed a keen interest in Australia.

Mansbridge had toured Australia in 1913, and from his memoirs it is clear that this was one of the great events of his life (Mansbridge 1920, pp. 47–50). In 138 speeches – to universities, trade halls, and employers’ federations – in Wollongong, Ballarat, Broken Hill, Newcastle, Castlemaine, Geelong, Albany, and Kalgoorlie – Mansbridge and his wife fired enthusiasm for his schemes and won ample moral and financial support. The Workers Education Association in Australia bloomed, and its ties with its English parent were thick. One Antipodean bud lay in Tasmania. There the WEA was offering courses ranging over Economics, Psychology, Literature and Social Reconstruction, and in almost every settlement that could claim a town hall: Hobart, Launceston, Burnie, Deloraine, Gormanstown, Devonport, Ulverstone, Zeehan, Strahan, and the forlorn and bizarre mining outpost of Queenstown.

In 1921 a vacancy became available for a WEA lecturer in Queenstown, and Brigden applied.