Copland was organising his final recruit to Giblin’s Platoon. As the student who had come second in the state in the matriculation examination, and as winner of the William Robert Giblin Scholarship, Roland Wilson had come to Copland’s attention. Copland came up to Ulverstone to seek an interview with Roland’s father, a builder. University was not what the father, or son, had envisaged.
I didn’t even know what a university was in those days, and I’m not too sure whether many other people did either. (Wilson 1984).
Wilson was coaxed into completing a single year of the new Bachelor of Commerce degree in the University of Tasmania.
It was ‘all a bit strange’, Wilson recalled 60 years later. The majority of lectures took place between 5 pm and 9 pm. He was the sole full-time student. And the interest of almost all other students was strictly vocational, save for his classmate, Keith Isles, with whom he later did battle in the Economic Record.[14] But there were compensations. Copland was an ‘exceptionally good teacher’ (Hytten 1971). Copland brought his own strong sense of aspiration into the classroom. He would scatter Latin tags, in the face of the mute incomprehension of students. A favourite that he would leave his students was: Cras ingens, interabimus aequor – ‘Tomorrow, again the unknown seas’. As one former student recalls:
Physically, Douglas Copland was not easily overlooked. His frame was tall and broad-shouldered, his figure lean and athletic until middle age, thick and bulky thereafter. His face was somewhat heavy, given mobility by a curious and attractive lightness in the eyes and genial expression of bonhomie … He had an ebullient personality and an unusual booming rasping voice (probably the product of asthma and elocution lessons) … These were assets for a public speaker. Audiences were seldom indifferent. (Harper 1984).
Wilson was also not indifferent to Brigden, who taught Wilson Economics II in 1923, and whose lectures Wilson assiduously typed out. Between the dry, laconic, sometimes ‘acid tongued’ Wilson, and the poetic, discursive, ever-courteous Brigden, there grew a rapport that might not have been anticipated. Brigden seemed to pluck in Wilson a string that gave a deeper, fuller tone than his commonly sharp, astringent notes.
The year before meeting Brigden, Wilson first encountered Giblin, in a different and more unexpected way. Wilson recalled the ocassion in his 1976 Giblin Memorial Lecture:
While I was a student at this University my second-year essay on inheritance laws and taxation led him to seek personal acquaintance with the obscure author. A hand-written note invited me to lunch – which turned out to be poached eggs in a Murray Street café. It was followed by the suggestion that I should draft a bill on the subject of my essay for submission to the Tasmanian Parliament – a proposal which left me completely flabbergasted – and then by a visit to the Royal Tennis Court where I was introduced to the mysteries of one of the games at which he so excelled. (Wilson 1976, p. 308).[15]
Giblin persuaded Wilson to do another year’s study: ‘He began actively to encourage my studies’. In a later year of his degree, Giblin appointed him Secretary of the State Disabilities Committee, ‘So I had six months of very good apprenticeship with him looking over my shoulder’. Giblin later explained to Keynes, ‘We talk one another’s language more than most, and I am greatly attached to him’ (KCLA LFG 15 May 1943). A ‘warm friendship’ that would last 30 years had begun.
Giblin’s patronage of Wilson was to occasion a pivotal incident of Giblin’s difficult relationship with Tasmanian society at large in the 1920s. John Reynolds (1901–85),[16] a youthful contemporary in the 1920s, has provided the background in a memoir entitled, ‘L. F. Giblin: A plea for an adequate biography and Tasmanian incidents’ (Reynolds c. 1951).
The post-war generation in Hobart was as mentally adrift and unadjusted as elsewhere throughout the world. The high hopes of brighter new worlds as preached by the starry-eyed patriots, which had taken fathers and elder brothers to Gallipoli and Flanders, did not eventuate. Old pre-war Hobart, and Tasmania for that matter, seemed by 1921 to be slipping back into the outlook of the depression years of the eighteen nineties. The old exclusive social sets … still set the fashion in thinking; deference was paid to them by the University, and religious and other bodies.
It was into this gloomy atmosphere that Giblin appeared like a brilliant meteor.[17]
For those with eyes, he gave new horizons, quite literally. He encouraged travel abroad, when a presumption reigned that this pleasure was reserved for the rich. He encouraged Tasmanians to discover their own state. He never ceased to talk about the attractions of the Tasmanian mountains and the unique character of the island’s geology, flora, and fauna. To demonstrate his beliefs, he led many expeditions into the then ‘unknown’ country west of Mt Wellington …
In 1926 Giblin became probably the first man, and almost certainly the first white man, to defy the ‘absolutely foul weather conditions and intense exposure’ and successfully scale Mt Anne (1425 metres).[18] ‘His simple talks to plain folk about these feats had a great deal to do with the formation of the now flourishing walking, mountaineering and skiing clubs’ (Reynolds c. 1951).
It only further tickled Giblin’s admirers, and grated his adversaries, that Giblin deported himself ‘eccentrically’. Five years before Bunny Austin, the Davis Cup champion, had refused the traditional tennis attire of cricket flannels, and had asked his tailor to create some shorts, Giblin had already adopted shorts for the summer of 1928. When the Governor required all attendees of Royal Society of Tasmania meetings to wear dinner jackets, Giblin arrived late, in a battered slouch hat and haversack, ‘went right up the front, sat down just opposite the Governor and cocked one hobnailed boot almost in his face’ (Hytten 1971, p. 53).
Giblin’s capacity to shock also took more serious forms. In 1925 at the formal dinner to commemorate the centenary of the separation of Van Dieman’s Land from New South Wales, he expressed a preference for a Soviet form of government for the island.
Giblin, in other words, was a ‘progressive’. ‘It is impossible within the limits of this article’ wrote Reynolds ‘to recall all his battles with prejudice and stupidity’.
One battle involved his youngest protégé, Roland Wilson. As Wilson later recalled, Giblin had ‘eventually persuaded a very reluctant young man to seek an opportunity for overseas study’. But where lay that opportunity? The Tasmanian Scholarship that had borne Giblin to Cambridge had been abolished. The one path to overseas study was the Rhodes Scholarship. But here stood an obstacle. ‘Since the inception of the scheme of the Rhodes Scholarships candidates had come exclusively from private secondary schools which enjoyed the doubtful patronage of the “Right People”’ (Reynolds c. 1951). Wilson came from a State school, and Giblin was very much not of the ‘Right’ people.
But Giblin ran the Scholarship selection committee, and with Copland and Brigden called into battle, the committee chose Wilson.[19] His success was vehemently resented: it was ‘unthinkable’ that a Rhodes Scholar could come from a state high school, and have studied economics but not Latin. A display of indignation was organised. A ‘Member of the University Senate’ complained anonymously in the Hobart Mercury:
The local selection committee made the choice of the wrong type of man to be our Rhodes Scholar for 1925 … The Rhodes Trust discourages the candidature of students specializing merely in a science or a commerce course, but requires a ‘man’s man’ of broad and true scholarship.
The Hobart Mercury itself pronounced in its editorial of 19 March 1925:
Rhodes ‘knew that the business mind which is only a business mind, or the scientific mind which is only the scientific mind, is not the highest type of mind or the type necessary for a true statesman or leader of men … Philosophy, literature, history, science, economics – that is the order by rank.
The controversy discouraged Wilson. He was tempted to relinquish the award, and accept in its stead a position as factotum to the directors of the local Cadbury concern. The urgings of Copland and Giblin braced him to ignore the contempt of the Mercury. As a result Giblin became a ‘target of abuse’.[20]
The contretemps over the 1925 Tasmanian Rhodes Scholarship underlines Giblin’s struggle against an introverted and excluding Tasmanian elite. But it may also be one symbol of the arrival of the economist in Australian public life. An economist had won the Rhodes Scholarship.
Wilson was soon to be a student at Oriel, Brigden’s old college. But before he had even left, he had been introduced to Oxford. A debating team from the University of Oxford was touring Australia, and the University of Tasmania’s team had accepted their challenge. Brigden – the witness, presumably, of many debates in the trades hall and the University Union – wrote a long letter of gentle advice to the home team’s speaker, Roland Wilson. The First Speaker, Brigden advised, should justify their contentions on pragmatic grounds, as pragmatic grounds are always the most persuasive. Only the Second Speaker should resort to principles. ‘Whatever you do don’t cram for the debate. You should have finished with all those textbooks and things which I gave you … Above all be careful to have no weak points. The great fault in debating is to include too many arguments, the weaker of which your opponents sieze upon.’ Brigden appended a three-page speech by way of suggestion. ‘Our little University will, I am sure, come well out of it. They may, you know, be holding us cheaply’ (NLA JBB 3 May 1925).
Wilson went into battle against two luminaries of 1920s Oxford. The Oxfordians’ first speaker was Christopher Hollis, a one-time President of the Oxford Union, and later a ‘Catholic author’, a biographer of Dryden, and one of Evelyn Waugh’s ‘closest friends’. Their second speaker was J. D. Woodruff, President of the Oxford Union, later an editor of the Tablet, an author of a long study of the Tichborne Claimant, and a close friend of Roy Harrod.[21]
Wilson was affirming ‘That the principle of compulsory industrial arbitration on the part of the State be approved’. The University library was crowded. The debate ‘most entertaining’. The Oxfordians advanced ‘an easy flow of words and ready wit’. Wilson replied in a ‘telling manner’ (Mercury 6 May 1925). The negative won.
