A Leftist in Cold War Canberra

On July 29, 1953, the Canberra Trades and Labour Council, normally a staid body, re-elected a boisterous young Labor man named Bruce Yuill as its president. The Council was the peak employee body in Canberra, which meant that Yuill, a flamboyant fellow traveller, headed the trade union movement in Australia’s national capital at a crucial time politically, with the Cold War well under way and the Australian Labor Party teetering on the brink of the historic schism of 1955.

Yuill’s supremacy was short-lived. Within a few months his involvement with unionism—and with an associated round of left-wing political activities as well—was at an end. The process by which he ceased so suddenly to be an aggressive left-winger, when reconstructed, provides us with a good close-up view of the pressures that produced the great Labor split.

A tertiary-educated economist who hailed from the North Shore in Sydney, Bruce Yuill embraced the cause of labour in the Chifley era with the fervour of an outsider. Born in Killara on December 7, 1925, he came from a family which had wealthy connections. His father John Ford Yuill was the nephew of George Skelton Yuill who, after migrating from Scotland to Australia, became a notable shipping agent and was also successful in the frozen meat trade.

Oral testimony has it that Bruce’s father was a Protestant but his mother Eileen was a Catholic. Bruce, it is said, was raised as a Catholic. By the time reliable documentation becomes available his early Catholic connection seems to have waned. Yuill graduated from Sydney Church of England Grammar School in 1942. By 1945 he was enrolled as an evening student in economics at Sydney University.

It was at Sydney University that Yuill emerged as an activist and Labor man. He served as president of the Evening Students’ Association. When bank nationalisation became an issue in August 1947 the Sydney Morning Herald featured a letter to the editor from Yuill, now employed with the Cumberland County Council, in which he expressed his resentment at snobbish slurs cast on Prime Minister Chifley’s ability to understand economic and financial matters.

On November 3, 1948, Yuill was elected as the inaugural chair of the ALP Youth Council (the progenitor in New South Wales of today’s Young Labor). In the following year he joined the Amalgamated Postal Workers’ Union as a research officer and also served as the publicity officer of the Fabian Society in Sydney. His objective in working for the Fabian Society, he stated in correspondence with the Trotskyite Nick Origlass, was “to try and get the ALP to adopt a socialistic attitude”.

Labor’s 1949 federal election campaign sealed Yuill’s left-wing faith. The newly minted Bachelor of Economics cut a striking figure as he buttonholed commuters outside Burwood railway station one Saturday morning. “Point Piper background, suede shoes, fighting with facts and figures”, was how a newspaper reporter summed him up.

Yuill’s private as well as his public life was bound up with Labor’s cause. On June 3, 1949, he married Barbara Lee, a fellow North Shore member of the ALP Youth Council. They were an impressive couple. Both were tall and dark; Barbara’s teeth flashed when she spoke, while her husband, committed as he was to confrontation and controversy, loved to sport brightly coloured clothes, especially ties and socks.

The young couple moved to Canberra early in 1950, just as the newly elected Liberal-Country Party government headed by Robert Menzies was settling in. The move followed Yuill’s appointment as a research officer in the Department of Immigration.

Yuill was vetted when he applied for a job with the Commonwealth public service but his political activity in Sydney was not an issue. He had not yet been subjected to detailed scrutiny by the security service. Such surveillance only came after he moved to Canberra.

Yuill planned to snare Labor preselection for a seat in parliament but until the right opportunity came along he was happy to focus on trade union work. He was a member of the Federated Clerks’ Union and soon after leaving Sydney he was accredited as one of its delegates to the Canberra Trades and Labour Council.

It was in his TLC capacity that Yuill first attracted the attention of the security service. Intelligence officers at this time monitored all the reports of TLC proceedings published in the Canberra Times. Yuill’s Cold War dossier effectively began once his name started to crop up in such reports in the middle of 1950.

Tracking began on May 17 when Yuill spoke at the TLC in support of the Sydney University Labor Club which was seeking accommodation for twelve members who planned to visit Canberra to protest against the proposal by the Menzies government to pass legislation banning the Communist Party.

Yuill’s reputation as someone whose activities needed to be monitored was confirmed a few weeks later when the Canberra Times reported that he had spoken at the TLC in support of a motion, eventually defeated, that would have obliged the TLC to combat the proposed ban on the Communist Party “by every possible means”.

By the end of 1950 there was already an impressive Australian Security Intelligence Organisation dossier on the Yuills, including input from unofficial informants. Barbara Yuill, it was reported, “has admitted that both she and her husband are ardent communists but has not admitted membership of the [Communist Party]”. The security service learnt that Yuill had engaged in a heated discussion at the Hotel Canberra when he was alleged to have “demonstrated in no uncertain manner his pro-Communistic views” which included making disparaging remarks about the House of Windsor.

On February 15, 1951, Yuill was elected as deputy president of the FCU branch in Canberra. Earlier he had led an unsuccessful attempt to get the TLC to donate an amount of £1 towards a fund to pay the legal expenses of Frank Hardy whose novel Power without Glory was the subject of an historic court case.

Political activism took its toll on Yuill’s marriage. When the King’s Birthday long weekend rolled around in June 1951 his young wife was not impressed when he indicated that he intended to spend the time off work in Sydney attending the ALP annual state conference. Barbara preferred to spend a long weekend differently. When Bruce insisted on going to Sydney, Barbara told him their marriage was over and left him for good.

Now that he had no domestic responsibilities to speak of Bruce had more time in which to crusade. He become a regular writer of letters to the Canberra Times. Inflationary pressures caused by the Korean War had raised the possibility of public service job cuts. In his debut effort in the Canberra Times Yuill zoomed in on this threat. Unionists in the public service, he insisted, should resort, if necessary, to direct industrial action to ward off the challenge. 

Security agents were not the only people keeping tabs on Yuill. He had trade union foes as well. The immediate battleground was in Yuill’s union, the FCU. In 1952 its New South Wales branch (which covered Canberra) was the scene of an historic struggle between the branch’s Communist Party office holders (whom Yuill supported) and insurgents supported by the ALP’s official network of anti-communist activists (the ALP Industrial Groups). As the struggle intensified it spread to Canberra. Annual elections for all FCU positions in the Canberra branch were scheduled for April 4. Yuill was running for the post of branch secretary. On the eve of the election a story in the Canberra Times revealed that an ALP Industrial Group was operating in the local FCU branch. It was running a ticket. In response Yuill solicited support for his campaign by inserting an advertisement in the Canberra Times: “Vote for the Independent Unionist, Independent of ALL pressure groups”. The appeal was in vain. The Industrial Group ticket was successful in the Canberra FCU election.

The war with the Industrial Groups was unstoppable. Sidney Rhodes, their successful candidate for the position of Canberra FCU branch president, was at the same time the long-serving president of the TLC. Left-wingers, among whom Yuill was ever more prominent as a critic of the Industrial Groups, set out to do him in. The annual TLC elections were scheduled for the end of April and as they drew near excitement mounted. Yuill could not be silenced. A story in Tribune conveyed criticism of the Industrial Groups made by Yuill at a meeting of the TLC to communists across the nation.

On April 30, when the TLC held its annual election, Yuill defeated Rhodes for the position of TLC president. His status as the leading anti-Industrial Groups figure in the trade union movement in Canberra was confirmed when he was criticised in the press by Jack Kane, the secretary of the New South Wales Industrial Groups (and a future Democratic Labor Party senator).

It was unwise albeit heroic for anyone in the ALP to take on the Industrial Groups in 1952. They were becoming an increasingly powerful faction in the party. In the two years or so before the split of 1955, they were involved in a marriage of convenience with the federal leader of the party, Dr H.V. Evatt. In the lead-up to the federal election due in 1954 Evatt was doing everything possible to sanitise his image. He was desperate to kill off the slightest suggestion that he was soft on communism. This strategy led Evatt to distance himself from his one-time left-wing foreign affairs expert Dr John Burton. The latter’s rose-tinted views on how Australia should develop its relations with China, which the communists had ruled only since 1949, meant that he was seen as an electoral embarrassment.

Yuill had no difficulty when faced with a choice between supporting Burton and possibly offending Evatt. On June 18, 1952, he chaired proceedings when Dr Burton, fresh from attending a contentious Peace in the Pacific Conference in Peking, addressed an excited audience of unionists, diplomats and students at the Canberra Trades Hall.

Yuill had made an imprudent move. Evatt’s de facto alliance with the ALP Industrial Groups was for the moment unstoppable. At the end of June candidates led by Joe Riordan and supported by the Industrial Groups took control of the FCU’s central council in Sydney. Yuill was on the losing side in the New South Wales branch of the FCU. He stood, but lost, when the Canberra branch chose its representative on the central council.

Yuill was undaunted by defeat. He remained ready to proclaim his militant faith whenever he could. In the official directory published by the TLC he inserted fighting comments on the need for greater union solidarity in Canberra. Of more immediate import, the power of radio was harnessed on his watch. Beginning on October 26, 1952, the TLC featured a Sunday evening industrial session on Canberra’s commercial radio station 2CA. Yuill was the inaugural speaker. ASIO employees diligently transcribed what he and other speakers on the weekly program said.

On January 18, 1953, Yuill used the 2CA session to allude to instances of “blundering and stupidity” in the work of Australia’s security service. Following this broadcast his views were mentioned, but not responded to, in a prime ministerial press conference. Behind the scenes a flurry of bureaucratic correspondence was occasioned by Yuill’s act of outspokenness. ASIO advised (or perhaps reminded) the Public Service Board that it considered the man to be a security risk. The Board in turn advised the Immigration Department to transfer Yuill to another position so that he no longer had access to confidential official information.

But in true Canberra fashion no precipitate action eventuated. The Secretary of the Department of Immigration, the highly effective Tasman Heyes, was of the view that “caution and care should be taken in considering the whole problem before insisting upon action”. Heyes had “a very poor opinion of Yuill and could well do without him” but he was not going to let Yuill attract attention to himself as a political martyr. 

So for the moment Yuill’s bifurcated life continued: frustrated public servant during working hours and anti-Industrial Group firebrand in his spare time. The type of activities being monitored by ASIO continued over the next few months as if nothing had happened. Yuill attended a cocktail evening at the Soviet embassy; along with Dr Burton he protested outside the US embassy against the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg; and he caucused with left-wing elements in Sydney at the 1953 ALP state conference. The political buzz at the inner-city apartment where Yuill resided was incessant. It intensified when Yuill acquired a flatmate in the person of Fergan O’Sullivan, Dr Evatt’s press secretary.

The annual TLC elections for 1953 required careful planning in view of the uncongenial factional climate facing an anti-Industrial Groups stalwart such as Yuill. Without fanfare a change was made to the TLC’s rules whereby the outgoing president no longer needed to be an accredited delegate from his or her union in order to be eligible for re-election. The FCU, as Yuill well knew, had turned into a stronghold for the Industrial Groups; there was no question of his ever again being picked as one of its TLC delegates.

The planning paid off. On July 29, Yuill, by forty-six votes to twenty-nine, was re-elected as TLC president. He celebrated his victory by providing the Canberra Times with a contentious statement in which he reaffirmed his strong opposition to plans by the state Labor government in Sydney to enforce compulsory unionism by legislation. Such a move was seen as an attempt to inflate the membership of Industrial Groups-led unions.

The triumphant mood was soon deflated. On the Friday morning after his re-election Yuill was getting a lift to his day job in the Department of Immigration when the car he was travelling in collided with a truck. An ambulance took him to hospital where he was treated for shock and lacerations.

From then till the end of the year it was one shock after another for Yuill. The crucial turnaround in his fortunes in 1953 was precipitated by a tinpot municipal election. On September 20 Canberrans had to elect representatives to the Advisory Council, which operated as a partly-elected local assembly with no real power. The Labor Party in Canberra—which was part of the New South Wales branch of the ALP at this time—nominated a ticket of four candidates headed by Fred Quinane, its branch secretary. Quinane was a significant figure. Behind the scenes he was the representative in Canberra of the Movement, Bob Santamaria’s secret anti-communist organisation.

Yuill, because of his opposition to the Industrial Groups, was in the Movement’s sights and the lead-up to the Advisory Council election provided Quinane with an opportunity to inflict serious damage. Well before the election loomed Yuill had approached a fellow TLC stalwart—Leo O’Neill from the Australian Workers Union—to sound him out about the possible idea, if circumstances were conducive, of standing as an endorsed TLC candidate at the September 20 poll. Broaching such an idea was most unwise since, if knowledge of this suggestion got out, Yuill could be accused of plotting against the endorsed ALP ticket for the Advisory Council election.

Pre-election jitters dominated the last TLC meeting held before polling day. There was uproar when it was announced that Quinane and another of the Labor candidates had chosen to ignore a request to attend and be interrogated by Yuill. The TLC president had drawn up a list of five questions, each of three parts, which were intended to locate the slightest hint of pro-Industrial Group sentiment lurking in the breasts of the four Advisory Council candidates. Quinane’s refusal to respond had been endorsed by both Dr Evatt and the Industrial Groups-influenced New South Wales ALP executive. Amid the confusion Leo O’Neill, armed with the knowledge of their earlier conversation, accused Yuill of deliberately attempting to split the ALP in Canberra.

O’Neill’s words were music to the ears of Yuill’s internal Labor opponents and they acted without delay. The local ALP branch executive met on the Sunday immediately following polling day. Leo O’Neill, acceding to a request from the anti-Yuill camp, presented the executive with a sworn statement in which he said that Yuill has pressed him to run against the endorsed ALP Advisory Council ticket. The executive resolved that Yuill had committed “a flagrant and sustained breach” of party solidarity and suspended his party membership pending the next branch meeting at which it would call for his expulsion.

The Industrial Groups had sidelined Yuill in the Federated Clerks’ Union. They were now out to end any future he might have in the ALP as well. No effective defence was permitted. The Canberra ALP executive condemned Yuill in his absence. He had, as TLC president, travelled to Sydney to attend the national congress of the ACTU when the blow fell. He learnt about his suspension from Monday’s Sydney Morning Herald. The resulting pressure was hard to bear. By the weekend he had succumbed to illness.

There was a short delay while Yuill recuperated before rank-and-file members of the Canberra ALP got round to considering the proposed act of excommunication at a meeting on October 8. In the lead-up to the meeting Yuill received a vote of support from the TLC but the meeting itself was controlled by enemies led by Fred Quinane. Evatt’s private secretary Bill Byrne was in the chair and presided over an execution. In the course of the night Yuill’s friend John Burton accused Byrne of “partisan chairmanship”. Yuill had already walked out in protest before the vote to expel him, moved by Quinane, was carried, fifty-two votes to twenty-four.

Yuill was under immense strain. The shock of expulsion was followed quickly by talk of a possible vote of no confidence at the TLC and to top things off he was immersed in a law course as well. Late in October the TLC granted him leave of absence so he could sit his examinations in Sydney.

Yuill never resumed his TLC duties. While in Sydney the strain of his law examinations, combined with his factional worries, finally took its toll. He returned to Canberra under doctor’s orders to give up the TLC presidency.

Yuill announced his resignation on November 12 and it was accepted at the next TLC meeting. His factional opponents led by Fred Quinane were satisfied but Dr Evatt needed to show his displeasure in his own way. At a meeting called at his instigation, and which probably occurred on November 16, Charles Spry, the Director-General of Security, advised the Labor leader that his press secretary Fergan O’Sullivan was a flatmate of Yuill’s. Spry told Evatt that Yuill was “either a Communist or an informant of the Communist Party”. Evatt promptly told his press secretary to move out of Yuill’s apartment.

O’Sullivan’s departure amply confirmed that it was time for Yuill to live somewhere else as well. There was not much future for him in Canberra, given the extent of animosity towards him in the ALP. 

Yuill staged an impressive disappearing act. On February 27, 1954, readers of the Canberra Times learnt that the recently retired TLC president was about to sail from Sydney on the Oronsay (“the epitome of post-war British ship-building”) to take up a research fellowship in Industrial Relations at Glasgow University. They were not told, though ASIO knew about it from an informant, that Yuill’s father had paid for the passage. Leftism had clouded Yuill’s relations with his North Shore family but it was now a thing of the past. “The mother”, his ASIO file noted, “said that she was very pleased that Bruce had become a good Roman Catholic again recently.” The parents were financing a sojourn in Scotland by G.S. Yuill’s prodigal heir “in the hope that it will break their son’s bad associations”.

These parental hopes were amply fulfilled. In 1957, having spent years researching in Britain and then working in North America, Yuill finally returned to Australia where he forged a completely different set of associations. He pioneered the academic study of management and later became a consultant to mining companies. He embraced the Liberal Party and endorsed the aims of the H.R. Nicholls Society. 

In one sense Yuill’s earlier left-wing period could be dismissed as a passing act of youthful bravado but nonetheless it is still worthy of attention. Yuill, knowing that his family could always rescue him if necessary, felt free to explore the murky waters of Labor factionalism in the Cold War era without inhibition.

The resulting response was revealing. The key finding to emerge from the Yuill experiment—for that is what it was—is incontrovertible but still needs emphasising. Adherents of the ALP Industrial Groups and their anti-communist associates were not a fringe or unrepresentative element on the eve of the great Labor split of 1954–55. They controlled or influenced crucial areas of power in both the political and industrial wings of the labour movement, including at the grass-roots level in Canberra. That is why Bruce Yuill’s left-wing career in the national capital ended in an ignominious retreat.

Stephen Holt, who lives in Canberra, has been an occasional contributor to Quadrant over many years.