Chapter 3 of The Nationbuilders
Keywords: Political Economy & History;
It is easier to become prime minister than to be a good one, for that involves transcending the leading a political party to leading a nation. Unlike the much beloved Michael Joseph Savage, Peter Fraser was bereft of public charisma. Yet he is the greatest prime minister of those who presided only in the twentieth century, and has been described as the only New Zealander leader ‘with a plausible claim to be recognised as an international statesman’.[1]
Fraser was born and raised in highland Scotland his father a shoemaker. His formal education was brief for the family needed his contribution to their income. The apprenticeship in carpentry was cut short by poor eyesight. For the rest of his life he wore thick spectacles and a preferred discussion over document. Yet he studied as widely as the informal education system would allow. That included the Presbyterian church (to which he returned to towards the end of his life), evening classes, adult education, and reading, which he did all his life. In a parliamentary eulogy in 1950, the the Minister of Education and ex-professor of law, Ronald Algie was to say Fraser was ‘an educated man in the truest sense of that much-abused and oft-despised word’.[2]
When young he was strongly influenced by Robert Blatchford, Keir Hardie, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin and William Morris and other English writers, and later by Karl Marx and the US syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World. The Fabians were also important. He frequently quoted Bernard Shaw, and that may be where his lifelong love for the theatre began. While that early socialist education would have given him a preference for public ownership, and a suspicion of the market, it was supplemented by a more orthodox training via the WEA. (John Condliffe claimed that while professor of economics at Canterbury College, he taught there three future prime ministers: Savage, Fraser, and Walter Nash.)
Pat (as he was then known) Fraser arrived in New Zealand in 1911. He found employment as a labourer and then on the Auckland wharves, quickly becoming president of the Auckland General Labourer’s Union, which was transforming into a class-conscious, industry-based union. During the next few years he became involved in a number of industrial disputes, including the representative of the Red Feds (the New Zealand Federation of Labour) at the site of the 1912 Waihi strike, and a leader in the 1913 Auckland wharf strike. Neither was a union success. The syndicalist Labourer’s Union opted out of the provisions of the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act, and found itself out manoeuvred by the employers setting up a scab arbitrationist union. Fraser learned a lesson his government was to use on the Auckland carpenters in 1948, but more generally it may have been a major factor in shifting him towards a more evolutionary socialism. ‘[F]rom 1916 or thereabouts he swung gradually from a left-wing to a right-wing socialist viewpoint’, including reversing his support for land nationalisation in 1919, to opposition by 1927 as an unrealistic policy.[3] Even so, he was at first an enthusiast for the Bolshevik revolution. In 1918, at the age of 34, he was elected to Wellington Central, a seat transformed to Brooklyn in 1946 he held till his death 32 years later.
The world is different within government By September 1938 Fraser was telling the Police Association:
Now, the point is that our standard of living, which at present is probably the highest in the world, cannot be maintained, far less [be] increased, unless the whole economic resources of the country are organised and utilised in the production of more commodities. That is the background of the whole of our economic life and of the activities of the Trade Unions and all the rest. The intelligent people among the Trade Unions know that today. That is where inefficiency in service is stultifying and destroying the efforts of the Government. If any band of workers, whether on the Public Works, on the waterfront, in shops, factories, or in any government service, are not pulling their weight, and doing their work more efficiently than before, they are simply striking away the foundations from the edifice that is being built. For instance, if in any industry 80 percent more men are employed, but the production is only increased 60 percent, then they are destroying the economic basis of that industry. These are matters we are talking about very frankly to responsible officers of the various Trade Union organisations. If men loaf in loading a ship or if the men responsible for getting the trucks down to a freezing company do not do their work efficiently, as a result of which other men are held up with nothing to do, then those responsible for the hold-up are destroying what the Government is trying to build up. No government can go on improving the conditions of the people in town and country unless the volume of production is increased and the people in turn give good service.[4]
This might be thought of as a statement typical of a minister who was resisting pressures in pay and conditions, although the mention of talks with unions is an indication that Fraser saw from an early stage the union movement had to be included in economic decision making.
Bernard Ashwin’s diary’s first reference to Fraser is at the time of the 1939 budget. The New Zealand economy was in severe stress arising from the current account deficit, while the Labour caucus was deeply split on economic policy, the dissidents led by John A. Lee advocating greater use of Reserve Bank credit. (Nash was in England):
As a result of my daily talks to him my opinion of the Prime Minister [Savage] improved. He will face facts and has courage. He agreed to my ideas being written into the Budget but he had to go to hospital for an operation the morning after he delivered it. In fact he was laid up a week before hand and came from his bed to read the Budget. Fraser (deputy Prime Minister) thus had a hand in finalising [the] document and above all else he is a keen politician and watered down some of the warnings against using Reserve Bank credit to pander to the left wing of the party. Mr Savage’s operation was apparently successful and when I called upon at his residence I was surprised how well he looked.[5]
Ashwin discusses the economic measures needed for the war effort, and mentions legislation the caucus promoted which would have enabled the government ‘the power to take over the Bank of New Zealand and in fact all the Trading Banks … Fraser and Nash were both opposed to it but apparently would not defy the caucus as I think Mr Savage would have done once he was convinced of the dangers involved in such hasty action.’[6] (Caucus got their way in 1945, when Fraser and Nash were out of the country.)
The diary was abandoned in October 1939, but its short record draws attention to three features of Fraser. First, he was a keen politician, sensitive to caucus pressures. (However he was not in thrall to caucus, although as deputy prime minister he had less authority than Savage. He would also have been mindful of the likelihood in the very near future that he would be dependent on caucus votes in any bid for the premiership.) Second, he was an efficient chairman of cabinet, when Savage was away. And third, Ashwin already had direct access to the prime minister.
While Ashwin remained critical of Nash, he reveals a quite different relationship with Fraser. Reflecting he 1969 he said:
I saw him almost every day during the war. For some reason he liked me and often asked me to call to see him. On my way home from work usually around midnight we would sit and talk through the early hours of the morning, He would give me some of his new proposals and seek my opinions of them. I always answered honestly; if I thought his plan crazy I would tell him so and I think Fraser respected me for this. I accompanied Fraser on most of his overseas trips.[7]
The rapport was not, however, unique. Alistair McIntosh gives a similar account of working with Fraser, as no doubt could have other departmental heads. Yet Ashwin was not uncritical of Fraser, although any reproach was overwhelmed by admiration:
Fraser could be very petty, and often wasted time arguing over trivial matters. But on major decisions he was most impressive and was quick to grasp what the really important factors were. I think his decision to leave the Second Division in the Middle East was an example of this. He was also particularly good at keeping his own party in line with his decision. He maintained a good relationship with Walsh, and thus got the Labour movement as a whole behind the war effort.[8]
Ashwin’s warmth was due not only to Fraser’s abilities and personality. There was considerable agreement between the two on practical economic matters. The convergence would have arisen partly because of the desperate situation of the war effort, but also because Fraser took a more orthodox line than the economic dissenters in caucus, especially on monetary policy. He did not give a lot of budget speeches, and their content tended to be political rather than indicating an economic philosophy. But there are occasional exceptions. The 1940 budget was particularly important for the new prime minister:
Without in any way raising any alarms or boosting any methods that might be called unorthodox, I would like to repeat what I said in a statement to the press on Saturday. I said that if we think we can fight the war with approved orthodox methods, when many of the old financial, social, economic, and fiscal lampposts and signposts have disappeared, then we are mistaken. I want to say this: nobody in the world wants to avoid inflation more than I. My opinion is that, in the long-run, it makes people pay in a roundabout way sometimes even in a dishonest way and it is preferable that they pay it straight out. I am not going into all the intricacies of the case that can be made for the issue of credit but everything must be based on goods and services. I want to say this: that this country cannot be stultified in its war effort, no matter what means have to be adopted financially. We cannot be defeated financially on the home front.[9]
Now this is all a bit tortuous, but the sentiments about inflation involve quite sophisticated economics thinking, for he is saying he is going to be as orthodox as circumstances allow (e.g. credit creation backed by production), but for the monetary reformers in the Labour caucus he also implies that he might be as unorthodox as necessary.
As soon as he sat down, John A. Lee, who had just been thrown out of the party, rose. ‘This budget is cast on more orthodox lines, although it is harsher to great wealth than any Labour Budget yet introduced, and the criticism from the Leader of the Opposition was, of course, along the lines of orthodoxy.’[10] Lee then went to move ‘that the question be amended by the omission of all words after that,’ and went on to add a series of unorthodox proposals, but in the Labour monetary reforming tradition. The amendment was seconded by Harry Atmore, independent MP for Nelson, and was lost 2 votes to 63. No doubt Lee had more support in the Labour caucus, even if it was unwilling to show itself in such public circumstances. No doubt Fraser knew this; hence some of the features of his preceding speech.
The dispute between Lee and Fraser (and, earlier, Savage) is somewhat of a puzzle. From this distance it appears to be about personalities of a younger man threatening the established order. Fraser’s concerns were compounded by his being jailed in the First World War, objecting to the conscription of men but not of capital. Thus he was no pacifist, and thought the Second World War a just one, for Hitler’s aggression was monstrous, and that ‘[t]o fight and crush him, and everything he stood for, was the solemn duty of all democrats and socialists.’[1] The extraordinary economic powers he acquired and delegated to such as James Fletcher and the Economic Stabilisation Commission were his attempt to ‘conscript capital’. McIntosh thought however, that ‘what stopped Fraser from misusing his authority was his well-balanced knowledge of British constitutional history. He always weighed the propriety of actions before taking them.’[12]
On the other hand Lee had been a war hero, and could claim a moral superiority to prosecute a war. It is said that in opposition all that MPs have to do is to plot against one another, and many keep to the habit in government. The (regrettably) final entry in Ashwin’s diary in September 1939 reports on Savage’s poor health and continues:
… his absence will I think prove a much greater calamity for N.Z. than most people realise. When he went into hospital the left wing of the party seemed to take it for granted that he would not return [so much for Lee’s protestations that he did not realise how sick Savage was] and rumour has it that Nash would be forced out of his position as Minister of Finance. Barnard (the speaker) was to be Prime Minister apparently because it was considered Lee would not be generally acceptable in that capacity. He is a lawyer but has not much in the way of ability or personality. I also heard that Lefeaux was to be pushed out [of the governorship of the Reserve Bank] and Kelliher, a brewery magnate, who is an advocate of the so called ‘new economics’ and social credit ways to be installed as Governor of the Reserve Bank. If there was much truth in these rumours it is a good thing for N.Z. that Mr Savage survived his operation. Nash is undoubtedly unpopular with the party and pressure might have been put on him to resign [h]is finance portfolio but just as he reached Wgtn war broke out in Europe. [13]
With hindsight, one might say that there were some domestic political benefits from war breaking out (and also it resolved the foreign exchange supply). In the hothouse of intrigue, Fraser’s initial paranoia may be understandable, and Lee was at the heart of the plot. There was an ideological dimension to the dispute. Bill Sutch commented in 1971:
But you must bear in mind that the Labour mandate in 1935 wasn’t a socialist mandate. It was a mandate to have an economics and social system that what would work in terms of the happenings that occurred to every man and woman, namely sickness, unemployment, age, poverty, housing, fluctuating prices. It was a political response and though the Labour Party had what was called a ‘socialist background’ and there were one or two socialists in it, it was not a socialist policy, unless of course you use the terms of my friend John Lee, who talked in terms of these things being socialist.
Now I may be the odd man out in this because I find that the present Labour Party also talks in terms of any ameliorative process that assists the rank and file of this country as socialism. That’s why I begin by saying this is a definition of socialism, but it wasn’t any of the definitions I knew because the essence of every definition I knew was that socialism at least was non-capitalism. And this country was of course a capitalist country.[14]
Lee, like others in the Labour caucus, was really a monetary reformer, with a bit of public ownership of commercial enterprises tacked on. In 1938 Fraser had told the police exactly the opposite. Production was key to welfare, not finance. In 1940 he said even more explicitly ‘We do not eat banknotes; we do not wear credit; we do not build factories with credit for material. Credit in itself does not make machinery or turn out goods.’[15] Even so, the outcome of the plotting may have been to push, in a way the conspirators did not intend, Fraser and policy towards ‘the historic compromise’ the extension of the power of the state over capitalism, rather than the replacement of capitalism, with the implication the state would be controlled by the people or workers and not the capitalists. Fraser had come a long way from the ‘Pat’ of his twenties and early thirties.
As deputy prime minister Fraser chose the portfolios of Education and Health (and Marine and Police). His health interests reflected those of his wife, Janet, who could have been a formidable MP or official, and became de facto (research) assistant to the Prime Minister, even to the extent of having an office next to his. She was a voluntary health worker, a member of the Wellington Hospital Board between 1925 and 1935, and on government committees inquiring into abortion and maternity services.
Education reflected an even greater interest. Fraser had joined the parliamentary select committee on education in 1921, which he served on until his death. As minister he forged one of those extraordinarily creative partnerships with the Director General for Education, Clarence Beeby. The two are associated with one of the great statements about the purpose of education:
The government’s objective, broadly expressed, is that every person, whatever her or his level of academic ability, whether he or she be rich or poor, whether he or she live in country or town, has a right, as a citizen, to a free education of the kind for which he or she is best fitted and to the fullest extent of her or his power.[16]
While Beeby drafted the statement, he has insisted that the sentiment was Fraser’s. Bill Renwick shows this is not a false modesty, nor a public servant attributing his own words to his political master. Fraser had expressed similar notions earlier. In his first major speech as Minister in 1936, before Beeby had entered government service, he explained education in human terms that a
[r]easonably well-designed education should aim at … the development of personality of each individual child, in an atmosphere of comradeship, equality, and mutual work and open air activity.[17]
Education has a key role in nationbuilding in that it may, or may not, transmit to the next generation a national set of values images, stories and aspirations a culture. Undoubtedly Fraser and Beeby had such an objective in mind, and largely succeeded in pursuing it, although perhaps it was the teacher colleges, rather than the universities with their dependence on imported staff which were the flag bearers at the tertiary level. (The irony is the Fraser created a formal education system, which often produces graduates far less accomplished than its informally educated creator.)
Fraser gave up the portfolios shortly after taking the premiership in April 1940. But he continued to take a close and effective interest in them, as he did in the arts, working closely with the Secretary of Internal Affairs, Joe Heenan, with whom he shared a love of literature. Among the institutions they created or developed out of their initiatives were a literary fund, an arts council, a national orchestra, and the history branch, some of which withstood the onslaught of the post-1984 barbarians. Similarly Fraser worked closely with the Maori, especially after 1946 when he took up the portfolio. It is said that he had an empathy with their land losses arising from the devastation to his family of the Scottish Highland clearances.[18] He promoted the development of women.
Fraser was a war prime minister. Given Savage’s increasing deterioration in health from just before the war began because of, there is a sense in which he was New Zealand’s only Second World War prime minister. Ian Wards says such was his commitment that he was a ‘warrior prime minister’ although, as previous few paragraphs tell, he was also very active on the civilian front.[19] The war was being pursued to create a new society in New Zealand.
On the war front there was the domestic problem of providing the resources to prosecute the war. Fraser left this to the Supply Council and the Economic Stabilisation Commission, discussed in chapters 2, 4 and 5. A 1944 Budget speech throws some light on his economic thinking.
The country has adopted a stabilisation policy; the country approved of it at the general election. It is not 100 percent perfect, and nobody expected it to be. Any person with a knowledge of the difficulties, the intricacies, and the contradictions of our economic system in regard to prices, importations, productions, cost of production and so on will agree to think that a government could produce a system that is 100 percent perfect would be to hope for the impossible. I do claim, however, that the work is efficient, and more efficient indeed than stabilisation processes in any other country that has adopted the idea. It is not perfect, and I admit right away that, on the price index there have been commodities that were not obtainable …
Excluding the rhetoric, the statement has the hallmarks of an economist presumably Ashwin all over it. Observe the unease about the interfering with the market, as well as the appreciation of the significance of shortages on a price index. After the war, Ashwin would have wanted to liberalise the economy somewhat faster than occurred, perhaps because of Nash’s reluctance to make decisions and Fraser’s political judgement. But Fraser’s 1944 budget speech hints that he may well have been more sympathetic than Nash.
Then there was the military leadership role. As the Encyclopaedia of New Zealand says, ‘[t]he New Zealand Army was less ready for war in 1939 than it had been in 1914.[20] (Presumably it was tact which left out the ‘even’ between ‘was’ and ‘less’.) Perhaps the Navy was a little better prepared (it had despatched a couple of cruisers into a protection role in the mid-Pacific a few days before war was declared). Other chapters record how Ashwin, Fletcher, and F.P. Walsh worked with Fraser to provide equipment, infrastructure and resources (coupled with economic stabilisation). Again Fraser left the fighting to his commanders, such as Bernard Freyberg, but they knew could rely upon him. (Ironically Freyberg and Fraser had been on opposite sides in the 1913 Auckland Wharf strike.) They turned a band of raggle-taggle gypsies into an impressive fighting force. Reminiscent of Oliver Cromwell’s ‘I’d rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows than what you call a gentleman and is nothing else,’[21] Fraser said of his troops
Every officer had come through the ranks, and has proved our system of education and the general opportunity given to our young men fir them for grave responsibilities. Nothing has given greater pleasure to our General [Freyberg], who has lived and worked under different circumstances, than the fact that his Division is officered by men who had come from the ranks.[22]
Fraser was beset with consequential, and yet over-arching, political decisions. He chose to keep the New Zealand Army active in the European-Middle East theatre of operations, while the Australians withdrew back to the Pacific theatre. He forged the Canberra Pact with the Australians which, being a foundation for Trans-Tasman relations, reflected the drift away from Britain as the sole basis to New Zealand’s international strategy. He dealt with conscientious objectors at home more humanely than they were treated in the First World War, and with recruitment from the Waikato tribes who refused in the previous war duty too.
The military-politico decisions plus the internationalist vision of Fraser and the Labour Party, naturally led him on to after-war world politics (although he was not the first – nor last – prime minister having mastered home politics had his interests journeying abroad). He was an active founder of the United Nations at San Francisco in 1945, and attended its general assemblies while he remained prime minister. He chaired the committee which led to the establishment of the Trusteeship Council. It was a critical pert of the story which led to the ending on British and other empires and, more locally, put Western Samoa into the trusteeship system thus setting it on its way to independence in 1961). His performance in the chair has been one of the greatest of New Zealand’s foreign affairs triumphs, perhaps challenged only by Bill Sutch’s contribution to the founding of UNICEF.
Being a small country far from the centre of the world, New Zealand has little leverage in international forums. Fraser used all his skills to ensure that the New Zealand interests and his visions were prominent. He insisted that the UN should have a peacekeeping role, and that economic and social issues should be matters of significance. Small states must have a voice. The tension became all the more severe as the Cold War developed. Fraser disliked the notion of a bi-polar world, yet became strongly anti-communist, while trying to avoid becoming uncritically pro-US. While the centre of Western power was shifting to the US, he tried to maintain a Commonwealth element in foreign policy, not least for defence.
New Zealand’s international status was paradoxical. For a country that was keen to promote independence for others, it did not enact the provisions of the Statute of Westminster, which technically gave it full international independence, until 1947. It had had the option from 1931. Its adoption had been considered in the early 1940s, but deferred because it might have sent the wrong signal to the enemy. In the interregnum, discussion could be as confused as Fraser’s 1945 statement that ‘[t]o us of the British Commonwealth it is very difficult to distinguish between self-government and independence, for the self-governing sovereign States of the British Commonwealth, self-government is independence and independence is self-government.’[23] More fundamentally, the world of the late 1940s was riddled with contradictions and paradoxes, and Fraser had to pick New Zealand’s way through the minefield. As McIntosh wrote implicitly criticising Sydney Holland, Fraser’s successor ‘[w]e do miss Peter Fraser’s farsightedness, astuteness, breadth and enlightened humanitarianism.’[24]
In assessing the greatness of Fraser as a prime minister, one cannot but observe the outstanding men with which he surrounded himself (although there were few in caucus): men who appear in this book Coates, Ashwin, Fletcher, and Walsh or would have had there been more space or a slightly different focus including Beeby, Freyberg, Heenan, McIntosh, and Shelly (plus Janet Fraser). One gain recalls Cromwell. ‘Sir the state in choosing men to serve, takes no notice of their opinions, if they be willing faithfully to serve them, that satisfies.’[25] From one perspective Fraser’s achievements were based on their competence, but from another, his ability to judge and use such men effectively is a mark of his greatness. There has been no other prime minister Coates is the challenger who has been so surrounded with ‘great men’ (and women), and who looked as good as they did.
Perhaps the most touching relationship is that between Coates and Fraser in the war administration, which drew together old parliamentary opponents. Fraser made similar use of Arnold Nordmeyer’s talents. His radicalism must have been a trial in the early years of the Labour Government, but he proved to be one of the few able cabinet ministers, and seems to have been Fraser’s choice as successor. (As ironies would have it, Nordmeyer lost his Waitaki seat in 1949 and was not in parliament when Fraser died. He returned by winning Fraser’s Brooklyn seat). Sutch was another trial in the early years of the Labour government, and yet in 1947 Fraser was instrumental in appointing him to a UN office in New York.[26]
With Lee he failed. Given Erik Olssen’s drawing of parallels between Fraser and Lee, there seems to have been almost a father-son antagonism.[27] Perhaps Lee was too ambitious, too in a hurry, too irascible to have led to any other outcome. Yet a little more patience, a little more insight, and he could have led the Labour Party, perhaps as early as following Fraser’s death.
Fraser’s last years in parliament were beset by health problems and dying colleagues. Janet’s death in 1945 broke his heart, and reduced his administrative effectiveness. Perhaps he was over concerned with international problems, perhaps he was exhausted of ideas on the domestic front. The transition to peace and rehabilitation of returning soldiers was not the disaster of the post-First World War era, but he could have liberalised faster – if Nash would have let him. The extraordinary economic growth rate of the 1935 to 1945 era of 7 percent p.a. in real terms (similar to the Asian economies in the 1980s), slowed down and even stagnated in the late 1940s. Fraser lost power in 1949, and died a year later.
Fraser’s memory was devalued by subsequent generations, as his achievements became taken for granted. And it is hard to forgive the way he used the power of the state to get his desired outcome on the conscription referendum of 1948: this time there was not even the pretence of conscripting capital. In the political arena, Fraser could be a thug. Martyn Finlay recalls how he was a master of caucus ‘exercising control partly by hectoring and sarcasm.’[28] Yet there was a poetry in the mater of politics, he loved and quoted it, promoted the creative arts, and cared for the world they represented. As of Cromwell it could be said a ‘ larger soul, I think, hath seldom dwelt in the house of clay than was his.’[29]
To have got New Zealand successfully through a world war was no mean achievement. But at the same time Fraser was building a better New Zealand – in education, health, the arts, for the Maori and women, and in foreign affairs. Of course the ex-Scot was not building a better England, but trying to ‘build Jerusalem in our most green and pleasant land’. [30]
Biographical Sources
Bassett, M.E.R. & M. King (2001) Tomorrow Comes the Song, Auckland.
Brown, B. (1966) An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, Wellington, Vol I, p.748-751.
Beaglehole, T. (1998) ‘Fraser, Peter,’ DNZB, Vol IV, p.182-187.
M. Clark (ed) (1998) Peter Fraser: Master Politician, Dunmore, Palmerston North.
Stacy, H. (1998) ‘Fraser, Janet’, DNZB, Vol IV, p.181-182.
Thorn, J. (1952) Peter Fraser, Odhams Press, London.
Endnotes
1. Bassett & King (2001) p.296.
2. R. M. Algie (1950) NZPD, Vol 294, 28 June 1951, p.40.
3. B. Brown (1966) p.751.
4. Official Report, Third Annual Conference of the New Zealand Police Association, Wellington September 6-8, 1938. p.5.
5. B. Ashwin, private diary in Ashwin family papers, p.10-11.
6. Ibid, p.27-28.
7. J. Henderson, J. (1970) ‘Interview with B.C. Ashwin’, copy held in Ashwin family papers, p.13-14.
8. Ibid p.13-14.
9. NZPD, July 3, 1940, Vol.257, p.326.
10. Ibid, p.336.
11. Reported in I. Wards ‘Peter Fraser Warrior Prime Minister,’ in Clark (1998) p.146.
12. Bassett And King (2001) p.197.
13. Ashwin, private diary, op. cit. p.28.
14. Reported in T. Simpson (1976) the Scrim-Lee Papers, Reed, Wgtn, p.51.
15. NZPD, Vol , Chx, 19 July, 1940, p.Chx.
16. Reported in C. Beeby, The Biography of an Idea, NZCER, Wgtn, p. 124. Gender adjusted as Beeby’s memoir implies.
17. Reported in W. Renwick, ‘Fraser on Education,’ in Clark (1998), p.74.
18. These activities of Fraser are detailed in R. Barrowman, ‘Fraser, Heenan, and Cultural Patronage,’ and C. Orange, ‘Fraser and the Maori’ in Clark (1998).
19. I. Wards (1998) p.147.
20. W. Murphy (1966) ‘Wars’, An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, Government Printer, Vol III, p.569.
21. C. Hill (1970) God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution, London. p.67.
22. Reported in Thorn (1952) p.225.
23. New Zealand Foreign Policy Statements and Documents:1943-1957, Government Printer, Wgtn, p.93.
24. A. McIntosh, letter to C. Berensden in I. McGibbon (ed) (1993) Undiplomatic Dialogue, AUP, p.207.
25. Hill (1970), p.68.
26. McGibbon (1993) p.119.
27. E. Olssen, ‘Fraser and Lee’, in Clark (1998) p.27-44.
28. M. Finlay, ‘Opening Recollections’ in Clark (1998) p.12.
29. John Maidstone to John Winthrop, cited in Hill (1970) p.192.
30. From a 1935 speech reported in Bassett and King (2001) p.136. Renwick (1998) p.87 reports a similar phrase in a 1938 speech.