A bit of a Lion, a bit of an ass.(Socialist Champion: Portrait of the Gentleman as Crusader)(Book review)

Socialist Champion: Portrait of the Gentleman as Crusader, by John Barnes; Arcadia/Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2005, $39.95.

"I LIKE THE POOR MAN'S politics and the rich man's dinners," the overly frank pioneer socialist Henry Hyde Champion was reported as saying. He was one of the more colourful of Melbourne's earnest band of Edwardian intellectuals and activists--though colourful only by comparison and chiefly because of his occasionally tactless tendency to be over-fond of the truth.

This biography lifts an interesting, if minor figure from oblivion and with him the literary, political and intellectual (mildly) "bohemian" circles he mixed with in Melbourne between 1890 and the First World War. The causes he became involved with were numerous: the Victorian Socialist Party, Fabians and half a dozen other groups which gradually cohered into the ALP; German socialists and Italian Garibaldi democrats; women's suffrage and early feminism; the Australian Church, brave but premature forerunner of the Uniting Church; the Unitarian and Christian Science churches; Theosophists; pacifists, protectionists, free traders, anti-sweaters; educational reformers; minor and some not so minor poets, artists and writers; David Syme's thunderingly high-minded Age newspaper; favoured restaurants and dining groups.

Champion's attitude towards most of them was, in a word, snooty, although this is probably revealed more here from his correspondence than at the time--though he certainly said a fair bit at the time!

The poverty of London's East End in the 1880s brought him to socialism from an unlikely background. His family came from the highest ranks of the Scottish aristocracy, his father becoming a major-general in the Indian Army. "H.H." was born in India in 1859 and spent much of his early life in the Raj, though educated at English public schools and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. He returned to India as a junior officer, but a further period in London was his road to Damascus.

The next few years brought restless, seemingly selfless work for the cause in England and Scotland. Among his friends were all the best socialist people--George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and the future Beatrice Webb, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor; Keir Hardie, the first "cloth cap" British Labour leader; the 1889 London dock strike leaders Ben Tillett and Tom Mann, whom Champion helped with organisation.

He seemed set for a parliamentary career, if not the leadership of the embryo Labour Party. But, like so many, his attempts at election to parliament were not in the right place at the right time and his accent and ill-concealed aristocratic condescension worked against him, his transparent ego and sense of a personal destiny even more so. He comes across at this time as a frenetic, gifted organiser and propagandist, but lacking empathy and oratorical flair and charisma--being merely fluent and logical on the hustings.