Life on the West Island - Sharing a pipe

West Island archivist and historian Anne-Marie Condé recently recounted how she had stumbled upon an interesting episode from the nation’s past:

I once had the task of combing through a digitised file of letters to Prime Minister Ben Chifley held by the National Archives of Australia. Clicking away, I noticed one from a man named W.H. Reece, sent in August 1946. “Would you please send me one of your pipes that you may have laid aside and you will not be likely to be using again,” wrote Mr Reece. “If it should be a bit strong, no matter. I know of a process that will overcome that. I have not been able to get a decent pipe for years.” The writer was an aged pensioner, “twenty days short of seventy-five years, living alone in New Norfolk, Tasmania”. He had raised a family of six girls and three boys. All three sons had served in the recent war, he added, with one still with the occupying force in Japan. Reece had “battled for Labor” since he joined the Amalgamated Miners Union in 1889. “I started in poverty and I’m ending ditto, but I’ve no regrets and have no apologies to offer for my support of the Grand Old Labor Movement.”

William Henry Reece went on to predict a Labor victory in the 1946 federal election and said that he hoped to be in Hobart for Mr Chifley’s campaign launch later in the year. He ultimately received a polite response from the Prime Minister (but no pipe). Mr Chifley wrote (in part):

“Dear Mr Reece, thanks for your letter… I am sorry that for the present I haven’t a suitable pipe to send you. As you say, good pipes are very scarce these days… I was interested to read of your lengthy support of the labour movement. You must have many memories to look back on”.

And he signed off with best wishes.

Further research revealed that Mr Reece was in fact the uncle of the man who became the long-term Labor Premier of Tasmania, Eric Reece, who gained the nickname of “Electric Eric” because of his unwavering support for hydroelectric power in the Apple Isle. He initiated many hydro projects, and the island’s commitment to hydroelectricity has resulted to this day in Tasmania producing all of its power needs from hydro sources. In fact, it even exports electricity into the eastern mainland grid, via an undersea cable.

Conté was fascinated by this conversational exchange and surmised:

Reece didn’t get his pipe but I doubt he was disappointed. Pipe smoking was a companionable habit the two men shared but Reece’s request, I suspect, was just an opening gambit. It has been said of Chifley that he used the lighting of his pipe as a stalling tactic while he thought through a response to a problem. And so, preliminaries over, Reece felt perfectly free to address his prime minister as an equal, one Labor man to another, to tell his story…

And Will Reece did have quite a story to tell, which was revealing about the ethos of the working class who for decades were the backbone of Labor’s support across the nation. His father was a miner in the northern and western parts of the state, where deposits of valuable minerals were discovered in the 1870s and later, including tin, silver, gold and copper. Many of these mines only operated for a few years, so the Reece family moved often in search of poorly-paid mining work. Will was one of 14 children; his mother died aged 38, in the act of giving birth to stillborn twins. The family lived in hand-to-mouth poverty and each of the older siblings took up manual work a soon as they were able.

As an adolescent, Will commenced an apprenticeship with a blacksmith at the Ringarooma tin mine and joined the Amalgamated Miners’ Union in 1889. Then he moved on to work as an itinerant blacksmith in agricultural areas for almost two decades before marrying and settling in New Norfolk. Forced in 1915 to give up blacksmithing because of an accident, he opened a photographic studio but it failed, and he was declared bankrupt in 1921. However, that didn’t stop him, as Condé reports:

Clearly this man had bucketloads of self-belief. He stood twice, unsuccessfully, for the municipal council and then, undeterred, turned to state politics and was a candidate for Labor in the elections of 1919, 1922, 1925 and 1928. He failed each time. Meanwhile he became an organiser for the renamed Australian Workers’ Union, and here he found his métier. His nephew’s biographer noted Will Reece signing up shearers, shed-hands, miners, labourers and roadmen across the state, including in mining centres on the west coast. New heavy-industry projects provided fresh fields for the AWU, and there was Will Reece, visiting the new carbide factory at Electrona in the south and the hydroelectricity works at Waddamana in the central highlands.

Meanwhile, Will’s nephew Eric was much more successful with his political ambitions. His formative years had been similar to Will’s: he had worked in mines and on farms from his early teens; joined the AWU at fifteen and spent most of the 1930s depression unemployed. But he got a job at the Mount Lyell copper mine in 1934 and was appointed organiser for the AWU there in 1935. He was elected Labor member of the Tasmanian parliament in November 1946, was in office as premier between 1958 and 1969, and again from 1972 to 1975. He is popularly regarded as the most successful premier of the state, particularly because of the hydroelectric projects he instituted.

But Condé reports that Will Reece didn’t live to see any of this. Perhaps, as promised, he made it to Hobart in September 1946 to hear Ben Chifley’s two-hour campaign speech given to a capacity crowd at the town hall. “The whole country is prosperous,” Chifley declared that night. “That is the first ideal we have, and we go to the people on that record.” Labor’s election loss in 1949 and Chifley’s death in 1951 must have saddened Will Reece. He died in 1953, no doubt with his certainties still intact.

Will Reece and Ben Chifley may never have physically shared a pipe, but this little-known story illustrates an open, frank and personal approach to West Island politics and government which has now disappeared under an avalanche of mass communication, social media, spin, fake news and conspiracy theories – and the nation is clearly worse off as a result.