A bright, working-class boy, then Christian patriot during World War I, Gordon Crane became a star university scholar concerned about the condition of the working class. As a 1922 graduate of the University of Queensland with first class honours in history, he could have had a lucrative and successful career, at least as a middle-class professional. Instead, he devoted his life to the socialist workers’ movement, to which he brought profound Marxist insights into the nature of capitalism, in the late 1930s.
Figures like Crane, who are not academics, authors of articles in respectable journals or books, don’t feature in mainstream histories. There are brief mentions of Crane in an online labour movement database and a very few books, theses and articles. But people like him matter to us because they made important contributions to workers’ struggles and expanding our understanding of how capitalism works.
Born in 1897 to a skilled metalworker father, Gordon Crane was the oldest of seven children. He won a scholarship to Ipswich Grammar School, where he won a Thallon Memorial Medal in 1914. His dad worked in the Ipswich Railway Workshops, and the solid gold medal, with a locomotive on one side, was awarded to the children of railway workers who did best in the state’s intermediate high school exam. For decades, Thallon had been a senior Queensland Railways employee, eventually commissioner.
Having won further support to go on to senior high school, then a teacher’s scholarship and enrolling in Queensland University, Crane volunteered to fight in the First World War in March 1916, apparently without his father’s approval. Suffering from health problems throughout his life, he was hospitalised while in military training and medically discharged after six months’ army service.
Crane returned to study only in 1918, part time. From 1920 at the latest, he worked as a teacher. When the University Senate decided to up the fee for students sitting exams in 1919, Crane and Fred Paterson organised collective protest. The Senate backed down after a student mass meeting.
While at university, Crane’s social ties shifted from the Church of England Men’s Society to the Workers Education Association. Although it was organised through the university and its full-time tutors were paid by the State Education Department, the association in Queensland was a radical adult-education organisation, whose program included classes in Marxist economics. Crane conducted some of its classes as a volunteer and, in 1921, was elected its treasurer.
The prize-winning essay in economics that won him the lucrative Archibald scholarship for honours study demonstrated his concern for workers’ wellbeing and implied that he had reformist socialist politics. The WEA Students’ Society gave him the three volumes of Marx’s Capital in gratitude shortly before he left Brisbane.
After graduating with a BA in history and economics, Crane taught at Mt Morgan’s high school. But he was soon employed full time, by the Education Department, as the Workers’ Education Association tutor in nearby Rockhampton. The WEA in Rockhampton was dominated by union militants and socialists, especially rail workers. The railway was the city’s largest employer.
Crane was not only active in the Teachers’ Union, arguing for its affiliation to the Labor Party. He was also an advocate of what is today called progressive, “child-centred education”.
In August 1925, Crane resumed his very close connection with Queensland Railways, though in a quite different spirit from his gold-medal award a decade earlier. He was very active in a week-long strike by railway workers that started in Rockhampton on 27 August (a day before the rest of the state).
Queensland’s Labor government had cut the basic wage from the equivalent of $8.50 a week to $8 in 1922. Now members of the rail unions, led by the very militant Queensland branch Australian Railways Union, insisted that the cut should be restored and that unionists had the right to hold stop-work meetings. Workers of the Railways Central Division, which included Rockhampton, added restoration of a 36¾ hour week for clerical workers. The Northern Division also demanded time and a half for night work.
Both Crane and Fred Paterson spoke at many, if not all, of the rail workers’ mass meetings in favour of the industrial action. Paterson—by then a member of the minuscule CPA and between 1944 and 1950 the party’s only ever representative in an Australian parliament—was even coopted onto the strike committee. The government conceded the demands common to all three divisions. At the 1,500-strong Rockhampton meeting, which accepted this, according to the Capricornian, “Three cheers were given for the ‘Great Labour Movement’, the Disputes Committee, and Messrs. Paterson and Crane”.
By December 1925 at the latest, Crane had Communist politics even if he was not, like Fred Paterson, a member of the Communist Party of Australia. When questioned about the difference between socialists and Communists at a meeting, the Observer and Evening Brisbane Courier quoted him as saying:
“that the Communists were prepared to carry their fight against capitalism to the bitter end, whenever it might be necessary, the Socialists were prepared to draw the teeth of the working class, and would take no course except constitutional action. Consequently, the Communists were the enemies of capitalism and the Socialist party was capitalism’s last defence.”
At that stage the Queensland Labor Party still tolerated members who were also members of the Communist Party. Not for much longer. While Premier Bill Gillies had conceded the main demands of the 1925 railways strike, his successor, Bill McCormack, headkicker and former Australian Workers’ Union official, manoeuvred to isolate and weaken the ARU. Using a requirement that ALP members had to pledge that they weren’t members of the CPA, he pushed the militant union out of the Labor Party in 1926.
At a pettier level, the Education Department tried to exiled Crane to a one-teacher school in the bush, first to Jundah, more than 200 kilometres south-west of the railhead at Longreach. There were protests. Gordon then accepted the position at Djuan, another one-teacher school, only 50 kilometres north of Toowoomba, in the parliamentary constituency of the conservative Queensland opposition leader.
A year later, in February 1926, the ARU put him on as state organiser. The union became involved in the South Johnstone sugar mill dispute. Railway workers refused to transport scab sugar from the mill, in solidarity with AWU members striking over job security at the mill. McCormack responded by locking out the entire railway workforce of almost 19,000 until workers signed a pledge to obey management’s instructions. The dispute ended without any concessions by mill management. AWU members returned to work; the ARU accepted the pledge and a guarantee that there would be no victimisations.
From 1927, if not earlier, Crane was following the CPA’s line and helping to build its front organisations, whether or not he was formally a party member. His acceptance of the party’s line continued when it became thoroughly subservient to the interests of the bureaucratic, capitalist ruling class in Russia, whose counter-revolution was complete by 1929.
Facing financial problems in 1929, the ARU ended Crane’s employment, on the basis of last on, first off. But the Rockhampton Trades Hall Board soon appointed him its secretary. He made a living during the Depression by doing coaching work for school students and people studying for professional exams, paid lectures and classes, and pay as part-time secretary of the Rockhampton Trades Hall Board, to which he was an ARU delegate. He also featured at political street meetings, actively supported workers and the unemployed in struggle, and appeared in court on behalf of two workers’ families faced with eviction.
In mid-1932, after the birth of his son, Crane gave up his Trades Hall position and set up a coaching business to improve his family’s income. He was politically inactive for the next four years. The only partial exception were formal, paid debates, the first attended by 700 people. He argued that the Douglas Credit recipe for prosperity, popular during the 1930s, was flawed economics, without apparently making a case for socialism.
The following year, the ARU’s Queensland secretary, Tim Moroney, recalled Crane to political duty, employing him as the union’s part-time education officer in Brisbane. Later, he worked full time for the national union, initially in Brisbane, then Sydney.
Unions have often used their journals as instruments for the education of their members. Crane’s new ARU education scheme was far more systematic than most. He organised discussion groups around a course of reading on Marxist economics, and imperialism, across the state and then nationally; an educational supplement in the Queensland branch’s monthly newspaper; and the publication of pamphlets.
Crane made pioneering contributions in Australia to the understanding of capitalism, in his ARU pamphlet The Workers’ Struggle against Capitalist Depression and the Way out, and articles in the Queensland ARU’s Advocate and the CPA’s journal Communist Review. He produced the first serious Marxist examination of cycles in the Australian economy. And he was also the first to explain systematically the relationship between economic crises and the long-term tendency for the rate of profit to fall. His publications drew on The Nature of Capitalist Crisis, by John Strachey, English publicist and then fellow traveller of the Communist Party. This became the main textbook for the ARU’s education course.
The CPA was prepared to tolerate Crane’s deviation from the Stalinist orthodoxy in economics—that crises were due to “underconsumption”, that is, the working class’s insufficient purchasing power. After all, Crane was expounding arguments made by an important ally in Britain. That Crane and Strachey were both drawing on Marx’s arguments in the third volume of Capital was much less significant.
Obscure economic theory was one thing, Russian foreign policy another. While believing that Russia was a workers’ paradise, Crane had the temerity in 1937 to criticise intensifying Communist efforts to woo western “democracies” into an anti-fascist alliance with the Soviet Union. Senior Party official Richard Dixon put him in his place.
But the CPA’s Communist Review, edited by Dixon, continued to publish articles by him. And, in late 1939, the Labour Council of NSW, in which the CPA was very influential, employed Crane to head its Research Bureau. Then, shortly after Nazi Germany invaded Russia in June 1941, like a good Stalinist, he joined the Australian Army.
In late 1945, Crane (at this stage certainly not a CPA member) toured the state campaigning on behalf of the Queensland Trades and Labour Council campaigns for the 40-hour week and a rise in the basic wage. He then settled in Brisbane and resumed his coaching activities. In 1946, Railroad, the newspaper of the NSW ARU, now under vehemently anti-communist leadership, published three articles by him. In them, he followed John Strachey in embracing Keynesian economics as a means to avoid crises under capitalism.
By the time he died on 8 February 1949, Gordon Crane had rejoined the Labor Party, well before the Queensland ARU reaffiliated. He was very fondly remembered by former comrades in the ARU. In his autobiography, Frank Nolan, a comrade of Crane’s in Rockhampton in the 1920s and later Queensland state secretary of the ARU, recalled:
“Gordon Crane as an adult educationalist had no superior in Australia. His death at an early age ... was a grievous loss to the Labor Movement. Gordon Crane had a wonderful analytical brain. He was a splendid writer and devastating debater. He could almost make you believe ‘black’ was ‘white’.”
Rick Kuhn is the author of Paradise on the Instalment Plan: The Economic Thought of the Australian Labour Movement between the Depression and the Long Boom, just published; and, with Tom Bramble, of Labor’s Conflict: Big Business, Workers and the Politics of Class.
