Robert Menzies
Robert Menzies was prime minister of Australia for eighteen years, longer than anyone before or since, first from 1939 to 1941, when he took the country into the war with the words that it was his melancholy duty to tell them that Britain was at war and Australia therefore also, and was forced out by his own party while he was in London, and then from 1949 to 1966, the years of the long boom, the Snowy Mountains scheme, the immigration that filled the country with Italians and Greeks, the Communist party dissolution bill the High Court struck down and the referendum the voters rejected, the ANZUS treaty, the Petrov affair, the universities, the commitment of troops to Vietnam in 1965, and a reverence for the crown that had him say to the young queen that he did but see her passing by and yet would love her till he died. He was born in Jeparit in the Victorian wheat country in 1894, the son of a storekeeper, took a first in law at Melbourne, and was a King's Counsel at thirty-five. The nickname Pig Iron Bob came from the wharf labourers who refused in 1938 to load scrap iron for Japan while he was attorney-general and insisted. He became prime minister in April 1939 on Lyons's death, went to London in 1941 hoping to sit in Churchill's war cabinet, and found on his return that the United Australia Party would not have him. He resigned in August and Labor governed the war. In the wilderness he founded the Liberal Party in 1944 out of the pieces and gave the radio talks on the forgotten people, the middle class of the suburbs who would be its voters. He won in December 1949 against Chifley's bank nationalisation and did not lose again in seven elections. The Cold War was his subject. There was the attempt to ban the Communists in 1951, the defection of the Soviet spy Petrov in 1954 on the eve of an election, which split Labor for a generation, the Suez expedition he supported and tried to mediate, and Vietnam, to which he sent a battalion and then conscripts. The economy grew every year and the state built the dams, the universities and the Canberra he had wanted. He retired in January 1966, unbeaten, was made Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, and died in Melbourne in 1978.
- Lived: 1894 CE – 1978 CE
- Nationality: Australian
- Roles: prime minister, politician
