Dunedin politician and soldier played key roles
A politician and a soldier played key roles in managing New Zealand resources in World War 1, writes Ron Palenski.
TWO Dunedin men were mostly responsible for shouldering the administrative and logistical burden of ensuring the New Zealand Division in World War 1 was always at a peak fighting strength.
They were the politician and the soldier. The politician was Sir James Allen, who was defence minister throughout the war and acting prime minister for much of it. Adelaideborn and Cambridgeeducated, he lived in Dunedin from the 1880s; part of Arana College at the University of Otago incorporates his home and Arana is a Maori transliteration of Allen.
The soldier was Alfred William Robin, who was born in Melbourne and came to
Dunedin with his parents, still young enough for some private schooling and a year at Otago Boys’ High School (where a classmate was a future brigadier, Joseph Cowie Nicholls). He pursued his father’s trade as a coach and wagon builder and proved so adept at painting the scrolling work that he had formal art lessons from a recently arrived Scottish landscape painter, James Douglas Moultray. Young Robin proved to be a proficient enough painter to exhibit with the Otago Art Society, but it was never more than a hobby. His heart lay with neither coach building nor painting, but with military matters. (Moultray’s son, John Elder Moultray, later gained Robin’s approval to be an artist and correspondent in the Boer War).
He wanted to be a soldier and everything he did was geared towards that goal. He read every military book he could find, he joined volunteer units such as the Dunedin Cavalry Volunteers, which became the Otago Hussars. He became a lieutenant in 1889, a captain in 1891 and from then until 1898, he commanded the Hussars and was described as ‘‘the smartest commanding officer in the colony’’. That earned him the plum position of selecting, training and commanding the mounted section of the New Zealand contingent that went to Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee pageantry in England in 1897. He even commanded the colonial section of the bodyguard that escorted the Queen from London back to Windsor on Jubilee Day.
That settled it. Back home, he quit the job with his father and joined the army, or the New Zealand Permanent Force as it was known. Command followed command and he was in charge of the first New Zealand troops to be sent off to war, the First Contingent to the Boer War. Robin’s biographer, Phillip O’Shea, wrote that senior British and other colonial officers admired Robin’s competence and his ability to inspire loyalty in those under his command. He was three times mentioned in dispatches, made a companion of the Order of the Bath and came home in 1901 to find his likeness on postcards and his name in headlines.
He became the first local to be New Zealand’s chief of the general staff and when Alexander Godley took over to whip the army into a shape acceptable to Britain, Robin went off to London to join the imperial general staff. He was home when the war began and wanted to serve, but Godley went off in charge of the Expeditionary Force so Robin had to stay at home as the senior army man. And home he stayed, working closely with Allen to ensure reinforcement drafts were both timely and of sufficient number. Among the myriad roles of the senior stayathome man in a country at war was management of the conscription process, which New Zealand handled as efficiently as it could. (It’s estimated that about 20% of the nearly 99,000 members of the NZEF were conscripts).
Honours continued to be showered on Robin. He was made a brigadiergeneral in 1915, and was knighted and promoted to majorgeneral in 1916. By the end of the war, when he declined a posting to London, the French made him a chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur.
But it wasn’t all grin and glory for Robin. Officially and on the surface, he was well regarded. But shadows lurked. The Christchurch Sun, a more virile paper at the time than most, said that Robin had not been a success. ‘‘His failure to rise to the occasion once the Dominion became deeply involved in the world struggle is a matter of common knowledge,’’ it said.
Robin was criticised privately at the time and later publicly for refusing to endorse official histories of the Boer War and of the First. Three attempts were made by different people to write a history of the Boer War, but Robin stymied each of them and a small volume didn’t appear until 1949. Robin also refused to allow another Dunedin man, the official New Zealand war correspondent, Malcolm Ross, to write a history of New Zealand’s involvement in the First World War, even though Ross had the backing of the Prime Minister, William Massey, and Godley, the force commander.
But Robin’s greatest public setback came with the embarrassing escape from an internment camp on Motuihe Island in the Hauraki Gulf in late 1917 of 11 Germans, among whom most prominently was Felix von Luckner, the commander of a commerce raider, the Seeadler, and who had become, embarrassingly for the Government, something of a folk hero to New Zealanders. Even today, the Navy Museum on the North Shore calls him ‘‘colourful and charismatic’’ and ‘‘who left an indelible mark on New Zealand society’’.
The mark of von Luckner certainly stained Robin’s career. A subsequent inquiry into the escape found that Robin, though not directly involved, had made errors of judgement and did not visit Motuihe to ensure prisoners were adequately guarded especially after the arrival of the highprofile von Luckner.
The inquiry found the commandant of the island, Lieutenantcolonel Harcourt Turner, to be responsible and the Government got rid of him. Allen himself, as the man with whom the Defence Department buck stopped, did not escape criticism. NZ Truth in its challenging way wrote: ‘‘We need hardly observe that in this glaring case of military ineptitude, the Minister of Defence has declined to shoulder any responsibility, has not sheltered his officers but — had sheltered behind his muddling subordinates.’’
The Sun returned to the attack and said von Luckner’s escape ‘‘revealed in a striking light the weakness of the Dominion’s first soldier’’.
Von Luckner and the others were recaptured at the Kermadec Islands after about a month on the run and they were returned to captivity in New Zealand, first taken to Ripapa Island in Lyttelton Harbour, then moved back north. This prompted some more derision. ‘‘A strong and competent GOC,’’ the Sun commented, ‘‘would not thus have exposed himself to the ridicule of the nation.’’
Allen was asked in Parliament what action, if any, he would be taking against Robin and said that none was contemplated.
Robin resigned late in 1919 and spent a brief period as acting administrator in Western Samoa, before retiring from public life.
For the last 15 years of his life (he died in 1935, aged 74, of a stroke), he devoted much time to causes such as the Boy Scouts Association and the St John Ambulance.