Days of future past

Many have seen new speaker Trevor Mallard’s decision to exclude both the good Lord and Her Majesty the Queen from parliamentary prayers as an initial step toward New Zealand becoming a republic, and a secular one at that.

In Hamilton, in 1911, a similar controversy arose.

It was all more surprising given the advocate was a man of the political right.

Colonel Allen Bell was a distinguished veteran of the Boer War.

Farming land at Te Rapa, he was a member of the Waipa District Council, the founder of the Waikato Agricultural & Pastoral Association and would later become the first director of the Waikato Dairy Company.

Bell’s forays into national politics had not been so successful.

A defeated conservative in the 1908 general election, he had by 1911 fallen out with own Reform Party, whose executive he accused of being unduly influenced by the alcohol lobby.

Overlooked as a candidate for the Raglan electorate, he chose to run as an independent, though one still informally associated with the Reform movement.

On the 16th of November, 1911, Bell filled the Hamilton Town Hall and made what the Waikato Times described as a ‘‘sensational statement’’.

At first focusing on the redundancy of New Zealand’s Legislative Council, he segued into a discussion of the British House of Lords.

Bell ‘‘held the hereditary principle was rotten and he believed and hoped that within a few years of wiping out the House of Lords, monarchy would also go and the British people would be living under a republic’’.

Though stressing his own personal patriotism, Bell declared that ‘‘an Empire such as ours should have at its head the best intellect and brains it was possible to obtain but there was no possibility of that while the hereditary system prevailed and they had to trust to Providence whether a man was born a wise man or a fool’’.

In the fallout that followed Bell was forced to resign his commission.

The Reform Party also formally distanced itself from his views.

Defeated in 1911, Bell was elected in 1922 as an independent candidate for the Bay of Islands.