When I left Oxford my father gave me three hundred pounds to spend on a year of travel, and I chose to go to Australia to stay with his eldest brother, Sir Charles Sladen, K.C.M.G., who had been Prime Minister of the Colony of Victoria, and was at that time leader of the Upper House, and of the Constitutional Party in Victoria. I wanted to see if I should like to settle in the Colonies, and go to the Bar with a view to a political career. We were not rich enough for me to think of the House of Commons seriously, and I have always taken a very keen interest in politics.
Further, I wanted to go and stay on my uncle’s station to get some riding and shooting, and to see something of the outdoor life of Australia, of which I had heard so much. And I wanted desperately to try living in a hot country. I knew by intuition that I should like heat.
I had not been staying with my uncle for a year before I had made up my mind to live in Australia, a conclusion to which I was assisted by my marriage with Miss Margaret Isabel Muirhead, the daughter of a Scotsman from Stirling, who had owned a fine station called the Grampians in the Western District of Victoria, and had been killed in a horse accident. As I had not been called to the Bar before I left home, I found that I had to go through a two years’ course, and take a law degree at the Melbourne University. This I did, though the position was sufficiently anomalous. For instance, I had to attend lectures by a Member of the Government, the Solicitor-General. I knew him intimately at the Melbourne Club and in private life, and we generally used to walk down to the Club after the lecture. Sometimes we went into a pub, to have a drink together, and we discussed anything from the forthcoming Government Bills to Club stories. He told me one day, before the public knew anything about it, of the intention of the Government to bring in a Bill to make sweeps on racing illegal. As much as forty-five thousand pounds had been subscribed for the Melbourne Cup Sweep the year before.
I said, “It is no good making them illegal; it only means that they will be carried on under the rose, and that a whole lot of the sweeps will be bogus. You can’t stop sweeps; all you can do is to put the bogus sweep on a level with Jimmy Miller’s.”
“What would you do, then?” he asked.
“Well, if you really want to stop them, you should legalise them, and put a twenty-five per cent., or fifty per cent. for the matter of that, tax upon them. You’d spoil the odds so that sweeps would die a natural death; and if they didn’t, you’d get a nice lot of money to save the taxpayer’s pocket. You would be like the Prince of Monaco, who lives by the gambling at Monte Carlo.”
He duly put the suggestion before the Government, but they thought that this would be paltering with eternal sin, and passed their Bill to help the bogus-sweep promoter.
This same man and I were asked one night to take part in a Shakespeare reading at the Prime Minister’s. My friend was late, and the Prime Minister, who was not a discreet man, began talking about him. Somebody remarked what a wonderfully well-informed man he was.
“Yes,” said the Prime Minister, “my Solicitor-General is one of those people who know nothing about everything. And the way he does it is that he never opens a book; he just reads what the magazines and papers have to say about books.”
Suddenly the Premier felt that his remarks were no longer being received with enthusiasm, and looking up, saw his Solicitor-General waiting to shake hands with him.