NAVELOCK WILSON.

Matamata Record, Volume II, Issue 108, 28 November 1918, Page 2

NAVELOCK WILSON.

Labor's Modern Viking. ■■""ii iMm » You need only look at Havelock Wilson to understand why he is not a pacifist. Though he is 60 years old and temporarily disqualified by rheumatism from the practice of the hornpipe there is still a Viking swagger in the curl of his greying moustache, a fighting truculence in his sea eagle's nose, a pugnacious tilt about his broad shoulders, the litheness of the British seadog in his steely frame, and the light of the joy of battle in his laughing eyes. He bears his years with wonderful lightness, writes the Socialist, Alexander M. Thompson, in the Daily Mail. His hair is still thick and brown, his face has the frankness of a boy, his manners have the breezy energy and courteous gallantry of Marrat's midshipmen. " Will you be good enough, when disengaged, very kindly to put me through ?" I hear him say to the telephone girl as I wait. Then, "Thank you so much. I know you are always most obliging." In these days of wrong numbers and general telephonic exasperation, what greater proof could a simple sailorman give of a noble, forgiving and chivalrous nature? But that is not quite the way he talks to masculine miscreants in strike times. "Now, then, you fellows," he will say, " let me see if I can't put some ginger and fight into you. I want you all to understand, including that Shetlander over there, who thinks he's holding this meeting, that while this row is on every man jack of you has got to unglue his eyelids and no shenanigan. Look here, old Blow-me-Tight with the secondhand Tartar whiskers " —this to the ancient mariner who persists in telling his mates what he did in similar circumstances in 1863 —" would you just hold your jaw while I'm talking, or shall we toss up two rounds out of three whether it's me or you for outside ? But I can tell you beforehand it me." Here a breathless messenger turns up to announce the arrival of a ship. "Hello, messmate, what's up with you ?" Then, the news being told. "Now, lads, every man on board that ship has got to join this union, and no cod about it. Who volunteers ? What ? All of you ? Well, I'd have blushed for you if

you hadn't. Now go and se about it.'

Havelock Wilson has a third manner, the manner in which he delivered his maiden speech when first returned as Indop Mident Labor member for Middlesbrough, and when Mr Asquith stopped his own speech on sailors' grievances to give a chance to "the man who knew all about it." That is the manner he wears when he is desperately in earnest. To discover the characteristics of that manner you have only to ask him what he thinks of the sinking of British sailors by German submarines. Havelock Wilson has been fighting all his life, ever since he jumped out of his bedroom window in 1858 to run away to sea with all his worldly possessions in a pillow-case, right up to this present'climax of his career when he is fighting, almost single-handed, against the namby-pamby tosh of the Labor pacifists. Though told that he might as well try to organise the tornado and the typhoon, he did actually succeed, after years of struggle, in organising the seamen in a trade union. He has been in gaol for Labor agitation. In the course of his strenuous fighting life he has had writs for damages, and petitions in bankruptcy "as thick," he says, with his happy sailor smile, "as blackberries on a hedge." He has been sold up repeatedly in the cause of the men for whom he fought. He has been thrown out of Belgium and Germany for trying to establish international co-operation in trade unionism. No man in the Labor ranks has suffered so much for his faith. They called him "the stormy petrel of Labor." Compare his turbulent life of strife with the easy careers of the smug, Pleas-ant-Sunday-Afternoon gentlemen who now suspect him of " betraying the Labor cause."