Long-term readers of the Honest History site will remember the true life adventures and writings of Les (Bill) Jauncey, radical, writer on conscription and banking, friend of King O’Malley, world traveller, and husband of Beatrice (Bea or Bee) Eva Edmonds Fripp Jauncey, heiress to a New Zealand baking powder fortune (thus Les’s moneybags), also world traveller, and (eventually) centurion. Our chief Jauncey researcher, Steve Flora, is still on the Jauncey trail occasionally and with good effect.
Steve has found (see below) a 1918 picture of Bea (and sister Gertrude) as a ‘Cheero Girl’ (sort of a dance troupe and social club, more respectable than it sounds) during World War I in Sydney, a 1934 report of Bea’s opinions of Australians on the world scene (right next to a note about how Mrs Don Bradman looks after the master batsman), and a 1952 article by a staunch old-style Labor socialist, Senator Don Cameron, reporting Jauncey’s remarks on a vote in the United States against peacetime military conscription. (On the same page of Labor Call, Harold Holt, federal Liberal minister, attributed Australia’s worries to ‘the close liaison between the Australian Labor Party and the Trade Union Movement’. Plus ça change.)
The Sun (Sydney), 31 March 1918
Also quite apposite, given today’s news on banking, is a 1934 article containing comments by Jauncey and O’Malley on JT Lang’s recently published book, Why I Fight, in which Lang condemns ‘the Money Trust’. ‘”Why I Fight” proves’, says O’Malley, ‘that Australian Capitalism is advancing towards a crisis’. For lots of Honest History posts on banking policy history, just use our Search engine with the search terms ‘banking’ or ‘bank’.
The Jaunceys, an acquired taste, but one rewarding to pursue. When we started on the Jauncey journey, we didn’t realise it would take us this far.
5 February 2019
Banks, banking and bank regulation … some things just seem to never change. I’m increasingly of the opinion Australia needs to resurrect the original concept of the “real” Commonwealth Bank … not this pale (and oft-times harmful) privatized shade that exists under its name today. Today’s CBA is as much like today’s MG … it bears the same name of the original, but that is about it …