William Beckwitch McInnes (1889-1939), Ronald Craufurd Munro Ferguson (detail), Historic Memorials Collection, Parliament House Art Collection. View full image
Later 1st Viscount Novar
Governor-General, 18 May 1914 to 6 October 1920
Considered one of Australia’s most able early Governors-General, Ronald Craufurd Munro Ferguson’s (1860-1934) service coincided with World War I. He is remembered for authorising Australia’s first double dissolution election and his close involvement in the nation’s political and military affairs.1
Munro Ferguson was born in Fife, Scotland. He served in the Grenadier Guards (1879-84) before entering parliament as the member for Ross and Cromarty. Defeated at the 1886 election, he returned to the Commons later that year, winning the seat of Leith Burghs which he retained until 1914. He served as parliamentary private secretary and junior Lord of the Treasury, but further advancement proved elusive. In 1889 he married Lady Helen Hermione Blackwood, the daughter of the Viceroy of India; they had no children.
Frustrated by politics, Munro Ferguson ‘sought an imperial career’.2 Passed over for governorship of Bombay and declining that of SA (1895) and Victoria (1910), he served as provost of Kirkcaldy before accepting the post of Australia’s Governor-General in 1914. Though labelled a ‘commoner’,3 the press described him as a ‘strong Imperialist’ and ‘conspicuous for his high-minded independence’. Regarding his selection, it was deemed ‘less on account of brilliancy or past services rendered’ than because he ‘possesses that strong saving commonsense ... [which] more than any other attribute, is required in the Governor-General of the Commonwealth’4
Only weeks after commencing, Munro Ferguson was called on by Prime Minister Joseph Cook to dissolve Parliament. Rather than act solely on Cook’s advice, he consulted with the Chief Justice of the High Court before granting the double dissolution election, which took place on 5 September 1914.5 When World War I erupted, ‘promotion of the British and Australian war effort became his main preoccupation’.6 His wife founded the Australian branch of the British (subsequently Australian) Red Cross Society. Munro Ferguson became a prominent supporter and private confidante of Prime Minister Billy Hughes, regarding Hughes’s commitment to conscription as vital to the Empire, a stance that risked compromising the political impartiality required of Governors-General. Munro Ferguson’s substantial influence waned shortly afterwards when Hughes negotiated the right to directly communicate with the British Prime Minister at the Imperial War Conference of 1918. This removed the Governor-General’s previously-held status as the official intermediary of communication between the Australian and British governments.
Munro Ferguson returned to England in October 1920 and was created Viscount Novar of Raith. He served as Secretary of State for Scotland (1922-24), on Scotland’s Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments, and was a member of the National Library of Scotland Board of Trustees. He died in Fife on 30 March 1934.
William Beckwith McInnes
William McInnes (1889-1939) studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School before travelling to Europe in 1912 to tour France, Spain, Morocco, and the UK. Regarded as the heir to great Australian landscape artist Arthur Streeton, McInnes exhibited his depictions of the landscape at the Royal Institute of Painters in London in 1913, returning to Melbourne the same year where he mounted a sold-out exhibition at the Athenaeum Gallery. In the 1920s, McInnes won five of the first six Archibald Prizes. He won the prize twice more, in 1930 and 1936. In 1927, he was commissioned, with Septimus Power, to paint the opening of the first Parliament in Canberra. McInnes taught drawing at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School from 1918 to 1934, and from 1934 to 1937 was Head of the School. In 1935 and 1936 he acted as the Director of the National Gallery of Victoria. He was president of the Australian Art Association in 1923–24 and a member of various leading art societies. His work is represented in national, state, university, and regional galleries across Australia.
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Ronald Craufurd Munro Ferguson
by William Beckwith McInnes
c. 1918
Oil on canvas
64.3 x 54.3 cm
Historic Memorials Collection, Parliament House Art Collection
References
1. Information in this biography has been taken from: C Cunneen,
King’s Men: Australia’s Governors-General from Hopetoun to Isaacs, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1983; B Carroll,
Australia’s Governors-General: From Hopetoun to Jeffery, Rosenberg Publishing Pty Ltd, Kenthurst, NSW, 2004; HCG Matthew, ‘Ferguson, Ronald Craufurd Munro, Viscount Novar (1860– 1934)’,
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; J Poynter, ‘Munro Ferguson, Sir Ronald Craufurd’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 1986; ‘Ronald Craufurd Munro Ferguson’, Australian War Memorial. Websites accessed 30 August 2021.
2. Matthew, op. cit.
3.‘The Governor-General and the Peerage’,
The Daily Telegraph, 20 February 1914, p. 8’; ‘Press comments’,
The Sydney Morning Herald, 9 February 1914, p. 9. Websites accessed 12 September 2021.
4.‘The New Governor-General’,
The Register, 9 February 1914, p. 6, accessed 12 September 2021.
5. H Irving, ‘Pulling the Trigger: The 1914 Double Dissolution Election and its Legacy’,
Papers on Parliament, no. 63, July 2015, pp. 23–42, accessed 12 October 2021.
6. Australian War Memorial, op. cit.
7. Information in this biography has been taken from: ‘WB McInnes’, National Portrait Gallery; ‘William Beckwith McInnes’, Carrick Hill; R Haese, ‘McInnes, William Beckwith (Billy) (1889–1939)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published first in hardcopy 1986; ‘McInnes, William Beckwith’, A McCulloch, S McCulloch and E McCulloch Childs, eds,
The New McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art, Aus Art Editions in association with The Miegunyah Press, 2006, p. 646. Websites accessed 25 March 2021.