A metallurgist looks at Russia Professor J. Neill Greenwood and the Soviet Union

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A metallurgist looks at RussiaProfessor J. Neill Greenwood and the Soviet Union

Carolyn Rasmussen

It was 1931, and all over Australia men and women were being put off work as the economy ground down into lower and lower gear. J. Neill Greenwood, Professor of Metallurgy at the University of Melbourne, was deeply troubled. ‘The condition of human unhappiness and despair in these years impressed me very much’, he wrote forty years later in his autobiography, ‘impressed and puzzled me for I could see no satisfactory reason why economic activity—the life of a nation—should become so depressed, simply because there was a shortage in the supply of money.’ ‘Everybody’, he recalled, began ‘penny pinching’ and

the goods produced were piling up in the shops and factory warehouses. People walked instead of taking the tram. You could not walk the length of Swanston or Collins Street without being ‘touched for the price of a meal’. One morn-ing near the university I was stopped as I walked from the station. ‘Give me a meal, governor—I don’t want no mon-ey—just give me something to eat.’ So I took him round to a café in Lygon St and set him up.

A metallurgist looks at Russia 79

Greenwood and Henry Payne, Professor of Engineering, ‘got together discussing the situation’ and decided to interview the chairman of the Commonwealth Bank and member of the University Council, Sir Robert Gibson. He looked at them ‘sadly’ when they suggested that ‘this was just the time for much needed public works’. ‘Where is the money to come from?’ he asked. ‘I was a scientist’, Greenwood mused, ‘and had never thought of the way in which human activities were organised. I could not help wondering where the money always came from when there was a war. But in the capitalist world it was evidently no use expecting logical replies to naive questions.’ Here, in charac-teristic tone, Greenwood sketches the early moments in a journey that would greatly extend his political, economic and cultural educa-tion. He made up his mind to go and see for himself whether there were any feasible alternatives to capitalism.1 In the 1930s that could only mean the Soviet Union, but along the way he took a discerning look at the United States of America. It is his juxtaposition of the two economies and his access to leaders of the metals industry and uni-versities in North America, Great Britain and Europe that adds an unusual perspective to his accounts of his journey, which was more fact-finding tour than pilgrimage.

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Greenwood was born in 1894 at St Helens, Lancashire, England, the youngest of six children. His father, a grocer, died when Greenwood was eleven months old, plunging the family into precarious economic circumstances. A bright and ambitious boy, he left school at 13 to work as a laboratory assistant in a lead smelting works while attending night school. A scholarship took him to the University of Manchester where, between 1913 and 1922, he gained a BSc, an MSc and a DSc, all undertaken with leading academics in their fields and all with first-class honours and prizes. For much of that time he also worked in industry. Greenwood spent most of the war years as chief research assistant with the manufacturer of armament steel Armstrong Whitworth & Co. Although attracted by academic research, he enjoyed the best of both worlds as chief of the research department at Samuel Fox & Co. Ltd, Stocksbridge, Yorkshire (a subsidiary of United Steel Co. Ltd) from 1919, especially when, in 1922, he was awarded a Carnegie Scholarship by the Iron and Steel Institute to investigate the

Political tourists80

possibilities of using optical pyrometry in steel works practices. This was cutting-edge metallurgical science, and Greenwood was sought after by the renowned Australian-educated metallurgist, Dr Walter

John Neill Greenwood, c. 1940 (UMA/I/1979, University of Melbourne Archives)


Rosenhain, superintendent of the physical metallurgy department of the National Physical Laboratory. As it happened, in 1924 Greenwood was appointed to the newly established chair of metallurgy at the University of Melbourne in preference to Rosenhain.2

Metallurgy and metal manufacturing industries, especially steel-making, entered a new and exciting phase over the period in which Greenwood had obtained his education. So too did the mining and ore-processing industry in Australia to which these new develop-ments were directly applicable. The leading Australian base metal companies were alert to these developments and profitable enough to support teaching and research in metallurgical science at the uni-versity beginning in 1916. The chair of metallurgy was most unusual in the university in that it was funded on a five-yearly basis by eight major ferrous and non-ferrous mining companies, most of them based in Melbourne.

While this private funding made the occupant of the chair unu-sually vulnerable to external pressure, this vulnerability was offset by Greenwood’s academic standing, combined with his critical attention to the needs of the Australian mining industry. Any early discomfort he experienced was related to the nature of metallurgy as a discipline. Part pure science (physics, chemistry and geology), with a myriad of possibilities for laboratory research, metallurgy’s clear application to mining and construction placed it in the Engineering Faculty. Greenwood happily inhabited these two worlds of pure and applied research himself, but neither he nor his department ever fully belonged in either faculty. The science professors feared encroach-ment on their territory while sneering surreptitiously at the ‘applied science’ work as more appropriate to technical schools. On the other hand, many in the Engineering Faculty considered Greenwood’s courses too theoretical and marginal to the education of practical engineers. This left Greenwood, as he put it, ‘playing a lone hand’. The only thing that mattered to Greenwood, who harboured few doubts about his standing as a metallurgist and a teacher, was that ‘I almost invariably got my way in the end’.3 This motif of the determined and at times contrary lone hand is central to an understanding of Greenwood’s career and his particular response to the Soviet Union.

Despite the friendliness of colleagues in the early days, Greenwood aptly positions himself as a perennial outsider with his


slightly rueful observation that ‘I have never had a feeling of “belonging” in Melbourne’. This position has origins in the social unease of the bright scholarship boy who must spend most of his time with colleagues educated at private schools and a bevy of wealthy self-made men in a country other than the one in which he was born. Acutely conscious of his ‘humble beginnings’, he would blush deeply whenever he realised he had slipped back into his Lancashire accent. Nevertheless, given that Australia was, in most respects, far more socially fluid than England, it is likely that his discomfort reflected more substantial social transgressions. Greenwood’s first wife, ‘a sci-entific chemist’ from a cultured, intellectual European family, had introduced him to theosophy. Greenwood was by then, and remained, a confirmed agnostic. A degree of acceptance of theosophy, ‘as a way of thinking about emotional matters’, did not disrupt this agnosti-cism, but neither did it open up any great fellowship with others. His open rejection of orthodox religion, coupled with the slow and painful circumstance of his marriage break-up and his subsequent remar-riage, exacerbated his social isolation in Melbourne.4

As an agnostic and a rationalist, Greenwood was not alone in the university, but these views isolated him from easy association with a larger group who shared his concern for economic and social justice. The university, and Melbourne more broadly, harboured a strong strand of what might loosely be called Christian socialism. This ideal-istic but dissident tradition found its strongest expression in the uni-versity in the Australian Student Christian Movement (ASCM) in which Harold Woodruff, Professor of Bacteriology and Professor Harold Payne, Dean of Engineering, were major figures. Like Greenwood, Woodruff also visited the Soviet Union (in 1933) and returned with a qualified report of progress there.5 Yet Greenwood stood somewhat aloof from the camaraderie of the major ‘popular front’ anti-war activities in which Woodruff and the ASCM joined other varieties of Left–liberal ‘fellow travellers’ in the 1930s.6 Clearly Greenwood was not a ‘joiner’. At Manchester he admits to having skirted the fringes of intense political activity, while a lecturer in his department, ‘an ardent Communist’, admired his social outlook suf-ficiently to be deeply disappointed when Greenwood ‘jibbed at throwing in my lot with the Communist Party’.7 The experience of the Depression served to strengthen an already dissident position, but


not to the point of moving him to join any party, let alone the Communist Party.

While investigating the failure of boilers at the Yallourn Power Plant in 1931, Greenwood noted that ‘rumours’ about a ‘Communist Plot’ to attack the plant were taken seriously enough for armed guards to be placed on duty at night. About this time, he began ‘taking eco-nomic affairs very seriously’ and paying more heed to stories ‘about another kind of economy which did not seem to be affected by the American debacle’. This new interest led him not to the embryonic Friends of the Soviet Union (FOSU) but to the Institute for Pacific Relations (later the Australian Institute of International Affairs)8 and an association with men such as the dissident–liberal intellectual Frederic Eggleston and mining engineer, company director and econ-omist E. C. Dyason, who toured the Soviet Union himself in 1932.9

The Empire Congress of Mining and Metallurgy was meeting in 1932. Greenwood planned a year’s sabbatical leave around his attend-ance at the congress, as well as consultations regarding a proposed research program to investigate the phenomenon of lead ‘creep’—the area for which Greenwood and his school would ultimately earn an international reputation.10 He planned to visit Canada, the USA, England, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia—and the Soviet Union, ‘despite many dire warnings of the type, “You’ll get in but you may not get out.”’ In the event, it was getting into the Soviet Union that proved the biggest headache of his whole trip. Once Greenwood had made up his mind to go to the Soviet Union, he began private lessons in Russian, but did not progress ‘beyond a facility with a few stock words and phrases’. He organised letters of introduction to people associ-ated with the Institute of Pacific Relations in the United States, Hawaii and Canada. He also arranged a strategic lunch with an unnamed member of the Communist Party in Melbourne, which later paid rich dividends.11

In Sydney, before departing, Greenwood met with Cecil Hoskins, chairman of Australian Iron and Steel Ltd and a founder of Australia’s iron and steel industry, who joined the chorus warning against the Russian leg of the trip.12 He received another ‘barrage’ at Broken Hill Pty Ltd in Newcastle. Nevertheless he spent an ‘interesting week’ with his ‘technological friends in the group of steel companies’, followed by a stay ‘on a pleasant oasis’ at the Anglican Training Centre at


Morpeth in the Hunter Valley, directed then by the Rev. Dr E. H. Burgmann. Greenwood found the future Bishop of Goulbourn ‘a delightfully broad-minded man—who was not shocked by [his] lack of religious fervour’ and very interested in his proposed trip. Burgmann, who before the decade was out would earn the tag ‘Red Bishop’,13 was a fellow member of the Institute of Pacific Relations. Similar tracking between captains of industry, technical and scientific colleagues and social progressives would characterise much of Greenwood’s twelve months away.

As Greenwood set off to cross the Pacific in April 1932 to ‘study metallurgical processes and social and economic experiments’,14 he took with him several powerful impressions. One was the apparently impenetrable assumption in some quarters that simply wishing to visit the Soviet Union made him a ‘Communist’. It was an assumption that activated the contrary streak in Greenwood’s character. The other was a series of images of Depression Australia: the shanty town at Port Kembla, the ‘cave dwellers’ beyond Sydney’s Botanic Gardens, where the unemployed were making ‘homes in the rocky cliffs with hessian and corrugated iron screens’, and an unemployed recluse living off fish he caught and water trickling down the cliff face, waiting patiently for ‘life to be normal again’.15

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If Greenwood’s interest in the Soviet Union had been aroused by his personal dismay at the state of the economy in Australia, his two months’ travelling around the United States provided powerful rein-forcement. Perhaps his most vivid experience was walking to his hotel in Washington, weeping from the effects of tear gas used by the army and police to clear an encampment of Word War I veterans who had come to plead their case for subsistence with Congress. The camp was then set alight. Everywhere Greenwood visited ‘economic activity was at a low ebb—in some cases steel companies were closed down or operating at about one eighth of capacity’. This was hardly a sur-prise. Far more importantly, everywhere he went, it seems, he found ‘puzzled intellectuals’:

for they could see neither cause nor chance of recovery. There was much soul-searching about the iniquity of


speculation—which had been rife before the collapse of 1929. One man said he had never known such questioning as there was of the existing monetary system. And many businessmen who were helping to rehabilitate and increase the industrial capacity of the Soviet Union—particularly with respect to the Kuznetsk-Magnitogorsk iron, steel and coal complex—were quietly speaking of the rapid advance in Russia as compared with the stagnation and worse in America.16

Everywhere Greenwood was ‘having discussions with academics and businessmen on the need for economic planning’. At the Brookings Institution he discussed planning with Lewis L. Lorwin17 and later with Lawrence W. Wallace, executive secretary of the American Engineering Council. ‘Surprised to find how much thought was being given to planning in all its aspects’, he wrote in his diary,

It is interesting to note that such a highly placed technical body … fi nds no necessity for alarm in calmly considering possible changes of a radical nature in the existing order. It augurs well for future development and is in direct opposi-tion to those rabid and noisy people who only consider a redistribution of money and not the redistribution of the products of labour. The money illusion still exists in its grip and will do for many years to come. The example of Russia is however before the world and is being keenly studied here.18

In New York Greenwood stayed with ‘Mr Ross’, the metallurgical engineer who had helped design the blast furnaces for the BHP plant at Newcastle, held discussions with ‘Dr Person of the Scientific Management Society (Taylor) and attended a group meeting of 12 people and heard their opinions on American society and the economy in general’. Greenwood’s contacts with American intellec-tuals ‘left him with a great sense of admiration’. Indeed, he ‘gathered the optimistic impression that social and financial changes of a high order were “just around the corner”’. These views were reinforced in Montreal.19


This was ‘Brother, can you spare a dime?’ America inching its way towards the ‘New Deal’.20 Australians would not experience even a hint of such a transformative enterprise until the election of a fed-eral Labor government in the depths of World War II. Greenwood’s world view had been enlarged by his North American experience. It had grounded his sense that a progressive marriage of engineering and ‘planning’ might hold the key to a more equitable and rational society.21 So it was this progressive perspective, rather than a socialist orientation, that framed his response to the Soviet Union—together with an instinctive solidarity with workers, born of his own struggles at the wrong end of a capitalist economy. As he remarked in the course of his account of the convoluted process by which he finally obtained a visa, ‘Tactics I had learned as a young man trying to get a pay rise of 2/6 per week began to pay off.’22

Despite his efforts in the United States and Canada, Greenwood arrived in London still without a visa. His problem was essentially that he refused to travel via Intourist. He would go as a visiting expert in metallurgy and heavy industry under the auspices of the Society for Promoting Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS), or not at all.23 He dug in his heels, and slowly the wheels turned. Intriguingly, he met one useful contact from Centrosojus (Russian Co-operative Society) at a lunch with the Canada-based Mond Nickel Co.24 Someone decided that Greenwood would be useful, officially inviting him as a delegate of the ‘Committee for the Promotion of Applied Chemistry’ to a Congress of Chemists in Kharkov (6th Mendeleyev Assembly) in late October 1932. He was one of 3000 del-egates. Only later did he learn that influence had also been exerted from Melbourne and that he was, in fact, travelling as a guest of the Comintern.25 Greenwood initially turned the offer down because it clashed with other arrangements, but soon realised it was either then or not at all.

So it was in a spirit of adventure, genuine curiosity and calcu-lated defiance that he embarked on ‘probably the most interesting month’ of his life. As so many before and since have noted, the intro-duction to the ‘new society’ began on board ship. ‘There were few passengers’ on the Felix Dzerzhinsky, and when the captain, ‘a quiet reserved man’, appeared at meal time, ‘He was dressed as an ordinary civilian without any decorations … Each day—via the grapevine—we


heard of meetings of the crew—which contained a number of women quite apart from the stewardesses and waitresses. The meetings apparently concerned the running of the general affairs of the ship and no doubt the captain would take note of any resolution passed on.’

When they arrived, ‘Customs examination was on board and third class passengers were cleared first—an indication that the lower masses here got preferential treatment.’ Greenwood had escaped the VOKS people in London and made his own way to Leningrad, but he was glad enough when they turned up there, for he had come disas-trously under-prepared. The authorities were under-prepared for him, too—and in the gaps thus created Greenwood wandered about in Leningrad much as any tourist would in a foreign place, observing everyday life, churches, markets and beggars (which ‘surprised’ him) and discovering the value of American currency. In Moscow, he was escorted around by a slightly piqued young woman who had to look after him on her day off. ‘It is we poor things who are to be pitied—you came as a bolt from the blue,’ she complained. It did not help that he insisted on walking everywhere rather than taking the proffered taxis.26

Greenwood was alert to contrasts and ironies everywhere he went on his travels, but he was intent on discerning the bigger pic-ture. In the United States he was ‘conscious of the wide disparities between rich and poor and the varied degrees of racial conflict between the white and dark people’.27 He noted ‘plaintive little waifs’ at train stations on the way to Moscow ‘calling “Kleb, kleb” (Bread, bread)’. The sardonic tone with which he reports on the early stages of his Soviet experience, especially the string-pulling that secured him transport and accommodation at very short notice,28 suggests some alertness to the totalitarian undertones in the system into which he was venturing. He was certainly determined to escape officialdom whenever he could. He was not a man to be easily groomed. He had defied far more significant people back in Australia.

Not until he arrived in Kharkov in the Ukraine was Greenwood fully chaperoned (by Madame Yaroslavskaya) and provided with a technical interpreter as well. He spent three weeks there, wandering about, he claimed, ‘as freely as I had done elsewhere in my travels’. The Russians found Greenwood as difficult to manage as every one


else had. As he said, he liked to get his way. Certainly the Mendeleyev Chemical Society was fined for failing to inform Moscow that he was returning there.29 In any case, there was little the Soviet Union needed to hide from a scientific engineer and a technological optimist in 1932. Lenin’s proposition that ‘Communism equals Soviet Power plus electrification of the whole country’ had been taken very seriously. In Victoria, the same sense of the heroic effort required to bring state-wide electricity supply led to the appointment of Australia’s greatest war-time general, Sir John Monash, to head the enterprise.

Fresh from his own experience of grappling with boilers at the Yallourn Power Station, Greenwood was impressed by the Dneiper Dam and the associated electricity generation plant under construc-tion. He was even more impressed by the concept of an energy grid that utilised locally occurring fuel and the clustering of heavy industry ‘so that waste products (including steam and heat) from one may be the raw material of another’. As an engineer and an applied scientist, Greenwood naturally envied the greater recognition in the Soviet Union of the ‘enormous advantages of linking science and industry’, the scale of investment in research and the honour afforded to scien-tists.30 Most of all, he was impressed by the scale of the effort, ‘paral-leled only by those in the USA in times of prosperity—being initiated and carried out by people who but 15 years before were classed as the most backward of Europe … And all … without “private enterprise”.’ At the very least, he thought, given that the ‘capitalist world’ was ‘so sick’, it was worth examining the conditions producing such develop-ments, because even ‘if their ways are not our ways—ours are old and theirs are new—so, according to the general laws of progress, it is more likely that theirs are the way of the future—ours those of the past’.31

Greenwood responded to a sense of optimism, of a work-in-progress. He recalled warmly the easy informality of the students in Kharkov who plied him with questions and cheered when a group of them marching caught sight of him watching the procession to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the revolution. He noted ‘their conscious-ness of pride in the life they were living and their hopes for the future’. He was impressed by the emancipation of women ‘from economic dependence on man’.32 Like most sympathetic visitors, he was dis-posed to discount the drabness, the regimentation, the signs of


hunger. He ‘realised how difficult it had been for them to show much personal progress in the few years they had since the planned economy started’. In any case, much of the opulence displayed in Western cities was, in his estimation, a thin veneer, relatively easily applied, compared with the effort required to ‘raise the general standard of the many’.33

Greenwood’s eye for contrast remained sharp. Visiting a Moscow family known to friends in Melbourne, Greenwood found them living in ‘a single room—divided into two for sleeping and living respec-tively. Here I got a sad story of the reduced circumstances of two intel-lectuals’ and the ‘bright story of two young people … their children who were in the forefront of the new progress’.34 Capitalism had its own causalities. Greenwood had seen them everywhere he went in the Western world, and the tsarist regime had been deeply oppres-sive. Was it too idealistic to bring back hopeful reports of a real-world attempt at universal provision of work, health, education and all the wonders of modern engineering? Greenwood did not think so, and before he left Moscow he discussed with VOKS the procedures for set-ting up a branch in Australia.35 He did not wait until he returned home to begin to spread the gospel. ‘Wherever I went … it was the chief topic of conversation.’ In England, he wrote a letter for the Bulletin of the London Institute of Metals, although it was ‘politely’ returned, because ‘they were not prepared to publish views so widely divergent from others they had received’. In February 1933 he reported to VOKS that he had been giving lectures in Germany. Clearly, he spoke to anyone who would listen, and his views preceded him. As a Canadian colleague, Herbert Haultain, Professor of Mining Engineering at the University of Toronto, told him as he retraced his steps home, ‘bad news travels quickly’, and Greenwood’s ‘views on Russia were bad news’.36

There was worse news around, and just as Greenwood’s experi-ence of the United States was important to his education beyond the laboratory bench and the blast furnace, so too was his extensive travel in central Europe. He found the tenor of politics in Berlin in December 1932 worrying. The German industrialists were often unpleasant and arrogant, inclined to read him lectures on ‘the advantages of pastoral and agricultural economy’ and why Australia should leave ‘more tech-nological operations for the advanced western countries’.37 Finally,


his last days in Europe provided an appropriately dramatic segue to his political activities in Melbourne on his return. In Cologne he treated himself to all four parts of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, but he found that

outside the opera house another more real Wagnerian situ-ation had developed—Hindenburg in Berlin had been replaced by Hitler. And so at one fell swoop the enigma of the west—poverty and worklessness in countries geared for industry—but short of money, i.e. confi dence—was brushed aside. From those days of March 1933 the world received notice that it had six years (although at that time the date was not clearly prescribed) in which to prepare for a second titanic struggle such as it had faced in 1914/18. I’m sure the students with whom I had spoken in Kharkov would see the signifi cance of this change before the peo-ples of the rest would realise it.38

There is a prophetic irony in this image of Greenwood inside the opera house while momentous political events took place outside, since ‘culture’ would provide a cloak to protect him from the full force of the icy winds of disapproval already blowing in Melbourne.

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On his return Greenwood found a ready audience, ‘both public and private’, for his impressions of ‘the State of Affairs in Russia’. Among them were ‘many people’ who, like himself, ‘had been uneasy about economic affairs’, and ‘it soon became known’ that he ‘did not hold with the many despairing views of life in a communist country’.39 Even in the mainstream press, there was a considerable appetite for such travellers’ tales, as well as some serious expert analysis. A notable series of articles by Samuel Wadham, Professor of Agriculture and another of the university’s ‘progressive’ scientific intellectuals, appeared just after Greenwood’s return in May 1933, in the wake of architect A. G. Stephenson’s impressions of Moscow. These stories were framed by reports of the trial and imprisonment in the Soviet Union of British engineers employed by the Metropolitan Vickers Electrical Co. on the one hand and moves by the United States to give diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union on the other.


At the same time fear of a ‘Red Invasion’ was rising. ‘Communism in Australia’, warned the Argus ominously,

has passed the stage at which it may be regarded with amused contempt. It has become a real anti-social menace which, if not resisted with a tenacity of purpose equal to its own, will achieve its object by destroying the system into which its poison is being injected … Not so very long ago it appeared that communism as preached by the Communist Party of Australia, was appealing only to the more ignorant and lawless elements among those who hitherto had sup-ported the Labor Party.

Clearly, with influential academics such as Greenwood bringing back the deadly infection, ‘the mischief’ was becoming ‘much more wide-spread’ and so more likely to capture the imagination of ‘well-meaning idealists’ and, worst of all, ‘young people’, especially ‘hot-blooded university students’. This latter group was deemed especially vulner-able, for ‘They have seen many of life’s values upset—many old truths called in question—by the events of the Great War and by the trou-bled period of readjustment succeeding the war and not unnaturally a spiritual unrest has possessed them. Intellectually unsatisfied they have craved for a change of some kind and a radical alteration of the basis of society such as communism stands for has seemed to them a possible solution.’40 There was danger for Greenwood in this atmos-phere. He soon heard, ‘via the “grapevine”’, that one big company openly said they would not employ his students—‘lest they be tainted’.

Greenwood did skirt very close to the Communist Party for a time, through his involvement with the FOSU and his high-profile public speaking. It was partly conviction and partly a calculated act of defiance. The industrialists who funded Greenwood’s university posi-tion expressed their displeasure in no uncertain terms. ‘Which do you prefer’, he was asked, ‘your opinions or your position as Professor of Metallurgy?’ Greenwood stood his ground. ‘There is only one answer I can give—I will stand by my opinions. If I am not prepared to do that you have obviously made the wrong choice in selecting me.’41 These confident capitalists were not, in the end, prepared to make good


their implied threat of dismissal, although in ‘twenty years of ostra-cism’, he lost some of ‘the close collaboration previously obtained’ with the industry. He was ‘no longer invited to the Annual Conference of the Bureau of Steel Manufacturers’. Only ‘the non-ferrous industry and in particular Broken Hill Associated Smelters’ appeared unper-turbed.42 Greenwood was too good a scientist and, for all his bravado, he soon stepped a little to one side of the burgeoning ‘popular front’, focusing less on the economic and more on the cultural dimensions of Soviet life.

The initial determinants of Greenwood’s desire to visit the Soviet Union were economic, social and scientific. He was uninterested in politics and remained, throughout his life, demonstrably naïve politi-cally. Greenwood’s particular response to his actual experience of the Soviet Union acquired over time a heightened cultural and spiritual dimension. This cultural dimension is inseparable from his convic-tion that science and art, technology and culture, should be inte-grated. About the time Greenwood travelled to the Soviet Union, he came to the recognition that ‘a life devoted to science … left some-thing suspended as it were—something incomplete’. It was ‘also nec-essary’, he believed, to develop a ‘corresponding feeling for art. There are glimpses of this in my attraction to early metal culture, my interest in archaeology and anthropology and my work in association with the cultural aspects of the Russian revolution. My personal feeling for the underdog was also related to this aspect of my life.’43 Greenwood’s subsequent efforts to bring together the ‘two cultures’ of science and the arts became sufficiently significant and defining for them to be noted by the University Council in its Minute of Appreciation at his retirement.44 Or, as Greenwood put it towards the end of his autobiog-raphy, ‘In all this rambling story it will be noted how I was able to blend the “cultural” with the technological theme.’45 It is in this spirit that his efforts to bring together the two cultures of Australia and the Soviet Union should also primarily be viewed.

Greenwood regarded ‘culture’ with the particular reverence and pleasure of those for whom it is not a natural inheritance. As a ‘gauche youth’, needing ‘all the culture I could absorb’, he took full advantage of the rich offerings in Manchester while studying there.46 Once in Melbourne, he struck up a friendship with William Laver, the retired Professor of Music, which quickly broadened into a shared passion


for ‘bush-living’ in the Kinglake area. In Moscow, he took in ‘a cross-section’ of museums, plays and operas, and there was an acknowl-edged element of cultural pilgrimage in his travels through central Europe. As a metallurgist he took particular interest in the relation-ship between metal technology, art and the development of various civilisations. His forays into archaeology and anthropology led in 1935–37 to a collaboration with Jessie Webb in the History Department and the preparation of a lecture program on early metal culture.47 Later in his life Greenwood would try his hand at novels, poetry and painting.

Bringing all these elements in his life and personality together, Greenwood typically began his speeches in Melbourne following his return from the Soviet Union in 1933 with a discovery he made in the museum of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. There, ‘amongst the relics of a culture which flourished on the Euphrates 3000–5000 years ago’, he was drawn to the inscription on one stone tablet—‘a contract for the lease of a farm which included the proviso that if the rent was not paid by a certain date’, the amount due in corn and cattle was to be ‘doubled!’ ‘Here’, he announced to an audience of ‘several hundred people’ in the Assembly Hall, Collins Street, Melbourne, in July 1934, ‘amongst the relics of a bygone age, I sud-denly realised that the economic systems by which some live on the labour of others have their roots in remote antiquity. No wonder, then, that it is difficult to change people’s ideas.’48 This realisation, in the midst of the Great Depression, further coloured his response to developments in the Soviet Union and inspired his efforts once back in Australia to change ‘people’s ideas’.

Greenwood explained his decision to found the Australian Society for Cultural Relations with Russia (ASCR) in these terms: ‘As time went on I became more and more convinced that I could help general social advance by informing people of the cultural advances which accompanied the political changes in the Soviet Union … The new regime was committed to spread this culture [of the old elites] to the masses and to that extent I was interested.’49 By 1935 Greenwood’s own particular travel story had lost its freshness, but just as impor-tantly, he clearly had not found a home in the FOSU. The reason is suggested by his assertion that even in the midst of all his public speaking, ‘I still had no interest in politics as such and I was still


sufficiently naïve to think that other people would be able to see and understand this. I was very wrong—but that did not stop me from telling people what I had seen.’50 He was not alone in finding the FOSU too political. The proliferation in Melbourne of less commu-nist-dominated Popular Front bodies for Left–liberals and Christian socialists to join was testament to this. In creating another one, Greenwood was, perhaps inadvertently, serving the purposes of the Soviet Union in widening the circle of Soviet sympathisers.

Unrepentantly determined ‘to educate the people’ about the true state of affairs in the Soviet Union, as he tells it, he contacted VOKS requesting material to distribute and ‘got a group together in Melbourne which we called the Australian Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union’. He persuaded Sir James Barrett, the maverick ophthalmologist and Chancellor of Melbourne University, to be president.51 Branches were soon established in other states, with Greenwood handling all connections with Moscow. In November 1935 he organised a ‘Two Days of Friendship’ conference at which Dorothy Alexander (Gibson), Muriel Heagney and ex-Senator R. C. D. Elliott were featured speakers and L. F. Giblin, Professor of Economics at Melbourne University, was a chairman.52

The ASCR received much material including books, pictures, records and musical scores, but the story runs cold here, for no records from the 1930s have survived. Greenwood obviously found support among some university colleagues, but most stood aloof. He was now remarried and deeply involved in the day-to-day running of the Metallurgy School and his own research.53 His wanderlust satisfied for a time, the scientist, who ‘was always happiest carrying out the minutest, to many, tedious, details which were needed to fulfil the task satisfactorily’,54 reasserted himself. The ASCR drifted to the outer mar-gins of the Popular Front, which became increasingly preoccupied with the threat of war. Perhaps ASCR’s most significant achievement in Melbourne was ‘a magnificent exhibition of photographs’ mounted in Centennial Hall in the National Museum of Victoria in May 1938. It attracted 20,000 visitors.55 Sir James Barrett’s opening address rein-forced the message that most travellers brought back from the Soviet Union. Of the three European dictatorships, at least in that country, he declared, ‘the progress made in health and education was such as to contain lessons for some of the democracies, including Australia’.56


The others lessons related to the richness of Soviet cultural life. In his lecture on Soviet literature, painting and music, W. K. Dunn waxed lyrical: ‘Ten million copies of the works of one of Russia’s national poets had been sold’, he enthused, ‘and the works of all the principal European, English and American authors were translated and sold in large numbers.’ ‘The Red Army had its own symphony orchestra’ and Melbourne University’s Professor of Music, ‘Bernard Heinze and others, were taking a keen interest in Soviet music’. Dunn hoped the time was not far off ‘when Australians would have the opportunity of hearing some of it in the Melbourne Town Hall’. ‘That is if the authorities do not ban it,’ he added.57

This was not an idle observation. In Sydney, Eric Baume broad-cast his aggressively anti-Chamberlain views anonymously until he was told to stop or lose his job as editor of the Sydney Sun.58 There were other similar stories doing the rounds. Most significantly for the future of ASCR, social activist Jessie Street held a press interview a few days after her return from a trip to the USA, England, Europe and the USSR in 1938 to observe social and economic changes and attend the League of Nations in Geneva. She ventured to suggest that most of the current assessments of the Soviet Union in the West were mistaken. Accustomed to substantial coverage of her views, Street was amazed that no report of this interview appeared. When she queried the editor of one major daily paper, a personal friend, he told her that he had no intention of publishing the interview because ‘the wool [had been] pulled over her eyes when she went to Russia’. This gave Street a retro-spective insight into the subtle control of information. It so angered and frustrated her that she immediately joined ASCR.59

*

With the signing of the German–Soviet Non-Aggression pact in August 1939, Greenwood effectively closed down the Melbourne branch of ASCR. The baton passed to Jessie Street in Sydney, and ASCR shel-tered under her substantial wing during the period between the pact and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, when the society morphed into the Russian Medical Aid Committee.60 In Melbourne, the Australia-Soviet Friendship League orchestrated the creation of Australia-Soviet House. Greenwood was feeling a little dizzy.


At a stroke the political atmosphere changed. There were some enthusiasts immediately ready to start again where we had left off. I was not able to adjust so readily to these political changes which had never really interested me. I was still able to separate clearly in my mind the culture of the Russian peoples from the policies of their government. Probably this was not possible yet much of the accumulat-ed culture—the language, art, science, theatre, music, poetry was a product of the earlier regime. The new regime was committed to the spread of this culture to the masses and to that extent I was interested. But I could never become enthusiastic about politics as such—which has always seemed to me to be an amoral aspect of human relations—whatever country or form of government was concerned.61

‘But the enthusiasm in Melbourne went further than [he] had envis-aged.’ He was drawn into the Australia-Soviet House ambit, although his crucially important war-related activities left little time for any of his ‘outside’ activities until the war was finally over.62 Opened in November 1944, Australia-Soviet House was initially an entertain-ment and rest centre for members of the armed services. It drew much of its initial financial support from the enthusiasm for such activi-ties.63 It was not until 1946, according to Greenwood, when Czechoslovakia was drawn into the communist orbit and Professor Max Crawford resigned,64 that he was ‘called on to fill the breech’ as president in May 1947.65

Given the fraught relations within Australia-Soviet House at the time, Greenwood’s acceptance of the role was further confirmation of his self-confessed political naivety. Furthermore, his research (in 1949 he was appointed to a new chair of Metallurgical Research) and his conservation campaigning, as president of the Committee of Management of Kinglake National Park, had assumed higher priority. It seems too that his pessimism about capitalism had yielded to an acceptance of its resilience, if not unequivocal reconciliation. The post-war reconstruction regime of the Chifley government, with its emphasis on planning and such projects as the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme, had revived his enthusiasm.66 Aside from the


financial problems plaguing Australia-Soviet House, Greenwood was uncomfortable with its drift to the Left. Perhaps most critically, the determined ‘lone-hand’ element in his personality was reasserting itself.

Greenwood’s time as a publicist for the Soviet Union was drawing to a close. ‘I think my presence as head of the organisation restrained some of the other officials from using the House as a centre of polit-ical activity as I insisted that it must devote its energies to cultural issues only. In this I was out on a limb—and I remained out until 1948 when I resigned as I felt I could no longer control this issue.’67 In the course of this retreat, Greenwood, who had long ago lost the easy entrée to Melbourne’s middle class afforded to academics, now alien-ated a good number of his associates on the Left. So far from favour had he fallen that when in 1948 he applied for a visa to return to the Soviet Union as a Nuffield Travelling Fellow, he was refused. As usual he spoke his mind. ‘The Ambassador was polite—(I am afraid I was not) … I said some very blunt things to him—I’m sure they were not couched in diplomatic language—I have always had a way of speaking my thoughts.’68

Ironically, it was when Greenwood was in exile from the ranks of fellow travellers, rather than during the height of his affair with ‘socialism in our time’, that he experienced the deepest chill of disap-proval as the Cold War intensified in the early 1950s. The next few years were lonely and hard in the public arena, although not all his difficulties were related to his unfashionable views. If Greenwood had ever been a pilgrim to the Soviet Union, he had found not Mecca but a false prophet. He drifted in and out of depression, staving off the worst of it by walking in the Botanical Gardens and writing a novel ‘at odd moments—particularly at lunch time when I ate in my room avoiding contact with my colleagues in the dining room. In some ways it concentrated my thoughts away from the distracting silences when there should have been conversation.’69

When the thaw finally came in the mid-1950s, there was still a good deal of what Greenwood considered some of his most satisfying work yet to be done—including a third professorship leading a new Department of Applied Science in the university from 1960 to 1964.70 In retirement, ‘the little man’, as he was affectionately called by his students, basked in the honours accorded him by his peers and, most


especially, in the significant achievements of his students, who were his greatest legacy to his adopted home.

AcknowledgementThe author wishes to thank Professor Norman Greenwood for insightful comments and advice.

Notes1 ‘Autobiography’, 1971 and 1981, based on diaries which were not

preserved. J. N. Greenwood Papers, University of Melbourne Archives (UMA), Accession No. 82/34 (hereafter JNG MS), pp. 79–80.

2 For more detail, see Carolyn Rasmussen, Increasing Momentum: Engineering at the University of Melbourne, 1861–2004, MUP, Carlton, 2004, pp. 80–82, also pp. 137–8, 144, 168, 172.

3 JNG MS, p. 58.4 Ibid., pp. 56, 36, 52, 97.5 See Workers’ Voice, 1 December 1933, p. 2; Argus, 27 November 1933, p.

14; R. Gibson, The People Stand Up, Red Rooster Press, Melbourne, 1983, p. 139.

6 For more detail, see Carolyn Rasmussen, The Lesser Evil? Opposition to War and Fascism in Australia 1920–1941, History Department, University of Melbourne, 1992.

7 JNG MS, pp. 36, 135.8 Ibid., p. 80.9 E. C. Dyason, ‘Bolshevism, fascism and democracy’, Economic Record, vol.

8, no. 15 (December 1932), pp. 160–2. See also Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Australian visitors to the Soviet Union: The view from the Soviet side’, chapter 1 of this volume

10 Note, Argus, 22 March 1933, p. 8; JNG MS, pp. 93–4.11 JNG MS, p. 80.12 Idem.13 Note, E. H. Burgmann, The Education of an Australian, Angus &

Robertson, Sydney, 1944; P. Hepenstall, ‘The bush legend and the Red Bishop: The autobiography of E. H. Burgmann’, Historical Studies, vol. 19, no. 77, October 1981, pp. 567–72.

14 Argus, 19 April 1932, p. 6.15 JNG MS, p. 81.16 Ibid., p. 82.17 Author of, for example, Time for Planning: A Social-economic Theory and

Program for the Twentieth Century, Harper, New York, c. 1945.18 Quoted in JNG MS, p. 83. See also J. N. Greenwood, ‘Economic planning:

Russian and American ideas’, Argus, 8 July 1933, p. 22.19 Ibid., pp. 83–4.20 This expression was given currency by Stuart Chase, a US trade union

delegate to the Soviet Union in 1927, in his book, A New Deal, published


in 1932. Note also Lewis Feuer, ‘American travelers to the Soviet Union, 1917–1932: The formation of a component of New Deal ideology’, American Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 2, part 1, 1962, pp. 119–49.

21 The infl uence of this aspect of his experience can be seen in some of Greenwood’s later writings, such as ‘The engineer in society’, Cranks and Nuts, Melbourne University Engineering Students’ Society, Melbourne, 1944, pp. 5–7. For an insight into the appeal of planning to the engineer in the early twentieth century, see e.g., E. Layton, ‘Veblen and the engineers’, American Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 1, 1962, pp. 63–72.

22 JNG MS, p. 85.23 On his return he claimed that his invitation had been ‘prompted by the

editors of a Leningrad metallurgical journal to which he had contributed an article’. J. N. Greenwood, ‘Industrial activity in the Soviet Union’, Proletariat, October 1933, p. 15.

24 At the time of writing his memoir he still found this a puzzle—a member of Centrosojus had been invited to this lunch to meet him—despite his feeling ‘that everyone else was defi antly in the other camp’. JNG MS, p. 85.

25 Ibid., p. 87.26 Ibid., pp. 87–8.27 Ibid., p. 86.28 See especially ibid., pp. 86–7.29 Ibid., p. 90.30 J. N. Greenwood, The Soviet Union: Social and Economic Conditions,

pamphlet, Friends of the Soviet Union, North Melbourne, [1934], p. 19. See also J. N. Greenwood, ‘Academy of Sciences of the USSR’, Australia-Soviet House Information Bulletin, July 1945, p. 1.

31 Greenwood, ‘Industrial activity’, passim; ‘Russia and the World’, Argus, 5 September 1933, p. 8; ‘Economic planning: Russian and American ideas’, Argus, 8 July 1933, p. 22.

32 Greenwood, The Soviet Union, p. 14.33 JNG MS, p. 89. See also Greenwood, The Soviet Union, pp. 5–6.34 JNG MS, p. 90.35 Report by I. Amdur, 28 April 1933, Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi

Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation [GARF]), f. 5283 (VOKS), op. 3, d. 278, ll. 8ob, 31. I am indebted to Sheila Fitzpatrick for the GARF research.

36 JNG MS, pp. 91 & 92. 37 Ibid., p. 90.38 Ibid., 92.39 Ibid., p. 94. For reports of some of these addresses, see Argus, 7 July 1933

and 14 September 1933.40 Argus, 22 May 1933, p. 12.41 JNG MS, p. 95. The story is confi rmed by a report to VOKS from D.

Thomas, Australian editor of The Soviets Today, GARF 5283/3/727, 139.42 ‘The development of the school of Metallurgy at the University of

Melbourne, 1924/65’, address to the Institution of Metallurgists, 23 May 1979. Greenwood Papers, UMA Accession No. 87/41.


43 JNG MS, p. 147.44 1 March 1965. University of Melbourne Council Minutes, UMA Accession

No. 94/86.45 JNG MS, p. 123.46 Ibid., p. 36.47 Ibid., p. 134.48 Greenwood, The Soviet Union, p. 1. Argus, Friday 20 July 1934. Many of

the audience bought copies of Moscow News and The Soviets Today from sellers in the vestibule and cheered repeatedly throughout the address.

49 JNG MS, p. 96.50 Ibid., p. 94.51 See Stephen Murray-Smith, ‘Barrett, Sir James William (1862–1945)’,

Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB), vol. 7, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1979.

52 R. Gibson, One Woman’s Life: A Memoir of Dorothy Gibson, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1980, p. 40. See also Argus, 2 and 4 November 1935.

53 J. N. Greenwood, ‘Metallurgical research in the University of Melbourne’, Cranks and Nuts, 1938.

54 JNG MS, p.129.55 Ibid., p. 96.56 Argus, 19 May 1938.57 Argus, 20 May 1938, p. 17.58 Eric Baume, I Lived These Years, George G. Harrap & Co., London, Sydney,

1941, p. 212.59 Jessie Street, Truth or Repose, Australasian Book Society, Sydney 1966, pp.

176–9. See also Lenore Coltheart, ‘Jessie Street and the Soviet Union’, chapter 13 of this volume.

60 Although he was apparently still technically president of the Victorian Branch in 1943. See also Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Max Crawford in the Soviet Union: The historian as diplomat’, chapter 10 of this volume.

61 JNG MS, p. 106.62 For some detail re this work see, ‘The Metallurgy School and the total war

effort’, Cranks and Nuts, 1941, pp. 12–13. He oversaw the production in industrial quantities of tungsten metal. Rasmussen, Increasing Momentum, p. 128.

63 Australian-Soviet House Bulletin, November–December 1945, p. 2.64 For some insight into the complexities of the situation see Fay Anderson,

An Historian’s Life: Max Crawford and the Politics of Academic Freedom, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 2005, pp. 170–5. See also Constance Lamour, Labor Judge: The Life and Times of Judge Alfred William Foster, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1985, pp. 159–60. Crawford remained as vice-president until March 1948.

65 JNG MS, p. 106; Australian-Soviet House Bulletin, May, 1947, p. 3.66 Note especially JNG MS, p. 83 and ‘Planning for the future’, Cranks and

Nuts, 1945, pp. 15–17.67 JNG MS, p. 114.68 Ibid., p. 106.


69 Ibid., pp. 122, 130.70 John Poynter & Carolyn Rasmussen, A Place Apart: The University of

Melbourne: Decades of Challenge, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic., 1996, pp. 212–14. F. H. J., ‘Retirement of Professor J. N. Greenwood’, University of Melbourne Gazette, February 1965, p. 3. ‘University honours Professor Greenwood’, University of Melbourne Gazette, December 1969, pp. 8–9. See also C. Rasmussen, ‘Greenwood, John Neill’, ADB, vol. 17.

Documents

A metallurgist looks at Russia Professor J. Neill Greenwood and the Soviet Union