Peter Fraser: towards a proper evaluation

For a quarter-century before his death, Sir Alister McIntosh contemplated crafting ‘a proper evaluation of Peter Fraser’s world contribution’. However, it was a casualty of his working on in Wellington’s corridors of power long after departing from his External Affairs/ Prime Minister era eyrie atop Parliament. He did gift an important statement on working with Fraser in wartime. McIntosh left also a legacy of Fraser material that will greatly enable future researchers to craft the biography Fraser warrants, which will properly shade the lightweight effort that Michael Bassett authored, with Michal King — essentially a decent enough social history of Peter Fraser’s years.

‘I’m being somewhat badgered about Peter Fraser. Of course it shows laziness and inertia that I haven’t done something over the years.… I’m now in a fix over a collaborator all very embarrassing as a matter of fact. I think I have left it too late.’ — Sir Alister McIntosh (1977)1

‘I think you were a bit grudging to the old boy. As Politicians go, he [Peter Fraser] was damned good.’ — Alister McIntosh (1951)2

‘When the outside world forced itself upon New Zealanders they found by unexpected good fortune a prime minister who was at his best in international affairs.’ — Gerald Hensley (2009)3

Alister McIntosh contemplated for a quarter-century crafting ‘a proper evaluation of Peter Fraser’s world contribution’.4 The exacting standards McIntosh would have imposed on himself had he journeyed on that task would have seen a classic emerge — Fraser warranted what McIntosh had in mind, a master-class in scholarship. McIntosh cherished eyeballing close friends, including the public scholars John Beaglehole and Fred Wood, who, too, were at the fore in ‘the slow business of his country [New Zealand] becoming articulate’5, particularly by promoting ‘our rightful place is in the South Pacific paddling our own canoe as best we can’.⁶

Ken Ross was an analyst with the External Assessments Bureau, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet from 1976 until 2012. He has been a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London and the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Canberra.

In 1951 Beaglehole sought from McIntosh feedback on his draft obituary of the recently dead Fraser: in his response McIntosh explained

Points you don’t make I think are that his judgment was extraordinarily acute. His capacity to judge the implications of any move or any situation was really remarkable. His only recreation was talking and he recreated a lot, but he talked sensibly and delighted, perhaps too much so, in displaying his truly amazing range of knowledge on everything under the sun. He was quite the best-informed New Zealand politician I have ever known or heard of, and though he did not have the culture and the polish of Winston Churchill or of Smuts he could, when confronted with the same problems as they were in a conference, give just as shrewd and penetrating an analysis and an equally good judgment as to a course of action.

… his mind was a critical one rather than a constructive, but that should not be taken to mean that he did not have constructive ability of a very high order — he did. His main intellectual fault, I think, was the disorderliness of his mind, owing to the fact that he had not had the discipline of a formal education, but that in turn, did not mean that he could not think much more accurately than 99 other people out of a 100.7

At least three publishing houses, including Dan Davin’s Oxford University Press, were seeking in McIntosh’s last years his signature on a contract to do the ‘proper evaluation’ of Fraser.⁸

That did not come about. Instead, Frank Corner and Norman Kirk recalled him to the ‘corridors of power’, a story canvassed in my previous article.⁹

Source material

By the time of his death on 30 November 1978 McIntosh had generated a wealth of Fraser material for future scholars. His papers at the Alexander Turnbull Library have much and some of that material is already public.10 There are two even more important resources that he bequeathed to interested scholars. Foremost is his 11,050 words delivered to the New Zealand Historical Society on 8 June 1973: he spoke then of his having worked with Fraser through the Second World War. That presentation is a scholarly tour du force, though is well short of what he would have contemplated in his ‘proper evaluation’. McIntosh acknowledged glancingly to that audience that his envisaged ‘proper evaluation’ of Fraser was by then beyond his capacity to handle, explaining

I regret that this has been such a hotchpotch. I had not realised how difficult it would be to select and organise and compress my material. Naturally I’ve left out a great deal and given a somewhat unbalanced picture.11

The June 1973 presentation appears not to have been recorded. The complete text is now only accessible at the Alexander Turnbull Library.12 Two abbreviated versions have been published, neither acknowledging how McIntosh’s original presentation has so seriously been abridged. The New Zealand Journal of History article, published in 1976, has 10,000 words, while the version in the Margaret Clark edited Peter Fraser: Master

Politician (1998) has only 4450 words. However, McIntosh’s central perspective of Fraser was not lost from them: Only a full-scale biography based on thorough research could do justice to one of New Zealand’s ablest public men. As a politician holding power under well-nigh insuperable difficulties Fraser deserves the most careful study. He was also a statesman, of whom we have had so very few. Certainly no other New Zealand leader ever attained such stature and reputation overseas. This is something that his fellow countrymen have never fully appreciated. And I am beginning to wonder if history will, in fact, do him justice.

Of course he was a complex character, full of contradictions, but basically he was a man of integrity; a powerful personality. And having attained leadership he acted as a leader whom people had to respect rather than love.

He was not an easy man to work for. I was often exasperated with him, in common with many others. But I was also fascinated not only by the content of the work and the situations involved but also by the astonishing range of his knowledge and abilities. Moreover, I was continually confronted with the sobering realisation that on so many occasions and on so many issues his perspicacity, his judgements, his farsightedness and his courage and determination to pursue a particular course of action were infinitely superior to my own.13

Perceptive presentation

McIntosh’s original presentation was not the ‘hotchpotch’ that he had called it. He circulated his presentation to friends. One, his long-time confidant, Dick Campbell, by return mail reiterated the importance of McIntosh’s presentation for It happily recalls much of the complex, deep old stick that he was; rings wholly true; must leave anyone who had dealings with him pondering how he could be better portrayed, and admitting how hard it is, impossible probably, to get the real man over, these decades later, to those who didn’t know him.

For no one I ever knew (‘not even Coates’ may be added) have I more admiration; but I could get nowhere in putting him on paper. So I could sympathise with the strains you were honestly admitting in getting past incidents and portraying the man.14

Campbell injected his hope McIntosh would do the longer effort: he reiterated a dozen important episodes in Fraser’s contributions to world affairs that McIntosh must include in the proposed book.

McIntosh’s second generous bequest was a smorgasbord of interviews he recorded during the 1970s. This material is only readable at the Turnbull Library as it remains unpublished. Of the interviews, McIntosh was his most lucid talking with longtime friend Keith Sinclair, who taped him on 14 January 1971, when researching Walter Nash.15 Erik Olssen had McIntosh in fine form on 16 August 1973, regaling on the dynamics between Fraser and John A. Lee.16 McIntosh’s subsequent interviews — with Fred Wood and Mary Boyd, and then with Michael King — were less successful. His memory was faltering and he had done too little preparation. Also, his interviewers were either too deferential (Wood/Boyd) or lacked knowledge of the subject (King). King’s interviews were done in 1978 and his transcripts far too often short-change McIntosh with gaps (indicating text not transcribed), mistaken personalities and outright mysterious individuals.17 Late in 2023 King’s tapes were newly listed on the Turnbull Library’s Tiaki search system for unpublished holdings; they are currently being digitalised.18 This material, expected to be accessible later this year, should be invaluable if a more thorough-going generation of transcripts are prepared — that would be an important contribution for future researchers of Peter Fraser and Alister McIntosh.

If McIntosh had made a go of the ‘proper evaluation’, he had good friends who would have passed over their own important recollections of Fraser. Foremost among them would have been Campbell and Geoffrey Cox; the latter tangled with Fraser numerous times during the Second World War. Cox’s recall of his first meeting with the prime minister in Cairo at the beginning of June 1941, immediately after the evacuation from Crete, was when Cox as General Freyberg’s junior intelligence officer had just been at Freyberg’s side for the ten-day Battle of Crete. Fraser had summoned Cox to instruct him to take charge of Freyberg’s publicity team so that New Zealand would be better informed of the division’s progress. Cox pushed back, arguing that he was now a fighting man, no longer a writer, and then offered the prime minister he could do a month-long consultancy to enumerate how Freyberg could best accomplish what Fraser sought. Cox’s report was a huge success as the prime minister and Freyberg got a top class effort for the remainder of the war from the colleagues Cox had suggested who would be the best fits for the publicity assignment. Thereafter, Fraser was periodically hassling McIntosh to make more use of Cox: that story I have covered in an earlier issue of this journal.19

Cautionary tale

There is a cautionary tale associated with McIntosh not having delivered his own proper evaluation of Fraser’s world contribution. No one else who has the necessary scholarly credentials has sought that challenge — Beaglehole, Wood, Gerald Hensley and David McIntyre have come closest in the course of their writings on the Second World War. Hensley’s talk ‘Peter Fraser at War’ is a smart, brief and crisp piece.20

Notwithstanding that for a quarter-century Michael King sought to deliver McIntosh’s envisaged Fraser, he had not the scholarly bent for that task (though he showed his strengths in literary biography). Jock Phillips in his recent Dictionary of New Zealand Biography entry for Michael canvasses capably King’s travails with his Peter Fraser project.21 King himself rarely commented publicly on that rueful experience with Fraser subsequent to McIntosh’s death, on 30 November 1978, but did make a brief mention in his talk ‘The Road to Oamaru’, an account of writing his Janet Frame biography, at the 2000 New Zealand International Arts Festival Writers Week. He explained then Christine Cole Catley introduced me to Alister McIntosh, who thought he might want help writing a book of memoirs. That meeting led to my beginning, and then not finishing, a life of Peter Fraser (it has since been completed by Michael Bassett, and published as a jointly authored book in March 2001). Fraser, like Te Puea, had turned out to be another whale: throughout his entire life cycle, he was visible, and traceable, only at widely spaced intervals.22

Important insight

King falling short on Fraser is captured by Keith Sinclair, who having authored two of New Zealand’s best political biographies — William Pember Reeves: New Zealand Fabian (1965) and Walter Nash (1976) — has good form for his ‘biography is not history’ comment. He added that ‘in a biography, events revolve around the person, and not vice versa’ and that ‘in mediocre biographies the person tends to disappear behind masses of detail or analysis of political, economic or other trends’.23 Sinclair’s insight explains that the two Michaels — Bassett and King — gave us a social history with Tomorrow comes the Song: A Life of Peter Fraser (2000). The jointly authored book reads as the third in a trilogy from Bassett — during the 1990s he had crafted prime ministerial biographies on Gordon Coates and Joseph Ward that were better fits in the social history genre. The book’s reviews displayed that this was so.24 At best, they were tepid to lukewarm. The most telling was by Barry Gustafson: ‘it falls short of an anatomy of either the inner core of Fraser the man or the political party, government and systems he was a prominent part of for 40 years’.25

For a serious future Fraser biographer the Turnbull Library has considerable holdings of the two Michaels’ papers for their combined Fraser project. Also, much of the agony for King of his earlier aborted solo Fraser effort is there too, including the late 1980s draft of his then work-in-progress Fraser biography.26

Regarding his Fraser effort, Bassett got it right: ‘It has been a huge project, the largest I have undertaken.’27 He may have done well with Coates and Ward but he was no match for Fraser. His rueful reflection of Fraser that ‘People who fail to leave a large collection of personal papers are a real trial to their biographers’ is a most revealing statement for his comfort zone.28 When, no longer prime minister, Fraser left the prime minister’s suite taking just three cartons of papers with him. Compare this with his deputy Walter Nash, who departed office in 1949 (and similarly so in 1960 when he lost the prime ministership) taking ‘a vast tonnage of [official] papers [and depositing them] in his garage’.29

Notes

1. McIntosh to George Fraser, 5 Jun 1977, Alexander Turnbull Library (ATL), 93-319-1/12. McIntosh’s reference to being ‘in a fix over a collaborator’ pre-dates Christine Cole Catley introducing Michael King to McIntosh later that year.

2. McIntosh to John Beaglehole, 17 Aug 1951, ATL, MS Papers-6759-179.

3. Gerald Hensley, Beyond the Battlefield: New Zealand and its Allies 1939–45 (Auckland, 2009), p.75.

4. Alister McIntosh, ‘Address on the occasion of his receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Canterbury in 1965’, reprinted in Malcolm Templeton (ed), An Eye, An Ear and A Voice (Wellington, 1993), p.24.

5. Vincent O’Sullivan, Long Journey to the Border: A Life of John Mulgan (Wellington, 2003), p.34. O’Sullivan was referencing Mulgan in this quotation.

6. McIntosh to Carl Berendsen, 17 Jun 1943, in Ian McGibbon (ed), Undiplomatic Dialogue: Letters between Carl Berendsen and Alister McIntosh 1943–1952 (Auckland, 1993), p.31.

7. McIntosh to Beaglehole, 17 Aug 1951, ATL, MS Papers- 6759-179.

8. Ken Ross, ‘A leap in the dark’, NZ International Review, vol 49, no 1 (2024), pp.15–18, has the back-drop to McIntosh’s not undertaking his ‘proper evaluation’ of Peter Fraser.

9. Ibid.

10. McGibbon (ed), Undiplomatic Dialogue, and Ian McGibbon (ed), Unofficial Channels: Letters between Alister McIntosh and Foss Shanahan, George Laking and Frank Corner 1946–1966 (Wellington, 1999).

11. ATL, MS-Papers-6759-177 has the ‘as presented’ version plus McIntosh’s subsequent light revision of that text. These three sentences are not in either the subsequent article or the book chapter.

12. ATL, MS-Papers-6759-177 and MS-Papers-8181-184. The former is a folder in the McIntosh Papers; it contains several versions of the presentation. The second folder, an Ian Wards folder, has several pre-presentation drafts. Wards, then the chief historian in the Historical Publications Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, assisted McIntosh with dictation and typing support during the crafting of the presentation.

13. McIntosh, ‘Working with Peter Fraser in Wartime: Personal Reminiscences’, in NZ Journal of History, vol 10, no 1 (1976), p.13, and Margaret Clark (ed), Peter Fraser: Master Politician (Palmerston North, 1998), p.167.

14. Campbell to McIntosh, 3 Aug 1973, ATL, MS Papers 6759-177. Then in retirement in England, Campbell had known Fraser since 1930 and had worked closely with him since 1935, including chairing the first Public Service Commission (1946 to 1953), a job for which Fraser had had him return from London, where he had as the official secretary managed New Zealand House for a decade.

15. ATL, OHint–0218 18/22. Sinclair interviewed McIntosh on 14 January 1971.

16. Eric Olssen has provided the author with a copy of the transcript. Olssen, John A. Lee (Dunedin, 1977) reflects McIntosh insights and acknowledges him.

17. Transcripts of King’s interviews are at the Turnbull Library in folders 77-107-12 to 77-107-17 and MS-Papers-2096-1 and -2. The interviews were on 16, 21, 29 March; 6, 12, 18 and 26 April; 1, 12, 19, 27, 31 May; 3, 13, 22 July; 1, 4, 6, 12 and 30 August; 12 September; and 9, 27 November. (McIntosh died on 30 November 1978).

18. ATL, Series–1573, sub-series 1573-1, ‘Recordings about Peter Fraser’.

19. Geoffrey Cox, A Tale of Two Battles: A Personal Memoir of Crete and the Western Desert (London, 1987), pp.117–18, and Ken Ross, ‘Geoffrey Cox — New Zealand diplomat’, NZ International Review, vol 45, no 1 (2020), pp.22–5.

20. Gerald Hensley gave the talk to a Ministry of Culture and Heritage seminar on 6 April 2011.

21. Jock Phillips, ‘King, Michael’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 2022. Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand.

22. Michael King, ‘Road to Oamaru’, in King’s Tread Softly For You Tread On My Life (Auckland, 2010), p.22. The whale reference is spelt out on page 21.

23. Keith Sinclair, ‘Political Biography in New Zealand’, in Jock Phillips (ed), Biography in New Zealand (Wellington, 1985), pp.32–3.

24. Jonathan Hunt, ‘The Rt Hon Peter Fraser’, NZ Listener, 31 Mar 2001, pp.60−2; James Watson in NZJH, vol 37, no 1 (2003); Jim McAloon in Political Science, vol 54, no 1 (2002); Tom Brooking in NZ Herald, 9 Mar 2001; Barry Gustafson, ‘Antipodean apparatchik’, New Zealand Review of Books, Aug 2001; and Bryce Harland in NZ International Review, vol 26, no 3 (2001).

25. Gustafson, op cit.

26. King to John Chilwell, 20 Dec 2001, ATL, 2012-028-148.

27. Michael Bassett to Rosemary Wildblood (Creative New Zealand), 19 Dec 1999, ATL, 2008-199-261.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., McIntosh to John A. Lee, 27 Jun 1966.