Joe Lyons and Benito Mussolini

I exhibited this statuette of Mussolini at the National Trust Fair at Runnymede last month. A passer-by, alerted by the article on TT ( here ) supplied me with an interesting connection between Australia’s only Tasmanian Prime Minister and the Dictator.

‘Honest Joe’ Lyons, then in his second term as Prime Minister was an avid admirer of Mussolini and had met him twice; as a result of their first meeting they considered themselves friends. Lyons and his wife had met the Pope and accepted a free-passage, first-class trip to New York on an Italian liner, and were to sing Mussolini’s praises. In 1937 a second meeting took place in Mussolini’s grandiose office in the Palazzo Venezia; this time, it was more than a mere courtesy call.

The League of Nations was falling apart and a war in Europe was looming. Mussolini needed someone to champion the idea of an Anglo–Italian détente at the upcoming talks in London, and Lyons was convinced that he was the man to broker a breakthrough. Mussolini’s final request to Lyons was to take a message to Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of England, to whit:

‘Tell the British government I want peace.’

It could be suggested that the statuette of Mussolini was a gift from Mussolini to Lyons, the then Australian Prime Minister; possible evidence for a close relationship is an unnumbered cablegram sent by Lyons as Prime Minister of Australia to Neville Chamberlain Prime Minister of England on the 28th ofSeptember 1938:

‘At this late hour I venture to suggest that there may be some possibility of averting war by personal appeal to Signor Mussolini. I can think of no other individual who might be able to influence Herr Hitler toward [a] peaceful solution. If Bruce, our High Commissioner in London, could be of any service to you by flying to Rome bearing a personal message from you to Signor Mussolini you may of course regard him as available and I am cabling him urgently to this effect. I suggest Bruce because, as Prime Minister of Australia, [I] am on good personal terms with Signor Mussolini. J. A. Lyons Prime Minister’.

(Reference: aa:a463,57/1067. The Australian Government pertaining to the Department of ForeignAffairs and Trade).

Was our Prime Minister, by September 1938, closer than one would expect to Mussolini; signified by the personal gift of this portrait statuette; a gift damaged in transit and so taken to Sanders, the Sydney silversmiths, early in 1939 for repair by someone from Lyons’s office?

Joe Lyons died as a result of a coronary occlusion on Good Friday 1939, the first Australian Prime Minister to die in office; the day Mussolini marched into Albania.

I suggest that at this point nobody – either within the Government or within the Lyons family – wished to know of, or collect, the statuette of the invading fascist dictator.

Such are the joys of a contact resulting from an advertisement on Tasmanian Times.

As a result I approached John Sanders with a request for any further information. He sent me the following information:

‘Unfortunately no documentation has survived to positively identify his [Mussolini’s] origins! I started working at W.J. Sanders in July 1947. My father, who owned the business, had died in November 1946 and the firm was being managed at that time by Betty Watson, who had been employed by him as office assistant since about 1940.

Mussolini was then lying in a cupboard with a broken leg and other minor injuries and Betty Watson understood that he had been brought in before the war for repair and never reclaimed. It was assumed that the outbreak of war in some way prevented that happening. By 1947 there were no surviving book entry records dating back that far and no attached tag or other customer identification and my father had not survived to tell the story.

Betty Watson left the firm in June 1948 and I took over management. When the firm moved premises in 1971 no claim had been made on him, and he was still in the cupboard in his original state, so at that time I restored him and have looked after him ever since’. – John Sanders, 2 November 2013.

I purchased Mussolini from John Sanders in 2012. Any further information will be gratefully received.