Intriguing front free
endpaper inscription : To Banjo, Marshall & Duncan
& friends. Hold and use
this to the best advantage
until you are able to get copies . I will call some day
& ask for it on my way
north when my
password will be Boots.
The identity
of
a person , simply listed
as “Banjo” in the above inscription
in the powerful 1910 American anti-war book , WAR
–WHAT FOR ? , has been revealed
. He was
Edward Hunter (1885-1959) , a prominent Scottish trade union organiser , politician and writer
active in the development of socialism in New Zealand. Like
his father , he became a miner
at the
age of 12
and, with little
formal education, went to
the West Coast of
NZ in 1906 , where he
became closely involved with miners
and was a
leading member of the New Zealand Federation of Labour.
Under the pseudonym
, Billy Banjo, he articulated miners’ concerns in prose
and verse . He strongly
advocated educating workers . In A Song of Freedom, he called on
miners to stand and fight
after the death of Fred Evans in a skirmish between police and striking miners at Waihi in November 1912
He also called for a general strike which was
proclaimed in 1913. His activities resulted in him being arrested and
charged with sedition , alleging he incited revolution. Hunter was blacklisted on the coalfields
because of his trade union organising and socialist beliefs. As a result , he became an organiser for shearers and
the Wellington Rural Workers Union . Increasingly , he turned to writing
and penned many
socialist poems and other works.
When his wife died in March 1915, leaving him to raise
four young children , he returned to Scotland with his family around 1919. There he became deeply involved in labour activity in
Glasgow . A play he wrote, The
Disinherited ,was performed
by people drawn from a
mining community. He worked as a journalist for labour
papers , was elected on a Labour Party
ticket to Glasgow City Council , in
which he became the deputy chairman, and even served as the city’s
police commissioner .
The book , written by
George R. Kirpatrick , of Ohio , containing
the inscription , had previously belonged to another prominent union activist H. E. Holland, imprisoned for
sedition during WW1 and parliamentary leader of the NZ
Labour Party from 1919-l933. An activist in Australia before he moved across the Tasman , Holland was an outstanding orator and writer, editor of the Maoriland Worker ; his state funeral in Wellington drew a crowd of 100,000 .
