Henry Ernest Boote
Henry Ernest Boote was a prolific and influential Australian editor, journalist, propagandist, poet, and fiction writer. He was an ardent trade unionist and socialist whose writings supported and sought to influence the Australian labour movement and the Australian Labor Party. In addition to his political and social commentaries in articles and pamphlets, his output included political and allegorical novels, essays and several volumes of verse. Boote's political philosophy was radical but measured, seeking to reconcile socialist idealism with the practical realities of Australian politics.
Boote emigrated to Australia from England in 1889 and worked as a compositor in Brisbane. From 1894 he worked as an editor of several regional newspapers associated with the Queensland labour movement. He edited Brisbane's The Worker newspaper from 1902. In 1911 Boote relocated to Sydney and joined the staff of The Australian Worker, owned and operated by the Australian Workers' Union. He was appointed editor in 1914 and remained in that position until his retirement in 1943.
Biography
Early years
Henry Ernest Boote was born on 20 May 1865 at Liverpool in Merseyside, north-west England, the eldest of six children of Joseph Henry Boote and his wife Elizabeth. His father had started a business as a mercer after leaving the Army, assisted by funds from his stepfather. Henry later recorded that the business eventually failed due to his father's "convivial habits". He was educated at Liverpool Public School.Young Henry left school aged ten years and found a job in a printery, a position known as a 'printer's devil', performing tasks such as mixing ink and fetching type. He later served his apprenticeship as a compositor. He continued his education by reading "serious books" in local free libraries and developed an interest in sketching and painting. Later Boote attended art classes at the Royal Academy and the British Museum. By about 1885, when he was aged twenty, he sold some of his pictures to a Liverpool art dealer. The dealer engaged Boote to copy pictures hanging at the Walker Art Gallery and later sent him to Wales to paint "from nature". When the art dealer left for South Africa, Boote returned to work in the printing trade. He was a member of the Liverpool branch of the Manchester Typographical Union.
Brisbane
Boote emigrated to the Australian colony of Queensland in 1889. He sailed from London aboard the R.M.S. Orient in early March and arrived at Sydney on 18 April 1889. While the vessel "was laying in Sydney Harbour", Boote was "engaged under agreement" by an agent of the Master Printers' Association for work at the Brisbane printing office of Messrs. Warwick and Sapsford. The Orient returned to England via Melbourne, so Boote travelled from Sydney to Brisbane aboard an inter-colonial steamer. On the day after his arrival in Brisbane, Boote went to the Trades Hall and met with the Secretary of the Queensland Typographical Association, Albert Hinchcliffe. He presented his clearance from the Manchester Typographical Union to Hinchcliffe, together with a letter of introduction and recommendation from the Liverpool branch secretary. Boote's application to join the Queensland Typographical Association was considered at a special meeting of the union management on 25 May, with a representative of the employees at Warwick and Sapsford being present. Boote was admitted provisionally as a member "pending inquiries". He was formally admitted as a member of the QTA at its regular monthly meeting on 8 June 1889. The business premises of Warwick and Sapsford was located in Adelaide Street in Brisbane.Henry Boote and Mary Jane Paingdestre were married in Brisbane on 6 October 1889. The couple had one son and two daughters.
Boote had two oil paintings exhibited in the fine art section of the 1891 Exhibition in Brisbane of the National Agricultural and Industrial Association of Queensland. His painting were titled 'Before the Daily Toil Begins' and 'The St. Lucia Reach', with the latter being described as "an exceptionally good piece of work".
In 1892 Boote was recorded as being employed as a compositor, living at Tillot Street near Boggo Road Gaol in Dutton Park, Brisbane. Boote was recorded as being a "prominent South Brisbane draughts player". He sometimes represented the firm of Warwick and Sapsford in draughts matches against employees of other businesses.
Boote's first published articles appeared in Brisbane's The Worker newspaper, the official journal of the Australian Labour Federation. After trouble amongst the employees where he worked, Boote was invited by the editor of The Worker to write about the situation in his workplace. When Boote took it along to the newspaper office, the editor was impressed and suggested that he should write an article for the newspaper. Boote's first article was published in the issue of 9 September 1893. It was the first of what became a regular column called 'A Fool's Talk'. He later explained that "the spirit of the Labour Movement in the early nineties had seized upon him, and he had felt something stirring within him that claimed utterance". His 'A Fool's Talk' column, by 'Touchstone', appeared weekly during September and October 1893 and only occasionally after that.
Editorial positions
Bundaberg
In 1894, while employed at Messrs. Warwick and Sapsford, Boote applied for the position of editor of The Guardian newspaper in Bundaberg, a journal published by the Bundaberg Co-operative Printing and Publishing Co. Ltd. and with affiliation to the Labor Party. He was appointed to the position in September 1894 after a selection process involving two other applicants.Gympie
In April 1896 the Labor politician Andrew Fisher lost the election for the seat of Gympie in the Queensland Legislative Assembly. Fisher had previously held one of the seats in the dual member electorate for the Australian Labor Party. His loss in 1896 was partly attributed to strong opposition from the local Gympie Times newspaper. To counter the influence of the Times, Fisher and a group of Labor party members floated a company to establish a rival local journal named Truth. In early June 1896 it was reported that Boote would be the editor of the newly-established Truth newspaper at Gympie, described as a "new Labour paper". Fisher had asked Boote to relocate to Gympie to edit Truth, which was published bi-weekly from July 1896. A review of the new periodical described it as a "bright and promising journal", with a "rose-tinted" cover "resplendent with blue ink". The editor, Henry Boote, was described as "one of the ablest of the new cult of Queensland Labour pressmen, and besides being a strong but moderate and clever writer, he is witty and original". Boote and Fisher, together with George Ryland, a local union organiser, largely wrote and produced the newspaper. Boote was not only the editor, but also the reporter and advertisement canvasser, working for two pounds per week. Boote and Fisher remained friends until Fisher's death in 1928.In the lead-up to the Queensland colonial election in March 1899 Fisher did not seek formal endorsement as a candidate for Gympie by the Labor executive in Brisbane, but chose to fight the election locally. Both he and Ryland were elected for the seat of Gympie. At the declaration of the election results on 14 March the candidate who ran third in the poll by fifteen votes, the Gympie solicitor Francis I. Power, had some bitter words to say about the fairness of the election, specifically referring to a leaflet printed by the Truth which he described as "a tissue of lies reeking with venom". He quoted a section of the leaflet that read: "Do you believe in black labor and leprosy? then plump for Power". The solicitor's attack focussed on Boote, as the editor, who replied: "I am the author and I am proud of it".
Boote was a member of the Social Democratic Vanguard, formed in Brisbane in 1901 and described as a proto-syndicalist socialist organisation. The syndicalist agenda emphasised the primacy of industrial workers within the structure of society. Strike action was encouraged as a means of enforcing solidarity amongst workers and controlling the means of production in the process of achieving a post-capitalist society.
In August 1901 Boote resigned as editor of Gympie's Truth newspaper. In early September a "farewell social" was held for him at the Hibernian Hall at which he was presented with "a handsomely framed address" on behalf of the directors, shareholders and employees of Truth Co. Ltd.
Brisbane's ''The Worker''
On 25 January 1902 Boote temporarily replaced Francis Kenna as editor of Brisbane's The Worker newspaper. Kenna had been in the position for two and a half years, but resigned to contest the Bowen electorate at the March 1902 Queensland general election. Boote's appointment as editor of the Brisbane Worker was confirmed in January 1903.In August 1903 the Brisbane Truth newspaper published a scurrilous accusation about Boote by John Michael Cross, a political rival of Boote's from his years at Gympie. Cross claimed that when Boote arrived in Brisbane in 1889, he went to work at Warwick and Sapsford's during a printers' strike. The accusation was refuted in a detailed article in The Worker, citing evidence that Boote had been en route to Brisbane for the duration of the strike. The accusation that Boote had been a 'blackleg' was revived two years later by William Maxwell, the state Labor member for Burke, during a debate in the Queensland Legislative Assembly on 1 August 1905. On 11 August the accusation was refuted and Boote's reputation defended by David Bowman, the member for Fortitude Valley.
The cartoonist Jim Case had his first professional start in the pages of The Worker during Boote's editorship.
By early 1911 Boote had separated from his wife, but they did not divorce.
In early 1911 Boote accepted a position as a feature writer on the staff of The Worker newspaper in Sydney, owned and operated by the Australian Workers' Union. On the night of 30 March 1911 "a farewell send-off" to Boote by the Australian Labour Federation was held at the fashionable Café Eschenhagen in Queen Street, Brisbane. The event was attended by federal and state Labor members of parliament and representatives of various unions.