For Two Pins

"Down-under" Australians are hypersensitive to any suggestion of uppishness from those who live at the top of the world, especially "Pommies" (the English). The defensive truculence carries over to domestic affairs. With fierce local pride and last-ditch tenacity they hang on to whatever they have won from others--be it battle positions, jobs, or their underpopulated country which they keep that way by restrictive immigration laws. Australian labor disputes, in particular, have long been notable for the stubbornness of the participants and the pettiness of the issues. Most Australian unions will strike for two pins, but would rather strike for one.

Unhappily, such matters are not well taught at Harrow and Sandhurst, where 41-year-old Brigadier Derek Schreiber, chief of staff to the Governor-General (H.R.H. the Duke of Gloucester) was educated. When the Brigadier married fashionable Viscountess Clive last fall his valet, ex-Corporal Ernest Cyril Field, persuaded himself that the marriage would mean an increase in his duties. He asked for a raise. Schreiber declined, Field departed.

When Field also lost a job as barkeep in Canberra's Hotel Kingston, he charged that the Brigadier had brought pressure through a brewery to have the hotel sack him. His wife (once the Governor-General's cook) also found she could not land a job. The Fields complained to the Canberra Trades & Labor Council that they were being "victimized" by the Brigadier.

Called into the dispute by the Council, the Prime Minister (and ex-locomotive driver) Joseph B. Chifley, himself a union man, talked it over with Brigadier Schreiber, heard his denial of the Fields' charges. The Council officially: (1) blacklisted the whole Schreiber household by denying it all union services, such as delivery of groceries, household repairs, gardening chores; 2) ordered the Kingston to reinstate Field on threat of extending the boycott to three Canberra hotels; 3) requested the Prime Minister to send Schreiber back where he came from--England.

This week the crusade ended. Field, not Schreiber, went back--to the Kingston's taps. The interdict against Schreiber was lifted.

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