Henry Edmund Holland

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Henry Edmund Holland (ca.1922)
Holland, first row, 2nd from left (1922)

Henry Edmund Holland (born June 10, 1868 in Ginninderra , New South Wales , Australia - † October 8, 1933 in Huntly , in the Waikato region, New Zealand ), known in public as Harry Holland , was a politician with the New Zealand Labor Party and her second party leader from 1919 to 1933.

Life

Australia

Henry Edmund Holland was born on June 10, 1868, the second son of the farmer Edward Holland and his wife Mary Chaplin in Ginninderra , New South Wales . He attended elementary school until he was 10 and worked on a farm until he was 14 years old. He then began training as a typesetter at the Queanbeyan Times . There he got to know, among other things, the realities of the working population at the time, long working hours and an oppressive employer. During this time he joined the Salvation Army in Queanbeyan at. In 1887 he finished his training and moved to Sydney to look for work , where he met his future wife. After the birth of their first child, Holland became unemployed and, in addition to the hardships, also experienced the hurt of his pride and disillusionment with his religious orientation. He left the Salvation Army without renouncing his faith and became an active member of the Australian Socialist League in 1892 . His socialist conviction and expression was based less on an intellectual basis, but all the more on an emotional level, which directed their view of the injustice and degradation of people.

Holland, who had started a career as a socialist journalist with his friend Tom Batho , founded the Sydney Socialist together in October 1894 . The paper's aggressive stance landed Holland in jail for three months in 1896 for refusing to apologize for an alleged denial of the head of the New South Wales Labor Bureau . After his release from prison, he moved the newspaper to Newcastle and renamed it the Socialist Journal of the Northern People . In 1898 Holland left his party, disaffected by the reform movement within it. In 1900 he moved his paper back to Sydney and changed the name of the publication again, this time to The People .

In 1901, Holland ran for the Socialist Labor Party of Australia , both for the Bundessenat and for a seat in his state, but received little support. In July 1901 he organized the Tailoresses' Union of New South Wales and led them on a bitter strike in November. Between 1902 and 1906 he published workers' newspapers in Grenfell and Queanbeyan .

From 1906, the working climate in Australasia began to deteriorate rapidly and labor unrest increased. In February 1907, Holland returned to Sydney to publish his new publication, the International Socialist Review for Australasia , and to run as a socialist candidate for Parliament in New South Wales . But he got into bitter arguments between the different factions of the socialists, to which he also gave cause and took part.

When the miners of the Broken Hill metal mine strike in 1909, Holland agitated bitterly against capitalism and even called for revolutionary violence. That eventually earned him a two-year prison sentence, which he only served five months. Another strike defeat at Newcastle in 1909 eventually led him to reflect on the role of socialists in the labor movement. In 1910 Holland was exhausted and discouraged and no longer excluded death as a solution to all its problems. In May 1911, a physical collapse and knee injury forced him to the hospital. He finally expressed his bitterness in his 1924 work Red roses on the highways .

In early 1912, Holland refused to register his son for military service and was sentenced to a fine. He evaded this by emigrating with his family to New Zealand in May 1912, also to be treated in the hot springs of Rotorua .

New Zealand

Having just arrived in New Zealand, Holland got involved in the strike at the Waihi gold mine , which began on May 13, 1912 and in which a miner was killed in a clash with the police. For Holland a class struggle seemed to be imminent and he believed that the majority of workers would stand on his side and follow him. The militancy of the workers in 1912 and 1913 was short-lived, and his positions and agitations increasingly brought him into conflict with his electorate and colleagues.

In November 1913, an altercation in the port of Wellington escalated into a general strike and a showdown between the recently formed United Federation of Labor and the government-backed New Zealand Employers' Association and Farmers. Holland was charged with rioting and sentenced to 12 months in prison, only part of which he served.

With the beginning of the First World War , he brought the Māori agricultural workers to an uncompromising international socialist stance and ran unsuccessfully for a seat in parliament for the country's Social Democratic Party in December 1914 . In 1916 the New Zealand Labor Party was founded, which Holland joined. When the party's first party leader, Alfred Hindmarsh , suddenly died in November 1918 from the virus of the then rampant influenza pandemic , Holland took over the party chairmanship the following year and Holland became his party's opposition leader in parliament in June 1926.

His political engagement ended abruptly when he suffered a heart attack on October 8, 1933 in Huntly at the funeral of the fourth Māori king Te Rata Mahuta and died from it. He was buried in Bolton Street Cemetery in Wellington .

family

Holland married Annie McLachlan on October 6, 1888 in Sydney , whom he had met on site with the Salvation Army. The marriage resulted in three daughters and five sons.

Works

  • Red Roses on the Highways . Holland & Stephenson / Howard and Owen Sts. , Sydney 1024 (English, online   [PDF; 1.3 MB ; accessed on June 7, 2020]).

literature

Web links

Commons : Henry Edmund Holland  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k O'Farrell : Holland, Henry Edmund . In: Dictionary of New Zealand Biography . 1996.
  2. ↑ Details for HOLLAND Henry Edmund (Harry) . Bolton Street Cemetery , accessed June 7, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Holland, Henry Edmund
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Holland, Harry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION New Zealand Labor Party politician and vice-chairman
DATE OF BIRTH June 10, 1868
PLACE OF BIRTH Ginninderra , New South Wales , Australia
DATE OF DEATH October 8, 1933
Place of death Huntly , in the Waikato region , New Zealand