THAT
LEAVES one final loose-end, and perhaps the biggest
question of all.
Why
did Scott tell Lawrence - an utter stranger - about
the strictly-confidential secret army that lurked behind
the King and Empire Alliance?
We can but speculate (as I already have done above).
Scott himself has left nothing of his own to explain
it.
The reason why the King and Empire Alliance and its
shadow secret army had been founded in July 1920 - no
doubt activated under the provisions of Herbert Brookes's
Australian Protective League contingency-plan - was
the election of the radical Storey-Dooley Labor Government
a few months previously...
...and the consequent fear by the middle-classes that
"the workers" - and here the good citizens
of Sydney and NSW had the disruptive image of the ultra-militant
IWW in mind - would rise up and launch a revolution
like the one that had broken out in Soviet Russia a
few years previously.
Yet the Labor Government had been defeated at an election
in March 1922 - a matter of weeks before Lawrence arrived
in Sydney.
It had not turned out to be as radical or dangerous
as Sydney's middle-class had feared.
The
Rosenthal-Scott secret army - "the garage"
- never "went into action", apart, perhaps,
for a few clashes and a bit of counting-out in the Domain
in May 1921 (see re "Jock" Garden above).
In fact, the Alliance's rationale for existence, together
with that of its shadow secret army, had been decaying
for some time, and now, with NSW Labor Government's
electoral defeat, that fear or excuse had all but evaporated.
The King and Empire Alliance struggled on for some months
before it merged itself out of existence by amalgamating
with another, minor, patriotic organisation in Sydney.
The K&E's secret army, Scott's "garage",
was stood down (or "banked its fires"), later
to re-surface in 1925 and 1930-32 - but without its
"cover" organisation - as "the Old Guard").
Maybe
Scott - "the indiscrete Callcott" - thought
it was no longer necessary to be so obsessively secretive.
The temptation to boast about the substantial organisation
that he had helped found and build up - and which may
soon to disappear without a trace - may well have proved
irresistible in the presence of a visiting English author,
whom he might have wanted to impress.
For Scott, too, had literary interests.
He collected first-editions, and had in his collection
autographed copies of Galsworthy. (His stepsons recalled
that he had a number of books by Lawrence which he kept
"under lock and key" - they thought because
of their risqué content.)
Later, following his death in Adelaide after the war,
Scott's book collection was valued separately for probate.
