Who was James Munro?
- scraze
- 7 days ago
- 10 min read
(and his similarities to a man whose name rhymes with Ronald Rump)
I am now starting on my third chapter of my book on Glen Iris.
I have called it: The Sub-Divisions.
I know.
I KNOW.
BOORRRING.
This is the first time my research question: “How do I make Glen Iris interesting?” has challenged me.
It’s even more challenging because I’m a social historian and not hugely interested in how land was divided up among rich people in the 1880s. When it came to my Ashburton book, Neville Lee had already written all about it in his award-winning “Ashburton through the Ages” so that time, I could just tell people to read that.
But no-one has done that for Glen Iris. And I know people like knowing about this stuff because they ask me all the time.
So. I am now confronted by the second rule of history writing: “find a way to make things you find boring interesting.”[1]
The people are always more interesting, so I decided to start with the land owned by James Munro.
Much of what we know about Munro is skilfully described by Michael Cannon in The Land Boomers; a book describing in intimate detail the rise and dramatic fall of the land speculators of the 1880s and the resulting Depression they caused.
It must have rattled some chandeliers in Toorak mansions when it first came out in 1962.
Locally, Munro is known as the namesake of Munro Avenue, running off High Street between Towerhill Road and Highgate Grove. There’s a few other Munro street names between Kew, Carnegie, Armadale and other eastern suburbs areas that are probably named after him too. That’s because James Munro’s name between Fairfield and Oakleigh is most synonymous with one of Melbourne’s most notorious historic white elephants: the Outer Circle Railway Line.
It turns out James Munro was a whole lot more than an unlucky investor and land speculator. He was prone to not paying his debts and using his rhetoric to talk his way out of financial predicaments. He also fleeced other investors and used his government position to further his own financial interests. The more money he made the less compassion for those less fortunate investors he showed. He felt no remorse and no shame for how he ruined people.
Sound familiar? It’s even more terrifying when you discover it was all legal.
Let’s take a look.
James Munro: the basics
James Munro was born in Sutherlandshire, in the highlands of Scotland on 7 January 1832. He began his working life as a printer’s apprentice. After marrying Jane MacDonald in 1858 and producing a few children, the Munro family migrated to Melbourne in 1853.
According to his Australian Dictionary of Biography entry, Munro was a ‘rough tyke’ growing up. He was tall, with a strong speaking voice (and associated Scottish accent) that he used to great effect. He was quick-tempered, excitable but easy to get along with as long as you let him have his way.
He was also an abstainer of alcohol, much like the man whose name rhymes with Monald Mump.
For the first few years, Munro continued in the printing trade at Fergusson & Moore in Flinders Lane and produced a whole lot more children. He also got himself involved in the local temperance movement.
Munro the Temperance Advocate
Munro first joined the total abstinence (from alcohol) movement back in Scotland. When he got to 1850s Melbourne, with its pub on every corner and enthusiasm for alcohol consumption, Munro’s vocal advocacy for temperance quickly earned him a level of social cache not possible back in Scotland for a printer’s apprentice.
He made a name for himself through his fire-and-brimstone approach to the evils of liquor, the need for a land tax, and the importance of high tariffs.
Munro was typical of Melbourne’s Temperance Men. He wore a lot of black; and what weight he kept off from not partaking in alcohol he compensated for with food. He also seemed to have quite a lot of children, adding another five after his arrival in Melbourne.
The working classes were not to know what the Temperance Men were talking about in the fancy coffee palaces and private clubs they built with their investments. For them, the men’s commitment to temperance gave the impression they were virtuous with a high moral standing. When every day people saw how rich the Temperance Men were getting, they thought they must be doing something right. So they entrusted them with their money.
Munro the Building Society founder
In the beginning, many of the Temperance Men were earnest early founders of building societies. Building societies - when run for their original purpose of providing reasonable loans for building houses and helping people eventually own them - were a great asset to the growing colony.
James Munro got himself in on the action by founding the Victoria Permanent Property Investment Building Society. According to Cannon’s book, “one day [in 1865] he was reading proofs of the regulations of a building society organised on the terminating principle. It occurred to him that a permanent building society on the lines of the Scottish Property Investment Trust might be better suited to Melbourne’s conditions.”
Munro washed his ink-stained hands and formed his own society. It became a great success and for a long time, Munro attracted respect for his financial fluency and business acumen.
Munro the politician
Munro’s notoriety as a temperance advocate gave him a public persona. In 1874, he used it to get himself elected to the Legislative Assembly as the member for North Melbourne. Back then, these were not well-paid positions, and their occupants could all retain their business interests. Should the business and governance streams of their public lives intersect… hey now, that was just how things were back then.
In government, Munro was quite the firebrand; jumping up and down and shaking his fist a lot when he did not get his way. No one liked him much but they respected him. Future prime minister Alfred Deakin said of him:
‘a fiery Scot, a speculative plunger, at that time thought to be a sound financier, a practiced political chief, cunning, untrustworthy and unscrupulous, and effective but sometimes injudicious debater.’
But Munro proved a tenacious campaigner. In 1877, the McCulloch government split North Melbourne in two to create Carlton, the beating heart of alcohol consumption in Melbourne. The powerful brewery and pub-owners united against Munro, refusing to allow him space to campaign. Munro bought himself a vacant block, had a hall built on it in 14 days, and began to hold passionate meetings that attracted hundreds of people. He won the seat by 37 votes. The breweries and publicans never forgave him.
Munro pushed hard to expand temperance across Victoria, sitting on committees ranging from the Total Abstinence Society to the Victorian Alliance for the Suppression of the Liquor Traffic. He also used his position and influence to build and finance the ‘coffee palaces’ – hotels where travellers could stay without being tempted by alcohol – the most notably remnant being the Windsor Hotel on Spring Street.
Unlike the man whose name rhymes with Thump, Munro liked to call things "Federal". There's no documentation on what appealed to him about this word.
As the member for Carlton, James Munro did do some (kinda) good things. He pushed hard for Melbourne to host the International Exhibition of 1880. Despite strong opposition, its overwhelming success ushered in the boom years, represented by the magnificent Exhibition Building that still stands in Carlton Gardens today. He was also an early advocate for women’s suffrage; mostly because women drove the temperance movement and he thought he could get them to vote for him.
Munro the Banker
In 1876, colonial legislators like Munro changed the business model brought in from Britain for building societies. They decided to include a clause in legislation that permitted building societies to ‘buy and sell or mortgage freehold or leasehold estate.’
Being an MLA helped Munro grow his building society and his personal finances at a satisfying pace. But this legislation change gave the numerous Victorian building societies exceptional power. The directors began to use the large deposits of public money paid into the building societies to compete for the best real estate. Combine this with the stubborn belief that you can never lose money if you invest in land and voila! You have yourself a land boom.
Munro ran everything above board for many years until around 1882, when he decided he did not make enough money from his building society. He resigned from it and decided he needed to start a bank.
With the help of a Bendigo gold millionaire, Munro started the Federal Bank and a new building society to run off it. He placed his son Alexander in charge of it and ran the Federal Bank himself.
Starting a bank in addition to a building society meant Munro could still receive government funds for buying and building on land but also use his government position, reputation and community status to quickly raise £500,000 capital from small depositors.
Today we would call this “double-dipping”. But it was not illegal at the time. And let’s face it, if you’re rich enough you’ll get away with it today too.
Munro was still a Member of the Legislative Assembly. This gave him and his cronies unprecedented access to the government’s plans for an extensive rail network. Munro began buying up land precisely in the places where the railway would be built. Property values in these areas began to rise enormously. When the railways finally eventuated, Munro sold off his land for a handsome profit.
One of those blocks was several acres near Glen Iris Station on High Street where the shops are on the south side. The boundaries are not the same today but if you think of it being in a triangle from Malvern Road to Grandview Road and east to Kooyong Koot Creek, that about covers it. It was one of countless small holdings. He also owned 20 blocks in Armadale, a large property at Narbethong, several thousand acres in Queensland, and 1 1/4 million acres of leasehold land in the Kimberleys (WA).
On the surface, Munro seemed like a shrewd financier and investor but the reality was that despite his moral pretensions he lacked originality, imagination and attention to the financial details and fine print. Wrote Cannon in the Land Boomers, “one of the peculiarities of this righteous man’s psychology was that he could always explain and defend his actions to his own satisfaction, however wayward they might seem to others. He kept his conscience clear.”
Just like someone with a name that rhymes with Ponald Pump.
Munro the Premier
By 1885, Munro’s political influence (i.e. ability to make other politicians paper rich) helped give his Federal Bank government business. When the government passed a law to prohibit Banks from owning Building Societies, Munro dutifully divested himself of his building society shares. But then he decided to start the Real Estate Bank, ostensibly “to manage all his various properties” but in reality to make his rich investors even richer by purchasing their property at inflated prices.
The last good year for Munro was 1890, after he successfully returned from a trip to England to raise more cash to finance his various companies. Still in the Legislative Assembly, Munro attacked the Gillies-Deakin Government for its financial excesses and poor governance. Munro found himself Premier and faced with a looming financial crash.
By 1890, the ambitious railway plans had almost bankrupted the Government, new investor money was drying up and several of the weaker building societies had gone under. Munro knew the writing was on the wall. Together with his Attorney-General, he devised the “Voluntary Liquidation Act 1891”.
Munro said at the time that its aim was to prevent mischievous speculators from forcing companies into compulsory liquidation. But really it was to remove any right small and minority depositors had to get their money back from people like him. He was the first to use it. The morning after the legislation passed (with only one dissenting voice – and doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know about his government) Munro’s Federal Building Society suspended payments to its depositors. Two weeks later, Munro’s Real Estate Bank did the same thing. Munro claimed the Bank had £600,000 of surplus assets when really it had debts of £540,000.
His house of cards starting to fall, Munro panicked. He was still the Premier but decided to appoint himself Victorian Agent-General in London, an appointment that required his immediate departure from the colony.
To say his “appointment” was poorly received by his numerous creditors would be an understatement.
The Federal Building Society went under 10 months later, the Federal Bank shortly after that. James Munro lost £608,000 on his various land deals. When the magnitude of his financial fraud came out, the new premier Shiell ordered him to return from London to explain himself. He did actually do that – the one decent act of that time of his life. But by this time, he was in catastrophic financial circumstances and was living off the charity of relatives.
The Aftermath
Munro never paid a single penny back to his creditors. His friends at other banks forgave his debts to them and the rest were written off as part of his bankruptcy declaration. He started a small real estate agency in Armadale and managed to survive of it.
Although he was by no means the only speculator to be consumed by greed and lack of remorse, Munro did make a huge contribution to an economic depression that caused untold misery on Melbourne’s population. There was hardly a resident not affected by the widespread financial collapse of the building societies and banks. Men abandoned their families or suicided and women were forced into prostitution to feed their children.
One story highlights the sentiment that surrounded Munro after his financial dealings came to light.
One day in 1893, a man called George Davis recognised James Munro in Collins Street. Munro was 61 years old and a rather pathetic figure. George walked right up to him, punched him in the face and knocked him out. He was immediately arrested and at his arraignment, told the judge he was financially ruined by Munro and sleeping in parks because of it. An anonymous sympathiser immediately paid his modest fine of £5.
Said Mr Nicholson, the magistrate, about the case, “considering the times the city has passed through, the behaviour of the citizens in general was distinctly creditable.”
James Munro died in 1908, survived by four sons and three daughters of eight children. He is buried in St Kilda Cemetery.
[1] For the record, the first one is “there are no yes or no answers.”
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