Mengjiang: The Empire of Japan’s Other East Asian Puppet State in Inner Mongolia

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Comparative politics, Inter-ethnic relations, International Relations, Military history, National politics, Political geography, Regional History, Travel

The creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo out of a huge chunk of China’s northeastern territory in 1932 was a springboard for Japan’s nationalists and militarists to expand territorially deep into China and other parts of Eastern Asia [see preceding blog: http://www.7dayadventurer.com/2019/06/27/manchukuo-an-instrument-of-imperial-expansion-for-the-puppet-masters-of-japan/].

(note how close Mengjiang’s eastern boundary came to China’s principal city Peking)

The Japanese military used Manchukuo as a base to gradually move piece by piece into Chinese Mongolia, Outer Mongolia, Siberia and elsewhere in China. Or as one Western observer of the day put it: “Automatically, by the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Japan became committed to the invasion of Mongolia”, [Lattimore, Owen. “The Phantom of Mengkukuo.” Pacific Affairs, vol. 10, no. 4, 1937, pp. 420–427. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2750626].

Demchugdongrub and his Japanese advisors ⇣

▫️▫️▫️

Demchugdongrub, Pan-Mongolism to vassal state
In Inner Mongolia, a member of the Royal House of Chahar, Prince Demchugdongrub (Te Wang 德王), was agitating in the 1930s for Mongolian autonomy from Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang Republic of China. Demchugdongrub and other Mongolian nationalists harboured irredentist desires for a Pan-Mongolia (the reuniting of Inner and Outer Mongolia) [‘5. Another Manchu-kuo, the dream of the “Inner Mongolian Independence”‘, TAKESHITA, Yoshirō 1997, http://teikoku-denmo.jp/ cited in Global Security, GlobalSecurity.org)].

Mengjiang flag⇣

▫️▫️▫️

Enforced mergers and shifting nomenclature
The opportunity arose with the aggressive expansion of the Japanese military into the country. Chahar and Suiyuan provinces in Inner Mongolia were taken by Japan’s Kwantung Army and its allies. With the muscle of the occupying Japanese military behind him, Demchugdongrub in 1936 was installed as the leader of a new puppet-state regime✳️, the Mongol Military Government (sometimes also called the “Mongolian Border Land”).

In 1939 South Chahar and North Shanxi provinces (both predominately Han Chinese in population✥) were added to the ‘Mongolian’ regime, now renamed the Mengjiang✼ (or Mongol) United Autonomous Government (蒙疆聯合自治政府) (Měngjiāng Liánhé Zìzhì Zhèngfǔ Mōkyō Rengō Jichi Seifu) with its capital in Kalgan (Zhāngjiākǒu) [ibid.]. On paper Prince Demchugdongrub remained Mengjiang head of state (until 1945), his main function seems to have been to give the territorial entity the countenance of legitimacy. One manifestation of Mengjiang’s Mongolian roots was Demchugdongrub’s adoption of the historic Mongolian calendar…1936, Mengjiang’s creation year, became the year 781 to associate the regime with Genghis Khan (below) and the height of power of the Mongol Empire [John Man, The Mongol Empire: Genghis Khan, His Heirs and the Founding of Modern China, (2015)]✧.

▫️▫️▫️

MUAG becomes MAF
In 1941 Mengjiang was rebranded once more, this time as the Mongolian Autonomous Federation (蒙古自治邦). At the same time the Japanese sponsored the elevation of Wang Zhao-ming. Wang, better known by his pen-name of Wang Jingwei, was put in charge of the Reorganised National Government of the Republic of China (中華民國國民政府) (RNGRC)❦. Wang had previously lost out to Chiang Kai-shek in a leadership struggle for control of both the KMT and the Chinese government.

Wang Jingwei, RNGRC president⇣

Wang’s defection to the Japanese was motivated by this and he envisioned his alternate government, RNGRC, would provide him with the power base within China he was seeking▣. With Wang’s appointment as “Chinese president”, Demchugdongrub’s MAF was subsumed under the Wang regime, but in practical terms the MAF was still autonomous of it, if not of the Japanese [‘Mengjiang’, (Military Wiki), www.military.wikia.org].

Mengjiang one yuan note⇣

▫️▫️▫️

RNGRC a ‘toothless’ regime
The RNGRC under Wang was a one-party totalitarian dictatorship, but the reality of Wang Jingwei’s regime was that it was only afforded very limited powers by it’s Japanese masters. Wang, befitting the function of a pliable puppet, was basically no more than a convenient pawn for the Japanese military to negotiate with Chiang’s government [‘Wang Jianwei regime’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. In 1944 Wang died in Japan…his successor as president mayor of Shanghai Chen Gongbo played an equally subservient role for the Kwantung (Chen in 1946 was tried as a war criminal by the Chiang government and executed).

Mongolian flag 1945⇣▫️▫️▫️

At the end of WWII, both the Mengjiang regime of Demchugdongrub and the ‘Reorganised’ Republic of China were effortlessly swept away by the invading Soviet and Mongolian armies. The Inner Mongolian territories were returned to China (along with Chinese Manchuria) and the Soviet satellite Outer Mongolia gained independence after a national plebiscite (100% yes vote!) in late 1945 (which the USSR immediately and China later recognised).

PRTT crest⇣

PostScript: Tannu Tuva, a regional curio Mengjiang (or Mengkukuo) and Manchukuo were not the only contemporary puppet states in that region of Northeastern China/Mongolia. Nestled in between Outer Mongolia and Russian Siberia, is the tiny enclave of Tannu Tuva (1944: 170,500 sq km, Pop. 95,400)…historically this land was part of Mongolia and therefore part of a client state of the Chinese Empire. The People’s Republic of Tannu Tuva (Tьʙа Arat Respuʙlik) (1921-44) was recognised only by the USSR and Mongolia. Nominally independent but in reality another satellite state of the Soviets, in late 1944 it was absorbed into the Soviet Union as the Tuvan Autonomous Oblast. Today, it is the Tyva Republic, a constituent member of the post-communist Russian Federation.

(map source: www.globalsecurity.org)

➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖

✳️ Demchugdongrub, despite his vaulting ambitions, was only ever nominally in charge of what was always transparently a Japanese-controlled puppet state

✥ exacerbating pre-existing tensions between the Mongolian and Chinese sections of the state (Lattimore, op.cit.)

✼ Mengjiang 蒙 (literally ‘fierce’ or in compound form ‘dream to act’). The entity is sometimes styled Mengkukuo 蒙古國 because of its parallels with Manchukuo

✧ the Mongolian prince’s supposed autonomy was always surface deep at best…”an autonomy administered by the Japanese for the Japanese”, (ibid.)

❦ colloquially known as the “Wang Jingwei regime“

▣ Wang’s would-be government was based in the former capital Nánjīng, however the de facto capital was Shanghai

.

Manchukuo: An Instrument of Imperial Expansion for the Puppet-masters of Japan

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Comparative politics, Economic history, Inter-ethnic relations, International Relations, Military history, Political geography, Regional History

In 1931 the Manchurian component of the Japanese Imperial Army faked the sabotage of the Southern Manchurian Railroad (which was controlled by the Japanese themselves) near Mukden (present day Shenyang). The Japanese military, playing the victim, alleged it was the work of Chinese dissidents, and used the so-called Mukden Incident to launch a full-scale invasion of Manchuria✴.

Kwantung Garrison troops in Shenyang, 1931 ⇓

The military onslaught from Japan’s Kwantung Army (formerly Garrison) [関東軍, Kantogun] (AKA the Guandong Army) met with determined if largely ineffective resistance…the Chinese were under-prepared, under-equipped and not as technologically advanced militarily as the Japanese, but their defensive efforts were also undermined by Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek who ordered the local warlord Zhang Xue-liang✪ to hold back on resisting the Japanese invaders. The reason – Chang had fixed on a strategy that prioritised gaining control over the rest of the China in the civil war against Mao’s Chinese communists [‘Mukden Incident’, Encyclopaedia Britannia, (John Swift), www.britannia.com]. The Japanese military successes were followed by the creation of a Japanese “puppet state”, Manchukuoꆤ, in Manchuria in April 1932 (comprising China’s Northeast and Inner Mongolia).

Background to Manchukuo: Japanese “special interests’

Japan had pursued an aggressively interventionist policy in the region for decades before Manchukuo. Victorious wars against a diminishing Chinese empire (First Sino-Japanese War, 1894-95) and Tsarist Russia (Russo-Japanese War 1904-05) emboldened Japan’s ambitions. Japan’s spoils of war after defeating the Russians included the extension of its economic sphere of influence to southern Manchuria. Moving into ports, mines, hotels and other businesses and its takeover of Russian railroads, brought with it a big influx of Japanese settlers [‘Manchukuo’, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/].

Even prior to Manchukuo’s creation, Japan had been conceded a portion of Chinese territory in the southern Liaoning Peninsula which included Dalian (renamed Darien by the Japanese). Known as the Kwantung Leased Territory, it remained in Japanese hands until 1945.

Manchukuo’s capital was Hsinking [Xīnjīng: (literally ‘new capital’)] (today reverted to its original name, Chángchūn) in Jilin province. In 1945 at the end of WWII the capital was moved to nearby Tonghua. Hsinking had the status of a “special city” under the Manchurian state, as did Harbin.

Puppet statehood

The Manchukuo state established by the Japanese militarists was initially a republic but in 1934 it was changed to a one-party constitutional monarchy, the so-called Empire of (Greater) Manchuriaᴥ. The Japanese dredged up the former boy-emperor Pu Yi (last Chinese emperor of the Qing Dynasty) to be the titular figurehead of the ’empire’. Executive power of the Manchukuo government purportedly resided with the prime ministers (Zheng Xiaoxu 1932-35 and Zhang Jinghui 1935-45). The Manchukuo PM held authority under an authoritarian–personalist dictatorship, but this was more perception than substance as real power lay firmly with the Japanese☯️.

“Emperor of Manchukuo” ⇓ (Model display of puppet emperor in palace museum)

Kwantung Army, a rogue element

The Kwantung◘ Army, the arm of the Japanese Imperial Army in Manchuria, functioned as something of a rogue element, habitually acting independently of the Japanese government and the Army General Staff in Tokyo which struggled to rein it in. The Mukden Incident (see above) and the Huanggutun Incident (see below) are two such instances of their rogue activities. Service in the Kwantung Garrison, which had its headquarters in the Manchukuo capital Hsinkingᕡ, was a recognised path for promotion in the Japanese high command…instrumental chiefs of staff Seishirō Itagaki and Hideki Tōjō were both beneficiaries of this [ibid].

Hsinking: Kwantung Army HQs ⇓

Highly politicised, the Kwantung Army adopted an extra-military role for itself in Manchuria, eg, the commanding officer of the Kwantung Army was also Manchukuo ambassador to Japan and held an extraordinary power of veto – even over the Emperor of Japan! [ibid.].

‘Race’-based stratification

Japan peopled the sparsely populated parts of Manchuria with Japanese migrants who sat atop a social pyramid with other ethnic groups in the region stratified under the Japanese. Rationing of essential foodstuffs (including rice, wheat and sugar) was administered in accordance with this racial hierarchy. The Japanese-dominated colony of more than 30 million has been characterised as more “an Auschwitz state or a concentration-camp state” than merely a “puppet state” [Yamamuro Shin’ichi, quoted in Smith, Norman. “Disguising Resistance in Manchukuo: Feminism as Anti-Colonialism in the Collected Works of Zhu Ti.” The International History Review, vol. 28, no. 3, 2006, pp. 515–536. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40111222].

Japanese dominated Manchuria was indeed a police state, one of the most brutal in an (interwar) era of totalitarian excesses. The Manchukuo regime unleashed a systematic campaign of terror and intimidation against the local Russian and Chinese populations (including arrests without trial, “thought crimes”, organised riots and other forms of subjugation) [‘Manchuria’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Artillery unit of Fengtian Clique ⇓

Resistance to Japanese domination

After the establishment of Manchukuo and the ineffective performance of the Fengtian (Liaoning) Army against the Japanese war machine, various Chinese militias were formed to carry on the resistance. The main forces comprised Anti-Japanese Volunteer Armies, backed by the KMT Nationalists and led by famous general Ma Zhanshanᕤ. Other resistance to the Japanese in the Northeast came from Communist-organised guerrilla units. The anti-Japanese militias’ campaigns, which included harrying and terrorising the Kwantung Army, lasted ten years until the Japanese Army and Airforce finally pacified Manchuria in 1942.

The brunt of the early Chinese fight-back against Japan’s imperial expansion was borne by these warlord militias and volunteer armies, but after Chiang Kai-shek was talked round to a truce with the communists and a united front against Japan in 1937 (in effect postponing the civil war to the conclusion of WWII), the Republic of China (ROC) army engaged directly with the Kwantung Army (Battles of Shanhai Pass, Rehe, Beiping-Tianjin, 2nd Battle of Héběi, Chahar Campaign, etc).

ROC flag (>1928) ⇓ 中華民國 Chunghwa Minkuo

1937: Second Sino-Japanese War

After colonising Manchuria, the Japanese military used it as a base to invade the rest of China. In 1937 the eruption of fighting between Chinese and Japanese troops near Peking (Marco Polo Bridge Incident) led to full-scale war. Antony Beevor [The Second World War, (2012)] marks this episode as being effectively the start of the Second World War (some historians date it’s origins earlier, from the Mukden Incident in 1931).

Marco Polo Bridge ⇓(Photo: The China Guide)

Siberian sideshow

Eventually the Kwantung Army, unchecked by Tokyo, overreached itself by invading Siberia, provoking the USSR into an undeclared war and several border conflicts and battles in the late 1930s. The clashes culminated in the decimation of Japanese 6th Army at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol in August 1939 [‘The Forgotten Soviet-Japanese War of 1939’, The Diplomat, (Stuart D Coleman), 28-Aug-2012, www.thediplomat.com].

1930s Tokyo ‘spin’

The Japanese came under attack in the West for establishing a harsh, totalitarian regime in Manchuria. Attempts were made to deflect the criticism by portraying the interventions in China’s northeast as a positive contribution to the restoration of regional order. Apologists for Japan, pointing to the pattern of internecine conflicts between warlords, communist insurgency and general chaotic conditions in the rest of China in the first third of the 20th century, argued that Manchuria in the same period had, courtesy of Japanese involvement, enjoyed “peace and order, progress and prosperity, (making) great strides in commercial and industrial development” [Saito, Hirosi. “A Japanese View of the Manchurian Situation.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 165 (1933): 159-66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1018175].

Manzhouguo passport ⇓

Japanese spin imbued the Manchukuo regime with a pseudo-legitimacy that was almost mythic: “the ‘Manchus’ followed the ‘kingly way’ (王道 wangdao) of harmony, prosperity, and peace under the benevolent guidance and protection of imperial Japan” [Review of Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern, (Prasenjit Duara), by John J. Stephan, The International History Review,Vol. 26, No. 1 (Mar., 2004), pp. 181-182. Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40110486]❅.

Myth-busting Manchukuo

Reconnecting with this, Japanese historians in the postwar period, tried to justify the horrors committed by the occupying Japanese army, characterising the incursion in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia as an act of ‘liberation’, prompted by motives which were ‘enlightened’. Recent research by Shin’ichi Yamamuro leads the Japanese academic to posit a view of the Manchukuo occupation that challenges the mainstream Japanese one. Yamamuro debunks the theory that right-wing Japanese military and civilian authorities were supposedly imbued with the idealism of wanting to construct a “paradise in earth” in China’s three northern provinces [Manchuria Under Japanese Dominion, (Shin’ichi Yamamuro, translated by Joshua A. Fogel), 2006; Bill Sewell. “Review of Yamamuro Shin’ichi. Manchuria under Japanese Dominion. Translated by Joshua A. Fogel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006,” H-US-Japan Reviews, March, 2007. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=265211196449094].

Scope of the membership of the Greater EACP Sphere ⇓

“Greater Co-operation” – code for Japanese expansion and economic domination

In 1940 Japan incorporated its Manchurian client-state into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (GEACS). The purported aim of GEACS was that it would be an economically self-sufficient “bloc of Asian nations led by Japan and free of Western powers”. In reality, this veneer of Pan-Asian idealism (regime motto: “five races under one union”) was a front for the Japanese militarists and nationalists to expand south and west and advance its domination of Asia [‘Manchukuo’, Wiki, loc.cit.].

A prized economic asset

Manchukuo (and the Inner Mongolia territory) was incorporated into both the Japanese war machine and the national economy. Rich in natural resources (especially coal and iron), under the Japanese Manchuria became an industrial powerhouse. Japanese citizens, who had been hard hit by the Great Depression, were enthusiastic in their support for the army’s intervention in Manchurian territory right through the period of Japanese occupancy [ibid.].

August 1945: D-day for the Japanese puppet states

August 9, 1945, the day after the second atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, the Soviet Red Army and the Mongolian Army invaded Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, which was to be the final campaign of the Second World War. In a swift operation (Manchzhurskaya Strategicheskaya Nastupatelnaya Operatsiya), Manchukuo, Mengjiang and Japanese (northern) Korea were all liberated, thus culminating in the break-up of the Japanese empire. Manchuria and Inner Mongolia were returned to China, and the Soviets set about orchestrating a communist takeover of North Korea…meanwhile Korea south of the 38th Parallel was occupied by US forces [‘Soviet invasion of Manchuria’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Victorious Soviet soldiers in Harbin ⇓Photo: https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/

Footnote: ‘Manchuria’ as a geographic descriptor was first used by the Japanese in the 1600s and later adopted by Westerners in China…the Chinese themselves these days are less inclined to use the term ‘Manchuria’, preferring to describe this part of China simply as Dongbei (东北), the Northeast).

Manchurian malfeasance – for the record: these days the once imperial “puppet palace” of Manchukuo is a history museum – a reminder to Chinese and the very occasional 外国人 (foreign) visitor alike of the aberrant and abhorrent regime imposed on North-East China during the interwar period of the 20th century. Manchukuo (State of Manchuria) comprising northeastern China and part of Inner Mongolia Area: approx 1.19 million km Pop (est) 1940: 30-35 million Ethnic Mix: Han Chinese (majority), Manchus, Mongols, Huis, Koreans, Japanese, Belorussians (minorities)

⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰

✴ in 1932 an independent inquiry with US participation, the Lytton Commission (Ritton Hōkokusho), found that both parties were at fault for the incident. In its Report which led to exposure of the Japanese duplicity, it condemned Japan for its aggression (albeit conceding it had “special interests” in the region), while also criticising China for inflaming anti-Japanese sentiments…the League of Nations subsequently demanded that Japan vacate Manchuria, Japan’s response was to give notice to withdraw unilaterally from the League (effective 1935) [‘Lytton Report’, (United States History), www.u-s-history.com]

✪ Zhang’s father, Marshal Zhang Zuolin, also a Manchurian warlord, had been assassinated by the Japanese Kwantung military in 1928, in an episode in Shenyang known as the Huanggutun incident. Zhang senior was one of the most powerful warlords in the Warlord Era, which saw local military cliques carve out territorial strongholds in different parts of China

ꆤ Manzhouguo in Chinese

ᴥ the Chinese expression for Manchukuo is 虚假帝国 (the “false empire”)

☯️ Zheng, a royalist and close collaborator of Pu Yi, had hoped that Manchukuo would become a springboard for the restoration of Qing rule in China, aims not shared by the Japanese who pressured him to resign in 1935 [‘Zheng Xiaoxu’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. His successor Zhang Jinghui was even more of a powerless figurehead, content to allow advisors from the Kwantung Army run the state, earning Zhang the unflattering sobriquet of the “Tofu prime minister” [‘Zhang Jinghui’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]

◘ Kwantung means “east of Shanhaiguan”, ie, Manchuria

ᕡ the Kwantung military also maintained a peninsula naval base at Ryojun (Port Arthur)

ᕤ the charismatic general started fighting against the Japanese, was then induced to swap over to the Japanese side and finally switched back to the cause of Chinese resistance

❅ Stephan summarises Manchukuo as “a producer of beans, bandits and bunk” with the ‘kingly way’ grandiloquence falling under the third of these attributes

💮ᕕ💮ᕕ💮ᕕ💮ᕕ💮ᕕ💮ᕕ💮

The Rise and Decline of Cobb & Co: An American Business Venture in the Colonial Australian Outback – Part II

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Commerce & Business, Heritage & Conservation, Old technology, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History

⇩ Cobb & Co coach at Scarborough, NSW(Photo: Powerhouse Museum, Sydney) ⇧

See also the preceding post The Rise and Decline of Cobb & Co – Part I

By the 1880s Cobb & Co’s coach lines had become so successful in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland that most of its competitors had been either relegated to the ranks of commercial obscurity, gone out of business altogether or been swallowed up by the ubiquitous, dominant transport market leader (or all three!)

Overreach and eventual decline

Cobb & Co’s foray in new areas of enterprise led it, and specifically company boss James Rutherford, into more and more diverse fields – everything from gold and copper mines to horse-breeding to newspapers. The inevitable downside of over-diversification was diminishing success…moreover the failures were often the result of bad and even disastrous investments (a Lithgow iron ore mine, a 1880s railway construction project connecting Glen Innes and Tenterfield)💮and in this the blame lay squarely with Rutherford. Rutherford as GM had some glaring shortcomings – he was often impetuous in business when he should have been measured, and made important (and increasingly unwise) decisions without consulting his partners [Kathy Riley), Australian Geographic, 18-Oct-2011, www.australian geographic.com.au].

⇩ A fully loaded six-horse Cobb & Co coach

(Photo: www.visityuleba.com.au) ⇧

Other factors contributing to Cobb & Co’s downfall

In addition to the instability of taking on too much concurrently, the company was a victim of misfortune and circumstance. The 1890s was a decade that brought drought and a depression to the colonies. The drought hit Cobb & Co like a sledgehammer – the cost of feed for their thousands of horses sky-rocketed! During just the four years from 1898-1902, the cost was £70,000, which was nearly half of Cobb & Co’s total revenue. Compounding this was further devastation arising from the drought – losses of livestock, plummeting of the values of company’s properties [ibid.].

⇧ Vic Museums (Photo credit: https://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/items/1256058)

Eclipsed by the advance of rail transport

The introduction of commercial railways in the inland regions of Australia from the 1870s was a forewarning that the demise of coach transport was on the horizon. Cobb & Co in Victoria and NSW survived the new competition from the railroad for a time – in part because the coach line adopted the strategy of providing a complimentary service to it (joining the dots between the rail routes)✪. It also pushed its operations further westwards into NSW to service new localities and communities beyond the rail terminus [‘Coaching days in NSW’, (Cobb & Co in NSW), http://www.orange.nsw.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Cobb-Co-Resource.pdf].

Ultimately though Cobb & Co was simply delaying the inevitable in the two southern colonies…Victoria ceased its company operations in 1890. The NSW operations’ decline led to its Bathurst and Bourke factories closing down not long after…all later coach-making was done through the Charleville Coach Plant in Queensland. By 1897 all the NSW lines ceased except those in the Bourke area [ibid.]. In 1902 Cobb & Co experienced a net loss of over £18,000 and owed considerably more than that to bankers and creditors [Riley, op.cit.]. Liquidation of the company soon followed. The following year the company was reformed but this wasn’t able to revive its flagging fortunes.

⇧ Cobb & Co Charleville coachworks (Qld) (Photo: www.qhatlas.com.au/)

Queensland, the last outpost for Cobb & Co coaches

Only “vast and untrammelled” Queensland held out against the railways’ dominance, maintaining “a solid demand for coaching” beyond Federation and into the new century, with routes in the colony peaking at more than 7000km in 1900. Queensland Cobb & Co lines lingered on, gradually losing business to the railways, their routes shrivelling up bit by bit. The advent of motor vehicles, while still at a rudimentary stage, foreshadowed that horse coaches were dinosaurs as a long-term prospect. Cobb & Co itself dabbled in automobiles and in store-keeping, but these ventures brought it no success [ibid.].

Air mail anyone?

The embryonic development of commercial air travel was another sign of the imminent end of the road for Cobb & Co. In 1922 QANTAS (Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services) launched its inaugural air mail and passenger flying service (based in central west Queensland). Cobb & Co made its final trip in 1924 on the Yuleba to Surat (Qld) route. Thus the curtain was drawn for good on what had been Australia’s first ever privately-owned public transport system [ibid; Simpson, loc.cit.].

Endnote: A television series rip-off
In the late 1950s and early 1960s there was a fictionalised TV take on the Cobb & Co story…made in Australia by ITV Britain♚. A fairly unexceptional piece of television adventure and light on historical accuracy, Whiplash was marketed in Australia and the US as “an Australianised Western”, it starred the serviceable American TV actor Peter Graves as the fictional “Chris(sic) Cobb”. Some of the episodes were written by the future creator of Star Trek Gene Roddenberry [‘Whiplash’, Classic Australian Television, www.classicaustraliantv.com].

⇧ ‘Whiplash’: Peter Graves in a scene (Photo: www.nostalgiacentral.com)

⇩ Artransa Studios, French’s Forest (Photo: www.abctvgorehill.com.au)

PostScript: The Cobb & Co Museum
Fittingly, given that Queensland was the state that maintained the Cobb & Co tradition the longest, it has a museum dedicated to the memory of the Cobb & Co pioneers. Located in country Toowoomba, the museum houses historic Cobb & Co coaches as part of an extended collection of horse-drawn vehicles – the ‘National Carriage Collection’. (Source: www.queensland.com)

⥰⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽─⤽⥰

💮 which left Cobb and Co a very sizeable £130,000 in debt

♚ filmed on location at Scone, NSW, and at Artransa Park Studios in French’s Forest, (northern Sydney) which then contained a suitably bushy backdrop

✪ this contrasted markedly with the fate of coach transport in England – where the introduction of railways, occurring from the 1830s, killed off the coaches in quick time [‘Cobb and Co coach’, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, (Margaret Simpson, Curator, Transport), 12-Jun-2013, http://maas.museum]

💠 💠 💠

The Rise and Decline of Cobb & Co: An American Business Venture in the Colonial Australian Outback – Part I

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Commerce & Business, Heritage & Conservation, Old technology, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History, Society & Culture

❝Such days as when the Royal Mail was run by Cobb & Co❞ ~ Henry Lawson

🌀-🌀-🌀

Cobb and Co is a name that still has much currency within Australian and New Zealand society. In New South Wales in the rural tourist industry there is the “Cobb & Co Heritage Trail” which invites travellers to take the “historical self-drive” following the outback route from Bathurst to Bourke that the celebrated erstwhile coach service once trekked. Queensland holds a Cobb & Co festival each year to honour the historic Surat to Yuleba route. There are touring bus and coach businesses operating that have also appropriated the name…in addition there are “Cobb & Co hotels” and “Cobb and Co bottle shops” scattered around regional areas of the eastern states※.

⇓ Cobb & Co Heritage Trail

All of this is testimony to the fame of the original Cobb & Company which was once a household transport name, etching for itself a place in the folklore of Australia’s outback regions. The company’s story begins in the goldfields of Victoria in the 1850s. In 1853 the American Adams & Co coach firm despatched Freeman Cobb and three American colleagues⚀ to Melbourne with the objective of establishing a local operation which would capitalise on the hordes of fortune seekers flocking to the Victorian gold rushes. As things transpired, Cobb ended up starting his own coach service together with the other Americans🔰, thus was born Cobb & Co.

Freeman Cobb ⇑ (Photo: www.geni.com)

The first trip (January 1854) of Cobb & Co carrying passengers, goods and equipment went from Collins Street (Melbourne city) to the Forest Creek goldfields (now Castlemaine) and to Bendigo✫. Cobb & Co was a winner pretty much from the outset…by 1856 the company was worth £16,000 (in 2011 values around $2.1 million). Freeman Cobb however didn’t stick around to see the full flowering of it’s success, after three years he sold out of his eponymous company, moving on to other (less successful) ventures. Cobb & Co changed hands a couple of times, and then in 1861 it was purchased by a consortium of nine US and Canadian businessmen for £23,000 ($3.4m in 2011) [‘Cobb & Co: historical transport’, (Kathy Riley), Australian Geographic, 18-Oct-2011, www.australian geographic.com.au].

The driving force of the firm under the consortium was another American immigrant, James Rutherford. Rutherford began by organising all of the company’s lines (the different routes), making them more profitable concerns. Under his leadership Cobb & Co expanded into NSW and Queensland (the NSW operations were based at Bathurst). At the company’s peak in the 1870s, it’s coaches were covering a distance of nearly 45,000km a week with routes stretching from the very top of Queensland (the Gulf of Carpentaria and Cooktown) down to southern Victoria [ibid.; ‘In the Days of Cobb & Co’, Sydney Mail, 20-Apr-1921, www.trove.nla.gov.au]. As one one chronicler of the iconic transport company’s story observed, Cobb & Co was many things combined – “the Qantas, the Australia Post, the TNT and the Holden of its day” [Sam Everingham, Wild Ride, The Rise and Fall of Cobb and Co, (2007)].

James Rutherford ⇓

(Photo source: State Library of Queensland)

What accounted for Cobb & Co’s spectacular success in the coach transportation business?

The decisive factors were manifold but basically Cobb & Co beat it’s competitors in several logistical areas. It’s coaches were faster and more efficient…while the rivals used heavy, rigid English coaches for their runs, Cobb imported American Concord coaches (made in New Hampshire and used in the American West) which were rounded and lightweight and had supple coach bodies – far more suited to the rugged Australian landscape than the cumbersome English coaches. Consequently Cobb & Co’s coaches gave a smoother, faster ride [Riley, loc.cit.] (the Concords, though superior, apparently didn’t always deliver that smooth a ride as they were known colloquially as the “red bone-shakers”).

A replica C & C Concord coach on display at Timbertown, NSW ⇓

The Concord coaches were fitted with leather braces and straps in place of the inflexible iron ones used on other horse-drawn vehicles which had a tendency to snap too easily (leather also provided greatly superior suspension for the carriage). Concord coaches were made to last the rugged journey and so contributed to a reputation for reliability that the Cobb service was able to establish [‘Days of Cobb & Co’, loc.cit.].

A master stroke by Cobb was to establish a series of changing stations every 16-32km along the routes. This gave Cobb & Co journeys the big advantage of always having fresh horses, enabling the drivers to maintain high speeds over long distances.

Cobb & Co coachmen – risky adventures, pitfalls and hazards of the job

The drivers themselves employed by the company were possessed of extraordinary skills in managing their horses and vehicles. They had to be to negotiate all the difficulties and obstacles in their paths and still keep on schedule…atrocious roads made worse by inclement weather, flooding of creeks and rivers, and unpredictable encounters with dangerous bushrangers◘, were all recurring events that challenged the mettle of the coach drivers. The dangers aside, experiencing the thrills and (near) spills and the full-on ‘wildness’ of a Cobb & Co journey through “the bush”, must have been an exhilarating experience for colonial travellers in the day.

Many of the drivers, some of which Cobb and (later) Rutherford recruited from the US, were colourful characters in addition to being accomplished horse handlers…blokes such as Dick Houston, Jim Conroy, ‘Silent’ Bob Bates, H Barnes, and not least “Cabbage Tree” Ned Devine. Devine, with his team of distinctive light grey horses, was by all accounts a particularly exceptional driver (earning himself a very good wage of £17 a week)…when the first English cricket team toured Australia (HH Stephenson’s, 1862), Devine was their driver on the Victorian leg of the tour [K. A. Austin, ‘Devine, Edward (Ned) (1833–1908)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/devine-edward-ned-3405/text5169, published first in hardcopy 1972, accessed online 31 May 2019].

Ned ‘Cabbage Tree’ Devine ⇓

(Photo source: State Library of Victoria)

Similarly, Cobb & Co’s grooms played an integral role in the highly organised operation…each groom was personally responsible for eight to ten horses and for their gear. The clockwork operation saw the drivers sound a bugle when they were one mile from the next staging post, this alerted the grooms to have the fresh team of horses primed and ready the minute the coach arrived. The pay-off for such a high level of efficiency, superior speed and dependability was that Cobb & Co scored lucrative mail contracts from the colonial governments [ibid.].

Cobb diversifies from its passenger and goods transport base

General manager Rutherford was the catalyst for Cobb & Co’s diversification into new businesses. Initially this payed dividends with its first move, appropriately enough, into coach and buggy building at Bathurst, NSW. Just four years into this activity Cobb & Co could boast that it was the largest coach-maker in Australia [ibid.].

Rutherford also acquired pastoral properties for the company, another profitably step for Cobb & Co. By 1877 they had nine sheep and cattle stations across NSW and Queensland covering an area of 11,000 square kilometres and turning a net profit of £77,500 (equivalent to $11.3M in 2011)…this was at a time that the company’s revenue from coaching – the principal business – was yielding only £11,500 ($1.7M) a year by comparison [ibid.].

By the end of the 1870s Cobb & Co had been in business for 25 years and had already established itself in the eastern mainland states as something of an institution in the “wide, brown land”. It had undergone diversification and experienced growth, but as I will show in Part II, the remarkable good fortunes of Cobb & Co was about to take a decided turn for the worse.

💫 –💫 –💫

PostScript: Exporting the Cobb & Co model

Unsurprisingly, the spectacular trajectory of Cobb & Co’s rise in fortune and fame drew imitators elsewhere. A number of coaching services, some using the same name (although totally unrelated to the original eastern Australian company), sprang up independently in South Australia, Western Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Africa. This last concern was started up by Freeman Cobb himself in 1871, hoping to cash in on the discoveries of diamonds and gold in the Kimberley and the Transvaal (unfortunately Cobb couldn’t reproduce his Australian success, dying in South Africa still in his 40s) [K. A. Austin, ‘Cobb, Freeman (1830–1878)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cobb-freeman-3237/text4883, published first in hardcopy 1969, accessed online 29 May 2019].

‘Kiwi’ Cobb & Co

The New Zealand version was begun by Charles Cole, who’d previously ran Cobb & Co’s Smyth’s Creek to Ballarat line in Australia❎. As in Victoria and NSW the impetus for the initiative in NZ was the gold rush in Otago (1861). Cole’s Otago coach proprietorship was in partnership with the Hoyts brothers (operating as Cole, Hoyt & Co., proprietors of Cobb & Co. Telegraph Line of Coaches)…later the service was extended to Christchurch and Canterbury. The legendary Ned ‘Cabbage Tree’ Devine worked at one time for the New Zealand outfit, driving the Dunedin to Palmerston and Oamaru routes [Austin, ‘Ned Devine’, loc.cit.; ‘Cobb & Co (New Zealand)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛⏛

※ in fact there are all manner of commercial enterprises in Australasia using the “Cobb & Co” handle as a trading name – restaurants, bars, B ‘n Bs, screen printers, clockmakers, kitchen manufacturers, etc.

⚀ the others were James Swanson, Anthony Blake and John Murray Peck (who later became a successful stock and station agent in Melbourne and a vice-president of the Essendon Australian Football Club)

🔰 the average age of the four American founders was just 22 – although they did have combined experience working for Adams, Wells Fargo and other coach companies in the US

✫ Cobb charged £5 per passenger for the roughly 110 ml journey [‘Days of Cobb & Co’, loc.cit.]

◘ one of the best known bushranging incidents involving Cobb & Co was the 1863 holdup at Eugowra (in the NSW central west)…notorious bushranging gang led by Frank Gardiner and Ben Hall robbed a Ford & Co coach (the firm was takes over by Cobb & Co one week later) of £14,000 in gold and banknotes from the goldfields [‘Details of the Robbery’, (Welcome to Eugowra in the heart of bushranger country), www.eugowra.aus.net]

❎ Cole brought one of the custom built Concord coaches across the Tasman with him to Otago