Prime Minister
Massey was sworn in as Prime Minister on 10 July 1912. Two days later it was reported in the press on the 12 July that he had accepted the appointment of Honorary Commandant of the Auckland District of the Legion of Frontiersmen . As time passed, however, some members of the Reform party grew increasingly frustrated at Massey's dominance of the party. He also earned the enmity of many workers with his harsh response to miners' and waterfront workers' strikes in 1912 and 1913. The use of force to deal with the strikers made Massey an object of hatred for the emerging left-wing. However, conservatives (many of whom believed that the unions were controlled by socialists and communists) generally supported Massey, saying that his methods were necessary. His association with the Legion of Frontiersmen assisted him greatly during this period as a number of mounted units, including Levin Troop rode to Wellington in mufti and assisted as Special Constables. Amongst the men of Levin Troop was a young Bernhard Freyberg who would shortly earn the Victoria Cross near Beaumont Hamel.
Amongst the first Acts enacted by Massey's government was one which "enabled some 13,000 Crown tenants to purchase their own farms."
Read more about this topic: William Massey
Famous quotes related to prime minister:
“Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life. What do you do after you are world-famous and nineteen or twenty and you have sat with prime ministers, kings and queens, the Pope? What do you do after that? Do you go back home and take a job? What do you do to keep your sanity? You come back to the real world.”
—Wilma Rudolph (1940–1994)
“If one had to worry about one’s actions in respect of other people’s ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)