Stanley Bruce(1883–1967)

Stanley Melbourne Bruce was born at St Kilda in Melbourne on 15 April 1883, into a Scottish-descended Melbourne mercantile family. Educated in Australia and at Cambridge, he was called to the English bar before the First World War. He served with the British Army at Gallipoli and on the Western Front, was wounded twice, and was decorated with the Military Cross and the Croix de Guerre.

He entered the Australian Parliament in 1918 and in 1923 became, at thirty-nine, the eighth Prime Minister of Australia. His government pursued a sustained programme of national development, framed around the modernisation of industry, infrastructure and migration, and brought Australia's currency, communications and scientific research onto a national footing.

After politics he served from 1933 to 1945 as Australia's High Commissioner in London, the senior Australian voice in Britain through the approach and whole course of the Second World War, and represented Australia in the wartime councils in London. In 1936 he was elected President of the Council of the League of Nations.

He chaired the League committee whose 1939 report reshaped international economic and social cooperation and helped shape the post-war food and agriculture institutions. In 1947 he was created Viscount Bruce of Melbourne, the first Australian to sit in the House of Lords, and he served as the founding Chancellor of the Australian National University from 1951 to 1961.

The Bruce name carries the royal-house weight of Robert the Bruce in a way no other Scottish family name does. Stanley Bruce carried it from a Melbourne suburb to the premiership of Australia and to the front rank of international public service.