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John WrenJohn Wren (3 April 1871 - September 1953), Australian businessman, has become a legendary figure thanks mainly to a fictionalised account of his life in Frank Hardy's novel Power Without Glory, which was also made into a television series. He exercised considerable influence in Victorian politics and business, but was not as powerful as subsequent legend has suggested. Wren was born in Collingwood, in the inner working-class suburbs of Melbourne, the son of Irish Catholic immigrants. In 1893 he established an illegal totalisator (betting shop) in a hotel in Collingwood. This made him a rich man and also gave him political influence in the inner suburbs. He expanded his interests into horse-racing, gambling, cinemas, goldmining and professional cycling, but became best known as a boxing promoter. Unlike many Australian Irish-Catholics, Wren supported Australian involvement in World War I, but he opposed conscription for the war and grew increasingly anti-British after the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916. This made him a supporter of the powerful Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, who became a close friend. Under Mannix's influence Wren was fiercely anti-Communist, and after the war he used his wealth to support politicians who opposed Communism and defended Catholic interests, but he also expected them to protect his business interests, both legal and illegal. By the 1920s, however, Wren no longer needed to be involved in small-time activities like illegal betting, and most of his money came from legal, if not entirely respectable, businesses such as racing and boxing promotion. During the 1920s, '30s and '40s Wren controlled a political machine in Melbourne's inner suburbs, which he used mainly in the interests of moderate Catholic Labor politicians such as James Scullin, Frank Brennan and Tom Tunnecliffe. But he was also a friend and supporter of the Country Party Premier of Victoria Albert Dunstan, and it was his influence which led John Cain, senior to support Dunstan's minority Country Party government through the 1930s. It was Wren's anti-Communism that led the novelist and Communist Party of Australia member Frank Hardy to launch a savage attack on him in his self-published 1950 novel Power Without Glory, in which Wren appears thinly disguised as a character called John West. Some of the charges of corruption levelled in the novel against Wren had a foundation in fact, but most were exaggerated, and some of the political conspiracies attributed to him were completely fictional. Wren was an old man in 1950 and had little real influence: Hardy's real targets were the anti-Communist Labor politicians also caricatured in the book. After Wren's death in 1953 his widow sued Hardy for criminal libel, but Hardy was acquitted. Frank Brennan's son, the author Niall Brennan, attempted to rehabilitate Wren in his 1971 biography, John Wren: Gambler. Hugh Buggy's The Real John Wren (1977) was also very favourable. A more balanced recent account is Chris McConville's article in Labour History, "John Wren: Machine Boss" (1981). Wren, John
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