Watt certainly became a ubiquitous figure in inter-war Sydney, exploring and exploiting opportunities to present the league and build its constituency. His ideal of ‘regulation by consent’ was influenced heavily by issues of equity in distribution—of power, finance, resources and wealth—among nations, primarily in a restive Europe, but encompassing a world internationalised through the legacies of nineteenth-century imperialism and facing disintegration through class-based unrest, the restraint of trade and the lure of ideologies that fed on such distortions.^[19] The schemes he proposed could be complex, such as a 1932 system of international tariff discounts that would reward countries adopting social reforms: a 10 per cent discount given to the produce of a state that implemented the 40-hour week; 5 per cent off for those that legislated against night work for women and children; another 5 per cent if children under 12 were kept from work.^[20] They were, however, delivered in an accessible, engaging style: ‘Why don’t we?’ ‘What if?’ He was a regular commentator on radio stations 2KY, 2CH, 2BL and 2GB, at public lectures and meetings associated with the union (in city, suburban and country centres), in the press and in classes of the Workers’ Educational Association [WEA]. An intense, restless man, Watt was remembered by J. D. B. Miller (later a leading international relations scholar) as ‘a fiery orator’ around the city: ‘a man of very deep convictions’ who ‘made the League of Nations Union…a significant body’.^[21]

Miller’s first memories of Watt come from the time when, as a schoolboy, Miller regularly visited the union’s office in Castlereagh Street. Perhaps Miller’s interest had been kindled by the recitation of Sir Walter Murdoch’s ‘Credo’, inserted by the union in the NSW Department of Education’s School Magazine: ‘I believe that all human beings are members of one family’, all races having the ‘same right to life and happiness and a fair share of the earth and of the things which the earth produces’.^[22] Schools were a favoured recruiting ground for the union, and Watt drove such initiatives hard (membership campaigns, badge distributions and international ‘pen friend’ programs, which by 1940 had garnered 25,486 subscriptions to the Correspondence Scholars International scheme).^[23] Whether in classrooms or public ceremonies, with precisely timed programs of speeches interspersed with musical and poetry recitals, Watt made certain the league had a ready appeal. On the radio, he carefully framed a persona serving the same purpose, with evident success: ‘[T]he listener feels you are able to be trusted,’ testified one letter of appreciation; ‘[Y]ou are not puffed up with your own vanity,’ noted another.^[24]

A marked ambiguity, however, surrounded Watt’s work with respect to his official role and its ‘advocacy’ dimensions—and these aspects in themselves reflected the fragility of the international as an area of social engagement. Watt was essentially the first fully salaried official of the League of Nations Union (Constance Duncan was appointed to a similar position for the Victorian branch in 1934, but shared it with other responsibilities, including to the Bureau of Social and International Affairs, a more exclusive and privately funded body devoted to exploring the origins of international conflict ).^[25] As such, Watt was to organise and (as he increasingly saw it) speak for an organisation that was of its essence voluntary but had to develop engagement with issues that demanded expertise and state action. In selling pamphlets and booklets, he was in part raising funds that met his salary, buying time to broach such work, as well as supporting an ideal.

Skilled in public relations—and sharing with his wife, Eileen, an interest in the psychology of commerce—Watt was inventive in devising schemes of social participation. A 100-car treasure hunt across northern Sydney, for example, ending in fireworks and community singing, was publicity for the union while also supporting Ray and Eileen’s travel to the Brussels World Peace Congress in 1936 (the third and last time he left Australia).^[26] In public speaking, he was drawn increasingly into questions of interpretation, tactics and style that were personalised: his point of view, his integrity, his opinion. Watt’s activities were therefore caught between an ethic of association that was essentially collective and patterns of organisation and commentary that were becoming increasing specialised.

This was not an unchallenged position. David Stead—stoically idealist and president of the NSW branch of the LNU in 1930–31—held that there should be no paid official for such a body: the task was a calling not a job.^[27] Other union colleagues expressed similar views, reflecting their own opportunities and the ambivalent placement of international concern between solidarity and expertise. Janet Mitchell, for example, served as education secretary for the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in 1924–26, then as director of the thrift service of the Bank of New South Wales (1926–31), and in 1925 was an Australian delegate to the first Institute of Pacific Relations conference in Honolulu. Frustrated in testing the boundaries of such new fields of instruction, she left in 1931 to work as a journalist in Harbin, China, with feelings of bitterness that Australia had failed to recognise her talents (she returned in 1933 as acting principal of the Women’s College, University of Sydney). Before departing, she closely scrutinised Watt’s sincerity, diagnosing a failure of his early, if ‘simple-minded’, idealism as he became more immersed in the LNU. Mitchell had grown ‘uncomfortable’ with Watt’s pursuit of a ‘political’ dimension to what should have remained matters of ‘publicity’.^[28] His ego, she judged, had compromised a cause that should have reflected selflessness and devotion.

Watt’s papers include many photographs of his activities with the Student Christian Union and the WEA: they are images of groups at study, at picnics, on rambles—of fellowship. If the LNU began with elements of the same ethos, it soon acquired other imperatives. As a personality, but also as an official, Watt marks these transitions. In contrast with Mitchell’s increasing distrust, Eleanor Hinder, who pioneered industrial welfare in Australia as superintendent of staff welfare at Farmer’s department store before travelling to undertake similar work in China and later at the ILO, sympathised with Watt’s fruitless search for a ‘place where your social vision could express itself’.^[29] Hinder saw a continuity with the religious vocation and university studies Watt had given up to assist his father’s troubled business, only to face again in the LNU the frustration of his personal capacities to make a difference. His importance to Hinder—and not to her alone—in building a sense of mission was implied in letters that closed with ‘love to you—that’s the kind of thing one doesn’t say to a man, if one is a woman’. From Shanghai, she wrote, ‘[Y]ou seem to be so real a factor these days in my life.’^[30] In addition to a personal closeness, there is a move beyond the bonds of fellowship in the qualities that define a cause. ‘We have the belief,’ another supporter wrote, ‘that you will make good and be a leader of men.’^[31]

Personal dedication and motivation were clearly sensitive issues in this context—perhaps they always are in transnational lives: what explains a move beyond the ready, local identity? If inter-war communist internationalism, according to Eric Hobsbawm, centred on an ethic of ‘transcending selfishness’, its liberal variations similarly ‘reprioritised loyalties’ in their own terms—although Watt’s idealist philosophy was more attuned to self-realisation than subscription to the laws of history.^[32] Hinder and Mitchell had acted on their belief in international causes but in ways that reflected the particular opportunities available to them, in part arising from earlier feminist internationalism. Unmarried and mobile, they made careers in work that offered an intersection between gendered roles and international opportunities.^[33] Watt, from 1926 married with children and living (ironically) in Anglo Street, Chatswood, stayed at home, seeking the authority of a public commentator. Scrutiny of his motives—of the fit between his personality and the task of winning public ‘trust’—was recurrent.

Even his much younger brother Alan questioned Watt from his college in Oxford, where he had travelled on a Rhodes Scholarship (the brothers’ circumstances in education, and career, were to prove very different). ‘Before I left,’ Alan probed in 1923, ‘the virtues that I saw in you seemed clouded. You seemed to feel that sacrifices on your part should be recognised; almost to suggest that unless they were so recognised, they would not be justified.’ Ray, Alan wrote from his Balliol study, needed to find humility, whereas for Alan—complaining of the ‘ghastly’ strains of his final examinations—philosophical reflection gained the legitimacy of academic study: ‘[W]e must seek the conditions of beauty and holiness,’ Alan counselled, ‘along the path of economic reconstruction.’^[34]

What lay behind such scrutiny? In these exacting assessments of Watt’s claims to speak for international causes there are tests of authority similar to those observed by Evans, Allen and McCreery in the context of ‘empire’. For Watt, however, they are informed by registers of secularisation, modernity and personality. Watt’s theological interests had transferred to psychology as a way of understanding the bases of international unrest. He concurred with one of his mentors at the University of Sydney, Professor Francis Anderson, for many years also president of the NSW LNU, who maintained that ‘the world passes from one crisis to another in the attempt not to forestall poverty, but to prevent the threatened prosperity’ that modernity might confer in aspirations and opportunities to be shared among humanity.^[35] To catch this popular sensibility required the tailoring of a certain appeal. In seeking to dispel the disillusions of colleagues, Watt could argue that

The challenge was to push such ‘new ideas’, and to create and capture enthusiasm.

The LNU was for Watt a career—if one with a salary that at certain points could be guaranteed only for three-month periods, and always needing supplementation.^[37] More than once he threatened resignation, either because he felt there was insufficient support for his work, insufficient payment for him as a ‘breadwinner’ or intolerable compromise to his mission. ‘I am not at all easy in my mind,’ he confided to Stead in 1931, given the failure of the union to address the extent to which international tension reflected incipient class rather than national conflict, requiring ‘coordinated action on economic and financial matters’ and, as such, sustained research and representation to governments.^[38] Frustrated, and sometimes labouring his discontent, he still strove to build a position from which it was possible to speak convincingly for international issues beyond the cycles of crisis.