Olley, Charles (1890–1965?), leading Rhodesian politician and journalist, was born 21 February 1890 in Belfast, son of Charles William Olley of Olleys Ltd, booksellers, stationers, and publishers, with outlets throughout Ireland; in 1900 he was declared bankrupt and accused of falsifying accounts. Charles junior was educated in Belgium and London and became a member of the Orange order. He married (1913) Dorothy Furniss Lucas; they had three daughters. He emigrated to Southern Rhodesia in 1918, where he practised as a pharmacist till 1935. Meanwhile he followed in his father's footsteps by becoming a publisher and journalist, and this eventually became his sole business interest. He became publishing editor (1921–35) of the Weekly Review, the first Sunday paper in the Rhodesias. He was also editor of the Rhodesia Monthly Review and manager of Stationers Ltd, and acted as correspondent for a number of South African papers.
Olley's interest in journalism was paralleled by his increasingly political role in Southern Rhodesia. He caught the populist mood of the territory, then in the midst of a referendum campaign on the question of becoming a fifth province of the Union of South Africa. Staunchly British and loyalist Rhodesia's rejection of union with the Afrikaner republican-dominated south was frequently likened to Ulster's rejection of a united Ireland. In keeping with this spirit, Olley championed the cause of small farmers and miners and the white working class against the interests of big business and international capital. In 1921 he became organising secretary of the Trades and Labour Council and Commercial Employees Association, but failed to unify shop assistants and office workers. He was one of the founders of the first Rhodesian Labour Party, although he became disillusioned with the party when it advocated a minimal degree of cooperation with African workers. At this time he threw his support behind the campaign for responsible government, which was granted in 1923. He managed to combine white proletarian connections with his chief recreations of big-game hunting and photography, becoming official press photographer for royal tours of the Rhodesias (1925, 1947, 1953, 1957, 1960). He championed the cause of the Salisbury Municipal Orchestra and was made a life alderman of the city. He also served as an executive member of the Prince Edward School council, as well as the hospital advisory committee and the Salisbury liquor board, and he represented Salisbury at several conferences of associated chambers of commerce. From the outset, he espoused a radical anti-capitalism and opposition to international big business, without ever becoming a socialist. In the 1920s he became a member of the populist Reform Party, and fatefully opposed an alliance with Labour, leading to the Reform Party's demise in the late 1930s.
Olley stood unsuccessfully as Reform Party candidate for the Salisbury Central constituency in the 1933 general election. Thereafter he crucially chose to make his mark at the municipal rather than national level of politics, being elected to the Salisbury city council in 1929. He served as a member for thirty-two years, for eighteen of which he was chairman of the influential city finance committee. He was deputy mayor of Salisbury (1942–3) and mayor (1943–5), and a founding member of the Municipal Association. He retained a keen interest in national issues and was an avowed champion of the white ‘common man’. He had strong views on race, even by contemporary colonial standards, and he typically played on the fears of the white working class. He was a founding president of the White Rhodesia Council, which advocated mass white immigration and the protection of white working-class and vulnerable commercial interests. During the 1930s he became closely associated with a fellow Irishman, Henry Hamilton Beamish (1873–1948), son of a Victorian rear-admiral, founder of ‘The Britons’, a notoriously anti-Semitic movement, and an associate of leading international fascists. Hamilton was elected to the Southern Rhodesian parliament as an independent MP in 1938, but when the second world war broke out, he was interned for his avowedly pro-Nazi views. Olley joined leading public figures in a petition asking the government for an assurance that Beamish was not being held for his anti-Semitic views, sentiments with which ‘forty per cent’ of Salisbury agreed. The petition added: ‘People think that Beamish has been framed by “Yids” ’ (Barry A. Kosmin, ‘Colonial careers for marginal fascists: a portrait of Henry Hamilton Beamish’, Wiener Library Bulletin, xxvii (1973–4), 21).
Olley became the leading champion of those Europeans who were vehemently opposed to even a moderate degree of political concessions to Africans. His principal antagonist on the city council was Mrs Gladys Maasdorp of the Labour Party, a staunchly liberal reformer who as mayor of Salisbury sought to improve the living conditions of Africans and to persuade white workers that African political advancement was both desirable and inevitable. In contrast to Maasdorp, Olley had a theory about what he called ‘soul evolvement’. If God had intended people to be equal it would have to be said that He ‘failed lamentably’. He presumed that Africans were going through ‘an evolutionary incarnation that others have long passed by and to think that they can be deviated from this stage of universal life [was] just sheer nonsense’ (Olley, ‘The case of the White Rhodesia Council’). Doris Lessing, the later novelist, was at that time a Labour Party activist and communist. She recalls Olley as a ‘little fat ugly man, in a striped businessman's suit . . . full of bullying self-confidence’. Scaremongering was his forte, warning that communist ‘agitators and kaffir-lovers’ were inciting revolution among illiterate Africans. According to Lessing, he also used to put scurrilous anonymous letters under the doors of his opponents (Under my skin, 308, 386).
After 1945 Olley was prime mover in the Amalgamated Commercial Employers’ Association and Ratepayers’ Association, which formed part of a broad coalition of white pressure groups opposed to monopolies and particularly the British South Africa Company. His chief political platform remained the White Rhodesia Council, the principal object of which was to oppose any expansion through amalgamation or federation with African territories to the north such as Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which was then being promoted by the British and Southern Rhodesian governments. He believed that European supremacy should be best secured through the continued entrenchment of the land apportionment act of 1930, the ‘Magna Carta’ of white Rhodesia, and the early attainment of dominion status. He attacked capitalist interests as being behind the fashionable ideal of partnership, believing that federation was a conspiracy by big mining interests to line their pockets while depriving white working men of their livelihoods. In 1944 he became a prime mover in the foundation of the inappropriately named Liberal Party, which he hoped would promote his ideals, but broke with it when it flirted with Afrikaners, whom he, as a British nationalist, regarded as aliens. He also opposed any dilution of the British character of Southern Rhodesia through the immigration of European immigrants. He denied, for example, that Poles would make good citizens, arguing that they would undermine the country as aliens had already ruined Britain by undercutting wages, communist propaganda, and criminal activity. Olley had not completely abandoned national political ambition: he stood as a Labour candidate for the Salisbury Gardens constituency in the 1948 general election, but was unsuccessful. He was unable to prevent the creation of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (1953–63), but the fact that federation was championed by a half-Lithuanian Jew, half-Afrikaner, Sir Roy Welensky, who became prime minister in 1956, added to his sense of alarm.
The faltering of the Federation in the late 1950s and the rise of African nationalism signalled an electoral heave against the traditional Anglo-Rhodesian political elite. Olley's political philosophy now entered the mainstream of settler politics. The populist Dominion Party and the Rhodesian Front, its right-wing successor, owed much to his political influence, with their appeal to the insecurities of white farmers, and lower-middle and artisan classes. He may indeed be regarded as prophet and anticipator of the Rhodesian Front, which came to power in 1962. In 1965 his political influence was ending as the Rhodesian Front leader, the prime minister Ian Smith, was planning a unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) from Britain for November of that year in order to forestall black majority rule. UDI was a bold example of right-wing direct action, well in keeping with his outlook and Ulster loyalist heritage. Before his death, around 1965, Salisbury honored him with the freedom of the city and made him a life alderman. Fittingly, perhaps, he remains commemorated in Charles Olley Crescent in Belevedere, formerly a Salisbury (latterly Harare) suburb once occupied by white artisans, the very class whose political interests and views he had so vociferously championed.