He was a man whom it was difficult to dislike. A biographer has described him as ‘tall, imposing, jovial and moustached’, a man who ‘did all the right things as representative of the district, had a suave word for everybody, patted children on the head and was extremely popular’.Daryl Lindsay, The Leafy Tree ( Melbourne, 1965), cited in Alan Gregory, ‘Peacock’. He was famous for having what Webb called a laugh ‘of appalling noisiness’.
