Category Archives: World War I

When we think of Australian women during World War I, we tend to think of them as either nurses (and less often, doctors), or as sock-knitters. But there was a small group of Australian women, generally from middle to upper-class origins who did make their way overseas as volunteers with the Red Cross, or in the case of Rose Venn-Brown, as an administrator with the YMCA. The Armytage sisters from Como, for example, also made their way over there; so too did Vera Deakin. This book, written by Rose Venn-Brown’s grand-niece tells the story of one of these ‘Aussie girls’ in France between 1916 and 1920. Although the Red Cross also drew on her services, her main interest was the YMCA, and after the war ended she was attached to the Australian Graves Detachment based at Villers-Brettoneux in France.

When WWI broke out in August 1914, Rose was working as Assistant Registrar at the Royal Hospital for Women at Paddington. Coming from an affluent family, there was no economic necessity for her to work, but the family of thirteen (!) siblings seemed to gravitate towards white-collar professions after their father died quite early. She would have been expected to resign on marriage, but the war intervened, and marriage never beckoned. She felt that her administrative skills might have been of use “over there”, but she was generally discouraged by the military authorities, who would only send trained nurses. Eventually she circumvented them by travelling to New Zealand and embarking from there as a civilian. Through contacts, she found herself commissioned with the task of organising the medical records of the Australian War Office in Horseferry Road, London. She was asked by the wife of the NSW Agent-General in London to help organize the War Comforts Fund Association for Australian soldiers (which so many women were involved with back home in Australia), and was offered canteen work for the Young Mens Christian Association (YMCA). As far as she was concerned, she didn’t travel all that way to do canteen work, but she pulled some strings to be appointed to look after the finances of the canteens, which had been in a poor state until then. By 11 April 1916, her permits were cleared to cross to France to work for the YMCA, something that men employed by the YMCA were not impressed by. The men called a protest meeting, and it was agreed that Rose would spend a certain amount of time working in the camps – which was, of course, exactly what she wanted in the first place.

Rose later published her letters back home, and her diaries from her time at the front. The author has drawn heavily on both of these sources, and Rose certainly wrote well. As a descendant rather than a historian, Sandra Venn-Brown does not interrogate these sources or their production in the same way that Janet Butler has done in Kitty’s War (my review here).

If Rose Venn-Brown were working today, we would call her an Events Organizer, as much of her work revolved around organizing lectures and concerts for the men in the YMCA ‘huts’ located behind the front. It was acknowledged that the men needed leisure activities as they cycled between periods on the frontline and then back at base, and she liaised with performers and lectures to schedule and stage these events and organized dances and concerts among the men themselves. By this stage, three of her brothers had enlisted and she enjoyed being able to catch up with them when she could. Much of her identity revolved being an “Aussie girl” and the comfort that the Australian troops drew from hearing a familiar accent from a “girl” who could just as easily come from their home towns. Travelling from one part of the Western Front to the other was not easy, and in a letter home Rose gave a graphic description of visiting Gamaches, 62 kilometres north of Amiens, in early 1919 when hostilities had ceased. The journey was about 190 kilometres but took a full day, with the car bursting into flames several times and requiring multiple repairs along the way.

She finally returned home, but lost money in organizing a tour for her friend Flora Sandes, an entertainer from Serbia, whom she met as part of her work for the YMCA in Europe. Rose seemed to have been afflicted by the restlessness that many soldiers felt on returning home, and after three years she left for Shanghai, then travelled back to England and France, where she revisited the old battlefields with a friend Daisy Daking, a leading folk dancer who was sent out from England to entertain the troops and teach folk dancing (a rather surreal image, I must admit, all those soldiers folk-dancing). In the 1930s she returned to be with her family, moving from one family member’s home to another. She never married and never had a family of her own. She died in Chatswood, aged 69, seen by some in her family as “a bit full of herself” and “strange”.

This book presented the “Aussie Girl” in a WWI context that was uncommon at the time, and now too, when the focus is more on soldiers and nurses. The book is interlaced with the author’s own commentary and recollections from various tours overseas, which gives it a more homely feel. The author has been badly let down in the proof-reading, because there are multiple errors that mar the text- a rather surprising oversight in a book published by Australian Scholarly Publishing. Nonetheless, as the blurb on the back says, it does give new insight into battlefield life during the Great War, and it has presented Rose’s own lively recollections and anecdotes to a wider audience.

My rating: 7/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library in preparation for a presentation I gave to Heidelberg Historical Society about George Lort Phillips, a local man who ended up commanding the Australian Graves Services unit until 1921.

The subtitle of this book is ” Devoted Labour for the Lost, the Unknown but Not Forgotten Dead”, which gives an indication of the stance towards war graves workers adopted in this book, several chapters of which were contributed by descendants. Published in 2019, it moves into the commemorative space left open after all the WWI centenary celebrations by looking at the physical and emotional work that followed the suspension of fighting, most particularly through the men who were attached to the Australian Graves Detachment.

The book opens with two very good context-setting chapters that explained the bureaucratic structure of the grave-worker organizations, both in relation to the British Army and to the AIF. It describes what was involved in grave work: opening the grave, checking for ID disks, paybooks and other identifying objects, wrapping the body in a blanket, sewing it up and marking it with an identifying tag. Bodies were collected and buried in designated cemeteries, some of which were later consolidated into larger cemeteries. Photographs of the relocated graves were sent to next-of-kin in Australia. The Australian Graves Detachment, comprising over 1000 men, was created in March 1919 when there was still a large number of soldiers waiting repatriation back home. It ceased to exist on 20 August 1919, when demobilization was largely complete, at which time its functions devolved to the much smaller Australian Graves Service.

The book then moves to biographical sketches of different men involved in the Australian Graves Detachment. These chapters start off with descriptions of the men’s military experiences (with the exception of Private William McBeath, who arrived too late to see military action, although he did undertake training in England in case the Armistice did not hold). Their military involvement explains the reality of war experience that they brought to their war graves tasks, both in terms of personal bravery but also in terms of the camaraderie of being ‘one of the men’. This camaraderie influenced -for good or bad- their leadership style with the AGD. This is seen in the case of Major John Eldred Mott, featured in Chapter 3, who as an ex-German POW, had displayed great ingenuity in escaping prison camp, and was seen as a largely sympathetic man-of-the-men. His leadership style was more consistent with management of civilian workers than a hard-and-fast military approach, but this was of course one of the ambiguities of the AGD. Drawn from a volunteer army, they were no longer operating under the rules of war.

Frank Cahill (also known as ‘Carr’), in Chapter 4, was one of the 1914 men who were promised an early return to Australia under the ‘first in, first out’ demobilization strategy, but he decided to stay on and volunteer with the photographic section, a division of the AGD that came in for criticism for the number and quality of their images. He returned to Australian in 1921 but could receive only a 25% pension for an injury to his wrist. He committed suicide in 1928, and his widow had to struggle to have her husband’s death acknowledged as “materially hastened by war service”.

In Chapter 5 Peter Bakker and Fred Cahir identify four indigenous soldiers who worked with the ADG: Edward “Darkie” Smith from Queensland, William Charles Miller from Tasmania, George William Mitchell from Queensland and John Ogilvie from Western Australia. Smith continued to work with the Australian Graves Services and was Australia’s longest serving indigenous WWI soldier, clocking up six years, two months and five days of continuous service. However, it is notable that the only court-martial within the AGD was the stabbing of Private Ogilvie- a manifestation of racism within the group?

Chapter 6 looks at Captain Allen Charles Waters Kingston, who was caught up in the Court of Inquiry in March and April 1920 which was critical of Kingston’s command of the AGD in Villers-Brettoneux. He was suspended as a result of the Court of Inquiry, and returned home on the same ship as two of his most trenchant critics.

Chapter 7 is probably the most personal of the biographical chapters, as it incorporates diaries and letters from the author’s grandfather. Private William Frampton McBeath enlisted in June 1918 after completing his carriage-making apprenticeship, and the war was over by the time he arrived. He was drafted into the Graves Detachment, where he kept a brief diary- one of the few kept by graves workers. He arrived back in Australia on 13 November 1919, along with 1300 other troops.

The biographical approach taken by this book, particularly when the chapters were written by descendants, leads to a fairly terse dismissal of van Velzen’s “tabloid” book Missing in Action which is more critical of the AGD and its successor, the Australian Graves Services. However, there is no getting around the fact that two inquiries were held into the graves services division, which highlights not only the troubles and conflicts within the units themselves, but the political sensitivities over graves work back here in Australia, something that Bart Ziino’s A Distant Grief captures well. The individual stories told in this book underline the physical and psychological difficulty that soldiers- not just graves workers- had when re-adjusting to life in Australia, as highlighted in Marina Larsson’s Shattered Anzacs.

The book closes by enumerating the enormity of the task undertaken by the graves workers. Between February and August 1919 nearly 70,000 Allied (not just Australian) soldiers were located, exhumed and reburied by the AGD. One hundred years on, the stark beauty of Commonwealth War Graves Cemeteries have washed clean the sheer drudgery and horror of their creation.

My rating: 7/10

Sourced from: SLV as an e-book. Read in preparation for a talk on George Lort Phillips at the Heidelberg Historical Society.

Australians are familiar with the War Memorials that stand in nearly every suburb and country town. They are so much just a part of the built environment now that we barely see them, except on Anzac and Remembrance Day when you walk past and see wreaths of flowers placed on them. At times I stop and look at the names, and shudder at the groups of names from one family, but more than 100 years on from World War I, they do not have a particular emotional resonance. That was not true at the time they were constructed. As Ken Inglis explores in Sacred Places, war memorials in every small town were a surrogate – however inadequate- for an individualized grave.

Quite apart from the practicalities and logistics of repatriating so many dead bodies from World War I, the decision was made at a Commonwealth level that all soldiers from Commonwealth countries would be buried in the Commonwealth War Cemetery closest to where they fell. But they had to be located first. In battlefields that were bombed repeatedly, with weapons that could blow a man to pieces and without time for careful record keeping, this was no easy task. At first it fell to the Australian Graves Detachment, which worked alongside the English Graves Registration Unit in identifying and burying Australian bodies. At the end of 1919, the remaining soldiers working for the Australian Graves Detachment merged into the smaller, newly founded Australian Graves Services. The tasks of digging up bodies remained with the English Graves Registration Unit- after all, who knew what nationalities were going to be uncovered?- but once located, the Australian Graves Services (AGS) would inspect the body and its remaining clothing, looking for identification to ascertain if it was an Australian soldier, and if so, who it was. It was hard work, physically and emotionally, and soldiers who worked in these deployments were cut some slack, especially in terms of their leisure time activities. But the families at home did not know that, and the government wanted to keep it that way. And when questions began being asked at home, often prompted by disgruntled ex-employees, there was a concerted effort to keep any inquiries out of the news.

This book is the story of the two inquiries that were held into the Australian Graves Services unit in the first two years following the war. Quite apart from the difficulties of the job, this was a unit riven by jealousy, ego, incompetence and deviousness. It was overseen from Australia House in London, with three main bases over in Europe: Somme/Amiens; Villers-Bretonneux and then Poperinghe up on the Belgian border. Each of the officers who headed these bases loathed the others, for various reasons. Van Velzen approaches the story from multiple viewpoints, moving from one officer to the other, retelling events from their perspective. This leads to a certain degree of repetition, but it does also allow for actions and people to be viewed in different lights. Nobody comes out of this well. Jealousy, obstruction and rorting look bad no matter how you describe it.

After an initial inquiry cleared out the initial ‘troublemakers’ (who returned to Australia to make even more trouble there), there was a reshuffle of authority and a forging of an alliance between George Lort Phillips at Australia House, and Alfred Allen, a Quaker who had come to the AGS through the Red Cross, who was in charge at Poperinghe . Exonerated and perhaps emboldened by the first inquiry, Allen had become increasing sure of his ability to find bodies through ‘divining’, and it was this confidence that brought him into collision with Cecil Smith who had been charged by his wife’s uncle Col. James Burns with locating his son, Robert Burns. James Burns was wealthy and influential (he was the Burns in the Burns-Philp shipping company) and he had the money and contacts to persist when Phillips and Allen began stonewalling Cecil Smith in the search for Robert Burn’s remains. Smith alerted the politicians back in Australia, who wanted to keep all this out of the newspapers, leading to a second inquiry which was quietly shelved, just as the first one was. And as for Robert Burns’ body? Well, you’ll need to read the book.

Van Velzen has relied heavily on the 790 page report ‘Court of Inquiry: To inquire into and report upon certain matters in connection with the Australian Graves Services’. Bart Ziino’s also drew on this source in his more academic text A Distant Grief (my review here), as did a recent article “Suppressing an ‘undesirable public controversy’: Corpses, the Department of Defence, and the Australian Graves Services, 1919–1921” by Romain Fathi in the most recent edition of History Australia (Vol 19, Issue 3). However, in this longer, and less academic book, Van Velzen draws more heavily on the evidence given to the inquiry in a more conversational style, using it to bolster the varying viewpoints as she moves from character to character. The tone is rather sensationalist, tending to look for good guys and bad guys. However, by locating the inquiry within the very human story of Robert Burns and his grieving father, you as a reader do not lose sight of the fact that it is a young man who has died here, even though the other players in this grubby affair may have.

You are left with a sense that everyone comes out badly here. Perhaps it is just as well that people ‘back home’ did not know, and perhaps there was a justification at the time for keeping it quiet. As is often the way of things, it is deputy heads that roll.

Marianne Van Velzen has written a very readable if populist book, with neat narrative framing around Robert Burns. Your attention is captured anew with each new character, with a satisfying ending, which is not something that you can often say about military books. Its marketing might be a bit sensationalist, but it’s a well-constructed story that uses its sources well in an engaging, but thought-provoking way that emphasizes the human and the political over the military

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Independent Church, Melbourne (now St Michaels). The Burke and Wills statue to the right of the church is in the middle of the intersection, its original location.. It’s a well-travelled statue. SLV image

Churches tend to sprout exhortations of “Peace!” especially at Christmas time, and it’s quite a jolt to read of the bellicose and jingoistic approach taken by the major Christian (and especially Protestant) churches during the First World War.  Michael McKernan’s book Australian Churches at War published in 1980, is based on his PhD thesis and is probably not easy to find today. However, there’s a (relatively) more recent transcript of an interview with McKernan on the now-defunct ABCRN program ‘The Religion Report’ that you might be interested in here.

The 1911 census which was the closest one to the outbreak of WWI showed that 98% of white Australians claimed to be Christians at the time. Only .24% of the population claimed to have ‘no religion’.  One of the immediate responses of the declaration of Australian’s ready involvement in WWI was a call to prayer, and to the churches the people flocked. What they heard there in those early weeks of war was to become the stance of the major Protestant churches throughout the war: the view that the war was God’s way of calling people to the churches for a moral awakening.

It is the argument of this study…that churchmen had synthesised war and Christianity so that support for the war effort became an act of high Christian virtue … churchmen accepted the war as part of God’s providence for the world; through sacrifice, suffering and devotion to duty men would be renewed, lifted to a higher, more thoroughly Christian plane. Their concern was not, primarily, for the welfare of the Empire; rather they hoped that war would transform Australian society. (Ch. 8)

It was this hope for moral transformation through sacrifice that brought the major churches to the forefront in encouraging enlistment, and later conscription.

The Catholic Church, at the start of the war, also encouraged enlistments amongst their parishioners in what they saw, along with the Protestant churches, as a ‘just war’, and as a way of proving their loyalty as part of Australian society.  During the first conscription referendum in October 1916, the Catholic Church hierarchy advised that it was a political matter, and one in which the church would not be involved.  Mannix, still under the authority of Archbishop Carr, spoke out only twice.  One was a three minute speech where after congratulating Prime Minister Hughes for allowing the referendum, he said that Australia had suffered enough. The other occasion was at a fete in Preston on 22 October, where he defended his right to speak, at a secular place, at a secular function and in his personal capacity. This, he said, contrasted with the Protestant laity who spoke from the pulpit, week after week.

However, Catholic opinion hardened against the war by the time of the second conscription referendum on 20 December 1917. This is generally attributed to the influence of the newly ordained Archbishop Mannix, and as a response to the Irish rebellion, but McKernan suggests an additional theological motivation. Once  the Allies had shifted from a position of checking Germany’s aggression to one of  jockeying for economic advantage by destroying Germany’s economy and industry, Mannix no longer considered it a ‘just war’. Moreover, Mannix was enormously popular amongst working-class Catholics, and the laity pushed the church into a stronger anti-war and anti-conscription position.

Chaplains were appointed in accordance with the religious affiliations reported in the 1911 Census. They only had to serve for one year, which gave them a different perspective to that of the troops they served. Some chaplains accompanied soldiers on the ‘voyage only’, others were embedded with ‘their men’, especially in Egypt.  Catholic chaplains maintained their focus on providing the sacrament by ensuring that there was a chaplain available at each point of an injured soldier’s progress through ambulance station and hospital.  Among Protestant chaplains, sectarian lines often became blurred, and instead of  insisting on ‘moral regeneration’ as was the stance ‘at home’, many chaplains came to realize a man, outwardly irreligious, could do good things. Such chaplains were welcomed by their troops and the army hierarchy: those who wanted to maintain the sectarian divisions that were rife back in Australia were given short shrift.

There were exceptions to this generally pro-war stance amongst Protestant churches, but not many.  One of them was Rev Leyton Richards, of the Collins Street Independent Church shown above, who argued for the role of conscience.  Congregationalists, a small number of Methodists, one or two Baptists, Rev Charles Strong from the Australian Church and Rev. F. Sinclaire from the Free Religious Fellowship were among those who spoke out.  The Unitarian congregation, from whom Sinclaire had split, was pro-war (a stance I did not expect).  McKernan notes that pacifists with an appeal to conscience won the tolerance and respect of their fellow-ministers, but not those whose opposition sprang from the political realm, outside the church.  They tended to be ostracized and demoted.

Even when peace was declared, the major Protestant churches had not moved on from the ‘moral regeneration’ stance that they had adopted during the first weeks of the war. The sectarian rigidities that had emerged during the war were to grow even firmer and last for the next fifty-odd years.

McKernan concludes his study thus:

It has been the argument of this book that clergymen never broke themselves clear of the events, never gave themselves the opportunity to see events in perspective so that they were ever reacting rather than acting. Their initial response to the war determined their position until peace was declared… In 1917 and 1918 Australian clergymen took no part in the growing worldwide discussion about a negotiated peace; instead they merely repeated their belief that peace would not come until the nation had reformed. And so they concentrated on reform, personal and national. They were always spectators of the course of the war, fussing with the side issues but refusing to come to terms with the main drama. (p 172-3)

It’s impossible to know, of course, how Christian churches would respond to a world war today, especially one where the ‘enemy’ was not Christian.  As Judith Smart has noted in relation to the pro-conscription women’s movement, it’s not particularly fashionable to look at the conservative, establishment view of WWI. Probably as a reflection of my own politics, while reading this book I found myself bristling at the patronizing moral stance of the major Protestant churches, and cheering those courageous enough to really grapple intellectually and spiritually with the question of war and peace. McKernan does us a service, however sobering, in highlighting just how rare this was.