Endurance and the First World War : Experiences and Legacies in New Zealand and Australia [1 ed.] 9781443868389, 9781443860284

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Endurance and the First World War

Endurance and the First World War: Experiences and Legacies in New Zealand and Australia

Edited by

David Monger, Sarah Murray and Katie Pickles

Endurance and the First World War: Experiences and Legacies in New Zealand and Australia Edited by David Monger, Sarah Murray and Katie Pickles This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by David Monger, Sarah Murray, Katie Pickles and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-6028-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6028-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures and Tables......................................................................... viii Acknowledgements ..................................................................................... x Introduction ............................................................................................... xii David Monger, Sarah Murray and Katie Pickles Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Endurance and First World War Scholarship David Monger Section I: Institutional Endurance Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 14 “I Get Blamed For Everything”: Enduring the Burdens of Office, James Allen as Minister of Defence in 1915 John Crawford Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 31 Enduring Charity: The Red Cross and War Charity Beyond the Great War Margaret Tennant Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 49 Seeing Trauma as Sacrifice: The Link Between “Sentimental Equipment” and Endurance in New Zealand’s War Effort Steven Loveridge Section II: Home Front Endurance Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 66 Challenging Enduring Home Front Myths: Jingoistic Civilians and Neglected Soldiers Gwen Parsons

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Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 86 “What with the War [and] the Epidemic, Times are Altogether Troublesome”: Agency and Endurance in Adolescent Writings Charlotte Bennett Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 103 “I Feel I Can No Longer Endure”: Families and the Limits of Commitment in Australia, 1914–19 Bart Ziino Section III: Battlefield Endurance Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 120 Promotion, a Poisoned Chalice? Paul O’Connor Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 137 Antarcticans and the First World War Katherine Moody Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 155 Enduring Memories: Samuel Hurst Seager and the New Zealand Battlefield Memorials of the Great War Ian Lochhead Section IV: Race and Endurance Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 178 Enduring Silences, Enduring Prejudices: Australian Aboriginal Participation in the First World War Noah Riseman Chapter Twelve ........................................................................................ 196 “An Ideal Life”: Anglo-Indians in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force Jane McCabe Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 215 Picturing the Empire: Enduring Imperial Perceptions and Depictions in British First World War Photographic Propaganda Greg Hynes

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Section V: Memorials Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 238 Endurance, Ephemerality and New Zealand’s 1919 Peace Celebrations Imelda Bargas Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 263 The Material of Remembrance: Their Name Liveth for Evermore? Kingsley Baird Contributors ............................................................................................. 284 Index ........................................................................................................ 288

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES Figures Figure 9.1: Lieutenant Commander Apsley Cherry-Garrard, RNVR, 1915 .................................................................................................. 141 Figure 9.2: Captain Tryggve Gran, RFC, 1917....................................... 144 Figure 9.3: Major Frank Debenham (seated), Canadian General Hospital, Salonika, 1916 .................................................................................. 148 Figure 10.1: Unveiling of the Chunuk Bair Memorial, Gallipoli, 25 May 1925 .................................................................................................. 157 Figure 10.2: Chunuk Bair Memorial and Cemetery, Gallipoli. .............. 162 Figure 10.3: Detail of the New Zealand Division Battlefield Memorial, Messines, Belgium ............................................................................ 164 Figure 10.4: View of the New Zealand Division Memorial at s’Gravenstafel, Belgium................................................................ 166 Figure 10.5: Samuel Hurst Seager, Perspective View of Proposed New Zealand War Memorial at Messines Looking Towards Mount Kemmel............................................................................................. 167 Figure 10.6: Relief sculpture for the New Zealand Memorial, Le Quesnoy, France, in the Paris studio of Félix-Alfred Desruelles ...... 170 Figure 10.7: New Zealand Memorial, Le Quesnoy, France .................... 171 Figure 10.8: Australian Memorial, Lone Pine, Gallipoli, designed by Sir John Burnet ............................................................................ 172 Figure 10.9: Louvencourt Cemetery (Somme), with Cross designed by Sir Herbert Baker ......................................................................... 174 Figure 10.10: Stone of Remembrance (War Stone), British New Buttes Cemetery, near Ypres, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens .................... 175 Figure 12.1: Ernest Hughes .................................................................... 212 Figure 12.2: Richard May....................................................................... 212 Figure 13.1: British artillerymen with a New Zealand trooper, leaning on an 18-pounder shell dump near Bécourt Wood ............................ 223 Figure 13.2: British West Indies troops cleaning rifles ........................... 225 Figure 13.3: King George V and Queen Mary inspecting Indian troops ... 229 Figure 13.4: King George V, with Generals Godley, Plumer, and Harper, inspecting cheering New Zealand troops....................... 230

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Figure 13.5: A member of the New Zealand MƗori Pioneer Battalion conversing with a local woman ......................................................... 234 Figure 14.1: Memorial to beacon fires, Mount Maunganui .................... 240 Figure 14.2: Inscription on memorial to beacon fires, Mount Maunganui ........................................................................................ 243 Figure 14.3: “Peace” tree at Victoria Park (now Temuka Domain) ........ 248 Figure 14.4: Inscription under “Peace” tree at Victoria Park (now Temuka Domain) ..................................................................... 249 Figure 14.5: Le Bons Bay Peace Memorial Library ............................... 254 Figure 15.1: Sir Edwin Lutyens, The Stone of Remembrance (detail), Caterpillar Valley Cemetery, Longueval, France .............................. 265 Figure 15.2: Exhumation of a First World War soldier, Boezinge, Belgium, 16 June 2007 ..................................................................... 270 Figure 15.3: Sir Edwin Lutyens, Stone of Remembrance, Caterpillar Valley Cemetery, Longueval, France ................................................ 273 Figure 15.4: Reninghelst New Military Cemetery, Reninghelst, Belgium............................................................................................. 277 Figure 15.5: Kingsley Baird, Tomb, Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne, France, 2013....................................................................... 279 Figure 15.6: Kingsley Baird, Tomb (detail), Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne, France, 2013.......................................................... 281 Figure 15.7: Kingsley Baird, Tomb (detail), Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne, France, 2013.......................................................... 282

Tables Table 8.1: Rank distribution of soldiers in the Papanui study ................ 127 Table 8.2: Rank distribution of soldiers in the Banks Peninsula study ... 128 Table 8.3: NCO fatalities on Tauranga and Nelson war memorials ........ 129 Table 8.4: NCO fatalities at Messines and Grévillers ............................. 129 Table 8.5: Fatalities for Canterbury Regiment and New Zealand Rifle Brigade, January 1917–November 1918 ........................................... 131 Table 8.6: Proportion of NCO fatalities by battle, 1917–18 ................... 132 Table 8.7: NCO death rates, 1918 ........................................................... 133 Table 12.1: Summary of emigrants to New Zealand .............................. 200

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Colleagues at the University of Canterbury and Canterbury Museum first supported the November 2012 ‘Endurance and the First World War’ conference, and subsequently this volume. At the University we thank Ed Adelson, Robin Bond, Jane Buckingham, Peter Field, Lyndon Fraser, Paul Millar, Judy Robertson and Heather Wolffram. At Canterbury Museum we thank Anthony Wright and Roger Fyfe. Financial assistance for the conference, from Peter Field as Head of the History Department and Canterbury Museum Director Anthony Wright, was greatly appreciated. At the Air Force Museum of New Zealand, the site of the Endurance conference, Simon Moody and Thérèse Angelo provided the perfect venue and professional organisational assistance. We are also grateful to Megan Woods, Member of Parliament for Wigram, who holds a PhD from the University of Canterbury, for opening the conference. The cross-sector collaboration involved in this project, including that between the editors, was a positive effect of the challenging times we faced working in a postdisaster environment. 17 anonymous peer reviewers generously offered timely and insightful advice on chapter drafts. Kate Hunter and Kirstie Ross organized an earlier symposium of First World War researchers in Wellington in 2010 that was the inspiration for this project. We would like to thank Carol Koulikourdi and the team at Cambridge Scholars Publishing for commissioning this volume and for carefully guiding it through to publication. Anna Rogers worked her magic in copyediting the manuscript. We are extremely grateful for the support of New Zealand Chief Historian Neill Atkinson at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage for a grant to support this publication of new scholarship on the First World War. Our families and friends have had to endure this project. The support of Dominic Murray and Mike, Eve, Clara and James McCosker was especially valued.

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Last, and most importantly, our punctual, thoughtful and accommodating authors have participated in the project with dedication and verve: all of this in the wake of the tragic and unsettling Canterbury earthquakes. David Monger, Sarah Murray and Katie Pickles Christchurch, May 2014

INTRODUCTION DAVID MONGER, SARAH MURRAY AND KATIE PICKLES Endurance is an important part of the history of the First World War. As a concept, endurance is wide-ranging and susceptible to multiple interpretations. It may be understood as a form of suffering—people endured physical discomfort, risk, injury and death; people endured mental strain, whether caused by exposure to such risks, anxiety over the safety of friends and loved ones or social and cultural pressures to conform to expectations. It may be interpreted as a question of morale and resilience. Servicemen and women and civilians around the British Empire and in France largely maintained their commitment to the war until its conclusion in 1918, despite grief, war-weariness and disillusionment. On the contrary, in Russia, Italy and, ultimately, Germany, resilience and willingness to tolerate the continuing demands of a modern, industrial, “total” war were eventually exhausted. Endurance is not, however, simply a physical, mental or even collective characteristic. How far did ideas and beliefs endure the challenge of the war? Did people, for instance, remain patriotic, and if so was their patriotism rooted in the same soil it had been before the war began? To what extent did wartime innovations, technological, political or social, endure in post-war society? How much did memory and commemoration mean that the war endured in cultures after 1918? The chapters in this book build on work begun at a November 2012 conference in Christchurch, New Zealand, a city in which endurance has been particularly prominent since the destruction and disruption wrought by major earthquakes since September 2010. The conference brought together researchers from a range of backgrounds: postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers shared their insights with high school teachers, researchers based in museums, libraries, heritage organizations, universities, the New Zealand Ministry for Culture and Heritage and the New Zealand Defence Force. The range of approaches taken to the question of endurance at the conference, and in these chapters, demonstrates the variety and validity of the concept as a means for interpreting the First World War.

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The book is divided into five sections, each containing chapters that address, develop and critique a specific theme of the endurance concept that is comprehensively introduced in chapter one. In Section I, which concerns institutional endurance, John Crawford examines the wartime endurance of Sir James Allen, New Zealand’s Minister of Defence and Acting Prime Minister from 1914 to 1918, Margaret Tennant turns to the voluntary institutional endurance of the Red Cross and Steven Loveridge discusses the role of sentimentality in public and private institutions. Section II considers aspects of endurance on the home front: resilience in the face of adversity, and the disjuncture between official versions of endurance and the realities of everyday coping. Gwen Parsons discusses and challenges home front myths for soldiers and civilians. Using adolescent writing as her source, Charlotte Bennett examines agency and endurance on the home front, extending her analysis to the disastrous 1918 influenza epidemic. Bart Ziino’s chapter reveals the limits of family endurance on the Australian home front. Section III centres on battlefield endurance in this global war. In a detailed local case study, Paul O’Connor considers promotion in the army as a poisoned chalice for some New Zealand soldiers. Katherine Moody uncovers the story of how and where Antarctic explorers served during the First World War. Ian Lochhead writes about the enduring memories created by Samuel Hurst Seager’s battlefield memorials. Section IV concerns the place of racial identities during the First World War. Noah Riseman examines the enduring prejudices surrounding the participation of Australian Aborigines in the war, Jane McCabe reveals the history of a group of Anglo-Indian migrants in military service and beyond and Greg Hynes examines depictions of race in British photographic propaganda. Together, these chapters reveal the importance of strategic and everchanging politics in the construction of race. Chapters in the earlier sections touch on the legacy of the First World War, but Section V makes it the focus, particularly in relation to peace celebrations and memorials. Imelda Bargas writes about New Zealand’s 1919 peace celebrations in the face of enduring hardship. Drawing upon his personal experience in constructing First World War commemorative monuments, Kingsley Baird considers a diversity of material forms. This book extends a thriving scholarship relating to the First World War that has already embraced the concept of endurance, if not always identifying it by name.

CHAPTER ONE ENDURANCE AND FIRST WORLD WAR SCHOLARSHIP DAVID MONGER Endurance has occupied a quiet, yet underlying and central place in the historiography of the First World War. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it has been a common theme in histories of soldiers’ experiences. As Steven Loveridge’s chapter illustrates, decades of research have sought to explain First World War soldiers’ capacity to withstand the dangers, terrors and even tedium of the “prolonged drudgery … with fearful moments” experienced in the “troglodyte world” of trench warfare.1 The range of factors claimed to have kept men going continues to grow with new research. Comradeship has proved a consistent yet changing explanation. In Eric Leed’s view, soldiers coped with the pressures of industrial warfare partly through intense relationships with the men around them, to the exclusion of outsiders, including civilians, from whom they were severed by their extreme experiences.2 For Tony Ashworth, such estrangement partly reflected the establishment of a “live and let live” system in which enemy soldiers informally avoided unnecessary violence towards each other, adding a “cooperative” perspective that civilians lacked.3 More recent accounts, however, have also highlighted ways in which comradeship, alongside things like unit identity and the social life of the military, helped to enhance soldierly endurance. J.G. Fuller’s account of British and Dominion troops made a strong case for the importance of 1

J.C. Dunn, The War the Infantry Knew, 1914–1919: A Chronicle of Service ([1938] reprint ed., London: Abacus, 1987), v; Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1975), ch. 2. 2 Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 3 Tony Ashworth, Trench Warfare, 1914–1918: The Live and Let Live System ([1980], London: Pan Macmillan, 2000), 146–47; see also Richard Holmes, Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (London: HarperCollins, 2004), 528–54.

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sport and leisure as compensations for the enforced separation from civilian life, while acting as “a refresher course in a set of values … of a sort to bolster compliance, stoicism and even confidence”.4 Recent works have also emphasized the value of comradeship for the maintenance of endurance. Alexander Watson’s study of British and German combat motivation acknowledges that, at times, soldiers simply had no choice other than to fight or die, but notes the efficacy of the “social buffering” and structure provided by comradeship among a small “primary group”, while also downplaying the idea of soldiers alienated from civilians and the war itself. Rather, Watson argues, protecting family and home life provided a continuing motivation, despite considerable disillusionment and fatigue.5 Likewise, in an account of the famous “mutinies” of 1917, Leonard V. Smith stresses the contingency of French soldiers’ withholding of service. Though severely antagonized by their conditions, lack of leave and anxieties about home, they were not prepared to push their resistance to combat and military authority to the point of a German victory.6 For Michael Roper, comradeship and sharing among men provided an essential element in their “emotional survival”, alongside the domestic ministrations of junior officers and regular contact from home, particularly from mothers.7 Joanna Bourke emphasizes soldiers’ “bonding”, but also notes men’s desires to maintain their ties with home, and return to it as soon as possible.8 4

J.G. Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), citation at 139. For further arguments about the influence of sport, see J.A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Eliza Riedi and Tony Mason, “‘Leather’ and the Fighting Spirit: Sport in the British Army in World War I”, Canadian Journal of History, 41:8 (2006); David Monger, “Sporting Journalism and the Maintenance of British Servicemen’s Ties to Civilian Life in First World War Propaganda”, Sport in History, 30:3 (2010). 5 Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 66–67, 72–84. On the decision to “fight or die”, see also John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme ([1976] London: Pimlico, 2004), 277–79. 6 Leonard V. Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division during World War I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 7 Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). 8 Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1996), ch. 3; see also Ilana R. Bet-El, Conscripts:

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Not all soldiers, of course, could or did endure the war. Each sought to cope in his own way, whether through comradeship and military social life, retention of links with home or recourse to humour to see off the worst horrors.9 Others succumbed, in varying degrees, to the continuing pressures of exposure to combat, privation, mortal risk and “nameless dread”. In the most severe—and, arguably, most historically familiar— instances such exposure proved unendurable for thousands of “broken” men, who suffered what was commonly, and inaccurately, labelled in Britain as “shell shock”. Despite rapidly being replaced in medical terminology, in modern society the term has taken on a much broader meaning, as a catch-all for immediate psychological incapacity, than it originally had.10 As the most vivid example of the war’s psychological effects, attention to these most extreme cases of mental breakdown arguably masks the more widespread psychological disturbance among those who continued in their combat roles.11 Roper contends that many soldiers suffered from “nameless dread” in response to the extreme fears and realities they encountered. As the chapters by Gwen Parsons and Jane McCabe in this volume attest, though many soldiers remained in their positions, the strain they endured left its mark, sometimes in fully diagnosed medical or psychological problems, at other times in more private circumstances affecting post-war home life.12 Despite efforts to provide civilian soldiers with contact with peacetime culture and society, normal standards of decency and propriety were hard to maintain.13 Forgotten Men of the Great War (2nd ed., Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2003) esp. chs 6 and 9. For evidence of propagandists’ recognition and attempted exploitation of such ideas, see David Monger, “Soldiers, Propaganda and Ideas of Home and Community in First World War Britain”, Cultural and Social History, 8:3 (2011). 9 On this last aspect, see discussions in, e.g., Fuller, Troop Morale; Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, Men at War: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France During the First World War (Oxford: Berg, 1992). 10 Fiona Reid, Broken Men: Shell Shock and Recovery in Britain, 1914–1930 (London: Continuum, 2010), 10, 25–29; Christopher Pugsley, On the Fringe of Hell: New Zealanders and Military Discipline in the First World War (Auckland: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991), 182–84. On the term’s cultural significance, see also Jay Winter, “Shell-shock and the Cultural History of the Great War”, Journal of Contemporary History, 35:1 (2000). 11 Roper, Secret Battle, 247. 12 Roper, Secret Battle, 318, 284–95. See also Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory, and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Marina Larsson, Shattered Anzacs: Living with the Scars of War (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2009). 13 Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 213–16.

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Socially reintegrating soldiers who had experienced industrial warfare was not as simple as collecting their uniform and issuing a train ticket. Governments and societies worried about the return of “brutalized” men— in some cases, perhaps, with good cause.14 However sound of body or mind, veterans needed facilities to help them endure peace.15 For some, at least, the “duration of the war” was not bounded by diplomatic chronology. Servicemen’s endurance has received most attention, but civilians also faced challenges to their ordinary lives in a war that blurred the distinction between soldier and civilian in several ways.16 As Katherine Moody’s chapter on Antarcticans demonstrates, men brought their particular histories to their wartime experiences. In occupied regions, civilians faced submission to the mixed mercies and justices of their occupiers, in some cases following a brutal and violent invasion.17 They were sometimes, as in occupied areas of France, forced to live separately from friends and relatives, sometimes in an alien time zone,18 under the jurisdiction of a hostile and occasionally exploitative enemy.19 Others coped with divided 14

For varied accounts, see George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Jon Lawrence, “Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence, and Fear of Brutalization in PostFirst World War Britain”, Journal of Modern History, 75:3 (2003); Robert Gerwarth, “The Central European Counter-revolution: Paramilitary Violence in Austria, Germany and Hungary After the Great War”, Past & Present 200:1 (2008). 15 Adam R. Seipp, The Ordeal of Peace: Demobilization and the Urban Experience in Britain and Germany, 1917–1921 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). For New Zealand examples, see, e.g., Stephen Clarke, “Return, Repatriation, Remembrance and the Returned Soldiers’ Association, 1916–1922” in John Crawford and Ian McGibbon (eds), New Zealand’s Great War: New Zealand, the Allies and the First World War (Auckland: Exisle, 2007); Gwen A. Parsons, “The Construction of Shell Shock in New Zealand, 1919–1939: A Reassessment”, Social History of Medicine 26:1 (2013), 56–73. 16 See Tammy M. Proctor, Civilians in a World at War, 1914–1918 (New York: New York University Press, 2010) for a broad recent account. 17 John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (London: Yale University Press, 2001). 18 People in occupied France lived on “German time” both literally, since the timezone was changed, and figuratively, as people’s days were punctuated by service to the occupiers’ requirements: Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 1914– 1918: Understanding the Great War (London: Profile Books, 2002), 57. 19 For experiences of occupation, see, e.g. Helen McPhail, The Long Silence: Civilian Life under the German Occupation of Northern France, 1914–1918 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999); Vejas Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front:

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loyalties, such as the “German-English-Belgian” Graeffe family in Brussels, who progressed from Belgian affinity, to attempted mediation between their neighbours and the German occupiers, to eventually taking German citizenship.20 Civilians outside the occupied zones faced increased physical dangers too, as technological advances allowed the shelling or aerial bombing of places supposedly well behind the “home front”, while blockades and the disruption of civilian food supplies also took a serious toll.21 As Section II of this book considers, there was a particular history to the Australasian home front being so far removed from the battlefield. This toll was not only physical and psychological; it infused many civilian societies and cultures with an ethic of sacrifice, obedience to authority and the endurance of hardships and discomforts as matters of virtually unquestionable duty. Civilians in Freiburg, Germany, found their city progressively stripped of materials, including their church bells, for military uses, while the costs of food rose astronomically and rationed alternatives did not always reach them.22 Ordinary people in England grew increasingly restive at the failure to adequately limit the costs of essential supplies, denying them the kind of “moral economy” they expected of wartime society.23 Faced with longer working hours, higher costs of living, Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 1914–1918, chs 2–3; Lisa Mayerhofer, “Making Friends and Foes: Occupiers and Occupied in First World War Romania, 1916–1918” in Heather Jones, Jennifer O’Brien and Christoph Schmidt-Supprian (eds), Untold War: New Perspectives in First World War Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2008). 20 Sophie de Schaepdrijver (ed.), “We Who are So Cosmopolitan”: The War Diary of Constance Graeffe, 1914–1915 (Brussels: Algemeen Rijksarchief, 2008). 21 See, e.g. Peter Loewenberg, “Germany, the Home Front (1): The Physical and Psychological Consequences of Home Front Hardship”, in Hugh Cecil and Peter Liddle (eds.), Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experienced (London: Leo Cooper, 1996); Avner Offer, “The Blockade of Germany and the Strategy of Starvation, 1914–1918: An Agency Perspective”, Holger H. Herwig, “Total Rhetoric, Limited War: Germany’s U–Boat Campaign, 1917–1918” and Christian Geinitz, “The First Air war Against Noncombatants: Strategic Bombing of German Cities in World War I” all in Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (eds), Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Catriona Pennell, A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), ch. 4. 22 Roger Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914– 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. ch. 5. 23 Bernard Waites, A Class Society at War: England, 1914–1918 (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987), ch. 6.

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concerns about loved ones and the possibility, albeit remote, of direct attack, civilians in Britain and elsewhere endured a censorious culture, particularly in the war’s early years, in which leisure, entertainment and sport were criticized as frivolous distractions.24 Young women, either newly employed in factories or released from the stricter confines of domestic service, found themselves objects of hostility for spending some of their wages in the traditionally male pub, and faced repeated calls to fulfil their biological duty by producing more children to increase the birth-rate.25 Soldiers’ wives were expected to trade their separation allowance for strict conformity to wartime society’s moral expectations.26 Women in many countries endured conflicting demands: to take men’s places in the wartime workforce, while remembering their place in the social order as a whole; to maintain war work alongside housework; to “keep the home fires burning”, but with a bucket ready to douse the flames.27 Religious sanction helped to make the war more than simply a matter of great power rivalries and instead one that pitted civilization/Kultur

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See, e.g., John Morton Osborne, “Continuity in British Sport: the Experience of the First World War”, in George K. Behlmer and Fred M. Leventhal (eds), Singular Continuities: Tradition, Nostalgia, and Identity in Modern British Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Jan Rüger, “Entertainments”, in Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (eds.), Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914–1919, vol. 2, A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008); Monger, “Sporting Journalism”, 376–78. 25 See, e.g., Stella Moss, “‘Wartime Hysterics’? Alcohol, women and the politics of wartime social purity in England”, in Jessica Meyer (ed.), British Popular Culture and the First World War (Leiden: Brill, 2008); Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Ute Daniel, The War from Within: German Working-Class Women in the First World War, trans. Margaret Ries (Oxford: Berg, 1997), esp. ch. 4. 26 Emmanuelle Cronier, “The Street”, in Winter and Robert, Capital Cities at War, vol. 2, 90–91. 27 See, e.g., Mathilde Dubesset, Françoise Thébaud and Catherine Vincent, “The Female Munition Workers of the Seine”, in Patrick Fridenson (ed.), The French Home Front, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Berg, 1992); Melanie Nolan, “‘Keeping New Zealand Home Fires Burning’: Gender, Welfare and the First World War”, in Crawford and McGibbon, New Zealand’s Great War; David Monger, “Nothing Special? Propaganda and women’s roles in late First World War Britain”, Women’s History Review (online early, March 2014, and forthcoming in print, 2014).

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against barbarism and godlessness.28 Rejection of or resistance to the war’s demands was not only an affront to notions of equal sacrifice, but also to God.29 Those who resisted the general consensus endured hardships ranging from intense everyday criticism to ostracism, incarceration and, in extreme cases, death. British conscientious objectors could face scorn and hostility from some (though not all) members of appeals tribunals, as well as idiosyncratically varied and shifting application of the rules, particularly before the newly appointed local representatives became familiar with the processes and confident enough to contradict them when an individual case deserved it.30 Some endured lengthy prison sentences, causing serious health problems and one death from influenza brought on, it was claimed, by the poor prison conditions.31 Others, from both Britain and New Zealand, were sent to the Western Front and subjected to military discipline including, in some cases, the passage, albeit followed by swift commutation, of death sentences.32 In Germany, where conscientious objection was not recognized as a viable perspective, men who refused to serve were assessed for signs of insanity.33 These minorities aside, larger numbers of civilians also found their loyalty questioned. The authorities in several nations felt the need to “remobilize” their civilians by 1917,34 while political dissidents were rhetorically or actually charged with treason, no matter how much they might present their views as a different patriotism. Official and unofficial propagandists painted a picture of patriotic conduct against which actions were judged. Those who “failed” 28 See, e.g., Alan Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War (London: SPCK, 1978); A.J. Hoover, God, Germany and Great Britain: A Study in Clerical Nationalism (New York: Praeger, 1989); Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 1914–1918, esp. ch. 5; Allan Davidson, “New Zealand Churches and Death in the First World War”, in Crawford and McGibbon, New Zealand’s Great War. 29 Gregory, Last Great War, ch. 5. 30 James McDermott, British Military Service Tribunals, 1916–1918: “A very much abused body of men” (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). 31 Keith Robbins, “The British Experience of Conscientious Objection”, in Cecil and Liddle, Facing Armageddon, 697. 32 Paul Baker, King and Country Call: New Zealanders, Conscription and the Great War (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1988), 178–90; Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918 (Boston: Mariner Books, 2012), 200–03. 33 Peter Brock, “Confinement of Conscientious Objectors as Psychiatric Patients in World War I Germany”, Peace & Change, 23:3 (1998). 34 See the collection by John Horne, State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), particularly the chapters by Horne and Wilhelm Deist.

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to meet these expectations faced a range of responses, including supposedly constructive criticism, ridicule, insults, threats or violence.35 “Pacifist” became, in some places, a generic and emasculating term of exclusion intended to delegitimize democratic debate, regardless of the critic’s actual views on the war’s validity.36 These economic, social and cultural pressures were exerted on populations in which many people endured daily apprehension for the safety of loved ones. Such anxieties touched people from all walks of life, as the chapters in this collection by John Crawford and Bart Ziino emphasize further. Once their relatives had enlisted for armed services, families endured what Tanja Luckins labels a “cruel purgatory”, beginning with dread before their departure and lasting until they either returned or were confirmed killed,37 or continuing indefinitely because officials could indicate only that someone was “missing, presumed dead”. Families and lovers kept touch as far as possible, going about their daily lives while “waiting and worrying”. If news came that a soldier was wounded, lucky relatives close to the battlefront might have the opportunity and financial means to rush to their side; those in more distant places such as New Zealand or Australia had no such chance.38 And ordinary people’s lives were not only afflicted by their own fears, but often those of decisionmakers. The British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, for instance, carried the weight of his office with that of anxiety for his son, until Raymond’s eventual death on the Somme; his opposition counterpart, Andrew Bonar35 See, e.g., F.L. Carsten, War against War: British and German Radical Movements in the First World War (London: Batsford Academic and Educational, 1982); Serge Berstein, “The Radical Socialist Party during the First World War”, in Fridenson, French Home Front; Paul Ward, Red Flag and Union Jack: Englishness, Patriotism and the British Left, 1881–1924 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998); Brock Millman, Managing Domestic Dissent in First World War Britain (London: Frank Cass, 2000); Millman, “HMG and the War against Dissent, 1914–1918”, Journal of Contemporary History, 40:3 (2005); Jon Lawrence, “Public space, political space” in Winter and Robert, Capital Cities at War, vol. 2; Gwen A. Parsons, “Debating the War: the Discourse of War in the Christchurch Community”, in Crawford and McGibbon, New Zealand’s Great War. 36 David Monger, Patriotism and Propaganda in First World War Britain: the National War Aims Committee and Civilian Morale (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), esp. 133–38. 37 Tanja Luckins, The Gates of Memory: Australian People’s Experiences and Memories of Loss and the Great War (Fremantle: Curtin Books, 2004), ch. 1. 38 Roper, Secret Battle, ch. 2; Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 2.

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Law, maintained his coalition government role despite the death of two sons in combat. Not all families suffered direct bereavements but, arguably, all were touched by a pall of fear and grief.39 Commemoration of the war and its costs began almost as soon as the war itself, in both private and official ways. “Shrines” were rapidly established, whether by local communities proud of their neighbours’ service, or the reverent preservation of a soldier’s bedroom in the family home. Governments, soon aware of the conflict’s momentous scale, took steps to ensure its endurance in public memory by founding museums and commissioning official war correspondents, photographers and artists.40 Memorialization proliferated across the nations involved in the war, as newspapers dedicated pages to “rolls of honour” for local casualties, communities contributed towards a wide variety of commemorative objects, as well as relief funds and charities, and families, particularly mothers, reflected on the loss and sacrifices they had endured.41 Chapters by Margaret Tennant, Ian Lochhead and Kingsley Baird in this volume shed further light on these aspects of commemoration. 39

Trevor Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the Great War, 1914–1918 (London: Polity Press, 1986), 751–55. For another perspective, see Kathryn Hunter, “‘Sleep on dear Ernie, your battles are o’er’: A Glimpse of a Mourning Community, Invercargill, New Zealand, 1914–1925”, War in History, 14:1 (2007). 40 See, e.g., Winter, Sites of Memory, 80–84; Catherine Rollet, “The Home and Family Life”, in Winter and Robert, Capital Cities at War, vol. 2; Jane Carmichael, First World War Photographers (London: Routledge, 1989); Sue Malvern, Modern Art, Great Britain and the First World War: Witnessing, Testimony and Remembrance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004); Andrew Green, Writing the Great War: Sir James Edmonds and the Official Histories, 1915–1948 (London: Frank Cass, 2003); Ken Inglis, “The Anzac Tradition” (1965) and “C.E.W. Bean: Australian Historian” (1970) in John Lack (ed.), Anzac Remembered: Selected Writings of Ken Inglis (Melbourne: University of Melbourne History Department, 1998); Robert Dixon, “Spotting the Fake: C.E.W. Bean, Frank Hurley, and the Making of the 1923 Photographic Record of the War”, History of Photography, 31:2 (2007) and Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity: Frank Hurley’s Synchronized Lecture Entertainments (London: Anthem Press, 2011), ch. 2; Ron Palenski, “Malcolm Ross: a New Zealand Failure in the Great War”, Australian Historical Studies, 39:1 (2008). 41 Winter, Sites of Memory, ch. 4; Gregory, Last Great War, 257–63; Bart Ziino, “Claiming the Dead: Great War Memorials and Their Communities”, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 89:2 (2003); Luckins, Gates of Memory, esp. chs 2–3; Suzanne Evans, Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I and the Politics of Grief (Montreal; McGill–Queen’s University Press; 2007); Claudia Siebrecht, “The Mater Dolorosa on the Battlefield—Mourning Mothers in German Women’s Art of the First World War” in Jones et al., Untold War.

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Efforts to ensure the endurance of memory continued into the post-war world. Towns and cities erected or extended memorials to the dead or missing—often, but not always, soldiers; sometimes conforming to a classical memorial style, sometimes seeking to reflect a specific local or national context. Commemorative sites on the battlefields of the Western Front, Gallipoli and elsewhere were rapidly developed, often under the aegis of the Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission.42 The fifth section of this volume contains chapters that discuss European and New Zealand memorials, and the sense of loss and grief. Vast memorials to the missing like those at Tyne Cot, near Ypres, or Lutyens’s masterpiece at Thiépval, acknowledged the thousands with no known grave, as Kingsley Baird considers in his chapter, which juxtaposes classical and modern styles of commemoration. Many of these sites rapidly became places of pilgrimage for the bereaved and the curious as services sprang up in places such as Ypres to cater to visitors’ needs.43 Ian Lochhead discusses the work of Samuel Hurst Seager in commemorating New Zealand losses on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Far from the battlefields, ceremonies were rapidly established, in the British world, on Armistice

42

See, e.g., Ken Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Carlton; Melbourne University Press, 1998); Nicholas Mansfield, “Class Conflict and Village War Memorials, 1914–1924”, Rural History, 6:1 (1995); Scott Worthy, “Communities of Remembrance: Making Auckland’s War Memorial Museum”, Journal of Contemporary History, 39:4 (2004); Jock Phillips, “The Quiet Western Front: the First World War and New Zealand memory”, in Santanu Das (ed.), Race, Empire and First World War Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Jenny Macleod, “Memorials and Location: Local versus National Identity and the Scottish National War Memorial”, Scottish Historical Review, 89:1 (2010); Katie Pickles, Transnational Outrage: the Death and Commemoration of Edith Cavell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Gavin Stamp, The Memorial to the Missing on the Somme (London: Profile Books, 2006). 43 Annette Becker, “From Death to Memory: the National Ossuaries in France after the Great War”, History and Memory, 5:2 (1993); Bart Ziino, A Distant Grief: Australians, War Graves and the Great War (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2007); Mark Connelly, “The Ypres League and the Commemoration of the Ypres Salient, 1914–1940”, War in History, 16:1 (2009). For discussion of “pilgrimage” in a later context, see Bruce Scates, “In Gallipoli’s Shadow: Pilgrimage, Memory, Mourning and the Great War”, Australian Historical Studies, 33:119 (2002), and Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Jenny Macleod, “The Fall and Rise of Anzac Day: 1965 and 1990 Compared”, War and Society 20:1 (2002).

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Day or Anzac Day, at which a verse of Laurence Binyon’s 1914 poem “For the Fallen” solemnly asserted that “we will remember them”.44 This commitment to remembrance, however, could not specify the forms that it should take. Since 1918, therefore, while we have, indeed, remembered, we have done so in a multitude of ways. There is, arguably, no enduring “memory” of the conflict—different nations, communities and individuals have drawn and sometimes promoted different understandings of its meaning. Some have seen it as the moment at which New Zealand and Australia “became” nations, separating themselves from Britain and claiming their own distinct path, leading to questions about the evolving meanings of Anzac Day.45 In Germany, too, the war played a prominent part in national memory from the Armistice, whether through the immediate repudiation of “war guilt” and the “diktat” imposed at Versailles and the condemnation of the “stab in the back” which played their roles in the rise of Nazism, the Weimar Republic’s attempt, outlined by Vanessa Ther, to reject both the “stab in the back” and the war itself as products of nationalist elites, or the crisis caused in the German historical profession by Fritz Fischer’s reassertion of German culpability for the war’s outbreak and suggestion of a “special path” and expansionist continuity in German aims from Second to Third Reich.46 Dan Todman, rejecting earlier accounts,47 suggests British public memories of the war have undergone several generational shifts, from a period of partial celebration in the 1920s, to the beginnings of rejection around the onset of 44

Laurence Binyon, “For the Fallen” (1914) in John Stallworthy (ed.), The Oxford Book of War Poetry ([1984] Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 209. 45 See, e.g. Keith Sinclair, A Destiny Apart: New Zealand’s Search for a National Identity (Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1986); Jenny Macleod, Reconsidering Gallipoli (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), and “Beckham, Waugh and the Memory of Gallipoli” in Crawford and McGibbon, New Zealand’s Great War; Maureen R. Sharpe, “Anzac Day in New Zealand, 1916 to 1939”, New Zealand Journal of History (1981); Scott Worthy, “A Debt of Honour: New Zealanders’ First Anzac Days”, New Zealand Journal of History, 36:2 (2002); Marilyn Lake, Henry Reynolds and Mark McKenna (eds), What’s Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010); James Curran and Stuart Ward, The Unknown Nation: Australia after Empire (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2010), 197–99; 246–53; Bruce Scates et al., “Anzac Day at Home and Abroad: Towards a History of Australia’s National Day”, History Compass, 10:7 (2012). 46 Vanessa Ther, “‘Humans are Cheap and the Bread is Dear.’ Republican Portrayals of the War Experience in Weimar Germany”; Alan Kramer, “The First World War and German Memory”, both in Jones et al., Untold War. 47 E.g. Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory.

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the Great Depression,48 to a negative reappraisal of the war’s purposes and justification by comparison with the “good” Second World War, to a cautionary tale about the consequences of industrialized warfare in the Cold War era, and to contemporary preoccupations with themes of futility and waste. As first the parents of dead soldiers and then the veterans themselves died, contradiction of what Todman sees as the “myths” of the war resulted in the kinds of cynical modern responses to the war perhaps best evoked by the comedy series Blackadder Goes Forth!.49 Not only has contemporary opinion been largely persuaded of the war’s futility, but the near constant rehashing of familiar examples perhaps encourages groans of protest against the “blood, the noise, the endless poetry”.50 Nonetheless, whatever individual perspectives different historians may have on the evolving memory of the conflict, it seems clear that the war has played an enduring role in the political, economic and cultural understanding of the modern world. Chapters by Charlotte Bennett and Imelda Bargas capture contemporary feelings of futility, while those by Ian Lochhead and Kingsley Baird focus on the post-war construction of meaning. The chapters contained within this collection, therefore, build on an extensive and ever-expanding scholarship covering the war’s relationship to “endurance”. In bringing together work by established and emerging New Zealand and Australian scholars with a specific focus on the concept of endurance, they offer readers both a series of individual reflections and a broader comparative exploration of a theme with considerable potential for further research. They continue a conversation that has endured since 1914.

48 For another interesting assessment of this shift, see Janet S.K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory and the Great War in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. ch. 6. 49 Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon, 2005). For a broader account of generational shifts in the understanding of the war, see also Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 50 Lord Flashheart in “Private Plane”, Blackadder Goes Forth! (1989), in Blackadder: the Whole Damn Dynasty (London, Michael Joseph, 1998), 416.

SECTION I INSTITUTIONAL ENDURANCE

CHAPTER TWO “I GET BLAMED FOR EVERYTHING”: ENDURING THE BURDENS OF OFFICE, JAMES ALLEN AS MINISTER OF DEFENCE IN 1915 JOHN CRAWFORD James Allen is one of the most important New Zealand politicians never to have been Prime Minister. He was effectively Prime Minister William Massey’s deputy in the Reform Government that came to power in 1912 in which he held the portfolios of Defence, Education and Finance. Allen proved to be a capable Minister of Finance and Education, but it was in the Defence area that he principally made his mark. Between 1912 and 1914 he oversaw the development of the Territorial Force and was the driving force behind the establishment of the New Zealand Naval Forces. He also played a pivotal role in New Zealand agreeing to raise and dispatch an expeditionary force in the event of a major war involving the British Empire.1 During the First World War he oversaw the establishment and maintenance of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF). More than 100,000 New Zealanders served overseas with the NZEF, which was commanded by Major (later Lieutenant)-General Sir Alexander Godley. This was a massive commitment by a nation with a population of just over a million. Apart from overseeing the formation of the NZEF in 1914, Allen’s most important contribution to New Zealand’s war effort was ensuring the provision of an adequate number of well-trained 1

Ian McGibbon, The Path to Gallipoli: Defending New Zealand 1840–1915 (Wellington: GP Books, 1991), 194–243; John Crawford, “Should we ‘be drawn into a maelstrom of war’: New Zealand Military Policy on the eve of the First World War” in Peter Dennis and Jeffrey Grey (eds), 1911 Preliminary Moves: The 2011 Chief of Army History Conference (Canberra: Big Sky Publishing, 2011), 118–23.

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reinforcements for the expeditionary force.2 The success of the NZEF was in part due to Allen’s effective working relationship with Godley, a man he respected rather than liked.3

I. Allen the man “Solid and dependable, and staunchly loyal to his party, he is indeed symbolic of all that was best in the conventional world of early twentieth century politics.”4 This was historian A.H. McClintock’s description of Allen and though fair in many ways, it is by no means the whole truth. For a man who came from a rather privileged background, Allen had throughout his life a strongly egalitarian and democratic outlook in both personal and political matters.5 For example, he insisted on cleaning his own shoes as he thought this was something all men should do.6 In 1918, as Minister of Defence, Allen opposed increasing the pay of NZEF officers writing: “I am not in favour of creating great distinctions between officers and other ranks, such as exists in other countries. We are a democratic land and we are compelling every man to do his share.”7 Although he was born in Australia in 1855 and educated in England, Allen was a patriotic New Zealander with a real sense of his adopted country’s distinct national identity.8 He believed that the unity inspired by the war and the sacrifices

2

A.D. Carbery, The New Zealand Medical Service in the Great War 1914–1918 (Auckland: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1924), Appendix B, 537; J.L. Sleeman, “The Supply of Reinforcements during the War”, in H.T.B. Drew (ed.), The War Effort of New Zealand: A Popular History of (a) Minor campaigns in which New Zealanders took part; (b) Services not fully dealt with in the campaign volumes (C) The work at the bases (Auckland: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1923), 1–21. 3 C.R. Allen, “Supplementary Notes on Lois Voller’s thesis on Sir James Allen”, 86, MS-0140/001, Hocken Library (HL); Liverpool to Long, 9 February 1917, Micro MS 616, Alexander Turnbull Library (ATL). 4 A.H. McLintock, The History of Otago: The Origins and Growth of a Wakefield Class Settlement (Dunedin, Otago Centennial Historical Publications, 1949), 687. The most comprehensive account of Allen’s life is L.C. Voller, “Colonel the Honourable Sir James Allen GCMG, KCB, TD, MA Cantab: Statesman”, (MA thesis, University of Otago, 1943). 5 Allen to Fisher, n.d., but 1889, MS Papers 103, ATL. 6 L. C.Voller, “Sir James Allen and the Allen Family”, AG-458-4, HL. 7 Allen to Godley, 15 August 1918, WA252/5, Archives New Zealand Wellington (ANZ). 8 Allen to Godley, 9 March 1915, WA252/1, 19 April and 11 May 1915, WA252/2, ANZ; Ian McGibbon, “Allen, James 1855–1942”, Dictionary of New Zealand

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that it entailed would lay the foundation for New Zealand becoming a ‘great nation’.9 Consistent with this view he attached much importance to the establishment of Anzac Day as an occasion of national remembrance.10 He had, for a man of his generation and background, a caring, if paternalistic attitude towards MƗori. In response to concerns from Godley about how the MƗori Contingent of the NZEF might be treated in Egypt, Allen wrote: I cannot conceive that they are likely to receive any unsatisfactory treatment at the hands of the people in Egypt. Although they are a coloured race I think it will be apparent on their arrival that they are very well trained soldiers, and very different to the ordinary coloured race. Surely if there has been no difficulty with the Indians there should be no difficulty with the MƗoris. The only thing I am afraid of however, is that possibly they may be weaker than the Pakeha in respect to temptations.11

Allen was not afraid of making tough decisions. Late in the war, for example, a furlough scheme for men who had left New Zealand as part of the Main Body of the NZEF in 1914 was introduced. Under the scheme men returned to New Zealand for a period of leave before re-embarking for further service. It soon became apparent, as Allen explained to Massey, that as “soon as men get back here [New Zealand] a very large proportion of them make up their minds that they won’t go back to the front again”.12 Allen responded to this problem decisively by placing severe limits on the numbers to be returned home and by stipulating that Major-General Sir Andrew Russell, the commander of the New Zealand Division, would decide which men could be spared. These arrangements ensured that the military effectiveness of the NZEF was not compromised by the furlough scheme.13 Allen’s capable handling of this matter stands in stark contrast to the shambles that developed over the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force furlough scheme during the Second World War.14 A Biography: Volume 3, 1901–1920 (Auckland: Auckland University Press/Department of Internal Affairs, 1996), 10. 9 Evening Post, 5 August 1915, 3. 10 Otago Daily Times, 26 August 1917, 7. 11 Allen to Godley, 23 February 1915, WA252/1, ANZ. 12 Allen to Massey, 24 June 1918, Allen 1, Box 9, ANZ. 13 Allen to Godley, 2 July, 15 August 1918, WA252/5, ANZ; Poverty Bay Herald, 5 September 1918, 2; New Zealand Herald, 7 September 1918, 6; Otago Daily Times, 25 September 1918, 6. 14 John McLeod, Myth and Reality: The New Zealand Soldier in World War II (Auckland: Heinemann Reed, 1986), 138–55.

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touching letter Allen received from the young children of a soldier who mistakenly thought their father was to be returned home under the furlough scheme is indicative of the pressures under which he worked.15 Allen has sometimes been described as a rather unfeeling, puritanical figure.16 He certainly appears to have lacked tact and had a character that did not invite “much sympathy or ready support”, but beneath a rather austere veneer he was a reasonable and compassionate man.17 In 1916, Allen received a telegram informing him that Private Frank Hughes had been executed for desertion. Hughes was the first member of the NZEF to suffer this fate and upon seeing that Hughes’s next of kin, his mother, lived in Wellington, Allen at once summoned his ministerial car and went to break the news to her personally.18 He was fondly regarded by his personal staff as a highly capable minister and administrator who was also a caring and considerate boss. He always, for instance, found time to personally buy them Christmas presents, “no matter what dreadful pressures of work was on”.19 It was also often alleged that Allen was stubborn, but from an examination of his ministerial record it is clear that he was prepared to change his position if a sufficiently strong case could be made. This is evident in his response to the vexed question of the high rate of venereal disease among New Zealand soldiers. During the early stages of the war Allen believed that the “fear of consequences” would in itself be an effective deterrent and keep the rate of venereal disease at an acceptable level.20 Experience during the war changed his views, and he became a supporter of the issue of prophylactic kits, as advocated by Ettie Rout.21 Massey was adamantly opposed to such measures and in fact both Allen and Russell found that they could not discuss the matter with the Prime 15

Peggy and Mollie Boyd to Allen, 8 August 1917, Allen 1, Box 12, ANZ. Stevan Eldred-Grigg, The Great Wrong War: New Zealand Society in WWI (Auckland: Random House, 2010), 140, 164. 17 Godley to Wilson, 7 June 1916, MS-Papers-737-14B, ATL. 18 Dixon to C.R. Allen, 30 August 1944, “Supplementary Notes” MS–0140/001, HL; Christopher Pugsley, On the Fringe of Hell: New Zealanders and Military Discipline in the First World War (Auckland: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991), 117–18. 19 Dixon to Voller, 9 January 1945, Voller, AG-458-8, HL. 20 Allen to Russell (copy), 28 February 1918, WA252/5, ANZ; Jane Tolerton, Ettie: A Life of Ettie Rout, Auckland, Penguin, 1992, 168–69, 185–86, 201; Bronwyn Dalley, “Come Back with Honour: Prostitution and the New Zealand Soldier, at Home and Abroad” in John Crawford and Ian McGibbon (eds), New Zealand’s Great War: New Zealand, the Allies and the First World War (Auckland: Exisle, 2007), 368. 21 Allen to Russell (copy), 28 February 1918, WA252/5, ANZ. 16

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Minister in a rational way. To get around this problem Allen simply did not tell Massey that he had authorized the distribution of the kits.22 Generally, he was well informed about matters relating to his portfolios and he made no real effort to disguise the fact that he thought he knew more about them than did his critics.23

II. 1915: Allen’s year from hell Owing to a combination of personal, administrative and political misfortunes 1915 may well have been the worst year in Allen’s life. Until the establishment of the coalition administration in August 1915, he retained all three of his portfolios and was obliged to attend a wide range of functions and ceremonies of varying importance. In the space of a few days in mid-December 1914, for instance, he travelled from Dunedin to Wellington and then on to Palmerston North for the prize-giving at the local girls’ high school, before going to Auckland to inspect the MƗori Contingent.24 As a result of legislative requirements and long-standing practice, Allen, like other ministers, was involved in the day-to-day work of their departments to an extent that is hard to imagine today. The Defence portfolio accounted for the great bulk of his tremendous workload. Following the outbreak of war the Defence Department expanded massively to deal with the administrative tasks required to fulfil a military commitment unparalleled in its size and complexity. One of the new sections established was NZEF Base Records, which was responsible for maintaining the records of all personnel and a host of related tasks.25 There were serious complaints about delays and mistakes by Base Records in notifying casualties from the Gallipoli campaign. One couple, for instance, learned that their son had been killed only when they were sent his personal effects.26 At Allen’s direction Base Records was given additional resources and reorganized in a largely successful effort to resolve these

22

Allen to Russell (copy), 28 February 1918, WA252/5, ANZ; Allen to Russell, 19 July 1918, Allen 1/9, ANZ; Tolerton, Ettie, 168–69, 185–86, 201; Dalley, “Honour”, 368. 23 Dixon to C.R. Allen, 30 August 1944, AG-458-8; Dixon to Voller, 9 January 1945, AG-458-4, C.R. Allen, “Supplementary Notes”, MS–0140/001, HL. 24 New Zealand Herald, 15 December 1914, 9. 25 Allen to Godley, 11 May 1915, WA252/2, ANZ; AJHR, 1916, H-14B, 32; Evening Post, 13 August 1915, 3. 26 Colonist, 6 October 1915, 4.

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problems.27 The Defence Department developed in a rather ad hoc manner that required the minister and his key officials to work extremely hard if it was to operate successfully.28 The work was unrelenting and wore Allen down, even though he was a robust, hardworking man. In January 1915, for example, he went down to Dunedin “to try and get a few days rest”, but shortly after he arrived, a telegram came with a request from the British War Office, which obliged him to return to Wellington to consult with senior military officers and ministers.29 During this gruelling year, as his private secretary, later noted, Allen was “working to the point of mental and physical exhaustion day in, day out”.30 There was, naturally, intense public and political interest in virtually all matters relating to the NZEF. Many small issues took up a considerable amount of Allen’s time, such as complaints that gifts sent to New Zealand troops in Egypt were being diverted for sale in markets.31 The questions that caused Allen most difficulty during 1915, however, were related to the camps established to train reinforcements for the NZEF. When the Main Body of the NZEF was raised in 1914 it was mobilized and undertook its initial training at temporary camps established at Auckland, Palmerston North, Christchurch and Dunedin. These camps were neither designed nor intended for long-term occupation. After the departure of the Main Body, semi-permanent camps were established at which reinforcements for the expeditionary force could be trained. By far the most important of these camps was at Trentham near Wellington.32 The consumption of alcohol by soldiers at training camps had been a controversial issue before the First World War and remained so throughout the conflict. Allen was pressured by temperance groups to prohibit the sale of alcohol to soldiers in uniform, to maintain a ban on sales of alcohol in camps and to tighten restrictions on the sale of alcohol generally. On the other side of the debate were those who pressed for the establishment of “wet” canteens that sold alcohol in military camps. Allen took a measured approach. He stressed that the great majority of men acted responsibly and that their freedoms should not be excessively restricted because of the 27

Public Service Commissioner to Allen, 6 December 1915 and related papers, AD1, 23/112, ANZ; Auckland Star, 7 December 1915, 8; Dominion, 8 December 1915; New Zealand Herald, 5 January 1916, 8. 28 Gibbon to Downie-Stewart, 21 June 1916, MS-985-3/13, HL; Liverpool to Godley, 17 July 1918, WA252/8, ANZ; AJHR, 1918, H-19C, 5–14, 63–67. 29 Allen to Godley, 18 January 1915, 12 February 1915, WA252/1, ANZ. 30 Dixon to Voller, 9 January 1945, AG-458-8; Voller, “Allen”, 30–39. 31 Allen to Godley, 12 February 1915, WA252/1, ANZ. 32 Sleeman, “Reinforcements”, 1–4.

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activities of a drunken minority. He declined to impose draconian restrictions but did put in place various limited regulatory measures to address overconsumption of alcohol by military personnel. Allen would not approve the establishment of wet canteens at New Zealand camps or in occupied German Samoa. Pressure from the powerful anti-alcohol lobby may well have driven this decision, but it was also consistent with his personal view that, in general, the consumption of alcohol by soldiers was not desirable.33 As he remarked approvingly to one deputation in March 1915, “the elimination of liquor in the Russian army had positively revolutionized it”.34 Godley established wet canteens in Egypt after the NZEF arrived there at the end of 1914 without any consultation with Allen. The latter made no effort to reverse this successful initiative, even though it was used effectively in New Zealand to attack the government. This stance suggests that although political considerations ruled out wet canteens in New Zealand and Samoa, Allen may well have appreciated that such facilities enabled the military authorities to more effectively control the consumption of alcohol by soldiers.35 Throughout 1915, the recruitment and training policies pursued by the Defence Department were savagely attacked. From early on in the war, Allen and his advisers settled on recruitment and training arrangements designed to ensure that there was always a steady and adequate flow of men to replace the losses suffered by the NZEF. Allen took a particular pride in his role in providing the NZEF with well-trained and disciplined reinforcements. The policy meant that many men who had decided to enlist had to wait for weeks or months before entering camp.36 Critics alleged that this disheartened a significant number of men and was one of the reasons why some regions found it difficult to meet their recruitment targets. They also asserted that recruitment was discouraged by centralising training at Trentham Camp, which had been decided on as the most efficient way of using the limited training resources available in New Zealand. There were strong demands for the establishment of local 33

Allen to Hodder, 22 January 1915, “Record a meeting between a deputation from the New Zealand Alliance, YMCA and other groups”, 17 February 1915 and related papers, AD1, 32/20/1, ANZ; Godley to December 1914, WA 1/4/7a, ANZ; Allen to Godley, 18 January 1915, WA252/1; Liverpool to Godley, 18 February 1915, WA252/8, ANZ; Allen to Godley, 14 February 1915, WA252/1, ANZ. 34 Northern Advocate, 10 March 1915, 5. 35 Godley to Allen, 10 December 1914, Allen to Godley, 23 February 1915, WA252/1, ANZ. 36 Allen to Godley, 26 October 1915, WA252/2; Sleeman, “Reinforcements”, 1–9.

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21

training camps, which would encourage men to enlist. Allen did not at first respond as effectively as he could have to this campaign, probably because he was so overworked.37 Later in the year, however, he took active steps to show the public how successful the New Zealand reinforcements system was. In November, for example, he arranged for the Eighth Reinforcements to parade through Christchurch before they departed for Egypt. In what a local newspaper described as one of the “leading events in the history of the city”, thousands of people turned out to applaud a “magnificent body of men”.38 There was also during 1915 considerable agitation by some politicians and members of the public for an increase in New Zealand’s military commitments, who argued that as many as 50,000 men should be recruited and dispatched overseas as quickly as possible.39 From early in the war Allen had been determined that New Zealand was not going to over commit its manpower resources and he steadfastly resisted any moves in that direction.40 Elsewhere in the empire, for instance in Canada, such sound policy was abandoned in the face of ill-considered patriotic enthusiasm, which led to the wasteful raising of an excessive number of the military units that could not be maintained.41 The most serious problem to confront Allen during 1915 was severe outbreaks of disease at Trentham Camp. In May 1915, when the camp was overcrowded with some 7,000 soldiers, there was a serious measles epidemic, and the situation grew worse in July with an outbreak of cerebro-spinal meningitis that claimed more than twenty lives and led to hundreds of soldiers being hospitalized. On 10 July, more than 5,000 men were evacuated to other camps in the lower North Island or billeted. This radical step broke the back of the meningitis epidemic. Outbreaks of infectious diseases were quite common in military camps during the First World War, but there had clearly been overcrowding at the camp and 37

Auckland Star, 10 July 1915, 4; Paul Baker, King and Country Call: New Zealanders, Conscription and the Great War (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1988), 33–34; Dixon to Voller, 30 August 1944, AG-458-8, HL; Triggs to Allen, 4 December 1915, Allen 1, Box 1, M1/3, ANZ. 38 Press, 15 November 1915, 8, 10 November 1915, 5; Allen to Godley, 11 November 1915, WA252/3, ANZ. 39 Clipping from the Evening Post, 21 September 1915 and other unidentified newspaper clippings, MS Papers 0204–18, ATL; Baker, King and Country, 34. 40 See for example Liverpool to Godley, 30 December 1914, WA252/8, ANZ; Allen to Godley, 14 February 1916, Allen 1, M1/15, ANZ. 41 Robert Craig Brown and Donald Loveridge, “Unrequited Faith: Recruiting the CEF 1914–1918”, Revue Internationale Militaire, 51 (1982): 53–8; Baker, King and Country, 34.

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Trentham’s medical facilities and personnel were inadequate. Although Allen reacted effectively once he realized the seriousness of what was happening at Trentham, there was an outcry, and he and his department were subjected to repeated and vehement attacks in Parliament.42 Many of these and other attacks on Allen were bitter and personal.43 In July 1915, for instance, he wrote that “violent political attacks have been made upon us. I have been told that I am the most hated man in the country. However, my skin is getting very thick.”44 But the aggression took a toll on him. As he told Godley in February, “It is hard to sit here and put up with it all and I sometimes wish I were out of it and in a trench alongside Tommy Atkins.” Allen, who was a retired Territorial Force colonel, is commonly depicted in wartime cartoons in his uniform, and he certainly had a strong sense of duty and saw himself as a soldier doing his bit for New Zealand and the empire in a just war.45 During 1915 he felt besieged: “I get blamed for everything.”46 He remarked on how eager the Opposition are to seize hold of anything in the administration of Defence or any other Department, which can be used for political purposes, and I am persuaded that in the case of most of them their patriotism is skin deep and simply a veneer and that beneath the veneer is the desire to have us off the Treasury Benches. I am sorry to have to write this because it represents a side of New Zealand life which is very unsatisfactory.47

Allen’s son John was in England when war broke out and quickly obtained a commission in the British Army. Of all his six children Allen was probably closest to John and was proud that he had rushed to join the fray.48 Lieutenant John Allen, aged twenty-eight, was killed at Gallipoli on

42

Allen to Godley, 15 and 17 July 1915, WA252/2; Carbery, New Zealand Medical Service, 67–71, 138–40; Auckland Star, 6 July 1915, 6; Free Lance, 23 July 1915, 7; AJHR, 1915, H–19B; Tim Shoebridge, Featherston Military Training Camp and the First World War, 1915–27 (Wellington: Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2011), 3. 43 See for example, New Zealand Parliamentary Debates (NZPD), 1915, vol. 172, 70–71, 94–96. 44 Allen to Godley, 17 July 1915, WA252/2, ANZ. 45 Allen to Godley, 14 February 1915, WA252/1, ANZ; NZPD, 1915, vol. 172, 378–79. 46 Allen to Godley, 23 February 1915, WA252/1, ANZ. 47 Allen to Godley, 11 May 1915, WA252/1, ANZ. 48 Allen to Godley, 12 February 1915, 23 March 1915, WA252/1, ANZ; C.R. Allen, “Supplementary Notes”, MS–0140/001, HL; McGibbon, “Allen”, 10.

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6 June 1915. In his last letter to his father and other family members, written three days before his death, he wrote: I find I ask much less about you all in my letters than the soldiers whose letters I censored. But I think constantly—no day passes without my thinking many times of you all—often I pass in spirit through the rooms at Arana [the Allen family home in Dunedin] … and I pray earnestly for your well-being and happiness.49

John’s death was a terrible blow to Allen, although he gave way to his great feeling of grief in public on only one or two occasions. He learned of his son’s death one morning and after “the first shock and grief of the morning hours … he endeavoured to put aside his private grief by burying himself in the drafting of the first War Pensions Bill”, while the same time carrying on with his demanding ministerial schedule.50 Eighteen months after John’s death, Allen wrote that “we grieve over our losses and simply have to bottle up our grief”. Such tight emotional control was considered socially appropriate and acceptable.51 The loss of his son seems only to have strengthened Allen’s singleminded determination to do all in his power for the Dominion’s war effort. Ten days after John’s death he wrote to Godley: As every Troopship goes away I cannot help feeling sad that I have to remain behind and now that I have lost my soldier son I would that I could take his place. We are endeavouring to bear with fortitude and courage the troubles that are upon us in New Zealand.52

At a national level Allen’s attitude was mirrored by the surge in recruiting prompted by the first heavy casualty lists from Gallipoli and the sinking of the British passenger liner Lusitania in May 1915 by a German submarine.53Allen and Massey were not friends, but generally worked well together, and Allen certainly seems to have had a considerable respect for

49

John to all at Arana and Wairewa, 3 June 1915, Ina Montgomery, John Hugh Allen of the Gallant Company: a Memoir (London: Edward Arnold, 1919), 225. 50 Note by Dixon, “Reaction to (Unfair) Criticism” enclosure to Dixon to C.R. Allen, 30 August 1944, AG-458-8, HL. 51 Allen to Godley, 19 December 1916, WA252/3, ANZ; Kathryn M. Hunter, “Australian and New Zealand fathers and sons during the Great War: expanding the histories of families at war”, First World War Studies, 4:2 (2013), 186, 194–96. 52 Allen to Godley, 16 June 1915, WA252/2, ANZ. 53 Baker, King and Country, 23–25.

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the Prime Minister’s political skills.54 During the later part of 1914 their relationship was put under strain by the fallout from the latter’s support for religious education in state schools. Allen was a devout and active member of the Anglican Church.55 He played a central role in a controversial and unsuccessful effort in mid-1914 to legislate for a referendum on the vexed question of reintroducing religious teaching in state schools. It appears this cost Reform crucial votes in the general election held in December 1914.56 The finely balanced and rather messy aftermath of this general election, which saw by-elections, recounts and court cases, created an unusually politically charged atmosphere that added to the stress Allen was under.57 As W.J. Gardner has noted in his important article on the Massey Government, “Massey at the least deserved credit for his unswerving loyalty to Allen in the teeth of bitter criticism”.58 It is, however, clear that during 1915 the Prime Minister’s loyalty was strained. Although the evidence is somewhat confused, it appears clear that Massey seriously contemplated stripping Allen of the Defence portfolio during mid-1915. In his unpublished biography of his father, Charles Allen states that at the height of the agitation over the epidemics at Trentham Camp Massey sent another member of Cabinet, Sir Francis Dillon Bell, to see Allen with the offer of a knighthood in return for his surrendering the Defence portfolio. Allen replied that in the interests of New Zealand he was prepared to resign, but that he did not wish to receive a knighthood. At this point, according to Charles Allen, the Governor, Lord Liverpool, intervened and insisted that Allen remain Minister of Defence. One of 54

C.R. Allen, “The Political Game”, MS-0140/001, HL; Allen to Bell, 4 May 1923, MS Papers 5210-055, ATL; Allen to Stewart, 10 September 1906 and 7 July 1916, ARC-0164/001, HL. 55 C.R. Allen, “Additional Notes”, MS-0140/001, HL; William Downie Stewart, The Right Honourable Sir Francis H.G. Bell, His Life and Times (Wellington: Butterworth & Co., 1937), 138. 56 Liverpool to Godley, 30 January 1916, WA 252/8, ANZ; Downie Stewart, Bell, 117–18; L.C. Webb, “The Rise of the Reform Party: a History of Party Politics and New Zealand between 1910 and 1920”, (MA Thesis, University of New Zealand, 1928), 136; T.H. MacIndoe, “The 1914 Election in the Otago” (BA (Hons) long essay, University of Otago, 1982), 33–34; Otago Daily Times, 7 November 1914, 13 and 15 December 1914, 6. 57 Liverpool to Godley, 16 December 1914, WA252/8, ANZ; Allen to Godley, 18 January 1915, WA252/1, ANZ; Marlborough Express, 19 July 1915, 4; Anthony Wood, “The Origins of the First National Government: A Study in New Zealand Wartime Politics, 1914–15” (MA thesis, Victoria University, 1963), 129–75. 58 W.J. Gardner, “W.F. Massey in Power, 1912–1925”, Political Science, 13: 2 (1961), 14.

“I Get Blamed For Everything”

25

Allen’s ministerial private secretaries during the war, G.F. Dixon, writing in 1945, recorded a rather different version of the incident based on his recollections and those of another of Allen’s secretaries. In this version Allen went to see Massey, who offered to ensure that he became a Knight Commander of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG) in return for giving up the Defence portfolio. According to Dixon, Massey’s offer was prompted, not by the outcry over conditions at Trentham, but by his desire, for political reasons, to accede to the agitation for the immediate dispatch of large numbers of volunteers overseas. Allen reacted angrily to the offer and told Massey that he would resign from Cabinet rather than lose the Defence portfolio. Massey, it appears, did not wish to lose Allen’s services entirely and withdrew the offer.59 Although there was no public inkling of any moves by Massey to relieve Allen of the Defence portfolio, the Prime Minister’s stance during the negotiations in mid-1915 to form a coalition government lends credence to the accounts set out above. Not until mid-June 1915 did it became clear that Reform had forty-one of the eighty seats in Parliament. Once the outcome of the general election had been confirmed, public pressure grew for Reform and the opposition Liberals to form a coalition government in the interests of the war effort. Late in the month, at Allen’s instigation, a powerful Secret Defence Committee of Parliament was established, chaired by the Prime Minister. Allen and several leading members of the Reform Government were on the committee, along with the Leader of the Opposition, Sir Joseph Ward, and several of his principal supporters. The committee was to have access to all relevant papers, would vote on matters brought before it, and once a decision had been made by the committee all its members would be bound to support that decision in Parliament. The formation of the committee was a useful development, which some observers felt would obviate the need for a full-scale coalition government. This did not, however, prove to be the case and agitation for a coalition continued to grow. Governing with a majority of one also posed significant difficulties for Massey, although the

59

C.R. Allen, “Supplementary Notes”, MS-0140/001; Dixon to Voller, 9 January 1945, AG-458-8, HL. I place particular weight on Dixon’s account because it is so detailed and because of the accuracy of his recollections of other events during this period that are not at all widely known. Charles Allen’s account is somewhat more suspect as it would be expected that any involvement by the Governor would be noted in the latter’s confidential reports to the Secretary of State for the Colonies. It is also unclear why Massey would wish or need to involve Bell in such a matter.

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government’s position was not perhaps as weak as has sometimes been suggested.60 Negotiations on the formation of a coalition government began at the end of June. They came at a very bad time for Allen, bowed down by various issues and mourning the loss of his son. During July, informed observers noted that some of Allen’s colleagues were unhappy with his performance over the Trentham epidemics, and that he had not received the full support of his party when under attack in Parliament. Newspapers such as the New Zealand Herald, which normally supported the government, were also critical of Allen. The coalition negotiations centred on the number of Cabinet seats the Liberals would receive and, in particular, who would be Prime Minister, Minister of Finance and Minister of Defence. The Liberal caucus felt strongly that Allen should be made to give up Defence.61 Some Reform MPs thought that Massey should take the Defence portfolio, but were insistent that Allen should remain Minister of Finance.62 In the course of negotiations the Liberal leader, Sir Joseph Ward, extracted increasingly favourable terms from Massey. In his final offer to Ward before talks broke down, Massey proposed that he should become Minister of Defence and that Allen would retain the Finance portfolio. When negotiations reached an impasse at the end of July Lord Liverpool intervened. He arranged a conference with Massey and Ward at which they all agreed that a new general election was not in the national interest and would, in particular, harm the Dominion’s war effort. After further negotiations, a coalition agreement was reached in early August 1915. Massey was obliged to give Finance to Ward, who also became a de facto co-Prime Minister, and to agree to a Cabinet with six Reform and six Liberal members. The deal also required that all Cabinet decisions be unanimous. In the new administration, which was known as the National Government, Allen was left with only the Defence portfolio, an outcome that seems to have satisfied him.63 60

Dominion, 26 June 1915, 3, 6 and 5 July, 1915, 8; Bruce Farland, Farmer Bill: William Ferguson Massey and the Reform Party (Wellington: The Author, 2008), 217–18; Michael Bassett, Sir Joseph Ward: A Political Biography (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1993), 222. 61 New Zealand Free Lance, 16 July 1915, 22; Marlborough Express, 19 July 1915, 4; Wood, “Origins”, 187–88, 201; Bassett, Ward, 222–23. 62 Liverpool to Godley, 11 August 1915, WA 252/8, ANZ. 63 Liverpool to Godley, 11 August 1915, WA252/8, ANZ; Wood, “Origins”, 176– 218; Webb, “Reform”, 144–50; Downie Stewart, Bell, 118–21 Gardner, “Massey in Power”, 10–13, Bassett, Ward, 222–25; James Watson, WF Massey New Zealand (London: Haus Publishing, 2010), 48.

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27

The structure of the new coalition National administration and, in particular, the need for unanimity made the efficient operation of government markedly more difficult. One Reform minister described it as “cumbersome in action and perpetually agitated by intrigues and dissensions”.64 Allen, however, adapted well to the new government arrangements and proved able to work effectively with most, if not all, of his Liberal colleagues.65 Allen’s experiences during 1915 certainly left a mark on him. His relations with Massey and his other Reform colleagues appear to have been strained. In January 1916, for instance, Lord Liverpool, described Allen as “a most difficult man to handle, and certainly most unpopular … suspicious of everyone, his colleagues not excluded”.66 Nevertheless, Allen put the crises of that year behind him and continued to play a central part in New Zealand’s war effort.

III. James Allen and the New Zealand war effort 1916–18 The first major issue the National Government had to deal with was the need to introduce conscription to ensure an adequate flow of reinforcements to the NZEF. In dealing with this complex and controversial issue, Allen displayed his usual capacity for hard, detailed work and good sense. The Military Service Bill allowing for conscription, which Allen introduced in May 1916, was generally regarded as a wellthought out and comprehensive piece of legislation. One of his Liberal Cabinet colleagues, George Russell, who was no friend of the Defence Minister, told Parliament that he had never seen a bill so carefully prepared, examined and revised before it was introduced. Allen saw conscription as having one objective, “to win the war”: “the most just, the most democratic—and I emphasize the word democratic—the most scientific, and the surest way to secure the necessary men to win the war would have been compulsory national service right from the start.”67 64

As quoted in Downie Stewart, Bell, 120. Allen to McKenzie, 21 September 1915, Allen Papers, Miscellaneous Correspondence, File Number One, as Quoted in Bassett, Ward, 227; Allen to Downie Stewart, 7 July 1916, ARC–0164/001, HL; Erik Olssen, “Towards a Reassessment of WF Massey: One of New Zealand’s Greatest Prime Ministers (Arguably)”, in James Watson and Lachy Paterson (eds), A Great New Zealand Prime Minister? Reappraising William Ferguson Massey (Dunedin: Otago University Press), 2011, 24. 66 Liverpool to Harcourt, 23 January 1916, as quoted by Bassett, Ward, 227. 67 NZPD, 1916 vol. 175, 486; Baker, King and Country, 86–89, 92. 65

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During the committee stage of the passage of the bill, Allen introduced an amendment that specifically recognized religious belief as a basis for exemption from conscription, but this proposal was rejected by the House of Representatives.68 Under the leadership of Sir Francis Dillon Bell, however, the Legislative Council inserted such a provision. This initiative was rejected by the lower house. A stalemate then ensued, which was broken only when both houses agreed to a compromise under which religious belief was accepted as grounds for arguing for an exemption, and the alternative service to be undertaken by men who were exempted was expanded to include service beyond New Zealand in the NZEF’s Medical or Army Service Corps.69 Allen’s position was driven by his own deeply held beliefs. In a letter to General William Birdwood, the commander of the Australian Imperial Force, Allen remarked that he was “astonished to see how many people there are who have no consideration for the conscience or religious principles of others”.70 From late 1915, there had been discussion of the idea that the empire’s political leaders should meet in London. Initially Massey and Ward were not keen on travelling to Britain, partly because Allen was so unpopular with the Cabinet and in the country at large owing to his support for religious education in state schools and the controversies relating to the NZEF that it seemed unwise to leave him in charge.71 As time passed, however, it became clear that the National Government was more robust than it had first appeared, that Allen’s popularity was increasing and that he could successfully take on the role of acting Prime Minister.72 Massey and Ward slipped out of New Zealand late in August 1916 and did not return until late June 1917. Over the life of the National administration they would spend nearly two years overseas, during which time Allen proved an effective acting Prime Minister able to deal successfully with a range of thorny issues and to keep a fractious Cabinet working.73 68

NZPD 1916, vol. 175, 693–94; Baker, King and Country, 172–73. Baker, King and Country, 172–73; Downie Stewart, Bell, 127–29. 70 Allen to Birdwood, 10 July 1916, Allen 1/9, ANZ. 71 Bassett, Ward, 231–32; Allen to Triggs, 8 December 1915, Allen 1/1, M1/3, ANZ. 72 Gibbon to Downie Stewart, 21 June 1916, MS-985-3/13, HL; Allen to Downie Stewart, 7 July 1916, MS-985-2/3, HL; Godley to Wilson, 7 June 1916, WA 252/6, ANZ. 73 Governor to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 27 June 1917, CO209/292 (copy), ANZ; Liverpool to Long, 24 April 1917, Micro MS 616, Reel 2, ATL; Furby to Massey, 16 April 1917, paper (notes on agreement), 20 April 1917, Allen to Massey, 26 April 1917, Allen 1/9, ANZ. 69

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The most significant issue to face Allen during his first period as acting Prime Minister was the actual introduction of conscription. Before this was put into effect in November 1916 a whole range of administrative tasks had to be completed, including such key measures as the preparation of the roll of men liable for conscription and arrangements for conducting ballots. The imposition of conscription affected virtually every aspect of New Zealand life and created many problems for the government. Some of these were minor, such as Lord Liverpool’s objections to the conscription of his butler or in fact any of his staff.74 Some, such as the opposition from trade unions and the furore over the conscription of some classes of Roman Catholic clergy, were significant and occupied much of Allen’s time. He deplored the rising tide of sectarianism in New Zealand and dealt with the concerns of the Roman Catholic Church in a reasonable and honest fashion.75 In general, the comparatively smooth and efficient introduction and operation of conscription in New Zealand owed much to Allen’s careful work and good sense.76

IV. Conclusion As the war progressed there was increasing recognition of the valuable contribution Allen was making. In February 1917, for instance, an editorial in the Otago Daily Times commented: Upon no person in New Zealand has the war thrown heavier responsibilities than those that have been cheerfully borne by the Minister who, as the political head of the Defence Department, has … been performing a task that might fairly be described as Herculean.77

Allen has been described as being “more of an administrator than a politician”, but it is more appropriate to consider him, as he saw himself, as a soldier doing his duty.78 He was convinced of the justness of the 74

Allen to Massey, 12 May 1917, Allen 1/ 9, ANZ; Baker, King and Country, 107– 15. 75 Allen to Massey, 19 December 1916, 17 March 1917, Allen 1, Box 9, ANZ; Baker, King and Country, 102–10; P.S. O’Connor, “Storm over the Clergy—New Zealand 1917”, Journal of Religious History, 4, 2 (1966), 129–48. 76 Baker, King and Country, 228–30; Margaret Levi, Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 116–17, 123–33. 77 Otago Daily Times, 13 February 1917, 4; Godley to Wilson, 7 June 1916, MSPapers-137, ATL; illegible to Stewart, 21 Jun 1916, ARC–0164/001, HL. 78 Baker, King and Country, 34; NZPD, 1915, vol. 172, 378–79; C.R. Allen, “Supplementary Notes”, MS-0140/001, HL.

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British Empire’s cause and determined that both he and New Zealand would do their duty.79 His single-minded commitment to winning the war led him into conflict on several occasions with Massey who, like Ward, was committed to winning the war but continued to place significantly more emphasis on political considerations.80 These strongly held convictions, combined with Allen’s capacity for hard work, managerial competence and good sense, were crucial in ensuring that New Zealand efficiently mobilized its manpower and other resources and was in consequence able to make a disproportionate contribution to the British Empire’s war effort.81 It has been argued that the extent of New Zealand’s war effort went beyond what was consistent with its national interest, and this argument does have some force, but there can be no doubt that the great majority of New Zealanders supported it.82 Although Allen came through the trials and tribulations of 1915 and successfully endured the burdens of office, by the end of the war he was physically and mentally exhausted. He was keen to retire from politics, which he did in 1920. Although he was proud of what had been achieved by New Zealand, and the role he had played, he knew all too well the price his family and the country as a whole had paid for their involvement in what he described in February 1915 as “this terrible war”.83 After the Armistice he sadly told a friend, “I suppose there are many mothers in New Zealand who think that I sent their sons [away] to die.”84

79

See for example Allen to Perkins, 18 December 1916, Allen 1/5, N2/61/1, ANZ. Liverpool to Godley, 17 July 1918, WA252/8, ANZ. 81 Liverpool to Long, 28 December 1917 [copy], Micro-MS-616, ATL; Liverpool to Godley, 17 July 1918, WA 252/8, ANZ; Baker, King and Country, 228–30. 82 James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000 (Auckland: Allen Lane, 2001), 109–12. 83 Allen to Godley, 12 February 1915, WA252/1, ANZ; Allen to Gunson, 18 December 1918, Allen 1/5, M2/90, ANZ; James Allen, “New Zealand in the World War” in J. Holland Rose, A.P. Newton, E.A. Benians (eds), The Cambridge History of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), vol. VII, part II, 225–41. 84 C.R. Allen, “Supplementary Notes”, MS-0140/001, 86, HL. 80

CHAPTER THREE ENDURING CHARITY: THE RED CROSS AND WAR CHARITY BEYOND THE GREAT WAR MARGARET TENNANT While the concept of “endurance” signifies forbearance and longsuffering, it also opens up the notion of legacies: continuing qualities, beliefs and structures. “Forbearance” during wartime is relevant to war charity, for in such conditions involvement in charitable activity could be all-consuming, long sustained and not without personal cost. In New Zealand it was claimed that leading charity workers, such as Wellington Mayoress Jacobina Luke, almost destroyed their health in pursuing their voluntary work, working day and night for the war effort.1 In other countries, too, the competitive and almost obsessive nature of wartime voluntary work was noted, as some individuals subsumed grief and anxiety and found consolation in communal enterprise. Involvement in war charity was one way of “keeping up”, personally and publicly, in the face of loss, or fear of loss.2 This chapter focuses on the post-war organizational persistence of a body heavily associated with wartime responses. It uses the example of the Red Cross, which began in the 1860s as an international humanitarian

1

New Zealand Truth, 30 March 1918, 2. See for example Bruce Scates, “The Unknown Sock Knitter: Voluntary Work, Emotional Labour, Bereavement and the Great War,” Labour History, 81 (November 2001), 29–49; Sarah Glassford, “Marching as to War: the Canadian Red Cross Society, 1885–1939” (PhD diss., York University, Toronto, 2007), 266– 7; Peter Grant, “‘An Infinity of Personal Sacrifice’: The Scale and Nature of Charitable Work in Britain During the First World War,” War and Society 27:2 (2008), 67–88.

2

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reaction to the casualties of battle, assisting sick and wounded soldiers.3 The organization gained enormous international prestige during the Great War, extending its activities to prisoners of war as well as the wounded, and establishing a presence even in countries, like New Zealand, that were far from the main theatres of war. This chapter considers how an organization that grew out of war, quickly gaining the allegiance of voluntary workers and generating vast amounts of money and materials under the umbrella of its distinctive and prestigious emblem, managed to claim a space within the post-war constellation of social services. More particularly, it examines the New Zealand context of a country not directly affected by post-war disorder and reconstruction. Some of the issues underpinning these themes were international in scope; others were distinctive to New Zealand and to the place of the voluntary sector in a small country with a relatively strong and centralized state. Internationally, war charity has come under scrutiny as part of a wider resurgence of interest in the voluntary sector over the past twenty years, much of it concerned with challenging the notion of a decline in voluntarism from some nineteenth-century “golden age”. Those questioning the notion of decline instead emphasize renewal and adaptation, and a constant reconfiguration of the relationships between the state and the voluntary sector.4 The Great War has been seen as a crucial stage in this process: in Britain, for example, pioneering forms of fundraising emerged, along with closer state oversight of charity and women’s massive involvement in its various forms. It has even been argued that the strength of social capital evident in wartime Britain, and

3

This paper draws upon research for a larger history of the New Zealand Red Cross, due for publication in 2015. 4 A key work is Geoffrey Finlayson, Citizen, State, and Social Welfare in Britain 1830–1990, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.) On Australia, see Melanie Oppenheimer, Volunteering. Why We Can’t Survive Without It (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008) and All Work and No Pay. Australian Civilian Volunteers in War (Walcha, NSW: Ohio Productions, 2002). For New Zealand, see Margaret Tennant, The Fabric of Welfare. Voluntary Welfare and Government in New Zealand 1850–2005 (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2007). Canadian work includes Peter Elson, “A Historical Institutional Analysis of Voluntary Sector/Government Relations in Canada” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2008). For a succinct and more recent discussion of the literature see Matthew Hilton and James McKay, “The Ages of Voluntarism An Introduction”, in Matthew Hilton and James McKay (eds), The Ages of Voluntarism. How We Got to the Big Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1–26.

Enduring Charity

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limitations on the degree of state control exerted over it, gave Britain “a distinct edge over Germany”.5 In other countries, including New Zealand, the First World War was associated with a surge of spontaneous voluntarism from which the Red Cross was a major beneficiary: “mass wartime killing was paradoxically accompanied by an outpouring of organized aid work.”6 The war represented an important moment in the evolution of many organizations with an international presence, often encouraging a more national focus and enduring organizational structures.7 There were 38 national Red Cross or Red Crescent societies in 1914, but in the “great sprawling world of the Red Cross national societies” their size and relationship with the state varied.8 The international Red Cross principles with which these societies were aligned, especially neutrality and impartiality, confronted huge challenges in the face of nationalistic wartime patriotism.9 One need in the post-war era was to reconnect the Red Cross “movement”, as it was tellingly but sometimes optimistically termed, with a transnational agenda that came to include “peacetime” goals and activities. This agenda required the “communities of the bereaved” who shared in the intensely personal and local experience of loss to move beyond the individual and national ramifications of their mourning and translate it into wider action for a better post-war world.10

5

Peter Grant, “Voluntarism and the impact of the First World War”, in Hilton and James (eds), The Ages of Voluntarism, 46. 6 Heather Jones, “International or Transnational? Humanitarian Action During the First World War”, European Review of History, 16:4 (2009), 697. 7 A point made by Jon Weir with regard to the Canadian and American YMCA organizations: “The YMCA at War”, accessed 26 July 2013, http://www.vahs.org. uk/2013/04/feature-4/. On the Australian and Canadian Red Cross societies respectively during the Great War, see Oppenheimer, ch. 3, and Glassford, “Marching as to War”, chs 3–7. 8 Caroline Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream. War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross (London: HarperCollins, 1998), 175, 381. 9 Jones, “International or Transnational?”, 702, argues that Red Cross organizations operated largely as an integral part of national war efforts. 10 On communities of mourning and efforts to find collective solace after 1918, see Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). In providing a searching service and, later, information on soldiers’ grave sites, Red Cross volunteers provided a mechanism to assist with mourning; the greater challenge was to translate mourning into constructive social action within and beyond national boundaries.

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The reputation of the Red Cross before the Great War underpinned its very strong claim on public sympathies in New Zealand during the conflict, and its ability to last beyond the war years. The Red Cross had a compelling foundation story that was reiterated throughout its history. It took the organization back to the Battle of Solferino, part of the wars of Italian unification, in 1859. Seeking an interview with the French Emperor Napoleon III, a Swiss businessman, Henri Dunant, stumbled across the aftermath of the battle between the French and Piedmontese forces, on the one hand, and the Austrians on the other, and was appalled by the suffering he saw. Dunant set about enlisting local civilians in an effort to assist the largely neglected wounded forces, providing them with water, cleansing their wounds and making the dying as comfortable as the minimal resources would allow. It was three years before Dunant could compile his “painful recollections” into a book he called A Memory of Solferino, which contained an account of the battle, a description of efforts to assist the wounded and the suggestion of voluntary societies organized to bring aid and relief to those injured in battle.11 The impact of Dunant’s memoir was huge, and it resulted in the formation of a committee of five Swiss gentlemen in Geneva—the beginning of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)—a meeting of representatives from leading European states and, eventually, the signing of the first Geneva Convention in 1864. The convention enshrined the principles of care for the sick and wounded regardless of nationality; neutrality for those assisting them, and for the ambulances and hospitals in which they did so; and recognition of the Red Cross (the emblem on the Swiss flag reversed) as the symbol of this neutrality. There is a substantial literature about why countries signed up to the principles of the Red Cross so rapidly in the late nineteenth century, and political and strategic considerations feature as much as humanitarian principles and concern for wounded soldiers.12 Nonetheless, the Red Cross could present itself as no ordinary entity: it was a “movement” with high humanitarian 11

J. Henry Dunant, A Memory of Solferino (London: Cassell & Co. for British Red Cross Society, 1947) (translated from the French of the first edition, 1862). For further on the formation of the Red Cross see Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream, chs 1– 2; Angela Bennett, The Geneva Convention. The Hidden Origins of the Red Cross (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, Phoenix Mill Thrupp, 2005). 12 See especially John Hutchinson, “Rethinking the Origins of the Red Cross,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 63:4 (2009), 557–578 for an argument that suggests the Red Cross helped to “militarize charity” and that national societies were more about assisting the nation at arms than about transnational humanitarianism.

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principles and an organized cohort of voluntary workers. The Red Cross had a strong international presence at the start of the Great War, and its emblem was very widely known—so much so that in New Zealand it was being misappropriated for a whole range of advertising purposes. New Zealand newspaper advertisements promoted “Red Cross” pharmacies, ointments and pills; there was even a “Red Cross sling” for hoisting prostrate cows.13 The consolidation of the British Red Cross in the 1900s was particularly significant for New Zealand, though Britain was never the most enthusiastic supporter of the ICRC, considered by some a suspiciously “continental” body.14 In 1914 there was a British Red Cross organization, which worked under a Joint Council with the St John Ambulance Association for wartime work. It had strong royal endorsement, Queen Alexandra specifically appealing to women throughout the empire to assist her in carrying out this “great scheme, which is essentially women’s work.”15 Royal involvement with the British Red Cross, and donations by royalty to Red Cross relief throughout Europe, were assiduously recorded in the colonial press, giving respectability and a mandate for involvement. The Crown’s vice-regal representatives were to play a significant role in developing or endorsing Red Cross societies across the British world.16 New Zealand lacked a Red Cross organization at the start of the war, though St John had been active since 1875. An appeal in August 1914 from a former Governor, Lord Ranfurly, prompted a whole range of “Red Cross” committees, some of them branches of other organizations such as St John and the various patriotic bodies that had emerged. There were at least 54 patriotic bodies containing the name of the Red Cross in an official list from 1918, but many other patriotic groups also raised funds for Red Cross purposes. Some of the 54 were identified simply as “funds” associated with such other bodies as the Victoria League, but other titles implied greater organizational formality around the Red Cross as an entity 13

Hawera and Normanby Star, 8 July 1910, 2. For further on this see James Crossland, “Expansion, Suspicion and the Development of the International Committee of the Red Cross: 1939–45”, Australian Journal of Politics and History 56:3 (2010), 381–92. 15 James Magill, The Red Cross. The Idea and its Development (London: Cassell & Co., 1926), 31–2, 40. 16 In the Australian context, the Vice–Regal consort, Lady Helen Munro Ferguson, was hugely influential in promoting and turning the Red Cross into a national organization: see Melanie Oppenheimer, “‘The Best P.M. for the Empire in War’: Lady Helen Munro Ferguson and the Australian Red Cross Society, 1914–1920,” Australian Historical Studies, 119 (2002), 108–124. 14

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in its own right.17 For example, the Nelson Red Cross, formed early in the war, took some four years to establish a “simple set of rules” providing for an annual meeting and election of officers, but it had nonetheless raised more than £22,000 despite its previously loose structure. The executive, as a consequence, was reported to contain a higher proportion of men, despite the earlier fundraising being “almost wholly women’s effort”.18 Ultimately, this superimposing of Red Cross activity on a range of existing voluntary initiatives ensured that it would have a problematic path to independence. New Zealand was said to have “taken the Red Cross to its heart in a remarkable way, and from the beginning of the war, while raising millions for other funds … maintained its Red Cross contributions at a high and ever-ascending level”.19 Much of this success was due to what would now be termed the Red Cross “brand”. The symbol of the red cross on a white background was powerful and easily recognized, providing a touch of glamour when reproduced on the aprons worn by nurses and volunteers, or on fundraising flags. Maternal qualities of tenderness and love were attributed to the organization: potential donors were asked to imagine sons and husbands “lying on beds of sickness in far distant lands, maimed, wasted, lonely”, buoyed and cheered by one thing only: “the sacred symbol of the Red Cross on a woman’s breast.”20 The rhetoric was most powerfully captured in the slogan of the “Greatest Mother in the World” in a now famous poster by the American artist Alonzo Foringer. The wording attached to the image of a nurse cradling in her arms a wounded soldier was a veritable paean to the care, effectiveness and female identity of the Red Cross: Seeing all things with a mother’s sixth sense that’s blind to jealousy and meanness: helping the little home that’s crushed beneath an iron hand by showing mercy in a healthy, human way; rebuilding it, in fact, with stone on stone and bringing warmth to hearts and hearths too long neglected. … She’s warming thousands, feeding thousands, healing thousands from her store; the Greatest Mother in the World—the RED CROSS.21

17

Patriotic Funds, Appendices to the Journals, House of Representatives (AJHR), 1918, H-46, 4–15. 18 The Red Cross, July–August 1918[?], Alexander Turnbull Library (ATL), MicroMS-0771: New Zealand Red Cross Society: Nelson Centre, Newspaper Cuttings, 1916-18. 19 Colonist, 11 September 1918, 4. 20 New Zealand Red Cross Record, 16 October 1918, 3. 21 Unidentified cutting, 1918, Alexander Turnbull Library (ATL), Micro-MS-0771: New Zealand Red Cross Society: Nelson Centre, Newspaper Cuttings, 1916-18.

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During the war huge amounts of fundraising occurred in the name of the Red Cross, the mechanisms for extracting money following common formulae. Many gave an excuse for light-hearted fun in the otherwise sombre context of war.22 There were queen carnivals—for which there was a veritable craze in 1915, especially—raffles, street collections, copper trails, flower days, stalls and bazaars, art unions, concert parties and mock courts. Elite social activities avoided any taint of frivolous diversion if they were reformulated as “Red Cross” tennis and tea parties, golf competitions and soirees, as long as attendance generated funds for the cause. Following other parts of the empire, the Red Cross distinguished itself from other patriotic appeals by initiating an “Our Day” collection in 1916. In Wellington groups as varied as the Returned Soldiers’ Association (RSA), the School Committees’ Association, the Tramways Union, Fire Brigade and Harbour Board personnel, Boy Scouts and the staff of various department stores decorated and staffed the various stalls, supplied refreshments and waved collection boxes. As in other centres, Wellington’s Our Day culminated in a procession. One report characterized the event as one where all sections of the community worked “as one great family” in a “splendid spirit of goodwill”.23 The “Our” in Our Day involved an imperial family; a unity of effort that crossed national boundaries, with funds being sent to the British Red Cross. Counterbalancing the high profile and high spirits of the fundraising event was the more constant effort of the Red Cross shop and depot. Here efficiency was the operative word: in the words of Sir Frederick Treves, head of personnel for the British Red Cross, “It is the primary business of the Red Cross societies to organize the generosity of the country, economise it, direct it into proper channels, and to prevent the waste of energy which is inevitable when no system of control exists.”24 In extensive operations, various Red Cross depots parcelled out materials and received back such made-up necessities as bandages, garments, hot water bottle covers, face cloths and surgical veils. Detailed instructions were issued, many of them originating with the British Red Cross. In the Red The image and phrasing are from the famous American poster by A.E. Foringer: see Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream, 243. 22 For a more general discussion of charitable fundraising events in New Zealand, including a case study of First World War carnivals, see Margaret Tennant, “Fun and Fundraising: the Selling of Charity in New Zealand’s Past”, Social History, 38 (2013), 46–65. 23 New Zealand Red Cross Record (initially Canterbury Red Cross Record), 23 November 1917, 19; 15 January 1917, 21. 24 New Zealand Red Cross Record, 26 April 1917, 19.

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Cross Record of April 1916, for example, “Instructions to Workers” gave detailed guidance on the construction of a “cholera belt”, along with notes on bandage making—varieties, dimensions, cleanliness, “plucking” (removing loose ends) and packing. By the end of the war advice on the knitting of stump socks featured, including the size of needles and gauge of wool required—only the most experienced knitters were to attempt these items of tragic delicacy.25 This was production-line charity, connected to a wider international enterprise and distribution networks but nearly always mediated through the British Red Cross. The link with Britain was to remain stronger than that with Geneva until the end of the Second World War: New Zealand’s Red Cross activities were very much part of an imperial transnationalism.26 As noted at the start of this chapter, underpinning the drive for efficiency was the “emotional labour” of war work and the networks of caring that were intrinsic to the committees, knitting circles and packing depots where women came together to work for organizations such as the Red Cross. As the “Greatest Mother in the World” the Red Cross generated such verses as the “Song of the Red Cross”, which exploited the appeal to emotions: Where the boys are lying wounded In their cots or battle plain, They are thinking of their mothers, Longing for their homes again. We can lighten all their suff’rings By the comforts that we send; And we’ll never give up helping Till this war is at an end.

“We may not fight,” the women workers were told, “but our hands can do their share”: “We can knit and sew as the sad days go, that the loved may feel our care.”27 Mostly there was unity and work towards a common cause, but there were hints of later strife. Despite periodic attempts to prevent the unauthorized use of the emblem and name of the Red Cross, it was noted 25

New Zealand Red Cross Record, 14 August 1916, 14; 27 August 1918, 18. Jones, “International or Transnational?” explores the complexities of national identification within a supposedly neutral transnational organization. For discussions of “imperial transnationalism” see Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine and Frank Trentmann (eds), Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism c.1880–1950 (Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 27 New Zealand Red Cross Record, 26 April 1917, 19. 26

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that, during and after the war, “persons engaged in [humanitarian] activities … felt themselves free to use the words without compunction for anything from a jumble-shop upwards”.28 The Red Cross Record expressed concern that not all activities carried out under the imprimatur of the Red Cross were entirely in keeping with the Geneva Convention, since the symbol was being used “in flagrant breaches of the Convention” to supply comforts to fighting men and even, in one instance, to raise funds for an aeroplane. It was reiterated that the “Red Cross Flag flies for sick and wounded soldiers and sailors only—and for those engaged in giving them succour”.29 As wartime publications complained, there was a danger of the powerful Red Cross symbol being co-opted for inappropriate ends—even for commercial objectives. Many wanted to be associated with it, and to exploit it. It was estimated that by the end of March 1918 New Zealanders had donated some £490,000 to the Red Cross (more than $53.4 million in recent equivalents), an amount exceeded only by a separate Soldiers’ Comforts Fund.30 Much of this was sent overseas, either to the British Red Cross to be spent on behalf of New Zealand troops who were out of combat through sickness, injury or capture; to the London-based New Zealand War Contingent Association, led by New Zealand expatriates and a former governor, Lord Plunket; to the New Zealand High Commissioner; or, from 1918, to the London New Zealand Red Cross Committee. Some centres and branches also sent material and money directly to the French Red Cross, since so much of the fighting took place on French soil. Despite signs of resistance to patriotic fundraising, particularly collections that required giving without some return in the form of entertainment, purchase or the chance of a win, the Red Cross Our Day appeal was reported to have avoided much of the “unpleasantness” faced by collectors for other efforts.31 Peter Grant has argued for sustained levels of giving to British war charities over 1914–18 in the United Kingdom:32 it is more difficult to tell whether the donor impulse similarly endured in New Zealand, but nearly all the Red Cross branches represented in a 1919 summary of activities in the Red Cross Record reported substantial

28 Crown Law Office opinion to Under-Secretary, Department of Internal Affairs, 3 July 1931, New Zealand Red Cross National Office (NZRC), Box 935, General files January 1931–December 1936. 29 Canterbury Red Cross Record, 14 April 1916, 17;19 June 1916, 3. 30 Patriotic Funds, AJHR 1918, S.2, H-46, 4–14. 31 Red Cross Record, 23 November 1916, 19. 32 Grant, “An Infinity of Personal Sacrifice”, 72–74.

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increases in funds raised as the war progressed—most especially in the 1918 Our Day appeal, which targeted funds to send to Britain.33 What differentiated the Red Cross from other patriotic organizations making claims on New Zealanders’ loyalty and pockets during the war? It had an established history, an often-told foundation story and an easily recognized emblem; it had a strong international dimension which was not too “foreign” or “continental” because it was safely mediated via the imperial connection and the British Red Cross in particular. (A 1918 information pamphlet published by Auckland Red Cross workers sidelined the movement’s Swiss origins, characterising it as “the intelligently directed, persistent effort of one of the most marvellous organizations ever contrived by British genius”.)34 But there was one impediment to the emergence of a distinctive Red Cross identity in New Zealand. In many parts of the empire the Red Cross and St John Ambulance Association joined forces to pursue war responses, sometimes under a Joint Council, as in Britain. In New Zealand the Red Cross did not have a pre-existing identity and many of its early promoters were also St John leaders. When, in February 1917, moves were made to formulate a constitution for the Red Cross in New Zealand, it was for a body called “The New Zealand Branch of the British Red Cross and Order of St John”. The addition of the name of St John was largely an afterthought.35 However, it was later embedded when, in October 1920, an Order in Council authorized the “New Zealand Branch of the British Red Cross and Order of St John” to disperse certain remaining war funds under the 1915 War Funds Act.36 One legacy of war was to be a difficult disentangling of the Red Cross identity from the St John organization, exacerbated by conflicting claims to large amounts of money.37

33

New Zealand Red Cross Record, April/May 1919, 5–15. Handbook of Information Concerning Red Cross Activities at Home and Abroad. Issued by authority of the Joint Committee Auckland Centre New Zealand Branch British Red Cross and the Order of St. John of Jerusalem (Auckland, 1918), 2. See also The Story of the Red Cross. Issued by the Auckland Branch of the British Red Cross for General Information (Auckland: Walsh Printing, 1917), 2–3, which focuses on the British Red Cross and mentions Dunant not at all. 35 Press, 21 February 1917, 3. 36 New Zealand Branch of the British Red Cross and Order of St. John, Annual Report 1920–21. 37 The St John side of this dispute is covered in Graeme Hunt, First to Care. 125 years of St. John in New Zealand 1885–2000 (Auckland: St John, 2009), 94–95, 103–05. Extensive Red Cross documentation is held in Boxes 935 and 937, New Zealand Red Cross National Office Archive. 34

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In the short term members of the two bodies worked amicably enough together. As incapacitated servicemen returned first from Gallipoli and later from other theatres of war, the needs of the sick and wounded, the traditional focus of Red Cross attention, were underlined. Also highlighted were the work of the Red Cross among prisoners of war, its highly organized international tracing service for the families of missing personnel and its role in locating, identifying and photographing war graves for relatives. Then, in 1918, Red Cross workers joined those from St John in responding to the influenza pandemic. The prevalence of the Red Cross emblem during this emergency helped to entrench it further in the public imagination, so much so that St John members, who at brigade level were at least as active, were irritated that most of the credit went to the Red Cross.38 The war, and then the influenza, gave the Red Cross an identity in New Zealand, but not one that was so firmly rooted that it could be guaranteed to endure. Fundraising for the Red Cross did not necessarily mean “belonging” to it. The Red Cross had to develop a peacetime structure and rationale without the urgency of wartime imperatives; to negotiate a place in the post-war constellation of social services, voluntary and government. And here there was a range of bodies with overlapping interests: St John (which had two separate, not always harmonious arms, the association and the brigades); those patriotic funds that lingered beyond the war; the RSA, which had welfare as well as advocacy functions; and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and the Salvation Army, both of which had gained a reputation for their recreational work and other assistance to men serving overseas.39 On the government side were the Department of Health, the Defence Department, which, for a time at least, retained an interest in convalescent servicemen, and the Pensions Department. External competitors apart, even among Red Cross workers an interwar divide between “Peacetime” and “Wartime” work (as they were designated—with capital letters and separate committee structures) proved to be sharper and more problematic than in comparable Dominions such as

38 Hunt, First to Care, 92. On the Red Cross role in the epidemic see also Geoffrey Rice, Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2nd ed. 2005), 151, 248, 280. 39 Hunt, First to Care, ch. 4 covers St John’s role in the Great War; and Cyril R. Bradwell, Fight the Good Fight The Story of the Salvation Army in New Zealand (Wellington: Reed, 1982), 101–3 refers to the Salvation Army’s chaplaincy, welfare and hostel work among the armed forces.

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Australia.40 A clear and coherent organizational identity took some years to emerge from a debate about entitlement to war funds, and about responsibilities to the maimed of the Great War, on the one hand, and to the generations of the future, on the other. International developments were moving in the direction of an expansion of the Red Cross remit. Formed in 1919 and heavily underwritten by the American Red Cross, the League of Red Cross Societies was conceived as “an agency of peace and permanent human service”, with a role in public health, child welfare and disaster response.41 Its initial membership of thirty national societies from across the world— including the vigorous Japanese Red Cross, but initially excluding those of the defeated powers—claimed “a mandate to do for peace what the [ICRC] had done for war.”42 At its first conference in 1920, at which New Zealand was represented, the focus was upon the devastations of typhus, tuberculosis and starvation killing millions of civilians throughout postwar Europe. The combined resources of the national Red Cross societies were to unite in a crusade against disease and disaster, and thereby promote peace in the word. The promulgation of the latest medical and scientific knowledge in the battle against disease and the coordination of relief work in national and international calamities were part of these objectives.43 The league’s agenda was endorsed in New Zealand by such key returned servicemen as Brigadier-General George Richardson, who, as well as having battlefield experience, had been New Zealand’s military representative in London. The language of war was applied to the battle against disease and natural calamity; the same military requirements of training, organization and structure were to be applied to the disorder of the post-war world. Richardson was effusive about the work of the Red Cross when he spoke in public and he promoted the need for a single, 40

This conclusion draws upon my reading of the Annual Reports of the New Zealand Branch of the British Red Cross and Order of St John for the interwar years, and the Annual Reports of the New Zealand Red Cross Society from 1933. The Australian situation is examined in Oppenheimer, Volunteering (2008) and All Work and No Pay (2002). 41 Daphne A. Reid and Patrick F. Gilbo, Beyond Conflict. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 1919–1994 (Geneva: International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 1994), 37, 39. 42 Moorehead, Dunant’s Dream, 265. 43 See Reid and Gilbo, Beyond Conflict (1997), 43–59 for the early negotiations around the formation of the league. Over 1921–22 most of the Red Cross societies of the defeated powers were permitted to join, with Turkey finally gaining admission in 1930.

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national Red Cross organization with women members trained for emergencies in peace and war. Speaking in 1923, Richardson noted that the Red Cross had previously been regarded as “essentially a war organization” without any specific peacetime functions, to be demobilized when the fighting ended. But just as armies had to stay alert, the Red Cross needed to keep its workers trained and its organization perfected, “for there is no period of peace so far as disease, sickness, suffering and social evils are concerned”.44 The first national president of the Red Cross, Dr William Collins, whose war service included a stint on hospital ships at Gallipoli, similarly presented the mission of the peacetime Red Cross as “a totally different conception of service from that of war or pre-war days”; it was mainly educational and it included children as the force for the future.45 Former soldiers, most of all, had a sense of the Red Cross’s power, efficiency and networks. But there were others, like James Flesher, chair of the Canterbury section of the New Zealand Branch of the British Red Cross and Order of St John, who believed that after sick and wounded soldiers had been dealt with, there would be “no use for the Red Cross in New Zealand”.46 Such views were predicated on the belief that St John could undertake any first aid work needed, and that wounded soldiers would recover and quickly be integrated into civilian life (a belief later found to be overly optimistic).47 Flesher also felt that while an “extension of Red Cross work was no doubt necessary in European countries … local conditions did not demand the same increase”.48 And so the post-war years saw Red Cross effort divided between those who wanted to use surplus war funds to assist returned servicemen, and those who promoted a much wider health and welfare peacetime mandate.

44

Annual Report, New Zealand Branch British Red Cross and Order of St. John, 1922–3, 14. 45 Report of Wellington Peacetime Division of the New Zealand Branch of the British Red Cross Society, 1925, 1, H1 103/21 (2965), Archives New Zealand (ANZ). 46 Minutes, Canterbury Centre Executive, New Zealand Branch of British Red Cross and Order of St. John, 18 October 1920, Canterbury Red Cross, Executive Minutes, E1. 47 Gwen A. Parsons, “The Many Derelicts of the War: Great War Veterans and Repatriation in Dunedin and Ashburton 1918–1928” (PhD diss., University of Otago, 2008), ch. 2. 48 Minutes, Joint Meeting of General Committee of St John Ambulance Association and New Zealand Branch of the British Red Cross and Order of St John, 26 January 1921, Canterbury Red Cross, Executive Minutes, E1.

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“War” work after 1918 involved the running of convalescent and then long-term homes, such as the Evelyn Firth Home in Auckland for chronically disabled men. Committees visited the homes and Red Cross social clubs were established, bringing comforts such as additional foodstuffs, magazines and film screenings to relieve patients’ boredom. Vehicles were provided for day trips, and there were attempts at basic forms of training in woodwork, basket-making and boot repairs, though vocational activities increasingly contracted over the 1920s. In the Depression, more assistance was given to unemployed ex-servicemen in the community, especially if there was illness involved. However, the bulk of the funds in trust went towards the running and support of four Red Cross homes throughout the country, and the visiting of ex-servicemen in public and psychiatric hospitals. This work was underwritten by a strong sense of commitment to the war wounded, even if the actual expression of this impulse proved much more testing than in the enthusiasm of the war years. The stalwarts visiting the homes aged, as did those within—by the 1930s the annual reports of the different Red Cross societies increasingly recorded the deaths of people who had been prominent in the wartime patriotic effort.49 By contrast, the peacetime agenda was about youth, international programmes and the future. The Junior Red Cross was an important part of its activity, and circles were started in schools from 1922. Another key development was the employment of Red Cross nurses to give instruction in public hygiene, first aid and home nursing. In the absence of an advanced public health nursing course in New Zealand, from 1922 a cluster of New Zealand nurses was sent on Red Cross scholarships to be trained at Bedford College in London. Many were former military nurses used to working in testing situations and open to the challenges of community nursing—they were part of the “heroic generation” of nurses who provided post-war nursing leaders across the world.50 The first New Zealand nursing sisters sent on the Red Cross-sponsored course, Edith Webster, Catherine Clark and Annie Kirkpatrick, had all served overseas with the New Zealand Army Nursing Service; Doris Christian came from a position on the staff of Apia Hospital.51 The Bedford course sent trainees on placements with district nursing associations, social services and 49

Paragraph based upon Annual Reports of the New Zealand Branch of the British Red Cross and Order of St John, 1920–1936. 50 Susan McGann, “Collaboration and Conflict in International Nursing, 1920–39”, Nursing History Review, 16 (2008): 32. 51 Information here and below based on Register of Nurses in New Zealand Gazette, 1920–34.

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charity agencies, and to lectures on public health nursing, elementary psychology, elementary bacteriology, modern industrial conditions and social administration.52 At the same time it sharpened their awareness of nursing as a worldwide profession with a mandate to provide leadership beyond hospitals. Some, while overseas, went on to extend their experience into fields such as midwifery. The training of the New Zealand nurses represented a considerable investment in their professional development, and they were bonded to work for the Red Cross Society for at least two years after their return.53 The peacetime initiative was strongest in Wellington, where another former army nurse, Jessie Lewis, went into schools to teach first aid and home nursing, organized voluntary auxiliary detachments to help out in the hospitals and started Junior Red Cross groups. Strong support was given to blind ex-servicemen and civilians through a Braille Club, and during the Depression years the Red Cross carried out supplementary relief activities. But the nurses were paid, in part at least out of “war” funds, initially on the grounds that they were themselves ex-army and were assisting returned servicemen and their families. As the nurses themselves started to be drawn from a wider nursing pool and their work extended to civilians, it was deemed not to be “war” work. In 1934 funding for the nurses was withdrawn, and the Red Cross “building” lost one of its “main pillars”.54 The fate of these first Red Cross nurses showed another legacy of the war, which encouraged continued Red Cross activity while at the same time constraining it. It all came back to the issue of the surplus war funds, who had the right to control them and how they could be spent. There were ongoing disputes and litigation between those who identified with the Red Cross or with St John, and the combined body, the New Zealand Branch of the British Red Cross and Order of St John, which came to have a life of its own. This restricted the expenditure of certain war funds and limited the range of Red Cross activity. It weakened other fundraising efforts because of a public perception that there were plentiful unspent 52

McGann, “Collaboration and Conflict”, 35–36. McGann (51) notes that between 1920 and 1939 ten New Zealand nurses attended this course, though some were sponsored by the Department of Health. 53 The cost of sending the nurses was eventually considered too expensive, especially once the Department of Health sponsored New Zealand-based training in association with Victoria University from 1928, using a Bedford course graduate, Janet Moore. This followed an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to establish such a course at Otago University. See Beryl Hughes, “Nursing Education: The Collapse of the Diploma of Nursing at the University of Otago 1925–26, New Zealand Journal of History, 12:1 (1978), 17–33. 54 Annual Report, New Zealand Red Cross, 1934.

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funds on which the organization could draw. It damaged the reputation of all the parties involved, and meant that the New Zealand Government did not officially recognize the New Zealand Red Cross as the country’s national Red Cross society until 1931. Even then, there were two Red Crosses in some parts of the country until 1938, since the New Zealand Branch of the British Red Cross and Order of St John (no longer recognized by the British Red Cross as a branch) did not immediately disband.55 These disputes meant that the New Zealand Red Cross lagged behind many other national societies. In Canada, for example, the Red Cross had one major advantage over other organizations in the years immediately after the Great War: “it had money”.56 Although the Depression reduced the wealth and influence of the Canadian Red Cross, its provincial centres ran outpost hospitals and nursing stations, supported veterans, sponsored courses in public health nursing at a number of universities, provided assistance to immigrants and ran at least one crippled children’s hospital.57 Its Junior Red Cross membership comprised 267,115 members, or nearly 2.5 per cent of the total population in 1934 (this compared with 4000 Juniors in New Zealand, 0.25 per cent of its population).58 By the late 1930s the Australian Red Cross was the largest organization of its kind in that country, and was running homes for children as well as veterans. It was contributing to the fight against tuberculosis through an X-ray programme for children, had started to establish blood bank services, had a strong Junior Red Cross contingent of more than 90,000 members and was entering its period of greatest prestige.59

55

See, for example, Annual Report, New Zealand Red Cross Society 1935, 13–14 for complaints about the effect of two bodies calling themselves “Red Cross”. The British Branch of the New Zealand Red Cross and Order of St John was finally and formally dissolved by the 1938 Joint Council of the Order of St John and the New Zealand Red Cross Incorporation Act. 56 Glassford, “Marching as to War”, 307. 57 Glassford, “Marching as to War”, 340–60. 58 Junior Red Cross figures are taken from notes sent by New Zealand Red Cross Secretary Malcolm Galloway to the Governor–General’s Secretary, 17 September 1934 G48 34 R/18(1), ANZ. The United States figure was given as a phenomenal 7.6 million, around 6 per cent of total population, but there needs to be some caution in interpreting figures: some Red Cross national societies counted the total population of schools in which they had Junior circles in their membership figures. Glassford, “Marching as to War,” 342, gives a 1939 Canadian Junior Red Cross figure of 425,000. 59 See Oppenheimer, “Volunteers in Action”, ch. 6.

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The later consolidation of the New Zealand Red Cross meant that it approached the Second World War with a far less developed civilian programme than Australia and Canada. Its first presence in New Zealand coincided with well-established state activism. Government activity in the areas of education and health was particularly marked during the interwar years, and there was little space for the Red Cross to develop substantial medical facilities, even if it had the finance to do so. A New Zealand report to the League of Red Cross Societies in 1924 confirmed that The Government of New Zealand has advanced far along the pathway of its moral obligations to the people—so far indeed that it has already elaborated and is now carrying on most of the systems which the National Red Cross Societies are at present, in many countries, endeavouring to establish.

Moreover, it noted that this work was so efficiently done by government agencies that the existing Red Cross nurses were restricted largely to theoretical instructional classes and Junior Red Cross work in many communities.60 A comprehensive social security programme after 1938 ensured that the role of the New Zealand Red Cross would be to supplement state social services, especially through its instructional work in the community and schools, and assistance with disaster relief. Even in the 1939–45 war, when its activities vastly increased, the New Zealand body struggled to attain the stature and government endorsement of the Australian Red Cross. The Red Cross presence in New Zealand was a legacy of the Great War. The organization’s post-war history showed the power of its wartime reputation to endure, and the aspiration of the Red Cross movement nationally and internationally to expand and to develop new agendas for service. But in New Zealand the organization’s legal personality and practical development were compromised by other residues of wartime arrangements. The determination that war funds should be spent only on sick and wounded returned servicemen was pursued particularly strongly in New Zealand, since such funds were regarded as having been raised for the men, not for the Red Cross as such. The link between the Red Cross and St John also proved more difficult to disentangle in New Zealand than elsewhere, because a hastily drawn and ill-conceived constitution shaped by the exigencies of war had locked temporary bedfellows into an 60

“New Zealand Red Cross Nursing Education and Public Health Nursing”, Meeting of the General Council of the League of Red Cross Societies Proceedings 1924 (Geneva, League of Red Cross Societies, 1924) 582–84, Archives, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Geneva.

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unhappy marriage. The bifurcation between “wartime” and “peacetime” activities seems to have been much more entrenched in New Zealand than elsewhere during the interwar years because of the inflexibility and argument about war funds. The reputation of the Red Cross nonetheless proved sufficiently strong to withstand the squabbles of the 1918–39 period. The Red Cross remained a potent and widely recognized emblem. The organization’s leaders constantly referred back to the Red Cross war effort, and promoted the Red Cross as the only truly international, non-partisan and nonsectarian voluntary organization in New Zealand and throughout the world, a “cog in the great wheel of mercy”, whose efficient running depended upon individual and united efforts.61 The New Zealand body enjoyed continuing support from returned servicemen and some intensely loyal workers, predominantly women, who were determined that it should remain, in the words of its post-war slogan “Still the Greatest Mother in the World”. The Second World War would offer further opportunities to substantiate that claim.

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Speech by National Secretary Malcolm Galloway, New Zealand Red Cross Society National Conference Summary of Proceedings (Wellington, New Zealand Red Cross Society 1940), 15.

CHAPTER FOUR SEEING TRAUMA AS SACRIFICE: THE LINK BETWEEN “SENTIMENTAL EQUIPMENT” AND ENDURANCE IN NEW ZEALAND’S WAR EFFORT STEVEN LOVERIDGE See that little stream—we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it—a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs … This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time … This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes … You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers … This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia … there was a century of middle-class love spent here.1 F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night, 1934

It has long been recognized that the Great War placed extreme strains on individuals, armies and nations. How were these endured and what roles did various factors play in remaining committed to the fight? This chapter considers the role of “sentimental equipment” in New Zealand’s war effort. The term, provided by the fictional war veteran, Dick Diver, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, is the assemblage of sentiments 1 F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night (London: Guild Publishing, 1985, originally published 1934), 67–68.

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individuals evoked to respond to the physical and psychological burdens of war. Such equipment includes adherence to principles like duty or honour, the value of personal bonds, theological teachings and group identity—which could draw from gender, religion, ethnicity and regional/national/imperial patriotism. And, as Diver shows in the quote above, the power of such sentimental equipment to sustain endurance sprang from its intimate nature; its closeness to the heart underwrote the belief that there were things worth enduring for.

I. Sentimental equipment in the front line The physical and mental tolls imposed by the First World War are salient features of the front-line experience. Indeed the dominant image of this conflict is a vision of tattered and exhausted soldiers stranded in devastated landscapes. Such bleak depictions speaks of the dehumanising conditions in which soldiers existed—the sights, sounds and smells of the battlefield, the horror, fear, doubt and boredom and the men’s detested companions, rats, flies and lice.2 How did people endure such surroundings?3 Of course, not everyone did. During the New Zealand Division’s time on the Western Front, some 1,511 New Zealanders were evacuated as psychiatric casualties.4 After the war, the Defence Department compiled a list of 93 soldiers against whom action was taken on account of self-

2

Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914–1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 3 Alongside this quintessential image it should be remembered that roughly threefifths of the infantryman’s service, in the British and Dominion armies, was spent out of the trenches and periods of inaction—which potentially provided time for boredom, doubts and anxieties to fester—also need to be considered in the investigation of endurance. See Amanda Laugesen, Boredom is the Enemy: The Intellectual and Imaginative Lives of Australian Soldiers in the Great War and Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), J.G. Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies 1914–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 4 Russell Clarke, “‘Not Mad, But Very Ill’: The Treatment of New Zealand’s Shellshocked Soldiers 1914 to 1939” (MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1991), 49. It has been noted that these figures reflect diagnostic factors and that those evacuated likely formed the tip of the iceberg. See Gwen A. Parsons, “The Construction of Shell Shock in New Zealand, 1919–1939: A Reassessment”, Social History of Medicine, 26:1 (2013), 56–73.

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inflicted wounds.5 Soldiers’ accounts highlight instances where the capacity to endure was exhausted: “A man in our line blew half his head off with a rifle this evening. He had told the Chaplain he intended to commit suicide.”6 However, recognition that nerves could break adds to the puzzle. That the majority of soldiers avoided these extreme forms of breakdown returns us to the question of what allowed most men to endure conditions that could drive some to such ends. One answer, and likely the most obvious in the public mind, is the discipline imposed by military authorities. The very nature of trench warfare made front-line social control easy to implement. The movement and independence of troops was restricted by their location between reserve trenches and enemy guns as well as by their reliance on wider organizations for supplies and information. Discipline could deteriorate dramatically when units were removed from the line or demobilized—the Wazzir Riot and the Sling and Etaples mutinies provide New Zealand examples of this phenomenon7—and harsh punishments could be imposed for a variety of offences including, in the case of the Italian Army, death by firing squad for smoking a pipe while on duty.8 The cases of five New Zealand soldiers executed for charges of desertion and munity attest to this power.9 This use/threat of the iron fist may have compelled a bare minimum of compliance, but it does not entirely explain endurance. Punitive measures struggle to account for instances where soldiers exceeded bare minimums or instances where endurance broke down; it is tempting to conclude that those contemplating suicide were not deterred by fear of a firing squad. Lastly, an army regulated with discipline deemed 5

“Medical – Wounds – Self inflicted – General file”, R22433608-AAYS-8638AD1-980-49/419, Archives New Zealand (ANZ). 6 Nicolas Boyack, “A Social History of New Zealand Soldiers in World War One, Based Upon Their Diaries and Letters” (MA thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 1985), 114. 7 The incidents mentioned are detailed in Christopher Pugsley, On the Fringe of Hell: New Zealanders and Military Discipline in the First World War (Auckland: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991), 31–32, 286–88, 292. 8 Richard Vinen, A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2000), 47. 9 For the general subject see Ian McGibbon, “Death Penalty” in Oxford Companion to New Zealand Military History, Ian McGibbon (ed.) (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 2000), 134–136. Reflecting developments in Britain, these cases emerged as a matter of controversy. All five men were posthumously pardoned in 2000 under the Pardon for Soldiers of the Great War Act. For additional commentary on this pardon see Ian McGibbon, “The Abuse of History”, New Zealand International Review, 26:1 (January 2001), 28–29.

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excessive or illegitimate will become a brittle instrument, which may break upon use. The role of incentives provides another approach. Incentives took various forms and apparently banal factors have been tagged as foundations for endurance. Keith Grieves notes an efficient postal service as a key in understanding “the resilience of the British soldier on the Western Front after 1916”.10 J.G. Fuller identifies working-class leisure activities such as football and music halls as crucial in cultivating humour and a sceptical stoicism.11 Michael Roper observes the “importance of food, clothing, warmth and rest”.12 Others have contemplated the role of more corporeal comforts such as alcohol, sex and tobacco: Niall Ferguson goes so far as to claim that men could not have continued fighting without tobacco and alcohol.13 Analysis of New Zealand soldiers’ accounts confirms the importance attached to these factors and substances.14 The loyalties social bonds could command and the solace they could offer also help to explain how soldiers kept going.15 The power of group cohesion to drive individual action is highlighted in psychological research probing instances where individuals put themselves at extreme risk for the interests of the group. A fear of letting others down appears to overwhelm concern for personal safety.16 This “impulse to self-sacrifice” is considered 10

Keith Grieves, Sussex in the First World War (Lewes: Sussex Record Society, 2004), xxiii. 11 Fuller, Troop Morale, 175–80. 12 Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), xi. 13 Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London: Basic Books, 1998), 351. 14 One New Zealand soldier noted that “the majority of troops drink to excess always if they have the money”. Nicolas Boyack, Behind the Lines: The Lives of New Zealand Soldiers in the First World War (Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1989), 106, 139. See also Jock Phillips, A Man’s Country? The Image of the Pakeha Male: A History (Auckland: Penguin, 1987), 184–88 and Christopher Burns, “A Taste of Civvy Street: Heroic Adventure and Domesticity in the Soldier Concert Parties of the First and Second World Wars”, Journal of New Zealand Studies, 13 (2012), 115–27. 15 William Manchester, wounded during the Second World War, provided an articulate expression of this dynamic in explaining why he discharged himself from hospital to return to his unit. “It was an act of love. Those men on the line were my family, my home. They were closer to me than I can say … Men I now knew do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another.” John Ellis, The Sharp End: The Fighting Man in World War II (London: Aurum Press, 2009), 337. 16 Ben Shalit, The Psychology of Conflict and Combat (New York: Praeger, 1988), 104.

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“an intrinsic element in the association of organized men in pursuit of a dangerous or difficult goal.”17 The solidarity of these communities also reflects the coherence provided by a common front-line culture that developed its own meanings and value systems.18 This development reflects various collusions between the circumstances of military life and the characters of those serving. Peter Simkins notes a broad agreement that the resilience of the British Expeditionary Force rested on “a bedrock of social cohesion” instilled by the nature of British society.19 Equally, Anzac mythology has long advanced the notion that troops were bound together by a distinct communal character, based on egalitarianism, mateship and fortitude. In some interpretations this front-line culture was marked by disillusionment as men became fatalistic, nihilistic and detached. In what has become a modern classic, The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell identifies the soldiers’ war as an experience that discredited traditional forms and rhetoric about warfare, revealing them as hollow, absurd and even obscene.20 When conventional expression became irreconcilable with reality, soldiers turned to bitter cynicism, biting irony and savage realism to capture a harsh, even senseless, reality. Parts of this thesis have been pursued by New Zealand historians. Nicholas Boyack claims that, for the average New Zealand soldier, the war was not “fought for reasons of patriotism or pride in the British Empire”. Rather, it was “an adventure gone hideously wrong or an experience forced upon them by circumstances they could neither control nor understand.”21 Likewise, Jock Phillips’s account of New Zealand public memory of the war directly draws on Fussell’s approach. Phillips observes a dichotomy between the cynical outlook of the veteran and the “high diction” of civilian patriotism, noting that the latter came to mask the former in public memory. As in Fussell’s thesis, the ordeals of the front line are seen as spurring this divergence in outlook, with veterans’ writings illustrating “a deep vein of 17

Glenn J. Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1959), 91. 18 For further exploration on this notion of “war culture” see Stéphane AudoinRouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18: Understanding the Great War, trans. Catherine Temerson (New York: Hill & Wang, 2002), 102. 19 Peter Simkins, “Everyman at War: Recent Interpretations of the Front Line Experience” in Brian Bond (ed.), The First World War and British Military History (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1991), 301. 20 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). 21 Boyack, Behind the Lines, 6.

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irony and cynicism”. “Above all, the heroic image of war was gone forever.”22 Certainly, cynicism, fatalism and detachment are normal responses to disempowerment, anxiety and boredom—all of which could be common experiences for First World War soldiers; the cynic, resigned to bleak prospects, gains insulation to shock, a fatalistic attitude cultivates indifference to one’s circumstances, detachment prevents the mind dwelling on painful contemplation. Nonetheless, these outlooks do not represent how all individuals responded all the time. The image of widespread or universal disillusionment risks masking how multi-faceted soldiers’ reactions could be and missing valuable insights into how they endured the war.23 Indeed brutalising circumstances, as well as desensitising, can stimulate searches for meanings that explain and/or reassure. Conceptions that one’s circumstances are associated with some larger or redeeming purpose, however that is defined, offer the human psyche some capacity to reframe and control apparently impossible situations. The psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers made an early observation of this while working with men suffering from what was then called shell shock. He noted that psychological resilience seemed better served by reinterpreting unpleasant experiences positively than by repressing them.24 More recent studies of the human mind under extreme stress also note the link between mindset and resilience. The capacity to endure is identified, in terms curiously similar to Dick Diver’s, with those “who early in life developed a positive outlook” and those able to “see alternatives in outcome in almost any situation no matter how bleak”.25 The retention of some sense of conviction is particularly important in responding to the psychological toll of killing, which is typically a cocktail of exhilaration, horror and remorse (with mixes varying according to individuals and circumstances).26 Though brutalization makes these 22

Jock Phillips, “The Quiet Western Front: the First World War and New Zealand Memory” in Santanu Das (ed.), Race, Empire and First World War Writing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 232–34. 23 For an example of some of the critical responses to Fussell’s modern memory thesis see Brian Bond, The Unquiet Western Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 24 W.H.R. Rivers, “An Address on the Repression of War Experience”, The Lancet, 2 February 1918, 173–177. 25 Edna J. Hunter, “The Psychological Effects of Being a Prisoner of War” in John P. Wilson, Zev Harel and Boaz Kahana (eds), Human Adaptation to Extreme Stress: From the Holocaust to Vietnam (New York: Plenum Press, 1988), 166–68. 26 Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), especially 231–40; Joanna

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emotions easier to handle, and though there are rare cases of individuals able to kill without conscience, most who end a life will, in some way, review, question and assess their actions. This is a lifelong process and sentimental equipment can play an important role in mediating doubt, guilt and remorse. A sense of that one’s actions were right or necessary aids endurance; an inability to come to terms and live with one’s actions can lead to post-traumatic stress.27 The process of grappling with trauma, relating it to something beyond the battlefield, and, consequently, augmenting endurance, is well illustrated in a letter New Zealander Private Walter Carruthers wrote to his family in August 1918: Sometimes I feel like going mad and taking a machine gun on my own as a good way out of it and then all of you have to be thought of and so there it is. I won’t throw my life away but if I do go it will be because of something worthwhile.28

This attests to how turmoil could be mediated, and perhaps reduced, via contemplation of loved ones and the value of a death for a greater cause. Personal bonds could also motivate a will to fight as revenge. After witnessing five of his friends being obliterated by a German shell, Corporal Ira Robinson told his sister Lizzie that This last stint has made me very bitter towards Fritz and I will never think of him as anything but a savage again and will treat him as such. I am on a gun capable of firing 700 shots a minute and if it would fire 1400 shots a minute it would not be going too quickly for me.29

It probably seems self-evident that personal bonds can evoke heartfelt responses, but more abstract ideas also had the power to tug heartstrings and justify hardship. Cecil Malthus’s recollections highlight detachment and a linking of hardship with purpose: The business of killing weighed heavily on us no doubt, but we set it aside as best we could. We could not allow it to be felt as a personal burden …

Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in Twentieth–Century Warfare (London: Basic Books, 1999). 27 Grossman, On Killing, 231–40. 28 Boyack, Behind the Lines, 90. 29 Chrissie Ward (ed.), Dear Lizzie: A Kiwi Soldier Writes from the Battlefields of World War One, (Auckland: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000), 90–91.

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Chapter Four We just had to believe in the ultimate justification, the purpose beyond our understanding.30

As he details elsewhere, this justification included the belief that New Zealand’s war was warranted to prevent a German conquest of Europe.31 Similarly, the notion of the New Zealand soldier, bloodied but unbowed in the face of obstacles, is a recurring feature in front-line writings. William Malone’s diary is a good example of this pride in identity; he was not employing Wilfred Owen-style irony when he wrote home about New Zealand casualties, “we feel that they have met a glorious death Dulce est pro patria mori.”32 Comparable sentiments can be glimpsed in Herbert Hart’s reaction to news of the Armistice. While acknowledging “weeks, months and years [Hart enlisted in 1914] of struggling against every conceivable form of horror” and noting that the cost had been “too great to permit any of us to feel joyful”, he concluded that “It has been a great privilege to have lived in this age and permitted to do something for such a sacred, righteous cause, and for the good of one’s country and posterity.”33 Such language hints at the pre-war belief that conflict could have a redemptive or purifying effect. Although naive enthusiasm appears to have been unsustainable, the idea that something valuable could be gained to compensate for what was being lost did survive (even thrive?) in the trenches.34 This theme could take a range of forms, from theological notions of sacrifice and salvation to more secular imaginings of a broad sunlit upland to be won. One New Zealander recalled the message of a chaplain’s front-line speech. “He told us that wonderful things would come out of the war, that when it was over we would be free to build a new and better world. Great spiritual blessings would spring from these times of trouble and sacrifice.”35 Ormond Burton’s wartime writings for trench publications also explicitly link crisis and salvation.

30

Cecil Malthus, Armentières and the Somme (Auckland: Reed Publishing, 2002), 138–39. 31 Cecil Malthus, ANZAC: A Retrospect (Auckland: Reed Publishing, 2002), 18. 32 John Crawford (ed.) with Peter Cooke No Better Death: The Great War Diaries of William G. Malone (Auckland: Reed Books, 2005), 197. 33 John Crawford (ed.), The Devil’s Own War: The First World War Diary of Herbert Hart (Auckland: Exisle Publishing, 2008), 271. 34 Certainly the way that the veteran’s voice became a political feature of the interwar world—most dramatically in the rise of fascism—reflects, in part, the notion that a trial by fire had given him greater insight into the nature of things. 35 Archibald Baxter, We Will Not Cease (Auckland: Cape Catley, 2003), 156.

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The travail of Europe is saving the soul of the twentieth century world. This war has given us a re-birth of wonder and mystery. There is another revival of romance, and we can see before us a great era of noble idealism and of splendid self-sacrificing devotion such as this world has not yet seen.36

For war correspondent Malcolm Ross, who spent a great deal of time among front-line troops and knew the effects of battle on men, the war built a “stratum of solid purpose and idealism” meaning that “the treasure which has been spent and the blood which has been spilt will not have been spent or spilt in vain”.37 Similarly, veteran C.A.L. Treadwell’s memoir claims that New Zealand soldiers became less indifferent to religion, something he puts down to “how near we lived to eternity” and “the comfort of the Word”.38 None of this is, of course, the final word on how soldiers responded to their circumstances. The intricacies of battlefield anthropology and the war experiences of New Zealand soldiers are vast, yet largely concealed, subjects and the work of continuing to investigate them will require great resourcefulness, empathy and effort.39 However, it is evident that the burnishing of sentimental equipment, and even streaks of idealism, were elements of front-line culture and should be seriously considered alongside the more understood instances of ridicule, irony and cynicism. These simple human sentiments were part of the men’s response to the dehumanising conditions of the First World War and have implications for the endurance they displayed.

36

Shell Shocks: New Zealanders in France (London: Jarrolds, 1916), 31. Captain Malcolm Ross and Noel Ross, Light and Shade in War (London: Edward Arnold, 1916), 59–60. 38 C.A.L. Treadwell, Recollections of an Amateur Soldier (New Plymouth: Thomas Avery & Sons Ltd, 1936), 237–38. For a slightly different take on the religiosity of the New Zealand soldier see Peter Lineham, “First World War Religion”, in John Crawford and Ian McGibbon (eds), New Zealand’s Great War: New Zealand, The Allies and The First World War (Auckland: Exisle Publishing, 2007), 490–91. 39 Soldiers’ writings must, of course, be considered critically. They are not omniscient accounts but interpretations shaped by various factors not always evident to the historian. There is also the risk, as John Keegan notes, of mining such sources for points of interest, leading to what he terms “The Historian as Copy–typist” accounts. From my own study of soldiers’ writings it would seem that discussion of sentimental equipment pales besides the small details of everyday life, dominated by work, pay, food and weather. John Keegan, The Face of Battle (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1988), 32. 37

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II. Sentimental equipment on the home front The total nature of the Great War means that issues of endurance and how they interacted with sentimental equipment can, and should, be extended to the home front. The conflict required a social as well as a military commitment. By the end of the war, almost half of the eligible male population had enlisted and roughly a tenth of New Zealand’s total population had been shipped overseas. As with the front line, those “over here” on the home front, endured in the face of terrible costs. More than 18,000 New Zealanders were killed in service and tens of thousands more were wounded, maimed and psychologically scarred.40 Distance played some role in dampening understanding of the realities of the front, though perhaps less than is sometimes assumed. By mid-1915 the first wounded, sick and maimed soldiers from Gallipoli reached New Zealand. One woman recalled being “devastated” upon seeing the soldiers she had cheered away returning “all mutilated”.41 Casualty lists, which soon became a feature in newspapers and public spaces, also spurred awareness of the lethal character of the war; Eric McCormick remembered that “the mere sight of casualty lists in the paper brought tears to my mother’s eyes.”42 The home front’s emotional investment in New Zealand’s military commitment sprang from the fact that it was constituted by the sons, husbands, fathers, brothers, sweethearts, relatives, friends, colleagues and neighbours; losses on distant battlefields meant devastating personal losses in families and communities. Because the husband was almost always the sole breadwinner, widows suffered both grief and financial problems. And, given the relative youth of New Zealand soldiers, many of the bereaved found themselves part of an older generation surviving the younger. Losing a child is recognized as “one of the most painful of all human experiences”; the scars can last a lifetime.43 As in the trenches, responses on the home front encompassed collapse, withdrawal, denial, the use of alcohol and efforts to keep busy. There was 40

Ian McGibbon, “Casualties”, Oxford Companion to New Zealand Military History, 80. 41 Paul Baker, King and Country Call: New Zealanders, Conscription and the Great War (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1988), 27. 42 E.H. McCormick, An Absurd Ambition: Autobiographical Writings, ed. Dennis McEldowney (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2004), 13. 43 Robert J. Kastenbaum, Death, Society and Human Experience, 11th ed (Boston: Pearson, 2012), 343-5, Barbara A. Backer, Natalie Hannon and Noreen A. Russell, Death and Dying: Understanding and Care (Albany: Cengage Learning, 1994), 277.

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also a curious reoccurring gallows humour around the loss of limbs that begs investigation. It is curious to note that mutilation could not be sanitized or glamorised as a combat death might and that this less than reverent treatment of the subject may fit Freud’s conceptualization of gallows humour.44 As on the battlefield, coercive authority and the organization/ manipulation of information help to explain the endurance of those at home.45 Again, sentimental equipment played a role in stabilising and augmenting resilience. As with front-line trauma, living with loss was a continuing process. Those struck by intense grief often feel that their world has been distorted so that they are unsure how to respond. Parents who have lost children, for instance, often find themselves not wanting to relinquish their grief: “The pain is part of the memory and the memory is precious.”46 Pieces of sentimental equipment provided a way of dealing with this quandary. Sanctifying loss by associating the dead with dignity and purpose offered a means of configuring memory, grief and day-to-day life. This dynamic is well expressed in Jay Winter’s study of the power of conventional language, imagery and ritual in Great War remembrance. Irony’s cutting edge—the savage wit of Dada or surrealism … could express anger and despair, and did so in enduring ways; but it could not heal. Traditional modes of seeing the war, while at times less profound, provided a way of remembering which enabled the bereaved to live with their losses, and perhaps to leave them behind.47

These “traditional modes”, which sprang from the greater meanings woven around the war from its outbreak, represent an extensive mobilization of civil society as churches, newspapers, pamphleteers, cartoonists, poets, and various associations, institutions and communal groups responded to the war. Treaty obligations to Belgium, the official 44

“The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press, 1971), 162. 45 The role of the state and coercive measures in driving/compelling New Zealand’s war effort is considered in Steven Loveridge, Calls to Arms: New Zealand Society and Commitment to The Great War (forthcoming, Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2014). 46 Kastenbaum, Death, Society and Human Experience, 361. 47 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 115.

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rationale for the British declaration of war, were considered as matters of duty and honour. The idea that the empire was fighting for “a scrap of paper” that was materially worthless but represented great intangible values became a prized part of this orthodoxy.48 Conversely the conception of the “shirker”—the man-made physically and morally flabby by the modern age and could not be motivated by high ideals—emerged as one of the major anti-types of wartime society.49 As at the front, those at home, increasingly aware of the lethality of the war, longed to make sense of the suffering, “to find a higher meaning in the war experience, and to obtain some justification for the sacrifice and loss”.50 The notion of the war as a crucible appeared: a time of trial with a purifying effect that would lead to peacetime dividends. The Empire Service League, for instance, saw acts of sacrifice as a spur to social unity and to social virtues that had been stultified by petty pre-war materialism. “It was only when we began to suffer sorrow that we began to awake from sleep … because we have suffered pain and see things in a new light, and seeing, are urged to make that light shine brighter still.”51 Theology, too, ascribed epochal qualities to the war; a Methodist publication described it as the fiery ordeal that the world will pass to a finer and gentler civilisation if only spiritually-minded men and women will be steadfast in their testimony, while they are valiant in their sacrifice.52

48 This is not to imply that this climate was all pervasive or that there was a homogenous response to the outbreak of the war; some enlistments were motivated by decidedly unidealistic factors, and recent scholarship has convincingly challenged the notion of any kind of uniform reaction. See Baker, King and Country, 17–19 and Graham Hucker, “‘The Great Wave of Enthusiasm’: New Zealand Reactions to the First World War in August 1914 – a Reassessment”, New Zealand Journal of History 43:1 (2009), 12–27. 49 This was part of a wider intellectual feature of fin de siècle gloom, perhaps most enduringly captured in Friedrich Nietzsche’s vision of the “last man”, whose outlook and lack of heroic impulses were fashioned by the absence of great struggles of meaning and the material comforts of modern bourgeois society. For a New Zealand context see Steven Loveridge, “‘Soldiers and Shirkers’: Modernity and New Zealand Masculinity into the Great War”, New Zealand Journal of History 47:1 (2013), 59–79. 50 George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 6. 51 Percival Witherby, What Freedom Means (Hastings: E.S. Cliff, Printers, 1917), 7. 52 Ross Malcolm Anderson, “New Zealand Methodism and World War 1: Crisis in a Liberal Church” (MA thesis, University of Canterbury, 1983), 187. See also

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Others offered assurance that the immortality in spite of death. This vita nobis data est at memoria example53—or literal. In 1915 the asked those in mourning to

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fallen had obtained some manner of might be allegorical—brevis a natura bene redditae vitae sempiterna, for editor of Church News, for example,

think of our brave soldiers marching on, in advance of us, mustering in the greater world that comes next to this … They are not sadly looking back, unless it may be that we make them sad. And if your very best and dearest is among them, how would he like you to pity him now?54

As in Dick Diver’s description, the capacity of sentimental equipment to offer assurances about the meaningfulness of a loved one’s death depended upon the degree to which these “tremendous sureties” had been built up over a period “going back further than you could remember”. For instance, the ideal of fulfilling public duty—“playing the game”—was presented as an admirable quality from which those separated temporarily by distance or permanently by eternity might draw comfort. A school lesson from 1916 provides an example of this message: In ancient Greece mothers rejoiced that they had sons who could fight for their country, and, when they went to battle, told them that it was better to die than be beaten. This is the spirit that should move the women of the Empire.55

This example also invokes history, the empire, the different duties of men and women and classical references, all elements that possessed a cultural weight capable of sanctifying sacrifice. Christchurch’s Bridge of Remembrance offers an illustration of how extensive this mobilization of sentimental equipment could be. While the bridge is unusual in being a utilitarian memorial,56 its symbols, traditions and motifs carry various meanings, the significance of which is detailed in Lineham, “First World War Religion” and Allan Davidson, “New Zealand Churches and Death in the First World War”, Crawford and McGibbon (eds), New Zealand’s Great War, 447–66. 53 “A short life hath been given by nature unto man; but the remembrance of a life laid down in a good cause endureth forever.” 54 Davidson, “New Zealand’s Churches”, 458. 55 School Journal, 10: 2 (1916), 41. 56 Of the 452 recorded civic memorials the small number of bridges, libraries and halls are vastly outnumbered by memorials whose sole function is to serve as reminders of the war, the dead and the ideals invoked around them. Phillips, The Quiet Western Front, 236.

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an account written in the year of its unveiling, 1924.57 The cross, which adorns the centre of the bridge’s main arch, is described in pagan and Christian terms, as an emblem of life “in ages before ours” and as an emblem of sacrifice “in our era”. This invocation of life and sacrifice is contained in the circle enclosing the cross, which is noted as symbolising eternal life. The arch itself, and the accompanying laurel wreathes, echo the European tradition of triumphal arches as symbols of victory. Other Neoclassical elements include fascines to represent unity and the use of a Latin inscription, Quid non pro patria—what will a man not do for his country. The place of region, country and empire is conveyed by the British lions and the British and Canterbury coats of arms adorning the arches. Relief works of sprigs of rosemary with the Shakespearean quotation, “There’s rosemary that’s for remembrance”, add another layer of meaning.58 Lastly, the arch is positioned to face east and west to reflect the sun’s movement: “the East, the dawn of life, the dawn of the Christian faith; the West, the evening of life, the end of our earthy journey.” Even the act of crossing the Avon is made into a metaphor: “As a bridge spanning the length of a river it should remind us of the brief span of human existence, and of the Great Beyond.” It is as if designers employed as many pieces of sentimental equipment as they could to sanctify death and link the war with larger purposes. Adding to the bridge’s meanings is the public’s reaction—the way in which they individually understood its symbols in a highly personal way.

III. Conclusion The process of imbuing the war, and its costs, with greater meanings endured after the guns had fallen silent. Wartime New Zealanders were told, or told themselves, that the conflict had been necessary to secure a better world. After 1918 the emphasis shifted to notions that the better world would be won, not via the sacrifices of the dead, but through the emulation of their sacrifices by the living. One veteran greeted the peace with the hope that the soldiers’ example might form the basis of a more just social order: “The returned soldier, even as he fought for the common good, is still prepared to work for it … Let us cultivate the national spirit 57 Quotes in this section are taken from James Wyn Irwin, Christchurch War Memorial: Bridge of Remembrance (Christchurch: Wyatt & Wilson Printers, 1924). 58 The herb grows on the Gallipoli Peninsula and sprigs were sometimes worn to signify remembrance. It has largely been supplanted by the poppy in this regard.

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born of this dreadful war.”59 Similar sentiments were aired by civil authorities, and wartime political leader Joseph Ward echoed a call for social reform and co-operation: “If all our people were inspired with the ideal of social service, with the feeling that they must live for others, our social evils would vanish like a morning mist before the rising sun.”60 The concepts of keeping faith with the dead and affirming the greater meaning of the war were features of interwar remembrance. As the Reverend W. Walker, the President of the Christchurch Returned Soldiers’ Association, put it in 1922, “we must strive to carry on the unfinished work for which they had given their all. The challenge of Anzac was for us to live the sacrificial life.”61 For soldier and civilian alike, New Zealand’s war effort called for continued commitment in the face of experiences and circumstances that give credence to the claim that this was “above all a contest of endurance”.62 Though this reservoir of endurance drew from many springs, the link between sentimental equipment and endurance provides a useful perspective that sits curiously with contentions of a meaningless war. In one sense it is unsurprising that many contemporaries sought to make sense of the war’s impact through long-established and cherished touchstones. Their ability to provide strength rested on their familiarity and capacity to bestow dignity—qualities that can be all the more covetable in times of crisis and tragedy. This capacity to perceive hardship, trauma and death as sacrifice offers a revealing insight into how both fronts sought to make sense of, and endure, the Great War.

59

Major Fred Waite, “A Soldier’s Words to Civilians” in National Souvenir of Peace (Wellington: Wellington Peace Celebrations Committee, 1919), 6. 60 Joseph Ward, Lessons from the War (Wellington: Printed by the Wellington Publishing Co, 1919), 6. 61 Press, 26 April 1922, 12. 62 Watson, Enduring the Great War, 1.

SECTION II HOME FRONT ENDURANCE

CHAPTER FIVE CHALLENGING ENDURING HOME FRONT MYTHS: JINGOISTIC CIVILIANS AND NEGLECTED SOLDIERS GWEN PARSONS At the centenary of the start of the First World War there is renewed and widespread interest in the conflict. The focus on soldiers is natural— remembering the contribution of the members of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) and those who died—although, as elsewhere, the approach to the memory and meaning of the war remains contested. What is the importance of the war to New Zealand? Is the national memory of the First World War now the same as it was to the war generation or the generation that followed? Historian E.H. Carr argues that the study of history is a process of continued dialogue between the present and the past.1 With regard to the British national memory of the First World War Dan Todman takes this further, suggesting that collective memory is a competition between different viewpoints. He sees the development of national memory or mythology as a reductive process that occurs over a number of generations: what is left is a collective memory that serves the interests of the time.2 This is a useful framework for considering the development of the New Zealand mythology of the First World War since it emphasizes both the context of the war and the context in which it is subsequently interpreted. However, Todman’s framework 1

E. H. Carr, What is History, (Camberwell, Victoria: Penguin, 2008), 30. Dan Todman, “The First World War in Contemporary British Popular Culture”, in Heather Jones, Jennifer O’Brien and Christoph Schmidt–Supprian (eds), Untold War: New Perspectives in First World War Studies, (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2008), 417–41; Dan Todman, “Remembrance”, in A Part of History: Aspects of the British Experience of the First World War (London: Continuum, 2008), 209–16.

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also demonstrates that national memory is not always “the truth”, but the generally accepted understanding of events.3 As Todman notes, the battle between the war poets’ version of the First World War, who see useless waste at the hands of incompetent generals, and that of revisionist historians, who have sought to re-evaluate contemporary attitudes to the war and the British military leadership, will not necessarily be won by solid academic scholarship; instead it is likely to be won by the social, political and cultural needs of twenty-first century New Zealand that prioritize one memory over another.4 These residual collective memories might well be called myth; they are inaccurate but entrenched and often repeated concepts which pervade the shared understanding of the war. The mythology of the First World War is not limited to the battlefield. Two home front myths have emerged in the New Zealand collective memory. The first is the popular belief that the New Zealand public was wildly enthusiastic about the war and remained united in support of the nation’s participation, even as the casualty rate climbed. This memory is not unique to New Zealand: the myth of the jingoistic home front has dominated memories of the war in many countries, enduring despite substantial historical research that demonstrates a much more varied attitude among the population and throughout the conflict.5 The second enduring myth is that during and after the war soldiers and veterans were a largely neglected section of the New Zealand community who spent the interwar years struggling to regain a place in civilian society. Again, this memory is not unique to New Zealand; however, the limited research regarding this particular national memory is unusual. Unlike Todman, this chapter focuses more on the accuracy of the myths than on their development. It argues that the New Zealand home front was much more divided than has popularly been remembered and casts doubt on the extent of the jingoistic civilian attitude towards the war. It also suggests that the 3

This echoes Raphael Samuel’s contention that history or collective memory is a combination of the research of the historian, personal experience, memory and myth. Theatres of Memory: Volume 1 Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (Verso: London, 1994). 4 Todman, “The First World War in Contemporary British Popular Culture”, 429. 5 Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Adrian Gregory, “British ‘War Enthusiasm’ in 1914: A Reassessment” in Gail Braybon (ed.) Evidence, History and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914–18 (Cambridge, 2003), 67–85; Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Catriona Pennell, A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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civilian population did not neglect returned soldiers and their response was influenced by a desire to reward and assist. The chapter also considers the origins of these two myths and the reasons why they have endured in the New Zealand collective memory, or, to use Todman’s framework, how they have continued to serve postwar purposes.

I. Jingoistic civilians The myth of unified civilian support for the war originated in the official wartime censorship enforced by law, as well as the unofficial censorship imposed by individuals. Censorship was initially introduced at the start of the war as a means of controlling the dissemination of sensitive military information. However, as John Anderson notes, after 1916 government regulation “gradually increased in severity and in political rather than military significance”.6 In December 1916, in the face of growing public dissatisfaction with the government’s management of the home front, war regulations made public expression of disloyal or unpatriotic opinion illegal.7 Later in the month the regulations forbade “unlawful” meetings, preventing protest gatherings, and the following February strikes and lockouts were banned, blocking industrial action as a means of protest. In addition, extensive postal censorship effectively shut down the activities of groups such as the National Peace Council, as well as enabling the prosecution of individuals.8 Censorship ensured that patriotic material dominated the public domain during the war, almost to the exclusion of any anti-war or anti-conscription material. Indeed, those currently involved in gathering materials to commemorate the centenary of the start of the Great War are finding it difficult to locate any materials that do not reflect a patriotic attitude towards the conflict.9 Based on this extant patriotic material, New Zealand history books present civilian patriotic support for the war as the norm, both reflecting and reinforcing the national memory. The memory of an enthusiastic 6

John Anderson, “Military Censorship in World War 1: Its Use and Abuse in New Zealand” (MA Thesis, Victoria University College, 1952), 9. 7 Section 4.j, War Regulations, gazetted 4 December 1916. 8 Paul Baker, King and Country Call: New Zealanders, Conscription and the Great War (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1988), 78, 74–75; e.g. Reg Williams was prosecuted as the result of a letter to a relative lamenting the war: Press 13 September 1916, 5. 9 Comment during questions, Session 3: “New Zealand’s Home Front”, Friday 23 November 2012, Endurance and the First World War Conference, 22–23 November 2012, Christchurch, New Zealand.

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civilian population is evident in many published general works on New Zealand history, which focus on the cheering response to the declaration of war and the participation of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, as well as enthusiastic patriotic activity on the home front. Patriotic activities, extensively reported in New Zealand newspapers, included recruitment rallies, endless patriotic fundraising such as fetes and parades, as well as anti-Germanism and the routing out of shirkers and malingers. So enthusiastic do civilians appear to have been about the war, that both P.J. Gibbons and Michael King, writing in popular New Zealand histories, describe the home front as “jingoistic”.10 This myth is also evident on popular New Zealand history websites. There is often some comment on opposition to the war or conscription,11 but it is the patriotism and enthusiasm of the civilian population that is generally the focus, with limited attention given to the body of academic literature dealing with various aspects of opposition to the war in New Zealand.12 For example, the New Zealand History Online article on the home front begins by saying that “Most New Zealanders responded to the war with great enthusiasm”,13 then links to five articles concerning objections to the war and military service. A number of distinct types of dissent are evident in this historiography, including pacifist opposition to war. Many books dealing with women’s experiences during the war also discuss women pacifists. For example, the Canterbury 10

P.J. Gibbons, “The Climate of Opinion”, in W.H. Oliver (ed.), The Oxford History of New Zealand (Auckland: The Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1981), 313; Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin Books, 2003), 301. See also Elsie Locke, who echoes this view of New Zealand society, Peace People: A History of Peace Activities in New Zealand (Christchurch: Hazard Press, 1992), 48. 11 For example, Philippa Mein Smith focuses on recruitment, the achievements of the Anzacs, home front (sacrifice of mothers, patriotic work, but also mentions anti–conscription which was not necessarily anti-war) in her general history of New Zealand, A Concise History of New Zealand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 132–35. 12 The exception is Stevan Eldred-Grigg’s The Great Wrong War: New Zealand Society in WWI (Auckland: Random House, 2010), which places more emphasis on the opposition. 13 “The war at home – First World War overview”, URL: http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/war/first-world-war-overview/defending-our-shores, (Ministry for Culture and Heritage), updated 20 Dec 2012, accessed 24 Jan 2014. See also Ian McGibbon, “First World War – Origins”, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, URL: http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/first-world-war/page-1, updated 13 July 12, accessed 24 Jan 2014.

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Women’s Institute was one of the few women’s groups to continue to promote pacifism during the war.14 The introduction of compulsory military service in 1916 was another cause of dissension on the New Zealand home front. Before 1916 the war effort depended on volunteers, but by the end of 1915 it had become clear that the flow of volunteers was drying up. Those opposed to conscription included members of the middle classes, who supported the war but saw compulsory military service as an attack on British liberalism and the rights of individual conscience.15 Although many MƗori tribes were instrumental in the organization and recruitment of the MƗori Contingent, others, many of whom had suffered significant land confiscations by the Crown within living memory, refused to send men to die for the empire.16 Religious animosity grew as pressure of recruitment reinvigorated longstanding sectarianism divisions within New Zealand society.17 Many socialist-inspired members of the industrial and political labour movements also opposed conscription because they refused to kill fellow workers— regardless of their nationality. Others objected to conscription as a means of oppressing the working class. The labour movement also criticized the government for failing to contain the rising cost of living and refusing to increase soldier remuneration. Class divisions created by the objections of the labour movement were a significant issue on the home front.18 Although this evidence of civilian dissent challenges the myth of the jingoistic civilian, it has had limited impact on the prevailing myth. One reason is that the extent of this dissent among the civilian community remains unclear. In general, historians argue that opposition was limited; 14

Megan Hutching, “The Moloch of War: New Zealand Women who Opposed the War” in John Crawford and Ian McGibbon (eds), New Zealand’s Great War: New Zealand, the Allies and the First World War (Auckland: Exisle Publishing, 2007), 85–95. 15 Gwen Parsons, “The Christchurch Community at War 1914–1918: Society, Discourse and Power” (MA thesis, University of Canterbury, 2003), 130. 16 Baker, King and Country Call, 210–22; Michael King, Te Puea: A Biography (Auckland: Hodder & Stoughton, 1977); P.S. O’Connor, “Recruitment of MƗori Soldiers, 1914–1918”, Political Science 19:2 (1967): 48–83. See also Monty Soutar, “Te Hokowhitu–a–tu: A Coming of Age?”, in Crawford and McGibbon (eds), New Zealand’s Great War, 96–105. 17 Baker, King and Country Call, 124–32; P.S. O’Connor, “Sectarian Conflict in New Zealand, 1911–1920”, Political Studies 9:1 (1967), 3–16; P. S. O’Connor, “Storm over the Clergy – New Zealand 1917”, Journal of Religious History 4:2 (1966), 48–85. 18 Gwen Parsons, “Debating the War: the Discourses of War in the Christchurch Community”, in Crawford and McGibbon (eds), New Zealand’s Great War, 553.

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for Paul Baker, “only a handful of socialists and anti-militarists publically or privately opposed” entry into the war.19 His overall conclusion is that opposition to conscription was important in forming government policy but that under Prime Minister William Massey and the Minister of Defence, James Allen, the government carefully managed the issue and so avoided the deep social divisions that developed in Australia. Analysis of the content of the local Christchurch media during the war years, however, reveals debate regarding participation in the war and, moreover, significantly more ambivalence among the civilian population than has generally been suggested.20 Within Christchurch, the war was promoted by members of the Christchurch elite and reflected their close identification with Britain developed through family, social, cultural and economic ties. They were able to use their power and influence in the community to promote the war, augmenting formal censorship. They dominated municipal government and the national parliamentary representation of their area and, as publicly elected officials, claimed to speak for and lead the community. They supported the war through the demonstrations, recruiting meetings and commemorations they organized as official civic events. They instigated, organized and led the array of patriotic organizations active in Christchurch during the war, and ensured that the local newspapers they owned and controlled reported these activities.21 Those who backed the war attempted to create a community that was united in support by bombarding it with a jingoistic sentiment. There is, however, evidence that the Christchurch elite was not entirely successful in their efforts. The results of the municipal and national elections held in 1917 and 1919 suggest that this group failed to influence the attitudes of members of the working class.22 In the 1917 local body elections, five New Zealand Labour Party (NZLP) candidates were elected while running on an anti-war, anti-conscriptionist and anti-exploitation ticket. This was just one less councillor than in the previous election. The NZLP mayoral candidate, James McCombs, lost to a conservative candidate, but the Labour vote was consistent with the previous two elections. In the local body elections of 1919, voters returned six NZLP candidates. McCombs again lost the mayoralty election, but this time in a three-candidate race where the main issue was port development. Finally, the 1919 general elections returned NZLP candidates in three out of the six 19

Baker, King and Country Call, 15. Parsons, “Debating the War”. 21 Ibid., 551–53. 22 Parsons, “The Christchurch Community at War”, 183–88. 20

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central Christchurch seats. The victorious NZLP candidates included the pacifist, anti-militarist and anti-conscriptionist Ted Howard, who won the working-class Christchurch South seat, beating the ultra-patriotic retired mayor, Henry Holland, who stood as an independent Liberal candidate. This seat was traditionally a close contest between the Liberal and Labour candidates, so Holland could reasonably have expected to win. Yet Holland, who had done so much to support the local war effort, was well beaten by one of the key opponents of the war in the Christchurch community. It appears that Howard’s opposition to the war had not damaged his acceptability for public office among working-class voters and Holland’s patriotism had not enhanced his chances. Although Christchurch was a Labour stronghold during this period, the support of a political party with members so publicly opposed to the war and conscription is important. It suggests that at least one section of the community—the working class—was ambivalent about the war. So why have the opinions and experiences of this significant section of the New Zealand community not affected the myth of the jingoistic civilian? That myth has retained resonance and relevance for post-war generations. Recognising the patriotism and patriotic work of those on the home front was, and is, a way of including civilians in the war experience, along with those who served in the military. More importantly, it is a way of including the civilian population in another myth, still central to the country and resonant today—that New Zealand national identity was forged on the beaches of Gallipoli.23

II. Neglected soldiers The myth of the neglected soldier is also central to the memory of the home front. It is widely remembered that the government and the patriotic 23

This view was perhaps first explicitly expressed by Gallipoli veteran Ormond Burton, who wrote “Somewhere between the Landing at Anzac and the end of the Battle of the Somme, New Zealand very definitely became a nation”, “A Rich Old Man”, MS-Papers-0438, folder 59, 138, Alexander Turnbull Library (ATL), quoted in Keith Sinclair, A Destiny Apart: New Zealand’s Search for National Identity, (Wellington: Unwin Paperbacks, Port Nicholson Press, 1986), 171. For more recent examples of this point of view, see “Speech to dawn service at Anzac Cove”, 25 April 2005, accessed 1 Nov 2013, http://www.nzherald.co.nz/anzacday/news/article.cfm?c_id=773&objectid=10122448; “Helen Clark Address – Mt Albert Anzac Day Service”, 25 April 2006, accessed 1 Nov 2013, http://www. scoop.co.nz/stories/PA0604/S00360.htm. For a discussion of the emergence of New Zealand national identity see Sinclair, A Destiny Apart, 156–73.

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civilians quickly lost interest in the 83,000 veterans and that returned soldiers suffered during the interwar years.24 This is despite a repatriation programme that offered free medical treatment for sickness and disability resulting from military service; war pensions for veterans disabled by military service and the dependants of soldiers who died as the result of military service; assistance in finding employment and vocational training; a soldier settlement scheme and war gratuity payments. This myth originated in the Returned Soldiers’ Association’s (RSA—later the Returned Services Association) successful campaigns of the early 1920s, which sought to persuade the government to increase repatriation support for veterans during the post-war economic slump. These claims that the government was not doing enough during the slump have been uncritically repeated in the limited published literature and unpublished postgraduate work dealing with repatriation policy.25 Historians describe veterans as alienated from the civilian world, suffering poor physical and mental health and consequently unemployed and living in poverty.26 The government’s response is described as one of “betrayal”: of “bureaucratic inefficiencies, government unpreparedness and an almost criminal complacency with which the various agencies, whose roles were to cater 24 For NZEF statistics, including demobilization statistics, see New Zealand Army, War, 1914–1918: New Zealand Expeditionary Forces, Its Provision and Maintenance (Wellington: Government Printer, 1919), 49. 25 Nicolas Boyack and Jane Tolerton, In the Shadow of War: New Zealand Soldiers Talk about World War One and their Lives (Auckland: Penguin, 1990); W.H. Montgomery, “Repatriation” in H.T.B. Drew (ed.), The War Effort of New Zealand: A Popular History (Auckland: Whitcombe & Tombs Ltd, 1923), 163–75; Stephen Uttley, “War Pensions Policy”, British Review of New Zealand Studies, 7 (1994), 33–48. Work dealing specifically with the solider settlement scheme includes Ashley N. Gould, “Soldier Settlement in New Zealand after World War 1: A Reappraisal”, in Judith Smart and Tony Wood (eds), An Anzac Muster: War and Society in Australia and New Zealand 1914–19 and 1939–45: Selected Papers (Clayton, Victoria: Monash, 1992), 114–29; and a number of studies by Michael Roche. Unpublished postgraduate work includes Peter J. Boston “Bacillus of Work: Masculinity and the Rehabilitation of Disabled Soldiers in Dunedin 1919 to 1930” (BA (Hons) thesis, University of Otago, 1993); Russell Clarke, “‘Not Mad, But Very Ill’: The Treatment of New Zealand’s Shell-Shocked Soldiers, 1914– 1939”, (MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1991). 26 Boston, “Bacillus of Work”, 72; Mindy Chen, “Between Two Worlds: A Study of the Letters, Diaries and Reminiscences of Some Otago and Southland Soldiers in the Great War” (BA (Hons) thesis, University of Otago, 1982), 137–140; and Marie Ann Robertson, “They were Never the Same After the War: The Mental Health of Returned World War One Soldiers and the Effect on Family and Community” (BA (Hons) thesis, University of Otago, 2003), 6.

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for the returned servicemen, were beset”.27 Moreover, historians reinforce the myth, charging that the government and war pension officials were focused on saving money by pushing veterans into employment or onto farms. Indeed, the soldier settlement scheme has been described as the “most disastrous” of the repatriation provisions, and has been condemned as epitomising the neglect of the veterans by the government, officials and the wider community.28 This myth is evident far beyond the pages of academic scholarship, and is replicated in a range of media. Indeed, this view is so pervasive that this researcher was constantly met by comments about “those poor men” when mentioning her interest in Great War veterans. The popular television series Landmarks, along with books such as Arthur Bates’s Bridge to Nowhere, reiterate the hopelessness of the soldier settler scheme, presenting the veterans as victims of the elements and governmental bureaucracy.29 More recent popular publications, including Stevan EldredGrigg’s The Great Wrong War, reiterate the myth.30 Jane Tolerton is less critical of the government’s repatriation provisions in her recent publication than in the book she edited with Nicholas Boyack twenty years earlier, but she still implies a lack of care on the government’s part.31 The myth extends beyond simply a memory of inadequate repatriation provisions. It links in with the collective memory of the horror of trench 27

Quotes from Boyack and Tolerton, In the Shadow of War, 245; and Clarke, “‘Not Mad’”, 146. 28 Boyack and Tolerton, In the Shadow of War, 245, 247; Clarke, “‘Not Mad’”, 146, and Chris Pugsley, L.H. Barber and the Auckland War Museum, Scars on the Heart: Two Centuries of New Zealand at War (Auckland: David Bateman in association with the Auckland War Museum, 1996), 22. 29 Kenneth B. Cumberland, Landmarks: A personal view of the story of New Zealand, (Auckland: Television New Zealand, 2008); Arthur P. Bates, The Bridge to Nowhere: The Ill-fated Mangapurua Settlement (Wanganui: Wanganui Newspapers, 1982). 30 Eldred-Grigg, The Great Wrong War, 430–31. For another recent example of such attitudes, see the report of Anzac Day commemorations in ‘WW1 Uniforms worn by troops on Anzac Day’, Radio New Zealand News, 25 April 2014: http:// www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/242512/wwi-uniforms-worn-by-troops-onanzac-day, accessed 30 April 2014. 31 It is unfortunate that her work also includes errors. She discusses rehabilitation (the provisions provided for the veterans of the Second World War) rather than repatriation (the provisions for veterans of the First World War). She also erroneously comments that war gratuities were money held back from soldiers’ pay, confusing them with allotments paid directly out of soldiers’ pay to nominated dependants. Jane Tolerton, An Awfully Big Adventure: New Zealand World War One veterans Tell their Stories (Auckland: Penguin Books, 2013), 253.

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warfare, best exemplified by the work of the war poets. Indeed, for those who survived the war there is little other than pity: for them there was no hero’s death, just a return to their civilian lives, worn down by the work of war and burdened by the memories. A social studies exercise on New Zealand History Online asks thirteen- and fourteen-year-old students to respond to the words of “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”: So now every April I sit on my porch And watch the parade pass by before me … I see old men all twisted and torn The tired heroes of a forgotten war …32

It is difficult to interpret these words without feeling a sense of pity. Understandings of repatriation policy are at the root of the myth that New Zealand neglected its veterans. Many historians of social welfare history have considered the role of repatriation policy within the history of the New Zealand welfare state.33 However, historians concerned with the repatriation of First World War veterans have tended to view the repatriation history in isolation. They discuss the subject only within the context of the First World War, sometimes mentioning the long-standing traditions of rewarding and compensating soldiers for military service, but 32 http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/classroom/anzac-day/homecoming-from-gallipolisocial-studies-activity, (Ministry for Culture and Heritage), updated 20 Dec 2012, accessed 24 Jan 2014. 33 See for example Melanie Nolan, Breadwinning: New Zealand Women and the State (Christchurch: University of Canterbury Press, 2000); Melanie Nolan, “‘Keeping the Home Fires Burning’: Gender, Welfare and the First World War”, in Crawford and McGibbon (eds), New Zealand’s Great War, 493–515; Justin Strang, “Welfare in Transition : Reform’s income support policy, 1912–1928” (MA thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 1992); David Thomson, A World Without Welfare: New Zealand’s Colonial Experiment (Auckland: Auckland University Press and Bridget Williams Books, 1998). Others have tended to see that repatriation provisions were a special kind of state assistance that is neither influenced by nor influences the embryonic welfare state. Elizabeth Hanson, for example, makes no mention of repatriation policy in her study of the background to the Social Security Act (1938), The Politics of Social Security: The 1938 Act and Some Later Developments (Auckland: Auckland University Press, Oxford University Press, 1980). Margaret McClure does give some consideration to the impact of war pensions spending on the development of wider pensions policy, but does not include it within her wider discussion of the development of the civilian social security system: A Civilised Community: A History of Social Security in New Zealand 1898–1998 (Auckland: Auckland University Press in association with the Historical Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, 1998).

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not contemporary attitudes towards state welfare assistance.34 Exceptions are Stephen Uttley, who places the developing war pension legislation within the context of the embryonic social welfare system, and Ashley Gould, who places the soldier settlement scheme within the context of the long-term government programme of closer land settlement.35 Russell Clarke and Peter Boston have also attempted to place their respective studies on the treatment of shell-shocked soldiers and disabled veterans within the contemporary context.36 They are, however, less successful than Uttley and Gould, because, like the wider body of repatriation literature, they have remained focused on the apparent failure of repatriation. Extending the approach of social welfare historians, and Uttley and Gould, will demonstrate that many of the apparent limitations of repatriation policy are clearly not symptoms of government mean-spiritedness, but rather a reflection of contemporary attitudes and beliefs. The Repatriation Department, established just after the end of the war, had a narrow focus and a short life. It wanted to get returned soldiers into paid employment, as its emphasis on providing employment assistance, an on-the-job training scheme for disabled veterans and the provision of business loans testifies. Indeed, repatriation was understood to equal employment. There were two reasons for this. The first was the reality that thousands of men would be returning to New Zealand. By providing vocational and employment assistance the government hoped to avoid mass veteran unemployment and the resulting hardship and financial distress. To that end the Repatriation Department’s initial provisions included public works, a traditional method of managing labour

34 For example, Boyack and Tolerton, In the Shadow of War. This is particularly explicit in the case with the unpublished histories of the RSA, which are firmly focused on the association’s work in promoting veteran welfare: J.O. Melling, “The New Zealand Returned Soldiers’ Association 1916 – 1923” (MA thesis, Victory University College, 1952); and W.R. Mayhew, “The New Zealand Returned Services” Association, 1916–1943” (BA (Hons) thesis, University of New Zealand, 1943). 35 Uttley, “War Pensions Policy”; Ashley Gould, “‘Proof of Gratitude’: Soldier Settlement in New Zealand after World War One” (PhD thesis, Massey University, 1992). 36 Clarke, “‘Not Mad’”, places the treatment of shell shock within the context of contemporary attitudes towards mental illness, and Boston, “Bacillus of Work”, places the treatment of disabled veterans within the context of contemporary attitudes towards breadwinning, dependency and disability.

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surpluses.37 Soldier settlement was also a means of reabsorbing veterans into the domestic economy. Many sections of New Zealand society saw the benefits of placing veterans on the land. Well before the war the settlement of men on small farms was widely considered a tonic for many of the Dominion’s social ills, including unemployment; soldier settlement was seen as a means of alleviating veteran unemployment.38 The second reason for the focus on getting veterans into work was the well-ingrained ideal of independence and self-reliance. By the end of the nineteenth century a distinctly ungenerous attitude towards the needy had become entrenched in New Zealand society.39 Popular opinion held every man responsible for making his own fortune and considered prosperity available to all prepared to work. Even when faced with ill-health or economic depression, each man, it was believed, should be responsible for his own well-being and that of his dependants. There was no merit in charity, only in working for a living. Charity was seen to create dependency, which was believed to undermine a man’s moral fibre.40 In keeping with the prevailing belief in self-reliance, repatriation policy did not seek to give veterans charity or reward them for their services, but rather to reinstate them in their pre-war position in civilian society, leaving them responsible for their own subsequent fortunes.41 This ethos is evident in the work of the Repatriation Department. It generally reserved occupational retraining for the unfit, whose war service prevented them from returning to their old occupation. They did not offer retraining to the able-bodied, who were expected to make their own opportunities. The prevailing ethos proved so entrenched that it is likely that many veterans entitled to repatriation assistance refused this sort of assistance. The Repatriation Department’s first annual report noted that only a quarter of discharged soldiers sought assistance from the government to find work, 37 “Annual Report of the Repatriation Department”, Appendices to the Journal of the House of Representatives (AJHR), 1918, H-30, 4; Thomson, A World Without Welfare, 113. 38 Bryan Dunne, “The Ideal and the Real: Soldiers, Families and Farming, 1915– 1930”, (BA (Hons) thesis, University of Otago, 1933), 11–17. Marilyn Lake argues that the soldier settlement scheme implemented in Australia was in part a means of managing veteran unemployment, The Limits of Hope: Soldier Settlement in Victoria, 1915–38 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1987), 25–36. 39 See Thomson, A World without Welfare. 40 Thomson explores contemporary attitudes to state assistance and charitable aid in A World Without Welfare. See also Margaret Tennant, The Fabric of Welfare: Voluntary Organisations, Government and Welfare in New Zealand, 1840–2005 (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2007), 26–7. 41 Montgomery, “Repatriation”, 163; AJHR, 1922, H-30, 1.

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noting that “our men are continuing to show that spirit of self-reliance which characterized their efforts during the war”, although it also reflected the fact that many men were able to return to their former employment.42 The short life of the department demonstrates this limited goal of getting the veteran population back into the civilian economy. The department operated until the end of 1922 when, noting a decline in applications for vocational assistance, departmental officials assured the government that “the work of re-establishing our discharged soldiers in civil life is nearing completion”.43 Neither repatriation officials nor the government conceived the department as having a role beyond the short-term provision of vocational training and job placements. Indeed, even the RSA supported its closure.44 The ethos of self-reliance and independence also had a powerful influence on the provision of war pensions, helping to create the myth of a negligent government. Legislators intended war pensions to compensate for lost earning power. The war pension rate paid to each veteran was determined by the percentage of disability he was considered to have suffered. Except in the case of total disablement, legislators did not intend war pensions to replace a living wage. They were to make up the shortfall between the wage that a disabled veteran might earn and that of an ablebodied man. With a high proportion of veterans assessed to be with a low percentage of disability, many received relatively small pension payments. Between 1924 and 1929, 60 to 64 per cent of all veteran pensioners with permanent pensions received less than £50, and more than a third received pensions of less than £30, reflecting assessments of minimal disability.45 In 1936, 74.8 per cent of men receiving war pensions were assessed as having 50 per cent or less disability, and received a pension at that rate.46 The pension legislation thus required disabled veterans to work to their remaining capacity, thus demonstrating independence and retaining their self-respect.47 42

AJHR, 1919, H-30, 2. AJHR, 1922, H–30, 1. 44 Mayhew, “The New Zealand Returned Services Association”, 58. 45 Gwen Parsons, “‘The Many Derelicts of the War’?: Great War veterans and repatriation in Dunedin and Ashburton, 1918 to 1928” (PhD thesis, University of Otago, 2008), Table 5.14, 151, data derived from AJHR, 1918–1930, H-18. 46 Comparative figures for New Zealand veterans are included in A.G. Butler’s extensive history of the Australian war effort, The Australian Army Medical Services in the War of 1914–1918 (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1938– 1943), Vol. 3, Table 62 and Table 64, 961. 47 Mayhew, “The New Zealand Returned Services Association”, 64. 43

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The war pensions legislation and administration inherited more than a desire to foster independence among disabled veterans. It also inherited a fear of being duped. Both those who administered charitable aid bodies and the fledgling social welfare system recognized that there were deserving poor, whose misfortunes were beyond their control, such as the death or illness of the breadwinner.48 However, there were also the “undeserving” needy, considered to be the authors of their own misfortune, usually through drinking or profligacy. Those involved in poor relief before the war often suspected the applicants for aid of being unwilling to work and fraudulently presenting themselves as genuine candidates for charitable assistance. They were, therefore, cautious. This caution was inherited by the War Pension Boards, responsible for considering war pension applications. Because the boards determined whether the death or disablement of a soldier was attributable to war service, they were automatically responsible for distinguishing the eligible (the war disabled) from the ineligible (those either fraudulently claiming to be disabled or, more commonly, disabled owing to other causes).49 It was this scepticism that gave the boards the reputation for being quick to dismiss “lead swingers” or “malingerers”.50 The 1924 Pensions Department annual report noted that “pure malingering is rare, although the partial form, which consists in an exaggeration of existing symptoms, is undoubtedly common”.51 The boards were also cautious in their deliberations because of the nature of the disabilities presented by veterans. The war pension legislation assumed a clear link between disability and war service. The effects of bullets, shell fire and diseases such as cholera and typhoid presented few problems, but in many cases contemporary medical knowledge simply did not support a link between a veteran’s disability and his military service. Doctors were often unsure whether illness and disability common in the civilian world, including rheumatism and deterioration of eyesight or hearing, were the result of military service or hereditary predisposition. The medical professions’ understanding of shell shock was limited both during and after the war.52 In addition, there was

48

Hanson, The Politics of Social Security, 11. War Pension Act, 1915, sec. 4 (3). 50 Boyack and Tolerton, In the Shadow of War, 246. 51 AJHR, 1924, H-18, 10. 52 Gwen Parsons, “The Construction of Shell Shock in New Zealand, 1919–1939: A Reassessment”, Social History of Medicine, 26:1 (2013), 56–73. 49

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no contemporary medical data to support veterans’ claims of latent or delayed disability.53 Many aspects of the repatriation provisions were developed well beyond the limitations of contemporary social attitudes and medical knowledge, discrediting the myth of the neglected soldier. For example, the Repatriation Department was innovative in its approach to the problem of veteran employment. Traditionally, repatriation policy had been centred on soldier settlement and war pensions, and there was no precedent for the employment bureau activities, vocational training and on-the-job training offered by the Repatriation Department from 1918 to 1922. Likewise, the war pension provisions went well beyond the dictates of contemporary ideals. As noted by David Thomson and Melanie Nolan, they represented a new type of state pension. In 1914 there were pensions for the elderly, widows, veterans of the Land Wars and miners suffering from miner’s lung or pneumoconiosis. These were granted at the discretion of the Pension Department officials and subject to various tests, including means, residence and morals. Thomson describes the 1915 War Pensions Act as a break with the past because it established state pensions by right rather than at the discretion of pension officials.54 This significant development in social welfare history, Nolan argues, acted as a blueprint for later state pension initiatives.55 More than this, veterans were the first disabled group to receive state assistance. Moreover, while state pensions, and Charitable Aid Boards, kept aid to a minimum to avoid creating dependency, the war pension legislation instituted pension rates that provided for a moderate income. As noted, most disabled veterans received considerably less than the full war pension rates because they were deemed to have a limited disability, and the average annual amount paid to veterans from 1920 to 1929 was between £48 and £59.56 Nevertheless, the war pension allowed for a good standard of living for fully disabled veterans of between £104 and £169, depending on rank.57 When allowances for dependent wives and children were added, the annual pension for totally disabled veterans before 1924 allowed for an annual pension of £234, which was on a par with the annual income of 53

Parsons, “The Many Derelicts of the War?”, 109–10. Thomson, A World Without Welfare, 55 Nolan, Breadwinning, 87–102. See also Nolan “‘Keeping the Home Fires Burning’”, 493–515. 56 Rate for permanent pension, Parsons, “The Many Derelicts of the War”, 150, derived from AJHR, 1918–1930, H-18. 57 Parsons, “The Many Derelicts of the War”, 149, derived from War Pensions Amendment Act (1917), Schedule 2. 54

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skilled tradesmen, such as plumbers, who in 1921 earned an average yearly income of £265, and bakers, who earned £244.58 Moreover, although the legislators intended war pensions to make up the wages of disabled veterans, they were prepared to innovate in response to widespread disabled veteran unemployment. In 1923 the government passed the War Pension Amendment Act, which established the economic pension, a supplementary amount paid to veterans receiving a war pension who were unable to find or retain employment. Essentially, it acknowledged that not all disabled veterans were able to work and that the government had a responsibility to fully support them. Although the contemporary context reinforced the importance of independence, reward was an important element in the repatriation provisions, as noted by Gould, in regard to the soldier settlement scheme.59 Farm ownership, seen as perhaps the best prize available to New Zealand citizens, was increasingly difficult to achieve by the early twentieth century. This is why the public pressured the government to expand the scheme, and why the government was unwilling to deny any veteran the opportunity to become a soldier settler, regardless of farming experience, size of capital or health. The scheme provided cheap government mortgages and loans to enable veterans to purchase farms and homes from the government, but amendments to the act soon enabled veterans to borrow in order to purchase land on the open market. The war gratuities, an aspect of repatriation often ignored by repatriation historians, were officially described as “a free gift by the State in recognition of the honourable service of soldiers of the Expeditionary Forces”.60 The rate was 1s 6d per day (£82 per year), and in the case of men who died after only a short period of service, their dependants were to receive a gratuity at the rate of not less than two years’ service.61 Men who had served for long periods received substantial payments, and when combined with Repatriation Department loans and Lands Department mortgages, war gratuity payments put the purchase of homes, farms and businesses within the reach of many returned men. The repatriation legislation assisted 12,000 former soldiers to purchase homes, effectively changing attitudes to home ownership in the Dominion.62 58

Parsons, “The Many Derelicts of the War”, 148–9, derived from the New Zealand Official Year–Book (Wellington: Government Printer, 1926), 748–51. 59 Gould, “‘Proof of Gratitude’”, 100. 60 New Zealand Official Year-Book (Wellington: Government Printer, 1919), 819. 61 Ibid., 820. 62 Ashley Gould, “Repatriation”, in Ian McGibbon (ed.), The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Military History (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 2000), 446;

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Nowhere is the special place of veterans clearer than in the government’s response to the economic crises of the interwar years. In response to the post-war slump, the government undertook to revalue land purchased through the soldier settlement scheme and introduced the economic pension. The response to veterans during the Depression was even more generous. While the government cut economic pensions and payments to the dependents of disabled veterans by 10 per cent in mid1931, veteran war pensions themselves, along with war pensions paid to the children of deceased soldiers, war widows and widowed mothers, remained unaltered.63 In comparison, all other state pensions were cut by 30 per cent and family allowances were stopped altogether.64 During the Depression the government also helped to establish the Exsoldiers’ Rehabilitation League, the primary recommendation of the 1929 Ex-Soldiers’ Rehabilitation Commission. The league provided assistance to disabled veterans, who, a decade after the end of the war, were struggling as a result of poor health and unemployment. Historians often suggest the government failed to support this initiative, and emphasize the lobbying of the RSA.65 It is clear, however, that, when state income plummeted and the government was faced with widespread deprivation, it did as much as was possible to support the creation of the league. It put through the supporting legislation, recognized the league as a quasiofficial body through close connections with government departments and officials, and in 1931 secured unspent funds from the Canteen and Regimental Trust Funds Board to support the creation of the league’s sheltered workshops.66 A key concern of league officials and the RSA, Miles Fairburn, “The Farmers Take Over (1912–30)”, in Judith Binney, Judith Bassett and Erik Olssen (eds), The People and the Land: Te Tangata me te whenua: Illustrated history of New Zealand, 1820–1920 (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1993), 205–6. 63 Stephen Uttley, “An Enduring Obligation: A History of War Pensions” (unpublished manuscript: Wellington, Department of Social Welfare, [1992]), 28; Mayhew, “The New Zealand Returned Services Association”, 108–09. 64 Tony Simpson, The Sugarbag Years: A People’s History of the 1930s Depression in New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin, 1990), 13. 65 Melling, “The New Zealand Returned Soldiers’ Association 1916–1923”; and Mayhew, “The New Zealand Returned Services” Association, 1916–1943”. 66 Disabled Soldiers Civil Re-establishment Act, 1930 and amendment. Regarding the quasi-official nature of the league see for example the minutes of the Canterbury Soldiers’ Civil Re-establishment League Committee, 1935, in the Disabled Soldiers Re-establishment Committee Papers 1935–1942, Disabled Servicemen’s Re-establishment League Archive, MSY2848, ATL. Regarding the procurement of the Canteen and Regimental Trust Funds Board money see “Jobs

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who supported the league, was the underemployment of disabled veterans and their reliance on the economic pension. League officials sought the “reclamation of men whose employability had deteriorated through ‘drift’ and lack of incentive” through employment.67 The league’s focus on employment—getting veterans into work and off the economic pension— encapsulated traditional ideas about the benefits of independence and selfreliance, embodied in the Repatriation Department a decade earlier. The veterans’ supporters were still influenced by the contemporary attitudes, but the government’s support of this new initiative suggests a more progressive attitude towards needy veterans. Returned soldiers were a privileged section of the community for whom long-held ideals of self-reliance and avoidance of charity were pushed and overturned in significant government assistance. Why, then, does the myth of the neglected veteran endure? There are several reasons. The first is that the interwar period was blighted by two economic catastrophes: the 1920–21 slump and the Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s. During the post-war slump, many veterans who had begun to establish themselves in society lost jobs, homes and businesses, as did many civilians. The Depression, a mere decade later, brought more misery to both groups. The hardship of these crises has overshadowed the repatriation successes, and, indeed, the interwar period as a whole. Another reason is that at the end of the Second World War the Labour Government promoted the “success” of the second repatriation programme in terms of the “failure” of the first.68 Historians, too, have tended to present the First World War repatriation scheme as the unsuccessful precursor to the later successful scheme.69 Legislators, who just a few for Ex–soldiers”, Dominion, 16 June 1932, and “From Disabled Servicemen to Disabled Civilians,” 2, Disabled Servicemen’s Re-establishment League Archive, 91–005–2/23, ATL. 67 “Soldiers Civil Re-establishment League (Inc): Report on matters arising out of the Ex–soldiers’ Rehabilitation Commission, 1930, and proposals with respect to future activities of the League”, 3, Disabled Servicemen’s Re-establishment League Archive, 91–005–2/21, ATL. 68 Ashley Gould, “‘Proof of Gratitude?’”, 18ff, notes a 1941 Labour government pamphlet, “Farms for Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen”, which presented selected aspects of the First World War land settlement scheme, presenting them as benchmarks of failure that the new scheme would avoid. 69 Sarah Neal, “Well Intentioned but Ill-Fated: The New Zealand Government’s Repatriation Scheme for World War One Returned Soldiers, 1915–1930” (BA (Hons) thesis, University of Otago, 2001), 56; “War History of Rehabilitation in New Zealand 1939 to 1965: Ex-Servicemen of World War II (1939–1945), Occupational Troops in Japan, Forces in Korea or Korean Waters and Malaya or

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years earlier had passed the Social Security Act, developed the second scheme in a world where the public held much higher expectations regarding the state’s role in helping those in need and the right of all veterans—not just returned soldiers suffering from the direct effects of military service—to state assistance. The rehabilitation scheme was also developed within a state that already had an effective bureaucracy for the organisation of state welfare.70 The repatriation scheme for Second World War veterans made more liberal provision for housing, vocational training, tertiary education, assistance into employment, as well as home and business loans, than its predecessor. Whereas the repatriation legislation had aimed to give Great War veterans a hand back onto the social ladder, the rehabilitation legislation aimed to give Second World War veterans a hand up the ladder as well. Indeed, historians estimate that the government’s Second World War veteran rehabilitation provisions proved so generous as to constitute “something of a parallel welfare state”.71 The broader aims of the second scheme, along with the different context in which it developed, meant that any comparison between the two schemes naturally resulted in the former coming a poor second best. The myth of the neglected soldier is also linked to the lauding of the first Labour Government for creating a New Zealand society in which citizens not only had an obligation to the state but the state had an obligation to its citizens. This administration is generally believed to have broken with the past and swept away the uncaring pre-social welfare state that had done nothing to allay suffering during the Depression. Within this version of history there is little room to acknowledge that the welfare state had already made significant advances under the arch-conservative William Massey and the Reform Government.72 To acknowledge the advance of the welfare state through the development of repatriation provisions is to undermine the extent of the change under the first Labour Government. The endurance of the myth of the neglected soldier owes much to the change of accepted norms in the 1930s. Regardless of the Malayan Waters” (Wellington: Rehabilitation Board, [1965]), 5–6; and Nicholas Boyack and Jane Tolerton, In the Shadow of War, 260. 70 Thomson, A World Without Welfare, 33–34. 71 Tennant, The Fabric of Welfare, 89; Jane R.M. Thomson, “The Rehabilitation of Servicemen of World War Two in New Zealand 1940 to 1954” (PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 1983), 335. 72 For a reappraisal of Massey, who is often viewed very negatively by historians, see James Watson and Lachy Paterson (eds), A Great New Zealand Prime Minister: Reappraising William Ferguson Massey (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2011).

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innovation and relative generosity of the repatriation provisions before 1936, the establishment of the welfare state with its “cradle to grave” assistance to citizens, made them look old-fashioned and distinctly ungenerous.

III. Conclusion This chapter has considered the nature of two home front myths, and their origins, and offered reasons for the endurance of these collective memories. It has dwelt particularly on the myth of the neglected veteran since this topic has received little attention from New Zealand historians. In comparison, there is a large body of scholarship illustrating the divisions on the home front that undermines the image of a jingoistic civilian population. Yet this scholarship has not yet dispelled the patriotic myth. This raises the question of how scholarship can impact on collective memory. It seems clear that in an area such as the First World War, which is laden with mythology that still resonates in the politics and culture of all participant nations, historians need to present work that directly addresses the historical context of events, as well as the contemporary implications of their findings. In this way historians can better participate in the creation of scholarship and collective memory.

CHAPTER SIX “WHAT WITH THE WAR [AND] THE EPIDEMIC, TIMES ARE ALTOGETHER TROUBLESOME”: AGENCY AND ENDURANCE IN ADOLESCENT WRITINGS CHARLOTTE BENNETT The influenza epidemic has caused a great deal of anxiety throughout the Dominion, and now that we have completed fighting the Germans, we are now fighting the germs. The deaths in the paper are simply beyond imagination, and it is so hard to realise that so many have succumbed through it. “Treakle Pot” to the “Dot’s Little Folk Page”, Otago Witness, 11 December 19181

Between 1914 and 1918 New Zealand youth were embroiled in a devastating international conflict. The First World War lasted four agonising years, drawing 104,000 men away from home to serve overseas. These combatants constituted approximately 10 per cent of the total population, and more than half of them became casualties of war.2 The conflict, however, was not the only crisis that disrupted children’s lives during this period. Amid news of the successive collapse of the Central Powers during the last few months of 1918, a deadly H1N1 virus emerged in Auckland. By the time the Armistice was announced in mid-November, New Zealand was in the grip of the 1918–19 influenza pandemic. 1

“Treakle Pot (Lindis Crossing)”, “Dot’s Little Folk” page, Otago Witness (Dunedin, New Zealand), 25 December 1918, 57 (“Dot’s Little Folk” letters hereafter cited as DLF). 2 John Crawford and Ian McGibbon, “Introduction,” in John Crawford and Ian McGibbon (eds), New Zealand’s Great War: New Zealand, the Allies and the First World War (Auckland: Exisle Publishing, 2007), 23; New Zealand Army, The New Zealand Army: A History from the 1840s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (Christchurch: Wyatt & Wilson, 1995), 103.

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This chapter explores how New Zealand children between twelve and twenty years of age endured these intersecting crises. Legal and cultural understandings of childhood were remarkably broad during the 1910s: contemporary definitions of youth largely included everyone under the age of twenty. Men had to be at least twenty years old to be eligible for military service and, from 1917, nineteen-year-old volunteers were required to obtain parental permission.3 Similarly, correspondents to the popular “Dot’s Little Folk” (DLF) children’s page published in the Otago Witness were considered to be “Old Writers”, and thus adults, once they had reached the end of their adolescence. The terms “older children” and “adolescents” are used to clearly differentiate this cohort from their younger counterparts; “youth” and “children” are used synonymously. Adolescent writings, like those composed by “Treakle Pot” in 1918, provide invaluable insight into older children’s emotions and the coping mechanisms that they used during this traumatic period. Although youthcentric histories focusing on the mid- to late 1910s have started to emerge from Europe and North America, little is currently known about the personal experiences of Antipodean youth during the First World War and the influenza pandemic.4 Extant research tends to focus on the institutions that structured children’s lives on the home front; Jeanine Graham and Deborah Challinor, for example, have demonstrated how institutions such as schools integrated New Zealand children into the war effort.5 This chapter extends this work by investigating how youth themselves felt about, and dealt with, both the conflict and the flu. 3

Paul Baker, King and Country Call: New Zealanders, Conscription and the Great War (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1988), 145. 4 Key international publications include Maureen Healy, “Mobilizing Austria’s Children for Total War”, in Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 211–57; Andrew Donson, Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Susan R. Fisher, Boys and Girls in No Man’s Land: English–Canadian Children and the First World War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011); Kristine Alexander, “An Honour and a Burden: Canadian Girls and the Great War”, in Sarah Glassford and Amy J. Shaw (eds), A Sisterhood of Suffering and Service: Women and Girls of Canada and Newfoundland during the First World War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012), 173–94. 5 Deborah Challinor, “Children and War: A Study of the Impact of the First World War on New Zealand Children” (MA thesis, University of Waikato, 1993); Jeanine Graham, “Young New Zealanders and the Great War: exploring the impact and legacy of the First World War, 1914–2014,” Paedagogica Historica 44: 4 (August 2008), 429–44.

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In order to illuminate the underlying factors that shaped adolescent responses to these crises, a comparative approach has been used. Older children’s discursive reactions to the war and the flu have been analysed with reference to their wider societal and temporal contexts. Overseas research clearly illustrates that adolescents responded to the First World War in complex ways. Andrew Donson concluded that, while German youth did participate in voluntary patriotic labour, they also took advantage of “dwindling controls over sex, crime, and play”.6 Rosalind Kennedy’s thesis recognized similar initiatives taken by British youth: “children tried to make sense of the war around them, combining what they learnt about the war from adults with what they came to understand about it for themselves.”7 Such behaviour substantiates recent historiographical assertions that youth in the past were historical agents, despite acting “from positions of relative powerlessness, marginality, and invisibility”.8 If children can develop their own interpretations of contemporary events and respond accordingly, their adherence to, or deviation from, societal rhetoric and standards is particularly significant. This chapter tests notions of adolescent agency and endurance in New Zealand, first examining the conflict before turning to the pandemic.

I. The First World War: Rhetoric and expectations New Zealand’s state of war with the German Empire, announced on 5 August 1914, had far-reaching consequences. The “substantive majority” of society enthusiastically supported the conflict—at least at the beginning of hostilities—and this emotional fervour was matched by considerable material pledges by both institutions and individuals.9 Governmental authorities immediately offered to contribute an 8,000-strong expeditionary force towards Britain’s imperial war effort and later introduced conscription to maintain sufficient reinforcement numbers.10 These military commitments 6

Donson, Youth in the Fatherless Land, 122–23, 154. Rosalind Kennedy, “The Children’s War: British children’s experience of the Great War” (PhD thesis, Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2006), 262. 8 Mary Jo Maynes, “Age as a Category of Historical Analysis: History, Agency, and Narratives of Childhood”, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, 1 (Winter 2008), 116. 9 Ian McGibbon, “The Shaping of New Zealand’s War Effort, August–October 1914”, in Crawford and McGibbon (eds), New Zealand’s Great War, 50. 10 Ibid., 57; Gary Sheffield, “Britain and the Empire at War 1914–1918: Reflections on a Forgotten Victory”, in Crawford and McGibbon (eds), New Zealand’s Great War, 41. 7

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increasingly burdened New Zealand’s non-combatant population. Labour shortages emerged as early as 1915, and families throughout the country faced significant emotional turmoil as casualties mounted overseas.11 Confronted with such pressures New Zealanders developed a war culture that “made sense of the war, and persuaded themselves to continue fighting it”.12 Children’s knowledge of the conflict was shaped by the pro-war language that filled the public sphere between 1914 and 1918. As Jay Winter has recognized, “[c]onsent was an essential element of mass warfare” and elite control over mainstream newspapers resulted in the publication of selective war information.13 Anti-war sentiments were further marginalized through anti-sedition legislation and readers were inundated with propagandist articles that glorified New Zealand’s belligerent status.14 Older children encountered similar crusading rhetoric in their church activities, although after 1915 the emphasis was more on the importance of sacrifice.15 The darker side of warfare became readily apparent following the Gallipoli campaign and Bible class teachers sought to comfort the bereaved. Children’s religious magazines, such as the Presbyterian Break of Day, overtly sanctified and validated New Zealand’s mass casualties. In 1916, editor James Aitken reassured his older readers that “So long as we live we shall go softly in the recollection of the price by which our liberties were secured. God grant us grace to be more worthy of the blood which has been shed for us.”16 In line with such rhetoric, citizens of all ages were soon integrated into the home front. Primary and secondary schools became key sources of war-related information for youth all over the world, and New Zealand 11

James Watson, “Patriotism, Profits and Problems: New Zealand Farming During the Great War”, in Crawford and McGibbon (eds), New Zealand’s Great War, 543. 12 Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audoin–Rouzeau and Annette Becker, France and the Great War 1914–1918, trans. Helen McPhail (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), xv. 13 J.M. Winter, “Propaganda and the Mobilization of Consent”, in Hew Strachan (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 216; Gwen Parsons, “Debating the War: The Discourses of War in the Christchurch Community”, in Crawford and McGibbon (eds), New Zealand’s Great War, 553. 14 John Anderson, “Military Censorship in World War I: Its Use and Abuse in New Zealand” (MA thesis, Victoria University College, 1952), 218–20. 15 Allan Davidson, “New Zealand Churches and Death in the First World War”, in Crawford and McGibbon (eds), New Zealand’s Great War, 453. 16 The Break of Day: The Children’s Missionary Magazine of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand, 7 (August 1916), 3.

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was no exception to this trend.17 This material explicitly encouraged youth to support New Zealand’s involvement in the conflict. Pupils at Wellington Girls’ College, for instance, listened to a two-part lecture in 1915 titled “What we can do for our Soldiers”, given by a representative from the National Service League.18 Self-sacrifice was extolled as the ultimate virtue, and educators applauded youth who acted accordingly. Headmaster Joseph Firth noted in his 1917 Speech Day address at Wellington College that: [s]ince the outbreak of the war the College had contributed £1600 to the patriotic funds … [and] the fact that had given him the most satisfaction was that [it was] provided through the self-sacrifice of the boys themselves.19

Adolescents, especially those who left school at fourteen, were involved in home front activities outside the classroom. In her March 1916 letter to the DLF page, fifteen-year-old “A Soldier’s Friend” noted that she had made a flannel for her local Red Cross Society group.20 There is significant evidence that suggests other adolescents were extensively involved in similar volunteer organizations during this period. For example, fellow correspondent “A True Patriot” was a key member of the Otago Women’s Patriotic Association, ultimately receiving a gold brooch in recognition of her service in December 1916.21 Older children were subject to additional war-related pressures and rhetoric. While all youth were expected to participate in fundraising and war effort activities, younger New Zealand children’s educational and 17

Key works on the war’s impact on Australian, Canadian, and European schools include John McQuilton, “True Britons: Teachers, Children and Youth”, in Rural Australia and the Great War (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2001), 138–48; Fisher, Boys and Girls, 51–78; Donson, Youth in the Fatherless Land, 59–90; Stefan Goebel, “Schools”, in Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert, Capital Cities at War, Volume 2: A Cultural History (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 188–34; Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, “Children and the primary schools of France, 1914–1918”, in John Horne (ed.), State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 39–52; Andrea Fava, “War, ‘national education’ and the Italian primary school, 1915–1918”, in Horne (ed.), State, Society, 53–69. 18 The Girls’ College Reporter: Wellington Girls” College 41:65 (Second Half– Year 1916), 10. 19 The Wellingtonian XXVI, 1 (May 1917), 11. 20 “A Soldier’s Friend (Kelso)”, DLF, 29 March 1916, 71. 21 “A True Patriot (Dunedin)”, DLF, 27 December 1916, 61.

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leisure activities were not significantly disrupted. The conflict, however, demanded more from older children. Secondary students were taken out of school to help with rapidly developing labour shortages, and male adolescents were increasingly viewed as future combatants who would serve overseas when they became eligible to enlist.22 The cadet movement exemplified these heightened militaristic expectations. By 1914 it was compulsory for boys aged fourteen to eighteen years and over to receive sixty-four hours of drill and rifle shooting training per year, and cadets at Wellington College exchanged their physical drill practices for bayonet fighting.23 In 1918 Palmerston North High School cadets were given lectures on conditions at the battlefront that discussed the use of gas masks and bombs in war.24 Older children, however, were not passive victims of this didactic environment. They readily grasped opportunities to respond to the war and its ramifications on their own terms.

II. Adolescent responses and writings Correspondence circles and children’s magazines provided space for adolescents to reflect on interests and events deemed worthy of discussion. Between 1886 and 1932 the DLF page published letters written by youth up to twenty years of age.25 Correspondents adopted noms de plume, formed local DLF clubs and exchanged letters among themselves in addition to writing to “Dot”, the column’s editor. Writers were largely Pakeha youth living in Southland and Otago, and older correspondents can be identified through information contained within their letters, such as their age, school class or employment status. Adolescents’ thoughts and observations were similarly captured in 1910s high school magazines. The editors tended to be teachers or senior members of the student body, but pupils at all levels were involved in the magazine content. These publications typically included editorials directed towards the whole student population, articles on academic and extracurricular activities, fiction pieces and an “Old Girls” or “Old Boys” section that outlined the 22

Charlotte Bennett, “‘Now the war is over, we have something else to worry us’: New Zealand Children’s Responses to Crises, 1914–1918”, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 7:1 (Winter 2014), 19-41. 23 Ian McGibbon, “Cadets”, in Ian McGibbon (ed.), The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Military History (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 2000), 76; Wellingtonian XXIV, 2 (December 1915): 6. 24 The Palmerstonian 4: 4 (October 1918), 31. 25 Keith Scott, Dear Dot, I Must Tell You: A Personal History of Young New Zealanders (Auckland: Activity Press, 2011), 29, 536.

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accomplishments of past students. Printed at least once a year, these magazines were regularly exchanged between institutions across the country. Adolescent writings suggest that the war was a key topic of discussion among older youth between 1914 and 1918. Germany was demonized in older children’s contributions to school papers, and particularly in those produced by boys’ colleges. In December 1914 J.H. Parr informed his peers at Waitaki Boys’ High School that [t]he motives which have inspired the German nation to foment the Armageddon of to-day have become of necessity the subject of endless investigation. To an unbiased mind, the Teutons’ deliberate and coldblooded provocation of an almost invincible combination of hostile Powers borders on the insane.26

Many adolescents explicitly blamed Germany for beginning the war and constantly reiterated the need for the British Empire to challenge this aggressive behaviour. E. Corcoran of Timaru Boys’ High School asserted in 1917 that “since this war has been forced upon them it behoves the Allies, as the champions of liberty and democracy, to wage it as vigorously as possible, and by bringing it to a speedy finish lessen the amount of suffering and distress”.27 These editorials clearly illustrate that, even though they may have drawn upon war talk generated by adults, adolescents strove to understand the driving factors behind the conflict for themselves. Older children played an active part in the war-oriented society around them and they appropriated the language they heard in their writings. DLF correspondent “A True Patriot” ruminated at length on her relationship with the war in early 1917: still we find ourselves in the midst of this terrible war. Still we find our soldiers fighting with a heroism not less true and with a course not less noble than that which was delivered at Gallipoli, each and everyone eager to “do his bit” to help oust the ruthless Huns.28

Many older children sought to align themselves publicly with New Zealand’s military endeavours, and document the personal sacrifices they 26 The Waitakian: The Magazine of the Waitaki Boys’ High School IX, 3 (December 1914), 163. 27 The Timaruvian: The Magazine of the Timaru Boys’ High School XII, 1 (December 1917), 14. 28 “A True Patriot (Dunedin)”, DLF, 25 April 1917, 63.

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were making for the conflict. Students at Columba Girls’ College proclaimed in their 1915 school newspaper: “We have tried to do our little part, and have contributed materially towards the patriotic fund during this year, but we feel that we could never do too much for such a worthy object.”29 Intriguingly, some adolescents deliberately challenged adult restrictions on youth behaviour. It was illegal for adolescents to volunteer for military service and numerous authorities discouraged this practice. Dot herself informed “Pontiac” in 1915 that “I think it is a mistake to enlist too young, and am glad you were rejected.”30 Nonetheless, several older DLF correspondents openly advocated underage enlistment, a stance probably motivated by the wider expectation that adolescent boys volunteer when eligible. Thirteen-year-old “Paperboy Bertie” thought it was a pity when his friend’ third bid for military service failed merely because Henry Beach (“Postman Henry”) was 17 years old.31 Not all adolescents, however, appreciated attempts by their peers to pressure them into enlisting. “Navigator” complained about such behaviour in December 1916: “[d]o you think it is right for a D.L.F. girl friend to say to you that you should be away to the war instead of letting other men do the fighting for you?”32 Older children paid close attention to the war’s consequences, and did not hesitate to voice their sometimes critical observations. Despite widespread adolescent support for the war effort, many were sceptical about rose-tinted depictions of military service. As “Grant” wrote in April 1917: [m]y uncle, who has returned [from the Front], is anything but well. He says his arm is never free from pain. It is all shrunken away to almost nothing. Above the elbow is just as thick as your wrist, as all the muscles have been blown away. … What a difference it was to see him when he came home to when he went away. It does seem a pity, does it not? To see the fine sturdy men going away, and coming back cripples; but it can’t be helped—someone has to go.33

Such observations were not unique among Antipodean adolescents. Kristine Alexander identified similar reflections within older Canadian children’s letters to the Maple Leaf Club, which appeared in the Montreal29

Columba College Chronicle II (November 1914), 16. “Pontiac (Invercargill)”, DLF, 25 July 1915, 68. 31 “Paperboy Bertie (Timaru)”, DLF, 25 January 1916, 75; Scott, Dear Dot, 515– 17. 32 “Navigator (Riversdale)”, DLF, 27 December 1916, 60. 33 “Grant (Pukerau)”, DLF, 25 April 1917, 63. 30

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based Free Herald and Weekly Star.34 Despite New Zealand’s and Canada’s distance from the main spheres of fighting, children were still exposed to the war’s tragic consequences through losing family members and witnessing the return of maimed servicemen. Personal experiences were crucial in shaping older children’s perceptions of the conflict. Although the war’s validity remained unquestioned, some New Zealand youth responded angrily when they thought their loved ones were being mistreated. “Remembrance” asserted that “I think it is a shame the way they are treating the boys who are fighting, don’t you? They are not getting their letters or parcels.”35 Conscription evoked particularly strong reactions from those who felt that their families had already given their fair share of men. In May 1917 fifteen-year-old “Ginger Mick” agreed that the conflict was “terrible”, but “I have four brothers at the war, and my other brother was drawn in the ballot, but I hope he does not go, as I think four out of any family is enough.”36 Patriotic enthusiasm evidently had its limits. The conflict evoked the most intense reactions from adolescents when it affected their families and those they knew. The war, after all, not only threatened the lives of brothers, cousins, uncles and fathers, but also their peers, colleagues, friends and boyfriends. Fifteen-year-old “White Violet”, for instance, wrote in September 1915: “I do wish this war would come to an end as there are so many dying of wounds and getting shot. My brother was wounded between August 6 and 7 … you can imagine how anxious one would get.”37 Older DLF correspondents kept each other informed about the status of their loved ones and, when confronted with tragedy, were quick to console the bereaved. Sixteen-year-old “Plain Bill” noted in early 1918, “I see another L.F. has given his life for King and country, but his parents will know that they have not sacrificed in vain. They will have all our heartfelt sympathy.”38 Adolescents made great use of rhetoric concerning the significance of wartime casualties, most likely because they felt this language was a crucial source of comfort.

III. Declarations of peace and the end of the war In late 1918, adolescents across the country greeted the news of peace with a mixture of jubilation and relief and, alongside their younger 34

Alexander, “An Honour and a Burden”, 179–80, 184–85. “Remembrance (Auckland)”, DLF, 24 November 1915, 71. 36 “Ginger Mick (Invercargill)”, DLF, 30 May 1917, 57. 37 “White Violet (Balfour)”, DLF, 29 September 1915, 77. 38 “Plain Bill (Hastings)”, DLF, 30 January 1918, 56. 35

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counterparts, took part in New Zealand’s peace celebrations. Numerous events leading up to the total cessation of armed hostilities were commemorated, including the capitulation of each of the Central Powers throughout October and early November. Ten-year-old “A Soldier’s Niece II” informed her fellow DLF correspondents that there was great rejoicing in her local community when news of Turkey’s unconditional surrender was received on Friday 1 November.39 Sixteen-year-old “Gipsy Belle” relished local end-of-war festivities in Gore: “[t]here has [sic] been some good demonstrations here. My word, the people were excited; and the Kaiser [bonfire] did burn lovely.”40 While rejoicing in the Armistice, however, many adolescents wrote of the significant personal ramifications of the end of war. Sixteen-year-old “Tharlerie” eagerly awaited the return of the Forty-second Reinforcements “as I know more in that lot than in any other”, and 18-year-old “Island Girl” rejoiced at the prospect of seeing her two brothers after two years of active service.41 Many, like “Treakle Pot”, also admitted that they had difficulty in believing that the fighting really was at an end: “[i]t seems so hard for one to realize that the war is actually over, and now we can look forward to all our dear boys coming home to us.”42 The absence of loved ones had so dominated adolescent wartime experiences that many felt that only their return would make peace seem real. But many older youth had lost family members. While greatly anticipating the return of one soldier brother in December 1918, “Shining Sunbeam” simultaneously mourned the loss of another.43 A total of 18,166 New Zealand servicemen had died in combat or from wounds, and older children were not oblivious to this widespread grief.44 “Kelvin” and his family appear to have emerged from the war largely unscathed. Nonetheless, he still recognized that [w]hen the boys begin to return the hardest part will come for those who see the other boys gladly welcomed home by their friends, and know that their own have found a nameless grave in a far-away battle field. One can hardly imagine that there is no war, and yet I suppose that in a year or two people will settle down into the old routine of life, as it was four years ago,

39

“A Soldier’s Niece II (Naseby)”, DLF, 13 November 1918, 57. “Gipsy Belle (Gore)”, DLF, 20 November 1918, 64. 41 “Tharlerie (Slope Point)”, DLF, 25 December 1918, 57; “Island Girl (Oreti)”, DLF, 18 December 1918, 62. 42 “Treakle Pot (Lindis Crossing)”, DLF, 4 December 1918, 57. 43 “Shining Sunbeam (Fairfax)”, DLF, 11 December 1918, 56. 44 Crawford and McGibbon, “Introduction”, 17. 40

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There was little opportunity for adolescents, and New Zealand in general, to come to terms with the cessation of hostilities. Peace celebrations were marred by the arrival of a deadly 1918 flu virus, and older children were swiftly drawn into a worldwide public health emergency.

IV. The 1918 influenza pandemic Towards the end of the war, countries across the globe were affected by a highly contagious disease later identified as an H1N1 influenza strand.46 This virus circumnavigated the world in less than a year, manifesting itself in a number of waves throughout 1918 and 1919.47 New Zealand was affected by two outbreaks and, as was the case overseas, the second wave, beginning in late October 1918, proved the most devastating.48 This later variant was most probably triggered by influenza viruses brought in on troopships returning overseas, and it spread to Christchurch, Wellington and Dunedin within a week of its initial emergence in Auckland. Many victims developed pneumonia as a secondary complication; it was this disease proved to be “the real killer” in 1918.49 By 18 November all parts of the country had suffered flu-related deaths, and approximately 8,573 New Zealanders died before the epidemic subsided in mid-December.50 Although authorities had needed to maintain public support to facilitate New Zealand’s participation in the war, there was no need to justify interventionist measures during the epidemic. In order to mitigate mass contagion, elected officials discouraged people from congregating outside their homes. The Blenheim Borough Council, for example, requested that parents “not allow their children to gather in the town”.51 Parents and 45

“Kelvin (Port Chalmers)”, DLF, 20 November 1918, 63–64. David M. Morens and Anthony S. Fauci, “The 1918 Influenza Pandemic: Insights for the 21st Century”, The Journal of Infectious Diseases 195, 1 (April 2007), 1018. 47 Niall P.A.S. Johnson and Juergen Mueller, “Updating the Accounts: Global Mortality of the 1918–1920 ‘Spanish’ Influenza Pandemic”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76: 1 (2002), 107. 48 Geoffrey W. Rice, Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand, 2nd ed. (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2005), 199. 49 Ibid., 24. 50 Ibid., 203. 51 Marlborough Express, 15 November 1918, 5. 46

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caregivers often insisted that children remain inside and at home whenever possible in an attempt to protect them from the virus.52 Official restrictions on young New Zealanders’ movements intensified with the temporary closure of key public institutions. On 6 November 1918 the acting chief health officer in Auckland, Dr Joseph Frengley, ordered the closure of “all places of entertainment, public halls, billiard rooms, and shooting galleries”.53 The Auckland Education Board followed his lead the next day, choosing to close all schools under its jurisdiction, and Parliament implemented these closures across the entire country on 11 November.54 Religious activities were also curtailed in some areas; Frengley requested that all Auckland churches hold only short morning services from 6 November and Canterbury’s chief health officer followed suit.55 Such regulations not only constrained children’s usual activities, but also their ability to find out what was going on. During the war adults working in schools and churches had been key sources of information, but these roles were not possible during the pandemic. Also hampered were opportunities to discuss events among themselves: the publication of most school magazines was suspended during November and December 1918. Youth were consequently forced to rely on the only remaining channel of mass communication, newspapers, for information—but these were also subject to governmental intervention. The Minister of Health, George Russell, tried to avoid public panic by prohibiting the publication of official death statistics in newspapers.56 Instead readers were provided with large quantities of government-approved advice about preventative and curative treatments. Numerous editors, for example, warned that Dr Robert Makgill, the Health Department’s senior public health expert, considered the inhalation of formalin a dangerous practice.57 Those adolescents in paid employment were not able to quarantine themselves inside throughout late 1918. Although numerous organizations were forced to close owing to staff illness or government intervention, many remained open for business. “Deadwood Dick”, for instance, informed Dot in late November that “We are working for three hours every day, and then get off” even though “nearly all the shops are

52

Bennett, “‘Now the War is Over’”. Evening Post, 8 November 1918, 5. 54 Rice, Black November, 75, 95. 55 Ibid., 75. 56 Ashburton Guardian, 4 December 1918, 4. 57 Evening Post, 18 November 1918, 6; Wairarapa Daily Times, 19 November 1918, 5; Wanganui Chronicle, 21 November 1918, 6. 53

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closed”.58 Some secondary students, not able to attend school, left the relative safety of their homes at regular intervals to help with flu relief efforts. Senior boys at the Marist Brothers’ school in Ponsonby, Auckland, for example, acted as messengers and orderlies at Vermont Street Catholic Girls’ School following its conversion into a temporary hospital.59 Older children affiliated with youth associations were recruited for similar roles, and Boy and Girl Scout troops responded strongly to public volunteer appeals. The Minister of Health recognized their efforts in late November, proclaiming that he felt “the Government is under a deep debt of gratitude to the Scouts” as they “have done a vast amount of work in carrying messages and food, visiting houses, and generally assisting the health authorities and volunteer organizations”.60 Unfortunately, these paid and unpaid work commitments put older children at greater risk of contracting the flu themselves; “A Hieland Belle” contracted influenza while working as a kitchen maid at Riverton Hospital.61 .

V. Adolescent reactions and correspondence Older children engaged with New Zealand’s second H1N1 flu epidemic discursively as well as behaviourally throughout late 1918. Adolescents’ letters reflected the geographical proximity of the virus, and its rapid transmission. “Island Girl” recorded in mid-December 1918 that “[t]he influenza is spreading rapidly. I don’t think there is one house in Winton and the surrounding districts where someone has not been ill.”62 Influenza “statuses” became extremely common on the DLF page. Twelve-year-old “Fair Aliza”, for example, noted that the flu had not yet reached her district of Raurekau in early December, and she hoped that remained the case.63 There was anxiety, too, over failed preventative measures undertaken by both national and regional authorities. “Duke of Kyeburn” wrote ruefully in late November that the flu continued to spread quickly despite the precautions taken by the Health Department.64 Children of all ages diligently recorded the closure of institutions such as schools and churches, but adolescents also considered how the flu affected individuals within their communities. Seventeen-year-old “Shining 58

“Deadwood Dick (Invercargill)”, DLF, 27 November 1918, 57. Rice, Black November, 82–83. 60 Evening Post, 26 November 1918, 7. 61 “A Hieland Belle (Te Wae Wae)”, DLF, 25 December 1918, 57. 62 “Island Girl (Oreti)”, DLF, 18 December 1918, 62. 63 “Fair Aliza (Raurekau)”, DLF, 4 December 1918, 57. 64 “Duke of Kyeburn (Kyeburn)”, DLF, 27 November 1918, 57. 59

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Sunbeam” noted that “[d]ances, shows—in fact, everything—have been post-poned on account of the flu. There are a good many cases in this district [Fairfax], and several have succumbed to it.”65 In mid-December “A Children’s Nurse” noted “I have not had the influenza yet, but where I work four of them had it; but all are better now”.66 Adolescents in the workforce noted unusual behaviour during the crisis. “Brown Eyes” informed Dot that “[h]ere in Invercargill, there are dentists going round with the milk, and everyone who can is helping with the nursing of the sick people”.67 Some correspondents understood the pressure that the pandemic placed on local health services and medical personnel: “Vanity Fair” noted in late 1918 that doctors and nurses were rushed off their feet in Oamaru.68 There was strong awareness of the danger this virus posed, and fear for both themselves and their families. “Grant” showed particular concern for her infant cousins, noting in early December 1918 that “[m]y auntie (Hazel) is here just now with her three small children … and as they have not had the flu, we are trying to keep out of it as much as we can. If any of us did take it we are going to put them in isolation.”69 This fear often became a reality. The flu invaded innumerable homes, putting many adolescents in the position of having to act as carers when parents, siblings and other close kin fell ill. “A Girl of the Limberlost” informed Dot in early December that “everything would have been very bright if this terrible plague had not been sent down on us in the midst of the armistice … since then I have been nurse to dad, mother, and two sisters, who have been pretty bad with the ’flu.”70 “Limberlost”’s relations appear to have recovered, but not all families were so fortunate. In the last two months of 1918, the DLF page published copious letters written by children bereaved by the pandemic. Older children were deeply distressed by the pandemic. “Harvest Queen” wrote in mid-December that “My mother died of influenza on the 27th November. My married sister is going to live with us after Christmas. … I don’t think there will be any Santa Claus this year.”71 Even those who evaded personal heartbreak expressed horror at the number of influenzarelated fatalities throughout New Zealand. Although the pandemic killed 65

“Shining Sunbeam (Fairfax)”, DLF, 11 December 1918, 56. “A Children’s Nurse (Gore)”, DLF, 18 December 1918, 62. 67 “Brown Eyes (Invercargill)”, DLF, 11 December 1918, 56. 68 “Vanity Fair (Oamaru)”, DLF, 4 December 1918, 56. 69 “Grant (Pukerau)”, DLF, 4 December 1918, 57. 70 “A Girl of the Limberlost (Wellington South)”, DLF, 4 December 1918, 57. 71 “Harvest Queen (Centre Bush)”, DLF, 18 December 1918, 62. 66

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almost half the number of those who had died in the First World War, these deaths occurred remarkably quickly. Adolescents were struck by the immediacy of this event, both temporally and geographically. After recovering from the flu, “Piper of the Clans” reflected: “Here we are amid sorrow and sickness! This epidemic is sweeping on and taking the people away before our eyes.”72 As they had during the war, youth drew on discussions at home and in the wider community to make sense of this troubling phenomenon. “Grant” wrote: I have heard some people say that the rain keeps the influenza down to a certain extent, and that the hot weather helps to spread it. They say also now that it is not influenza, but a Mediterranean fever. It may be so, as the people have very high temperatures.73

The pandemic, however, gave adults little opportunity to produce coherent reasons for it. The second wave started in eastern France, and although it did not peak everywhere at the same time, countries in the northern and southern hemispheres suffered almost simultaneous outbreaks.74 New Zealand had little warning before it was plunged into a state of emergency. Further complicating matters, adults aged between twenty and forty-five years were particularly vulnerable to this strain. Influenza typically posed the greatest threat to the oldest and youngest sectors of a population, but this variant particularly affected healthy and robust individuals.75 The focus was on preventing rather than interpreting fatalities. Without explanations, many older children created their own. Adolescents discussed the pandemic in its wider context. They recognized that they had emerged from a home front society only to face a world plagued by the flu, and their letters spoke of the pandemic’s dampening effect upon declarations of peace. In her discussion of proposed Peace Day celebrations, seventeen-year-old “A Dunedin Girl” commented that “This influenza epidemic has come at a very awkward time”.76 Similar observations were made by “Piper of the Clans”: “Everyone thought how lovely it would be when the war was over and the boys coming home again, but this great epidemic has come and stirred the world up nearly as bad as ever.”77 Although correspondents of all ages 72

“Piper of the Clans (Orawia)”, DLF, 18 December 1918, 62. “Grant (Pukerau)”, DLF, 4 December 1918, 56. 74 Rice, Black November, 56–57. 75 Ibid., 18, 23–24. 76 “A Dunedin Girl”, DLF, 27 November 1918, 56. 77 “Piper of the Clans (Orawia)”, DLF, 18 December 1918, 62. 73

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mentioned both the conflict and the flu during November and December, younger DLF writers largely saw these crises as distinct from one another. By contrast, adolescents closely observed the chronological overlap between the war and the pandemic, often identifying causal links between them. Several older children ascertained that New Zealand’s peace celebrations facilitated the spread of the virus. “Willochra”, for instance, insisted that she caught the flu at the celebratory concert and dance she attended after peace was declared.78 Older children also drew on the war more broadly in their written responses to the pandemic. The flu’s impact was often evaluated through death toll comparisons. “A Prairie Girl”, for example, noted in late November that “The influenza that is going around is terrible, and it will kill more people than the war has if it keeps on much longer”, and fellow fourteen-year-old “Kapuni-ite” made a similar judgement three weeks later.79 The war provided an obvious point of reference for youth forced to endure yet another global crisis, and their reflections on the two events often transcended simple numerical observations. Several DLF correspondents envisioned the flu as a type of conflict that, like its predecessor, necessitated resilience and hope. As noted earlier, “Treakle Pot” compared fighting the Germans with fighting germs, while “True Patriot” pondered: “when the bells of peace are ringing” there is a war raging with sickness. One day everyone was smiling and rejoicing over the Allied victories, and now all is sorrow and depression over this terrible epidemic … Surely all will yet come right, and “hope” is shining through the darkness, beaming in the distance as our “beacon light,” and all we can say is, “Hope for the best.”80

It was perhaps easier to be optimistic about tragic events when they occurred safely located overseas. The pandemic brought many face to face with death, often for the first time in their lives, and such experiences were traumatic.81 Many, though, chose to confront the crisis through their writing, determined to endure, as they had done during the war.

78

“Willochra (Enfield)”, DLF, 18 December 1918, 63. “A Prairie Girl (Tuturau)”, DLF, 27 November 1918, 56; “Kapuni-ite (Kapanui)”, DLF, 18 December 1918, 63. 80 “True Patriot (Dunedin North)”, DLF, 11 December 1918, 56. 81 Bennett, “‘Now the War is Over’”. 79

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VI. Conclusion The years from 1914 to 1919 constituted a particularly intense period in New Zealand’s history. During the war, adults in schools, churches and the media sought to justify the nation’s commitment to the conflict. These messages and expectations often explicitly targeted adolescents, encouraging them to support the war in particular ways. In late 1918, the arrival of the flu pandemic directly threatened those living in New Zealand itself. As local and national authorities tried to mitigate the danger, these interventionist measures significantly altered children’s lives and their opportunities to obtain information about the pandemic were severely constrained. The war and the flu may have varied greatly in terms of their geographic proximity and length, but adults intentionally sought to shape adolescent responses to both of these global crises. New Zealand youth did not, however, necessarily respond to either event in the manner expected of them. School magazines and DLF letters demonstrate that, like their European counterparts, older Antipodean children shared but also modified the prevailing mood, reacting to these crises on their own terms. Writing about the importance of both the war and the war effort proved to be a useful tool for older children grappling with extraordinary circumstances. Although they made much use of adult rhetoric in their writings during this period, they did not hesitate to challenge anything they deemed inapplicable or irrelevant to their individual experiences. Adolescents endured the 1918 influenza pandemic much as they had the war, and writing played a significant part. Their resilience is particularly apparent in letters from the last few months of 1918. They had been able to use wider explanations during the war, but no such interpretation existed for the pandemic. Undaunted, older youth developed their own, drawing on previous experiences in order to cope. It is clear that agency underpinned the responses of older New Zealand children to these two great crises of the early twentieth century.

CHAPTER SEVEN “I FEEL I CAN NO LONGER ENDURE”: FAMILIES AND THE LIMITS OF COMMITMENT IN AUSTRALIA, 1914–191 BART ZIINO Civilian endurance has again become a significant issue in understanding the nature of the First World War, especially since so much emphasis has returned to questions of consent and commitment in making and sustaining the conflict.2 Fundamental to that enquiry is an acknowledgement of the reality and legitimacy of the sentiments that drove individuals and communities to support the war. By extension, this also implies a need to understand the limits of that commitment and of the capacity to endure the strains of war. Michael Roper has highlighted the emotional struggle that underpinned the persistence of men and women at war, both at the front and at home. His argument, that citizen soldiers drew heavily on the emotional resources of home in order to survive the experience of mechanized warfare, correspondingly acknowledges families’ encounter with “the emotional experience of separation … [which] was felt equally by the soldier and his loved ones”.3 This chapter probes civilian endurance more deeply, through an examination of Australian families’ experiences of war and separation. It argues that persistent anxiety over loved ones at the front consumed individuals’ emotional resources and, even among the most patriotic Australians, tested 1

This research is supported by funding from the Australian Research Council, DP0880615: The culture of war: private life and sentiment in Australia 1914-18. 2 Stéphane Audoin–Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18: Understanding the Great War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 1–12; Pierre Purseigle, “A Very French debate: The 1914–1918 ‘War Culture’”, Journal of War and Culture Studies 1:1 (2008), 9–14. 3 Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 11.

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commitment to the war. That anxiety had its own structure and patterns that modulated both with individual experience and the developments of the war more generally. Understanding this reality allows us to begin to chart and historicize the experience of enduring, and to see the deterioration of the resilience on which the prosecution of the war ultimately relied. Most importantly, from 1916 persistent and increasing requests by families for removal of men from the firing line reflected a growing recognition, especially among parents, that the war was hastening their own mortality. Australians might have seen the war through, but we need to understand the immensity of the struggle for survival among civilians whose loved ones were at the front. As surely as it destroyed minds and bodies on the battlefield, the war could also cripple those subjected to its harshest vicissitudes at home. The limits of civilian endurance have been charted best in defeated societies, where we have been able to see the fracturing of social relations, and the breakdown of the compact between citizens and a wartime state unable to guarantee the necessities of life. Yet even in victorious societies those strains are evident: in Britain, for instance, Adrian Gregory has observed the economy of sacrifice that regulated social relations.4 While the private burdens of the war were not necessarily heavier in Australia than elsewhere, the conditions of the war there do help to illuminate personal efforts to cope with its demands. Australia’s total war was not marked by military conscription, major industrial mobilization or rationing of essential items. Yet mobilising on a voluntary basis shifted the heavy moral burdens of the war from the state to ordinary citizens, demanding that individuals and families determine what, and how much, they could commit to the war. Thus, the limits of that painful process become clearer. A family’s sacrifice had to be contained both in terms of lost labour and the prospect of lost life, and so they reorganized their domestic labour and finances, and began to endure the anxiety of prospective loss. On the one hand, then, civilian endurance becomes a question of economic sustenance, and so we see over the course of the war increasing resistance to demands for greater levels of military enlistment, and increasing

4

Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2000); Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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antipathy towards those thought not to have contributed in their turn.5 On the other hand, we also see shifting patterns of anxiety concerning those who had gone to war and increasing levels of social conflict based on differing perceptions of commitment and sacrifice. Anxiety began as early as enlistment itself. Parents were giving up sons to an uncertain future, and subjecting themselves to potential bereavement, and they expressed their worries openly through entreaties to loved ones to be careful. On the eve of her son Alfred’s departure in October 1914, Ellen Derham wrote to him: “If bullets are flying drop behind every cover you can. That is my advice. I want no victoria crosses. I want my son.”6 Such entreaties could hardly offer comfort after departure, as imagination intervened with terrifying scenarios of death and wounding, inducing a deep sense of powerlessness. The following day, Derham wrote of the weight she now bore: “We are only, all of us, taking our share of our country’s burden. It is very heavy. The whole thing is still like a nightmare to me and it will be until I hear that you are coming home again.”7 That sense of helplessness attended and multiplied anxiety, and it was exacerbated by Australians’ distance from the front. As her two sons, William (Will) and Charles, fought in France, Jacoba Palstra of Melbourne found that “The worst is to be thousands of miles away and always thinking in the other part of the globe”.8 Families were reminded by the very peacefulness of their own surroundings of the carnage they imagined at the front. In Sydney, Edmund Milne simply wished that he could share the dangers facing his sons, Edmund and Clarence (Clarrie), at Gallipoli, contrasting his own comfortable surroundings with the constant prospect of death at the front. Finally, in exasperation, he exclaimed “But what can I do—what can I do!!!”9 Despite this, as Roper shows, there were ways to meet and moderate that anxiety. Letters were critically important in sustaining relationships in intimate ways, and we should not underestimate their nourishment of home front resilience (though the four- to six-week time delay gave no 5

Bart Ziino, “Enlistment and Non-enlistment in Wartime Australia: Responses to the 1916 Call to Arms appeal”, Australian Historical Studies 41:2 (2010), 217–32. 6 Mother to A.P. Derham, c.21 October 1914. A.P. Derham papers, Accession Number A.1979.0096, folder 7/2/1/1, University of Melbourne Archives (UMA). 7 Mother to Derham, 22 October 1914. Derham papers, 7/2/1/1, UMA. 8 Mother to Palstra, 25 June 1917. William Palstra papers, A.1984.0057, box 1, UMA. 9 Milne to sons, 6 October 1915, E. O. Milne papers, PR84/187, folder 3. Australian War Memorial (AWM).

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genuine relief, and could be profoundly cruel).10 In November 1916, as the Somme campaign came to an end, Jacoba Palstra was delighted with a long letter from her son, Will, in France. “I have just gone over it again,” she told him, “it is sparkling energie [sic] and life, it was as though I felt it coming into my veins.”11 Only a cable, taking as little as two days to arrive, could provide greater comfort: “These are very anxious times,” Palstra wrote in June 1918, “and a cable with good news is like water in a dry land.”12 Nevertheless, correspondence, by providing momentary respite, only moderated persistent anxiety. For Rose Keast in Broken Hill, New South Wales, by mid-1918, with her son Jim absent more than three years, receiving letters had become almost her one imperative. “[Y]ou don’t know how cheering it is to get a letter,” she told him, “that seems all we have to look forward to.”13 Occupying oneself with work that contributed towards the voluntary war effort offered both a distraction from worry and a sense of involvement in the war. Even in the view of her contemporaries, Rose Keast devoted inordinate amounts of time to sewing for the Broken Hill Red Cross, though as she confided to her son, she was subjugating her deep anxieties about his welfare to her work: “while I am working it keeps me from thinking of my own troubles.”14 Such organizations could also provide important communities of support.15 Like Keast, Jacoba Palstra found that “Work is a great blessing after all”, as she began to knit a pair of mittens for her son Will. For men who continued as breadwinners in the absence of sons and brothers, their own work could be less immediately fulfilling. For solicitor and four-time Lord Mayor of Sydney Thomas Hughes, work offered distraction rather than any sense of contributing to the war: “I

10 See Roper, Secret Battle; Martha Hanna, “A Republic of Letters: The Epistolary Tradition in France during World War I”, The American Historical Review 108:5 (2003), 1338–61; Martin Lyons, “French Soldiers and their Correspondence: Towards a History of Writing Practices in the First World War”, French History 17:1 (2003), 79–95. The Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia shows an increase in average London–Adelaide delivery times from thirty days in 1914 to forty-four days in 1916–17. 11 Mother to Palstra, 13 November 1916. Palstra papers, box 1, UMA. 12 Mother to Palstra, 5 June 1918. Palstra papers, box 1, UMA. 13 Rose Keast to Jim Keast, 8 August 1918. A.J. Keast papers, PR00643, folder 10, AWM. 14 Rose Keast to Jim Keast, 7 December 1917, Keast papers, folder 9, AWM. 15 Bruce Scates, “The Unknown Sock Knitter: Voluntary Work, Emotional Labour, Bereavement and the Great War”, Labour History 81 (2001), 29–49.

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suppose it is as well to keep working hard in spite of our anxiety about you all, and about the war itself.”16 Anxiety was regulated not just by the tempo of correspondence and the vagaries of a transoceanic postal system, but by close civilian knowledge of developments at the front. News of the fighting filtered through to Australians relatively quickly, both in the form of news reports and casualty lists. As the first lists arrived from Gallipoli in May 1915, fear intensified for Margaret Melvin in Melbourne: “We are passing thro’ a time of terrible anxiety just now,” she told her son Jack, and it is you dear son who is ever in our minds, our hearts and prayers. We do not know where you are nor how you are. … It is very hard writing to night, but of course we keep hoping and trusting all is well with you, our dear, dear son.17

Similarly, as the casualties of the Battle of the Somme mounted in September 1916, Frances Anderson told her fiancé: “nearly everyone is being hit by these last casualty lists. They say Love is selfish and I begin to believe it when at every fresh grief I hear of, I pray a tiny prayer for my soldier boy.”18 The implications of loss were surely different for mothers, fathers, lovers, wives and siblings, both in practical and emotional/psychological terms, producing different forms and degrees of anxiety.19 Nevertheless, for all, the crippling uncertainty persisted and grew over the course of the war, compounded by an inability to conceive of when the conflict would end. In Perth, May Royle struggled to come to terms with not knowing when her husband Gordon would return, if at all, while she cared for their two-year-old son. She wondered, often, when he might come back, but just 16

Thomas Hughes to Geoffrey Hughes, 21 June 1918. Hughes family papers, ML MSS 1222/2, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales (hereafter Mitchell Library). 17 Margaret Melvin to Jack, 4 May 1915. MS 12347, box 3162/2, La Trobe Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria. 18 Frankie to Derham, 12 September 1916. Derham papers 7/2/1/6, UMA. 19 See especially Kathryn M. Hunter’s recent study of fathers’ affection and advocacy for sons at the front: “Australian and New Zealand Fathers and Sons during the Great War: Expanding the Histories of Families at War”, First World War Studies, 4:2 (2013), 185–200. Also Joy Damousi’s differentiation between mothers, fathers and widows in The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Tanja Luckins’s comments on sisters’ attitudes to remembering in The Gates of Memory: Australian People’s Experiences and Memories of Loss and the Great War (Fremantle: Curtin University Books, 2004), 246–48.

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as often gave up, recording in her diary, “What though is the use of wondering that”?20 Thomas Hughes, though certain of an Allied victory, conceded in March 1917 that “I … cannot see it yet in sight.”21 Similarly, Jacoba Palstra thought that the best thing to do was “to look not too far ahead, and thank the Lord for every bit of the way safely past”.22 Significant anniversaries—including departure of a troopship, birthdays or Christmas—helped to mark the passing of time. A year after his son Clarrie departed for war, Edmund Milne remembered the “poignant pangs” of separation, and how he and his wife “steeled our hearts, nerves for more of it, and now 1 year has passed”.23 The frustration of the situation began to tell on May Royle as Christmas approached in 1916. She recorded in her diary: “What feeling I have had today! Been feeling half mad, had to walk about clenching my hands. I want my mate.” On Christmas Day she “Woke up with a burst of tears and have been downhearted all day. … No Gordon, what is Xmas to me without him[?]”24 Anticipation of wounding and death at the front clearly had its costs at home: May Royle was already suffering significant emotional damage. The realization of those fears caused new levels of anxiety. The devastation of receiving notification of death is easily understood. Rose Keast saw the effects of bereavement in her own neighbourhood: her friend Mr Nelson had “aged very much since the death of his son”; she heard too that in another street a family had lost their son: “his poor mother has been in bed ever since she received the news she is almost distracted.”25 To have men posted as “missing” also induced terrible psychological strain, as kin, with few details to go on, struggled to conceive of their fates.26 News of wounding also heightened and 20

May Royle, diary 22 November 1916. Royle family papers, ACC 2728A/1, Battye Library, State Library of Western Australia. 21 Thomas Hughes to My dear Geoffrey, 5 March 1917. ML MSS 1222/1, Mitchell Library. 22 Mother to Palstra, 26 June 1916. Palstra papers, box 1, UMA. 23 Milne to sons, 19 October 1915. Milne papers, PR84/187, folder 3, AWM. 24 May Royle, diary 19 & 25 December 1916. Royle family papers, Battye Library, State Library of Western Australia. 25 Rose Keast to Jim Keast, 27 June 1917. Keast papers, folder 9, AWM. 26 See Bart Ziino, A Distant Grief: Australians, War Graves and the Great War (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2007), 30–34; Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 36–40; Damousi, Labour of Loss; Luckins, Gates of Memory; Pat Jalland, Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840–1918 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002), 322–25;

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intensified that existing struggle with the war. Jim Keast was wounded in the fighting at Pozières in August 1916; the shock to his mother was made the worse by her inability to tend to her son. “[O]h if I could be near you I would not mind so much,” she wrote. As it was, Keast and those who came to comfort her found themselves “imagining all sorts of dreadful things happening to our dear boys”. Struggling to contain her anguish, she declared more than once “such a longing to see you that I can hardly bear my own feeling”. The knowledge that other mothers were losing their sons constantly reiterated that possibility: “I dismiss the thought that it may be my turn perhaps someday as quickly as possible.”27 By October 1916, Keast’s angst was so insistent that she contemplated asking for her son’s immediate return, though she thought that if she actually approached the military authorities, “I daresay they would think that I should see a Doctor.”28 Keast was hardly alone in denying herself the right to express those desires, especially in the face of such common anxiety and suffering around her. Edmund Milne was committed to the war and deeply proud of his sons’ services to the empire, but fretted constantly about their wellbeing. Nevertheless, he batted away his own desire to have them home: “Whilst my heart aches to have you again my soul says, ‘Don’t be selfish wait hope and pray’—so be it!”29 Yet the erosion of emotional resilience led other parents, wives and siblings to feel that they could no longer deny themselves in the same way. From the time of the battles of the Somme in mid-1916, the Defence Department began to receive persistent appeals for the release of family members from service. Each of the “very large number” of applications, the secretary of the department reported, received careful consideration, though hardly any were actually granted. Families may have guessed that their chances of success were slim, but still their anxiety compelled them. “Applications of this nature,” the secretary noted in June 1918, “are being dealt with daily.”30 There were certainly reasoned arguments to be made for returning men, though they were underscored always by the insistence that families’ own emotional resources were depleted. Some asked to have sons and Marina Larsson, Shattered Anzacs: Living with the Scars of War (Kensington: University of New South Wales Press, 2009), 29–60. 27 Rose Keast to Jim Keast, 17 August 1916; 20 September 1916. Keast papers, folder 8, AWM. 28 Rose Keast to Jim Keast, 11 October 1916. Keast papers, folder 8, AWM. 29 Milne to sons, 15 May 1916 (28 May 1916). PR84/187, AWM. 30 Memorandum, Thomas Trumble to Secretary, Prime Minister’s Department, 27 June 1918. A11803, 1918/89/112, National Archives of Australia (NAA).

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husbands back to support their families. Such reasoning was particularly prevalent among farming and working-class families, where a son’s or husband’s labour extended beyond the immediate provision of income. Trying to maintain her family farm without her two sons, Agnes Crookston pleaded that unless one was released, “I fear we will lose the place and the boys and ourselves face poverty.”31 Others appealed less in terms of their own situation than the health of the troops at the front. Families in Australia often had a close appreciation of the health of their men folk, and the campaigns in favour of conscription had given expression and legitimacy to the claim that those at the front needed immediate relief. In writing to Prime Minister Billy Hughes, Frank Dobbs of Wagga Wagga in New South Wales spoke of “broken men” at the front, “unfit for rendering further effective service until their health is restored”. These men had to be returned home to their families for recuperation.32 The ultimate justification for any claim in this economy of sacrifice was the loss of a family member. Numerous supplicants cited the death of sons and husbands at the front as reason for sparing those who continued the fight. Here they not only offered up practical reasons for preserving sons who would support their families, but also pointed to the emotional trauma of loss. The Reverend Henry Gwynne Jones appealed to General John Monash to release a friend’s son from service. The family had already suffered “a staggering blow” in losing a son; Gwynne Jones now observed them “racked with anxiety lest the one surviving son … should be killed in action”.33 He was coming much closer here to the factors driving Australians to seek relief: waiting, hoping and the effort to maintain morale at home and at the front were exhausting the capacity to endure. The urge that so overwhelmed these people was also related more generally to the progress of the war itself. A series of events towards the end of 1917 encouraged Australians to become more assertive in making claims based on their own anxiety and health. Several public signals suggested that the war was not going well, and that the men at the front were suffering. The first was confirmation of a rumour that the Australian Government had sought and failed to have soldiers who had been away more than three years returned to Australia for a month over the 1917–18 winter. In acknowledging this, the Minister for Defence asked relatives 31 Agnes Crookston to Mr Hunter, 24 October 1918. Item ID 862667, Queensland State Archives (QSA). 32 Frank Dobbs to Prime Minister Hughes, 27 October 1917. A2, 1918/24, NAA. 33 Rev. Henry Gwynne Jones to Monash, 20 September 1918. Sir John Monash Papers, MS 1884, box 16, folder 141, National Library of Australia (NLA).

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and friends of the men at the front to “exercise the same noble virtues of patience and self-sacrifice that had distinguished their soldier relatives, and … in their letters to the front … show the same cheery spirit that was a point of honour in the Australian Imperial Force.”34 Increasingly, however, relatives and friends felt unable to maintain that patience and selfsacrifice. The extraordinary losses at Passchendaele were striking home as the minister made his plea, the Italian front was crumbling at Caporetto, the Bolshevik revolution finally withdrew the Russians from the war and, in Australia, a second referendum on the issue of conscription once again made the sufferings of the men at the front a matter for public debate.35 Finally, another hard European winter on the Western Front threatened further debility to those in the trenches. Numerous Australians now claimed that their men had been away long enough. They justified this attitude not only by reference to the sufferings of their men folk at the front, but also by citing their enduring anguish and the deterioration of their own health as they waited. They were approaching breaking point, and though hardly conceding the desire to win the war, at least felt that it was now legitimate to express the depth of their anxiety. In desperation, Mary Burke of Pinkenba in Queensland appealed to her state premier, T.J. Ryan. “[M]y husband”, she wrote, has been away now since Aug 8th 1916. Could you advise me in any way, or does it lay in your power, or could you do anything for me in the way of getting him back again, for I haven’t been in good health for quiet [sic] a time now, and I thought if it were possible to have him back, I could pull together, as really life is not worth living without him, it’s nothing but worrying, that has left me as I am, I often thought of writing to you for information, so I have made up my mind at last … for I am broken hearted, and more so if I can’t have him back …36

Burke’s appeal, disordered and plaintive, centred on her own sacrifice and suffering; she felt unable to endure her anxiety any longer. Hettie Claredge, writing to the governor-general, expressed the same difficulties. 34

Argus, 31 October 1917, 10. The literature on the conscription debate is expansive. See Ernest Scott, Australia During the War (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1936), and L.L. Robson, The First A.I.F.: A Study of its Recruitment 1914–1918 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1970), while Raymond Evans, Loyalty and Disloyalty: Social Conflict on the Queensland Homefront 1914–18 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987) also covers responses to the Bolshevik revolution in detail. 36 Mary Jane Josephine Burke to T.J. Ryan, 24 December 1917. Item ID 862645, File 3969, QSA. 35

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She had constantly assured her children that their father would be home soon; now, in ill-health “with the constant strain and worry of the war”, she found herself unable to continue the charade. Surely, she hoped, somebody could be found to take her husband’s place.37 In Sydney, May Bruce’s anxiety exploded. Her husband had been killed in the fighting at Passchendaele on 12 October. Now, two months later she had learned that her only son, whom she expected to be returning wounded to Australia, had returned to the firing line. Shocked and upset, she made her way to the private home of New South Wales Premier William Holman, only to be sent away. In an apologetic letter to the premier’s wife, Ada, that same evening, she explained that she was “A Soldiers Widow and a Broken hearted mother”, who did not know what she was doing that night. “I feel sure,” she wrote of her son, that “he will be killed I am nearly a mad woman and don’t know what to do.” She pleaded that he be withdrawn to the rear, where he would be safe.38 May Bruce’s reference to herself as “nearly a mad woman” was closer to the truth than we might think. Her aunt wrote in support of her claims: “it is a shocking shame to see the state she is in … I am afraid very soon she will be in the asylum.”39 Tanja Luckins has shown that numerous women found themselves committed to Australian asylums as a result of breakdowns occasioned by the loss, or the anticipated loss, of a loved one at the war. Luckins, too, detects an escalation of anxiety, and an increase in admission to hospitals for the insane from 1917, in tandem with, and directly related to, the extraordinary casualty numbers on the battlefields. In the press she found entreaties to women not to self-medicate to relieve their anxiety. “Clearly,” Luckins observes, “a fear of loss had become part of women’s experience of war, and the consequences for some individuals were devastating.”40 Not everyone reached the depths that Luckins detected, but their plight helps us to understand better the burden of almost unrelenting fear and anxiety. Individuals and families in Australia continued to expend their 37

Hettie Claredge to Sir R. Munro Ferguson, 16 February 1918. A11803, 1919/89/112, NAA. 38 M.M. Bruce to Ada Holman, 13 December 1917. Series 12060, A18/651, box 9/4765, State Records New South Wales (SRNSW). 39 Mrs E.J.O. Cowley (and May Bruce) to Mr Edwards, 21 December 1917. Series 12060, A18/651, box 9/4765, SRNSW. 40 Luckins, Gates of Memory, 124. The same phenomenon was noted in England in late 1917, when the clerk to the Chester Board of Guardians noted an “epidemic in lunacy”, in which the “local doctors attribute many of the cases directly to the strain of the war”. The Newsletter: an Australian Paper for Australian People, 19 January 1918, 6.

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emotional resources, punctuated only by knowledge of soldiers’ occasional periods of leave and safety. Well aware of what was happening, these people observed their health suffering, and began to fear that they would die before their loved ones returned. Rose Keast had been watching her own and her husband’s health deteriorating since her son’s departure: her hair was greying through worry, while her husband “has gone very thin I think he worries about you more than he says”.41 Now, when Keast wrote that “there is always the hope that we may be spared to meet again someday”, she was referring both to her son and to herself.42 That sentiment is nowhere clearer than in the plaintive appeals Ellie WhartonKirke made to the Governor of New South Wales to have her “baby son” given rest at home. All four of her sons had enlisted early in the war, and in 1915 she herself had been responsible for initiating one of the most successful patriotic fundraising events of the entire war, receiving a specially minted medal for her efforts.43 After her eldest son, Errol, was killed at Pozières in August 1916, Wharton-Kirke had become “very ill— under Doctor’s care and do not expect I’ll ever be better”. But the causes of her illness had been longer in the making than this. Ever since her sons had enlisted in the early stages of the war, she insisted, “I have borne this awful strain that I feel I can no longer endure.” Her one desire as a “heartbroken mother” was to see her “baby son once before I die”.44 The appeal was to no avail; and despite her public demand in 1917 that every man who had fought at Gallipoli should be given immediate furlough, in April 1918 Wharton-Kirke could only reiterate the feelings she shared with “thousands of Australian mothers who have suffered for nearly four years the agony and suspense”.45 Wharton-Kirke’s situation shows clearly that demands for the return of sons were no index of one’s commitment to the war, but a powerful measure of the impending limits of civilian endurance. Indeed, the surviving evidence suggests a strong patriotic middle-class bias in requests for the return of loved ones. This is not to suggest, of course, that workingclass families did not want their sons back, or that they were not patriotic—like Rose Keast they likely felt powerless even to ask the question, or like Mrs Briggs in Hobart simply appeared in person to make 41

Rose Keast to Jim Keast, 28 May 1917. Keast papers, folder 9, AWM. Rose Keast to Jim Keast, 27 June 1917. Keast papers, folder 9, AWM. 43 The medal is held at the Australian War Memorial. See http://www.awm.gov. au/collection/RELAWM12438.001, accessed 8 Nov 2013. 44 Ellie Wharton-Kirke to Sir Gerald Strickland, 11 April 1917. A11803, 1917/ 89/220, NAA. 45 Sydney Morning Herald, 22 September 1917, 11; 6 April 1918, 14. 42

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her “very pathetic appeal”—but to point to the strength of the prevailing urge that was challenging the personal dedication to victory in the war.46 Thomas and Louisa Hughes, for instance, felt strongly about the righteousness of the war, and indeed had attracted considerable personal antipathy as part of the Catholic leadership that advocated conscription. The death of their eldest son, Roger, in December 1916, had not challenged their commitment to defeating the enemy, but it increased their anxiety for their remaining son, Geoffrey, a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps. Though uneasy about discouraging him from his duty, both parents urged their son to ease their burden by taking opportunities to transfer to safer jobs behind the lines. These entreaties came with a reminder that “your dear Mother cannot bear much more strain, though she is good and brave”.47 At the same time, those fears exacerbated tensions over relative levels of sacrifice in the community. Enduring the anxiety of the war—a war in which the determining of duty and responsibility to the state remained with individual citizens—produced deep antagonism concerning differing levels of sacrifice.48 In April 1918, extremely disturbed by the renewed German offensive in France, Louisa Hughes rounded, again, on those who attended the annual agricultural show, horse racing or even the cinema, while the “best and bravest are giving their lives to save this country” for the “callous brutes” who remained behind. At the same time, however, she conceded the fundamental basis of her rage: “We long to have you safe home again you know that is our dearest and only wish now. Nothing else seems to matter very much.”49 How long could Australians endure? Appeals for the return of loved ones persisted throughout 1918, and the situation became more acute. In June, Jean Barnett wrote to the Queensland premier in “great distress”. She wanted her son returned from the front, even if only for a rest, as “I am in very bad health and am craving to see him”.50 The following month, John and Maria Hannon, of Enmore in Sydney, appealed for their son to be spared a return to the front after a stint in hospital. Two other sons had 46

W.H. Lee to Commandant, Anglesea Barracks, 28 May 1918. PD1/317, Archives Office Tasmania. 47 Thomas Hughes to Geoffrey Hughes, 27 December 1916. ML MSS 1222/1, Mitchell Library. 48 See Raymond Evans, “‘All the Passion of our Womanhood’: Margaret Thorp and the Battle of the Brisbane School of Arts”, in Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake (eds), Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 239–53. 49 Louisa Hughes to Geoffrey Hughes, 3 April 1918. ML MSS 1222/2, Mitchell Library. 50 Jean Barnett to T.J. Ryan, c. June 1918, Item ID 862652, File 6960, QSA.

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already died, and Maria Hannon’s health had “completely broken down”. They begged the governor-general to “do your utmost to relieve the situation”.51 The situation was not relieved: Albert Hannon rejoined his unit, though he survived to return home.52 As Luckins has shown, some broke down entirely and gave way to despair. Others were overtaken as they awaited the return of their soldiers. Edmund Milne, who had enjoined himself in 1916 to wait and pray, in July 1917 acknowledged his son’s observation that “grey hairs, grey heads, stern set deep lined faces will not be few when the ink is drying on the peace declaration”.53 Suffering chest trouble himself, he also conceded that “I haven’t got my old punch”. Six weeks later, he was dead at the age of fifty-four. Mary Langer Owen died in November 1917, aged fifty-three, with her son still at the front. One onlooker observed that her death had been brought on “undoubtedly by overwork for the war. She absolutely wore herself to fiddlestrings over the Red Cross. … she really and truly gave her life for the Cause.”54 Most parents surely survived to see their sons return, but they had observed others, and themselves, in their suffering. In May 1918 in Sydney, Isabella Parkes told her son Murray that her return to work would “help to pass the waiting time till your return—it really feels as if that was what I’m living for Mur darling”.55 By September she insisted that she was “hanging on … with might and main” to the hope “that you will come home to me just my own dear boy”. “Hanging on” had obvious meaning to these people in the struggle to maintain health and composure. “I’m doing all I can,” Parkes continued, “to keep the wrinkles away and keep the same for your sake.”56 She was deeply relieved, later that month, to find Murray was safe in England after leaving Mesopotamia, though she was quick to assure her son not to “think I worry Murray dear. I trust in the Lord and will wait patiently on him and believe that in his time he will grant me my hearts [sic] desire.”57 51

John Hannon to Governor General, c. 24 July 1918. A11803, 1918/89/112, NAA. 52 As Hunter has observed, such men were hardly unaware of their parents’ plight, and sometimes sought permission themselves to return. Hunter, “Fathers and Sons”, 193–94. 53 Milne to sons, 26 June 1917 (1 July 1917). AWM PR84/377, folder 8, AWM. 54 Thomas Hughes to Geoffrey, 2 December 1917. ML MSS 1222/2, Mitchell Library. 55 Mother to Parkes, 23 May 1918. Murray Parkes papers, PR03015, box 2, folder 9, AWM. 56 Mother to Parkes, 8 September 1918. Parkes papers, box 2, folder 9, AWM. 57 Mother to Parkes, 29 September 1918. Parkes papers, box 2, folder 9, AWM.

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The news of the Armistice in November 1918 was, then, at once an extraordinary relief, and yet no end to anxiety, just as it was no end to social and political division. Nevertheless, here was a chance genuinely to anticipate reunions, and to see families made whole. Almost immediately after the Armistice, Thomas Derham advised his son to leave the army and recommence his medical career as soon as possible. But Derham’s advice also indicated that the war had interrupted family life, and the normal phases of his ageing. He wanted his sons home: “we all wish to have you with us, settled down. As I am growing older (though I scarcely feel it) I want the family fixed up.”58 Jacoba Palstra allowed herself some relief at Christmas in 1918. It was “the first time in years that one dared to be happy and show it too.” And yet she reminded her son that the pain of separation persisted: “All hopes are fixed on next year—a united family on xmas day.”59 Shortly after, Wiebe Palstra revealed to his son a closer insight into his parents’ trial: It will be a great day for mother and I when you are safely back. Between ourselves I may say that through all this long period of anxiety dear mum has kept up wonderfully well—you may find she has aged a bit and sometimes she shows signs of weariness but on the whole she has kept up very well. It will be medicine to her to see you both and I think particularly to be sure you are both really well.60

Anxiety and pain, then, had not ended. Indeed, if we are to conceive emotional survival as a shared experience between soldiers and their families, then for those at home struggling with their own well-being, that ordeal entered a new phase. Parents and grandparents continued their efforts to defy ill-health, now in the knowledge that loved ones could be home within months. Even as men prepared to return, then, the limits of their families’ endurance were becoming clearer. The emotional and practical implications of their absence were thrown into relief by the prospect of their return and reintegration. Still waiting for her husband in August 1919, Grace Gallwey claimed that she was rapidly approaching breaking point as she continued to care for her two daughters alone. She declared herself in “very very bad health, suffering from heart trouble and a nervous breakdown”. Her doctors feared “mental breakdown” and, not knowing exactly when her husband might return, Gallwey felt that “I 58

Thomas P. Derham to Derham, 24 November 1918. Derham papers 7/2/1/1, UMA. 59 Mother to Palstra, 27 December 1918. Palstra papers, box 1, UMA. 60 Dad to Palstra, 13 January 1919. Palstra papers box 1, UMA.

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cannot possibly bear the suspense any longer. My reason will give way.” Even as the news arrived that her husband had embarked, Gallwey remained disconsolate. After three months of “great anxiety and suspense”, waiting for news that her husband would return, she wrote, “I am quite broken in health.”61 The Great War was a profound test of individual, familial and communal resilience. The trial had been arduous: it had depleted personal and familial emotional resources and corroded social cohesion in Australia. It had also seen the language of war neurosis popularly applied to those far removed from the battlefront: they had suffered “war strain” or “war nerves”.62 If this was becoming apparent in public, it had always been the very fabric of the war experience for those whose loved ones marched away. In November 1917, observing the sorrow in so many homes, and echoing her husband, Rose Keast told her son that “I only long to live till you come home again”.63 Jim Keast was reunited with his mother on Christmas Day, 1919. “Mum did not look too well but the reunion brightened her immeasurably,” he later recalled.64 Keast attributed his mother’s illness, in part, to the lead dust and other contaminants in Broken Hill. Her prolonged struggle with the war, however, was hardly less in evidence. Soon after her son’s return, Rose Keast’s health quickly began to fail and, three weeks later, she died, aged forty-eight. Others who did survive now prepared to face new challenges. We are beginning to learn about the burdens of caregiving after the war, and to understand that in the first instance it was families who accepted war-damaged and broken men back into their care.65 By charting the emotional damage of this war, we might also begin to understand that those who came home from the battlefront were themselves returning to war-damaged and broken families.

61 Grace M. Gallwey to Munro Ferguson, 13 August 1919; Grace M. Gallwey to H. Stanley, Esq, 23 August 1919. A11804, 1920/456, NAA. 62 Cited in Damousi, Labour of Loss, 29; Argus, 14 August 1915, p. 7. 63 Rose Keast to Jim Keast, 22 November 1917. Keast papers, folder 9, AWM. 64 Asdruebal James Keast, Straws in the Wind: Recollections (Canterbury, Victoria: self-published, 1974), 45. 65 Larsson, Shattered Anzacs; Roper, Secret Battle, 284–306.

SECTION III BATTLEFIELD ENDURANCE

CHAPTER EIGHT PROMOTION, A POISONED CHALICE? PAUL O’CONNOR The short life expectancy of young British officers on the Western Front in the First World War is commonly quoted as six weeks.1 But what about men promoted from the ranks to non-commissioned officer status? This chapter discusses the proposition that promotion of ordinary New Zealand soldiers to a non-commissioned rank exposed them to a greater risk of being killed. The possibility of this theory arose out of research I undertook in 2005 as part of a Royal Society Teacher Fellowship, hosted by the History Department at the University of Canterbury. The project, called “From Papanui to Passchendaele”, involved studying the military service of ninety-five men from the Papanui and Belfast districts whose names were recorded on various war memorials.2 Examining the validity of the idea that promotion from the ranks placed men in an even more hazardous position than ordinary soldiers brought into sharp focus problems about the nature and interpretation of evidence. After the bloody defeat at Gallipoli in 1915, and the effective destruction of the Main Body that sailed from New Zealand in October 1914, it was necessary to reconstruct a completely new and larger military unit. Thus the New Zealand Division was created, somewhat reluctantly, from the remnants of the Main Body, plus reinforcements from New Zealand. It was divided into three infantry brigades, the third of which became known as the New Zealand Rifle Brigade, nicknamed the “Dinks”, short for “dinkum”, because they were all volunteers and members of a unit that enjoyed the patronage of the Governor (later Governor-General), Lord Liverpool. The new commander of the New Zealand Division was Major-General Andrew Russell, former commander of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles in Gallipoli, one of the few commanders to come out of the campaign with any credit. Sandhurst trained, Russell was determined 1

John Lewis-Stempel, Six Weeks: The Short and Gallant Life of the British Officer in the First World War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2010). 2 See http://www.pap-to-pass.org/.

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The New Zealand Division 1916-19183 19,000–20,000 men, headed by a major-general

that this division was to be the equal of any British division, and to do this he needed time to train his men; he did not get it. After a period of holding a relatively quiet sector near Armentières in northern France, the division was moved south to take part in one of the major Somme offensives in September 1916. In The New Zealand Division 1916–1919, Colonel Hugh Stewart, the former commander of the 2nd Battalion of the Canterbury Regiment, summarized the battle thus: In the great battle of the 15th, and the subsequent advances on the 16th, in which all brigades took part in the grisly struggle in Goose Alley, in the 1st Brigade operations of the 25th and 27th and the final assault by the 2nd Brigade on 1st October, they had achieved all but unbroken success, 3 Adapted from Glyn Harper, Dark Journey: Three Key New Zealand Battles of the Western Front (Auckland: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2007), 522.

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Some historians have attempted to characterize the Somme as a victory for the British, pointing out the long-term effect on German morale and the relief of pressure on Verdun. Peter Liddle claims that “first, in 1916– 1917 terms, a British victory was won on the Somme, not one to be greeted with bell-ringing and bunting … but a victory nevertheless”.5 If it was a victory for the New Zealand Division, it was a pyrrhic one. Given these losses, Russell had to reconstruct the division, using more reinforcements from New Zealand, while analysing the lessons learned from the division’s first encounter with industrialized warfare. Further up the chain of command, British generals were drawing conclusions from the Somme battles. One was the need to modify tactics once battle had joined, as generals found they lost the ability to influence the outcome, owing to poor communication. The main conclusion was that a platoon was the largest unit that could be manoeuvred during a battle. This was supported by Cecil Malthus, a veteran of Gallipoli and the Somme, who in his memoir, Armentières and the Somme, wrote: The Great War proved the value of personal initiative—as have later wars still more. More and more it has become clear that it is not the battalion, not even the company, but the platoon that is the really essential unit, the one that must be depended on under pressure, and that a platoon cannot function unless it contains a number of cool, resolute, intelligent men capable of improvising, making sound decisions and reacting quickly.6

Thus company commanders had to train their junior officers commanding platoons to act independently, though within part of a company plan. Gary Sheffield makes this point, while quoting from Stewart’s book on the New Zealand Division: 4

Colonel H. Stewart, The New Zealand Division 1916–1919: A Popular History Based on Official Records (Auckland: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1921), 119. 5 Peter H. Liddle, The 1916 Battle of the Somme: A Reappraisal (Barnsley, Yorkshire: Leo Cooper, 1992), 156. 6 Cecil Malthus, Armentières and the Somme (Auckland: Reed Publishing, 2002), 135–36.

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One important advance was “Throughout the infantry training every effort was made to illustrate practically the principles of tactics underlying the recent reorganisation of the platoon into semi-specialised sections of riflemen, Lewis gunners, bombers, and rifle-bombers.” This was the recognition that the platoon of thirty-odd men rather than a large body was the major tactical unit, and gave the platoon commander much more flexibility as well as greater firepower.7

In a major offensive, once the covering artillery barrage had lifted, it was the platoon and section commanders—lieutenants, sergeants and corporals—Malthus’s “cool, resolute, intelligent men”, rather than brigadiers, who would be managing the fighting. It was they who organized the suppressing fire from rifles and Lewis guns on opposing defences, to enable flanking attacks from soldiers using grenades to subdue strong points before moving on to the next one. This “fire and manoeuvre” approach required all soldiers to be systematically trained in all infantry weapons—rifles, bayonets, Lewis guns, grenades—so that they could undertake whatever role was required of them. Leadership became devolved down to the platoon level, and the role of a commander was partly to devise an overall plan for an assault, and to train his men rigorously to carry it out. This required a professionalization of citizen soldiers, and that could not be achieved overnight.8 The “bite and hold” approach and the new “fire and manoeuvre” tactics were first tested in the Battle of Messines in June 1917. Sheffield argues that, in 1917, “General Sir Herbert Plumer, commander of the Second Army, emerged as an outstanding practitioner of the bite and hold method of battle”.9 The Messines offensive was preceded by an exceptional artillery barrage of 17 days, with a particular emphasis in the latter stages on destroying the German wire. Another part of the artillery plan was preparation for counter-battery fire against German artillery that might interfere with the infantry advance. These preparations were assisted by the fact that the Royal Flying Corps had supremacy in the skies and aerial observation could be used to develop a sophisticated artillery fire plan. This included not only the initial barrage, but also forward movement in

7 Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: The First World War: Myths and Realities (London: Headline, 2001), 182. 8 The development of post-Somme infantry tactics is discussed in detail in Christopher Pugsley’s The Anzac Experience: New Zealand, Australia and Empire in the First World War (Auckland: Reed, 2004), 176–83. 9 Gary Sheffield, The Somme: A New History (London: Cassell Military Paperbacks, 2003), 162.

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support of British advances and to help blunt the inevitable German counter-attacks. Meanwhile, Russell was developing a detailed plan for the division’s assault on Messines village. As was usual, he went forward to examine the ground over which he would send his troops, then developed an innovative modified approach to the assault by abandoning the creeping barrage and replacing it with a standing barrage in an arc around Messines village on both front-line and support trenches, supported by a machine gun barrage. He planned for two battalions to move through and beyond the town, leaving two companies to mop up any centres of resistance. During April and May, training and preparations continued relentlessly, detailed instructions were drawn up and allocated to specific companies and a large-scale model of the Messines area was made for officers to study. Platoon commanders and sergeants were called to conferences with battalion commanding officers to receive a detailed briefing on their specific role. This level of meticulous planning and preparation is in marked contrast to the amateurish approach taken at Gallipoli, and reflects both the growing professionalism of the New Zealand Division and the hard lessons learned by commanders in previous assaults. Initially the attack went well: the New Zealanders swept through and seized Messines village within a few hours. Sergeant James Blakemore of the Canterbury Regiment remembered: “Mighty big guns, wheel to wheel, more than 150 Vickers machine guns—the din was something tremendous. I reckon we could have taken Messines with a wet sack … not that much opposition.”10 They then had to endure the German counter-attack and were later committed to clear the area south of the Messines ridge. Despite this success, the cost of the victory was heavy, with 3,700 casualties, of which more than 700 were fatalities. While the New Zealand Division was withdrawn from front-line service for further training, British forces under Plumer maintained pressure on the Germans in the Ypres Salient. The intention was to seize a ridge of higher ground that surrounded Ypres like a hook. This would not only relieve Ypres but would also provide a path for a breakthrough into the flatter territory east of the ridge. Control of this ridge would, it was hoped, lead to the end of the bloody siege warfare of the last three years and mark the beginning of a decisive breakthrough. In an attempt to take this ridge, eight separate battles would be fought and the New Zealand Division would fight in two of them. The second battle was named after a ruined village on one of the highest points of this ridge, 10

Interview with James Frederick Blakemore, 5 August 1988, AB 453, Oral History Centre, Alexander Turnbull Library.

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Passchendaele, which was to become the site of New Zealand’s greatest military disaster. The role of the non-commissioned officers (NCOs) in setting an example for men to follow before and during battle was often critical in helping the New Zealand Division maintain its reputation. As Ormond Burton wrote in The Silent Division, The sergeant, disdaining what cover is to be had, moves along the line of his men with a word, a gesture, a smile, bringing good cheer to the overwrought, the trembling and the much afraid. In some indefinable fashion virtue goes out of him, and the weak, seeing him, become strong. Afterwards he may do great deeds but the men in the crumbling trench know that the supreme hour of his valour was in that time when nothing could have been written of deeds done but when shaken men could say, “He gave us the courage.”11

Stewart also credits the division’s success to its junior leadership, so critical in the fire and manoeuvre tactics that evolved during the war. The junior officers and non-commissioned officers constituted one of the Division’s strongest assets. Towards the end of the war officers were recruited almost exclusively from the ranks. Naturally mature for their years, trained in the stern school of practical experience, and privileged to take military courses in France and England, they possessed both personality and knowledge of their work in which company and battalion commanders could rely as on a rock.12

Given such comments, it is unsurprising that most of the winners of gallantry medals among the New Zealand Division were NCOs. This was partly a result of Russell’s reluctance to nominate officers, whom he apparently considered should be brave as a matter of course. Of the ten winners of the Victoria Cross from 1916 to 1918, two were privates (Henry Nicholas and James Crichton), one a lance-corporal (Samuel Frickleton), one a corporal (Leslie Andrew) and six sergeants (Donald Brown, Richard Travis, Samuel Forsyth, Reginald Judson, Henry Laurent and John Grant).13 Many other NCOs won lesser meals for gallantry. Sergeant Richard Corsbie from Papanui was forty-two years old when he was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for saving his severely 11 O.E. Burton, The Silent Division: New Zealanders at the Front 1914–1919 Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1935), 202. 12 Stewart, New Zealand Division, 617. 13 See http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/war/victoria-cross/nz-vc-winners, accessed 5 April 2014.

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wounded officer’s life under fire near Rossignol Wood on 7 August 1918.14 Lance-Corporal Thomas Feather from Little River on Banks Peninsula was awarded the Military Medal, which was gazetted on 29 August 1918. His citation read: On British Front, opposite Beaumont Hamel, 26th March 1918, and subsequent days. For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. On 5th April 1918, during an attack by the enemy, and under heavy hostile bombardment, this Lewis Gun NCO took his gun to its battle position, and, in spite of the shells bursting close around him kept an almost continuous burst of fire on the enemy lines as they advanced. By his personal disregard of danger, he helped considerably to break up the enemy advance on top of his flank. His steadiness and gallant conduct under heavy hostile fire were of great value.15

But did these new tactics of placing greater responsibility on junior leadership expose those promoted to ranks from lance corporal to sergeant, especially after 1917, mean that such men were at greater risk of being killed? The raw figures from the Papanui study seemed to suggest so.16 Of the ninety-five men whose military service was studied, there were five officers, four of whom were men with secondary education or recognized military experience, either in the Territorials or the pre-war Regular Army. This fits the common pattern that officers were drawn from the middle classes, who could afford secondary education, and who perhaps had the social contacts necessary to be considered for such a position. Twentythree men attained NCO rank, either as a consequence of previous military experience in the Territorials, or on the basis of their performance as soldiers. Interesting patterns emerged among men who were promoted from the ranks. Some were initially promoted while training in New Zealand, presumably because they showed some kind of leadership potential. When they moved overseas to active service, however, they reverted to the ranks. Understandably, men who had experienced combat would resent being ordered around by someone who had never been under fire. Inevitably, men would be required to replace those NCOs who were killed in the “normal” course of active service. The Papanui study showed that of the

14

See http://www.pap-to-pass.org/Corsbie.htm, accessed 5 April 2014. Wayne McDonald, Honours and Awards to the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in the Great War 1914 –1918 (Napier: Helen McDonald, 2001) 99–100. 16 Paul O’Connor, From Papanui to Passchendaele, http://www.pap-to-pass.org/, 2005. 15

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twenty-three men promoted beyond their initial rank upon entering active service, the median interval between their initial rank and their first Table 8.1: Rank distribution of soldiers in the Papanui study Captain 1

Lieutenant 4

CSM 1

Sergeant 5

Corporal 6

Lance-corporal Private 11 67

promotion was thirty-eight weeks. For the ten men who were promoted a second time, the average time interval between the first and second promotion was 10.5 weeks. Two men were promoted a third time, the median interval being 19.5 weeks. As had happened during training, promotion occurred either as a result of previous military experience in the Territorials, or on the basis of performance. Some men were promoted because they survived long enough to demonstrate a suitable standard of performance and because they were needed to replace the continuing losses at this level. For the Papanui–Belfast men, the average time interval between final promotion and a soldier’s death—either killed in action or died of wounds—was 18.6 weeks. The overall mortality rate for New Zealand soldiers serving in the First World War is generally given as 18 per cent. However, for the purposes of testing the proposition that promotion to NCO was a poisoned chalice, it is necessary to examine the proportion of deaths directly attributable to combat. A survey of causes of death of New Zealand servicemen in 1917 and 1918 showed that there were 11,069 deaths, or which 1,042 (9.4 per cent) were caused by disease, accident or drowning.17 This rough calculation indicates that the actual combat-related death rate was approximately 17 per cent, and subsequent comparisons should keep this figure in mind. The fatality rate of NCOs among the Papanui sample in Table 8.1 was 24.2 per cent (twenty-three out of ninety-five). However, a closer look at the NCO fatality figures from June 1917 to the end of the war showed an even more interesting pattern. Of those soldiers who were killed in action or died of wounds in this period, twenty-nine were of private rank, but sixteen were of NCO rank. This indicates an NCO fatality rank of 35.5 per cent, more than double the national fatality rate. These figures raised some 17

Information for these figures was derived from the New Zealand and World War One Roll of Honour, accessed 18 April 2014, via: http://freepages.genealogy. rootsweb.ancestry.com/~sooty/rohtitlepage.html. These webpages were compiled by Christine Clement based on cross-referencing the divergent information in The Great War, 1914—1918: New Zealand Expeditionary Force Roll of Honour (Wellington: W.A. Skinner, 1924) and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website.

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obvious questions. Was this sample group atypical, or were they just unlucky? Using evidence such as surviving honours boards from Papanui and Belfast Primary schools, and a Press article that listed the members of the Merivale Rugby Club who served in the war, it was possible to estimate that the average fatality rate of soldiers from the Papanui and Belfast districts who served in the war was approximately 22 per cent— Table 8.2: Rank distribution of soldiers in the Banks Peninsula study Lieutenant 2

Sergeant 5

Corporal 5

Lance-corporal Private 8 70

significantly higher than the national average.18 What was needed was evidence from other sources to determine whether this proposition of greater NCO mortality was valid. Using a similar methodology, an analysis was undertaken of the First World War soldiers whose names are recorded on the Banks Peninsula War Memorial in Akaroa. First, it was necessary to separate out those who were killed in action or died or wounds (as opposed to sickness). Of the ninety who were killed in action or died of wounds, two were officers, eighteen were NCOs and seventy were of private rank or equivalent. This gives an NCO fatality rate of 20 per cent—less than Papanui, but still higher than the national average. However, Banks Peninsula was more rural than Papanui and Belfast, so many men from that district served in the mounted rifles units in Gallipoli and the Sinai, taking their own horses with them. A closer analysis of those who died on the Western Front in 1917–18 was required. This new analysis showed that forty-four Banks Peninsula fatalities were of private rank and twelve were NCOs, indicating an NCO fatality rate of 21 per cent. Given that these men would have served in similar regionally based units to the Papanui–Belfast men, this analysis seemed to provide some support for the initial hypothesis that promotion to NCO rank exposed men to potentially greater danger because of the tactics that they were required to implement. But was a focus on two Canterbury memorials too narrow to be drawing broader conclusions for the rest of the New Zealand Division? Might Canterbury units have found themselves more in the thick of fighting than other New Zealand units? A holiday visit to Central Otago provided the opportunity to test the hypothesis further. The Wanaka war memorial overlooks the lake on a hill above the town centre. On it are recorded fifteen names: two sergeants, two corporals and eleven private 18

“Roll of Honour”, The Press, 14 March 1919, 8.

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soldiers. Of those, nine died between June 1917 and November 1918, of whom eight were killed in action or died of wounds. Two of the eight were sergeants, which suggests an equivalent fatality rate for the period of 25 per cent. Such a small sample was probably not statistically valid, so further evidence was sought. On the lakeside in Queenstown is a memorial that lists thirty-five First World War fatalities, consisting of two lieutenants, thirty private soldiers and three NCOs. Several of these, Table 8.3: NCO fatalities on Tauranga and Nelson war memorials War Memorial Gates Tauranga Anzac Park War Memorial Nelson

Officer fatalities 3

NCO fatalities 14

Private fatalities 35

NCO % of fatalities 26.9%

8

22

52

26.8%

Table 8.4: NCO fatalities at Messines and Grévillers Messines Memorial Grévillers British War Cemetery and memorial wall

NCO fatalities 134 87

Private fatalities 670 359

NCO % of fatalities 16.66% 19.5%

however, died of disease (or later in New Zealand having been invalided home) while others died in operations in Gallipoli or the Somme, so the actual combat fatalities for 1917–18 is two NCOs and eleven of private rank, a fatality rate of 15 per cent. Clearly no firm conclusions could be drawn from either memorial that might substantiate (or disprove) the original hypothesis. Perhaps looking at memorials from other regions of New Zealand might provide more evidence. Raw figures from photographs of the two war memorials at Tauranga and Nelson appeared to provide confirmation of the findings of the Papanui study. Using a combination of Auckland Museum’s Cenotaph database and the Commonwealth Graves War Commission website, it was possible to establish the ranks of most of the men whose names are listed on these memorials.19 As can be seen in Table 19 http://muse.aucklandmuseum.com/databases/Cenotaph/locations.aspx?# and http ://www.cwgc.org/, both accessed 13 April 2014.

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8.3, the fatality rate for NCOs in both districts was remarkably similar. Although such figures seemed to support the NCO fatality rate hypothesis, further evidence was required. New Zealand memorials overseas were studied to see if they could shine any light on the subject. An examination was made of the rank distribution of those men who are named on the Messines Memorial and the Grévillers British War Cemetery as part of the Dolores Cross Project, “a not-for-profit memorial initiative that began in April 2008”. Relying on supporters and volunteers, the project aims to “personally pay tribute to approximately 30,000 New Zealand military personnel buried on foreign soil with a hand-made tribute, the Dolores Cross”.20 The Messines memorial consisted of 670 private-equivalent names and 134 of noncommissioned rank, a 16.6 per cent NCO fatality rate. The Grévillers cemetery contains the graves and a separate memorial wall for the missing New Zealand servicemen who died in the Spring Offensive and subsequent 1918 operations. Of the 446 identified through the Dolores Cross project, 87 were of NCO rank—a 19.5 per cent fatality rate. These two percentages average out at 18 per cent, close to the overall New Zealand fatality rate of 17 per cent combat-related deaths. When combined with the Central Otago figures, these percentages do not appear to support the Papanui–Belfast hypothesis of higher NCO fatality rates. But this raised the issue that war memorials by themselves might not be the best sources of evidence upon which to draw conclusions about NCO fatality rates. A different approach to evidence was called for. Did all infantry units in the New Zealand Division have the same exposure depending on the operations in which they were involved, particularly in the 1917–18 period? Some comparison was needed. Using some appendices in the official regimental histories, in which figures were taken from the army’s base records, it was possible to make some initial comparisons.21 Between 1 January 1917 and the end of the war in November 1918, the Canterbury Infantry Regiment suffered 1,046 fatalities as a result of combat (either killed in action or died of wounds). Table 8.5 indicates that the Canterbury Regiment’s NCO fatality rate was 17.8 per cent of the total—similar to the

20

See http://www.dolorescrossproject.org/. A comprehensive list of official histories for the First World War I, in electronic form, can be found at http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/subject-000003.html. 21

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Table 8.5: Fatalities for Canterbury Regiment and New Zealand Rifle Brigade, January 1917–November 1918 Canterbury Infantry Regiment New Zealand Rifle Brigade

Sergeantmajor

Sergeant

Corporal

Lancecorporal

Private

2

63

53

68

860

4

123

133

199

1797

national average.22 A similar survey of combat-related deaths in the New Zealand Rifle Brigade between 7 June 1917 (the start of the Messines Offensive) and November 1918 provided an interesting comparison. The fatality rate of 20.3 per cent was clearly higher than the national average.23 Even allowing for the fact that the Rifle Brigade had four battalions to the Canterbury Regiment’s two, why might there be such a difference between two major units of the New Zealand Division? Perhaps an answer lay in how different brigades or battalions within the New Zealand Division were committed to major offensives. The first assault wave, with covering artillery fire, may suffer different types of casualties from that of follow-up battalions, who may have to dig in and suffer retaliatory artillery barrages before repelling a German counter-attack trying to retake the position seized by the initial assault. Certainly in the case of the Messines Offensive, Russell wanted to withdraw troops from Messines to avoid unnecessary casualties in the inevitable German counter-barrage, but was refused permission to do so. This decision probably led to a number of unnecessary casualties, as the majority of casualties in the First World War were caused by artillery fire.24 In recording the figures for these two units, the recurrence of key dates related to major offensives involving the New Zealand Division was clearly evident. One possibility was that there were some differences depending on which units were involved in which major offensives. Of 22

Captain David Ferguson, The History of the Canterbury Regiment, N.Z.E.F. 1914–1919(Christchurch: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1921), Appendix H, 493–524. 23 Lieutenant Colonel W.S. Austin (ed.), The Official History of the New Zealand Rifle Brigade (the Earl of Liverpool’s Own): Covering the Period of Service with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in the Great War from 1915 to 1919 (Wellington: L.T. Watkins, 1924), Appendix B, 328–53. 24 See Damien Fenton, New Zealand and the First World War 1914–1919 (Auckland: Penguin in association with the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2013), 76.

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course, not all combat-related deaths could be explained by participation in major offensives such as Messines, Passchendaele, the 1918 German Spring Offensive and the final Hundred Days. Some fatalities would have occurred, for example, on risky reconnaissance missions into no-man’sland, during trench raids or simply by having the bad luck to be in the wrong place when the New Zealand trenches were being shelled by German artillery. Table 8.6: Proportion of NCO fatalities by battle, 1917–18 Battle Messines Broodseinde Passchendaele Polderhoek Chateau German Spring Offensive

Canterbury Regiment 23% 4% 20% 12% 20%

1st Auckland 20.5% 23%

28%

A comparison of NCO casualties between the Canterbury Infantry Regiment and the 1st Auckland Infantry Regiment showed some interesting patterns in relation to major battles in which the entire New Zealand Division was involved. Between 7 June 1917 and the end of the war, the entire Canterbury Regiment suffered 170 NCO fatalities, whereas the 1st Auckland suffered eighty-seven. The Messines Offensive accounted for 23 per cent of total Canterbury NCO fatalities as opposed to 20.5 per cent of the Aucklanders. The two battles around Ypres in October reveals a different pattern. At Broodseinde on 4 October, the Canterbury Regiment committed few of its forces, suffering 4 per cent of their NCO losses. The Aucklanders, however, suffered 23 per cent of their NCO deaths for the period at Broodseinde. The pattern was reversed in the 12 October disaster at Passchendaele, in which 1st Auckland was not involved. The Canterbury Regiment suffered 20 per cent of its total NCO losses as a consequence of the 12 October debacle, compounded by 12 per cent of their NCO losses at the failed attack on Polderhoek Chateau in December 1917. Thirty-four Canterbury Regiment NCOs were killed during the division’s successful repulse of the German Spring Offensive in the Somme in late March and early April, 20 per cent of total NCO losses. 1st Auckland, however, lost twenty-five NCOs, representing 28.7 per cent of total NCO losses for the unit. Both units experienced similar rates of losses in the final Hundred Days of the war.25

25

Figures obtained from Ferguson, Canterbury Regiment and O.E. Burton, The Auckland Regiment, Being an Account of the Doings on Active Service of the First,

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Table 8.7: NCO death rates, 1918 Time period January 1918 26 March– 5 April 1918 21 August–11 November 1918

NCOs: % of deaths 15.2% 22.4% 20.7%

Further evidence of the influence of major operations on NCO losses became clear when examining the pattern of NCO deaths in 1918. A survey of combat-related deaths for January 1918 showed a total of 184 deaths when the division was occupying a so-called quiet sector, recovering from the brutal losses of the previous three months. Of these 184 fatalities, twenty-eight were NCOs, a fatality rate of 15.2 per cent. However, between 26 March and 5 April, when the division was sent south to help halt the German Spring Offensive, the losses were 614 combat-related deaths, of which 136 (22.4 per cent) were NCOs. In the period 21 August–11 November 1918, when the division was in almost continuous combat as part of the final Allied push to force the final German surrender, the NCO loss rate for the division was 20.7 per cent of the overall combat-related deaths. It appeared, therefore, that the timing of promotion might have had a bearing upon an individual’s level of risk of being killed. If a man was promoted to fill the gaps left in the division after the battle of FlersCourcelette in September–October 1916, in which there were 332 NCO deaths, then barring the hazards of holding a trench line between October 1916 and the Messines Offensive in June 1917, the risk of being killed may have been no greater than that of a private soldier. However, if a soldier was promoted to fill one of the thirty-nine NCO positions in the Canterbury Regiment after Messines, and faced the future perils of Passchendaele and Polderhoek Chateau, his chances of survival may have been a great deal less in comparison. Clearly the leadership role required of an NCO in the newly emerging fire and manoeuvre tactics when assaulting a fixed position may have exposed him to greater hazard, either because of the expectation that he be seen to lead from the front, or because experienced German defenders, especially snipers, may have deliberately targeted those who were obviously directing combat. But an explanation for a higher NCO fatality rate might lie in examining in more detail the roles that NCOs played. Rudyard Kipling, in his 1896 poem “The ’Eathen”, asserted “but the backbone of the army is the non-commissioned man”, and this is certainly modern (if not ancient) Second and the Third Battalions of the Auckland Regiment (Auckland: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1922).

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military lore. NCOs were expected to demonstrate the three Cs of leadership: confidence, competence and courage. Like the platoon commander, an NCO must be proficient in the weapons, tactics and understanding of the nature of fighting required in trench warfare. As previously noted, the new training manuals issued after the Somme emphasized the primacy of the platoon as the main fighting formation— SS143, issued in February 1917, stated bluntly that “the Platoon is the Unit in the Assault”—and the kingpin of the platoon was most often the sergeant.26 It was he, along with the platoon commander, who was responsible for ensuring the standards and functioning of the platoon. He was expected to be highly proficient in the use of the various weapons and familiar with a range of tactics so that he could oversee the training of junior NCOs and their men. On many occasions he might be needed to “train” a newly arrived platoon commander in the realities of trench warfare. In Armentières to the Somme, Cecil Malthus describes taking out a green lieutenant on a night patrol. He relates the lieutenant’s lack of awareness of noise discipline, failing to maintain his bearings in relation to the enemy and his own trenches, and forgetting to remember the password on eventual return to their trenches.27 The platoon commander would also know each man’s strengths and weaknesses and be on the lookout for the inevitable replacement of any junior NCO fatalities. Junior NCOs were in charge of a section of men, some with specialist responsibilities, and they needed to be competent enough to train and lead their section in a variety of roles. These could include, but were not limited to, leading night patrols to gather intelligence or a surreptitious trench raid to snatch prisoners for interrogation right up to leading the section in a large-scale assault.28 All these duties carried with them an element of risk, which was the implicit peril of accepting a stripe. As previously noted, experienced defenders, having analysed British assault tactics, may well have looked for and targeted the junior NCOs in order to blunt the effectiveness of an assault. SS143 also provided diagrams for the formation of platoons in a variety of different assaults. Appendix II showed the platoon in artillery formation—the preferred formation of a platoon while advancing under cover of artillery fire, with the right on the outer flank; the formation could be modified according to the ground or other factors. The leadership NCOs were expected to demonstrate was clear. Each section was led by their NCO who, having trained his men in 26

SS143, Instructions for the Training of Platoons for Offensive Action 1917 (Issued by the General Staff, February 1917), 3. 27 See Malthus, Armentières and the Somme, 66–67. 28 SS143, 6.

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their role as part of the wider fire and manoeuvre tactical approach, was expected to direct his men’s movements.29 When not in direct action, a junior NCO would be responsible for the welfare of the men in his section, especially the integration of reinforcements and supervising their learning. In this role, an NCO was crucial in providing new men with confidence, especially if he made an intelligent choice to pair the fresh recruit with a steady and experienced soldier to provide additional mentoring. The new army training manuals emphasized the idea of the army as a continually learning institution, and junior NCOs would be at the forefront of learning new tactics, training their men in these new roles and leading them when in direct contact with the enemy. Junior NCOs would often provide feedback to their platoon commander, who might feed such observations further up the chain of command for tactical refinement. Although the popular saying “Rank has its privileges” was certainly evident in the hierarchical nature of the military, leadership brought with it responsibility. For junior officers, sergeants and junior NCOs, knowing that the platoon was the “unit in the assault” meant that they were constantly at the sharp end of exchanges of fire, and that sometimes they were required then to place themselves in greater hazard than were privates. A junior NCO might be the first one into the German trenches on a raid to seize prisoners for interrogation. He might be the one to take new men out on nocturnal patrols in no-man’s-land to show them the ropes. Corporals or lance-corporals might make the decisive attack on pillboxes or entrenched machine gun posts while their section provided covering fire in major assaults. Certainly these were the types of actions for which Sergeants Dick Travis and Samuel Forsyth were posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.30 Undertaken on a regular basis, they exposed NCOs to additional danger. Furthermore, because the New Zealand Division was consistently larger than equivalent British formations, owing to an efficient reinforcement system, it was constantly exposed to hard fighting and suffered considerable losses on multiple occasions between May 1916 and November 1918. It is not surprising, therefore, that NCOs were killed in such numbers. In my day job, I am a teacher of history at Burnside High School in Christchurch. An important outcome of the students’ work is learning how to examine evidence in a range of different sources, both primary and 29

SS143, Appendix II. http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/files/documents/vc-citations/richard-travis-vc.pdf; http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/files/documents/vc-citations/samuel-forsyth-vc.pdf, both accessed 18 April 2014. It is instructive to note that Travis was killed by shellfire “going from post to post, encouraging his men”. 30

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secondary. They are taught how to distinguish different types of evidence, such as the distinction between fact and opinion. As part of their internal assessment students must show their ability to select evidence from which they can construct an accurate narrative of the past. At a higher level, they need to consider matters as sufficiency and reliability of evidence, which was thrown into sharper relief for me while writing this chapter. It became clear what was needed: a closer examination of both the nature of sources and careful checking of statistical evidence to establish a justifiable argument. An earlier question in relation to the number of Papanui–Belfast NCO fatalities asked if this sample group was atypical; were they just unlucky. A positive answer might now be given more confidently. The overall Papanui–Belfast NCO fatality rate of 24.2 per cent (or 35.5 per cent after Messines) is certainly higher than most other NCO death rates analysed above. However, the analysis has demonstrated that on average, especially when the New Zealand Division was involved in major offensive operations, the NCO fatality rate could regularly exceed the overall combat-related death rate of 17 per cent of those who served in the division. So for the thousands of New Zealand soldiers who were promoted from the ranks to a higher rank, the acquisition of another stripe may have been a recognition of their ability and worth as a soldier, but it also may have been a poisoned chalice.

CHAPTER NINE ANTARCTICANS AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR1 KATHERINE MOODY The Heroic Era of Antarctic exploration, when the continent first started to be visited and opened up, is generally considered to have covered the period from the 1890s to the 1920s. So what did the explorers of this era do in the First World War? Many of them had backgrounds in the forces, usually the navy, and were of the right age to serve. Very little has been published specifically on this topic—can more than biographical detail be discovered? This chapter provides an overview of initial research into this area and identifies themes for future research. Importantly, it compares the use of the concept “endurance” in both the First World War and Antarctic exploration. The war experiences of four members of two of the most famous expeditions will be examined in detail and a brief overview of the war service of other explorers who could be researched in more depth at a later date will be provided. The expeditions considered are Robert Falcon Scott’s 1910–13 Terra Nova expedition, officially known as the British Antarctic Expedition, and Ernest Shackleton’s 1914–17 Endurance expedition, also more grandly called the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The legacy of the Terra Nova expedition during the war, and contemporary reaction to the Endurance expedition, will also be considered. During the Heroic Era the historic maritime town of Lyttelton, near Christchurch, was the last port of call for a number of expeditions on their way south, including that of the Terra Nova in 1910. In his classic 1922

1

I would like to acknowledge the following for their assistance: Naomi Boneham, archivist at the Scott Polar Research Institute; Hugh Turner; Sara Wheeler; Gordon Leith, librarian at the RAF Museum; Andrew Dawrant, Royal Aero Club Trust; Alan Wakefield and the Imperial War Museum Photograph Archive; June Debenham Black for permission to use Frank Debenham quotes; and the Gran Family.

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memoir, The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard describes the ship’s arrival into Lyttelton: And so it was with some anticipation that on Monday morning, October 24, we could smell the land—New Zealand, that home of so many Antarctic expeditions, where we knew we would be welcomed. Scott’s Discovery, Shackleton’s Nimrod and now again Scott’s Terra Nova have all in turn been berthed at the same quay in Lyttelton, for aught I know at the same No. 5 shed.2

The story of this expedition is well known. In short, it combined science with an attempt to reach the South Pole. It became predominantly a race to the Pole when Norwegian Roald Amundsen announced he was leading an expedition that was also making for 90 degrees south. Amundsen’s party became the first to reach the South Pole on 14 December 1911. A little over a month later, on 17 January 1912, Scott, Edward “Uncle Bill” Wilson, Lawrence “Titus” Oates, Henry “Birdie” Bowers and Edgar “Taff” Evans reached the pole, only to discover they had been beaten. Disheartened and short of supplies, the polar party perished on their return journey, first Evans, then Oates—who went outside to walk to his death in a blizzard, an act interpreted as selfless, which became legendary. Scott, Bowers and Wilson died in their tent during yet another blizzard, only a few miles from a food depot that could have saved them.3 One of the party who discovered the tent containing their bodies in November 1912 was the expedition’s Norwegian ski expert, Tryggve Gran,4 who had been recommended to Scott by another Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen. During the expedition Gran kept a diary in which he noted his fellow explorers’ awareness of growing tension in Europe:

2

Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World (London: Constable, 2011), 27. 3 Stephanie L. Barczewski, Antarctic Destinies: Scott, Shackleton and the Changing Face of Heroism (London: Continuum, 2009), 77–82. 4 Ranulph Fiennes, Race to the Pole: Tragedy, Heroism and Scott’s Antarctic Quest (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2003), 342.

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26/4/12 Among other things we discussed the possibility of war between Germany and England. One thing I now understand clearly: the seamen of England are deeply suspicious of the Fatherland.5

On 13 January 1913 the return of the Terra Nova, a Dundee whaler, to Antarctica brought news that “the Serbs, Bulgars and Montenegrins have thrashed the Turks”.6 This was the First Balkan War, the last fracturing of the Ottoman Empire before the First World War broke out. Captain Oates, a member of the landed gentry and a cavalry officer who had been injured in the South African War, bought his way onto the Terra Nova expedition, as did Apsley Cherry-Garrard, whose family had come into money when he was a boy. One of the youngest members of the expedition, Cherry, as he was known, was given the role of assistant zoologist. An intense and earnest character, he was deeply traumatized by his perceived failure to rescue the polar party when sent out to look for them in March 1912.7 Before the polar journey began Cherry, Bowers and Wilson had made a journey in the treacherous Antarctic winter to collect emperor penguin eggs from Cape Crozier. The three faced what seemed like certain death together and this astonishing feat of endurance forged tight bonds between them.8 Cherry was devastated when Bowers and Wilson did not return from the pole.9 In losing close friends, and wondering if he could have saved them, he was already enduring what many would later experience during the war. A glimpse of Cherry’s intensity can be seen in a letter to The Times published on 10 October 1919. The First World War was noted for the introduction of new military technology, and in this letter Cherry brings attention to an advancement that was used on the expedition and was later, in a more developed form, introduced to the war: Sir—it is only right to point out that an early and practical forerunner of the tanks was used by Scott in the Antarctic … We had 3 [tracked motorsledges]; one of them sank into the sea, but the two survivors, after doing excellent work on sea-ice, were driven on the polar journey by Day and

5

Geoffrey Hattersley Smith (ed.), The Norwegian with Scott: Tryggve Gran’s Antarctic Diary 1910–1913, trans. Ellen Johanne McGhie (London: National Maritime Museum, 1984), 192–93. 6 Smith (ed.), The Norwegian with Scott, 233. 7 Fiennes, Race to the Pole, 323–27. 8 See Cherry–Garrard, The Worst Journey, ch. VII. 9 Sara Wheeler, Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001), 6.

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Cherry rather exaggerates their success, but certainly the tracked Wolseley motor-sledges were a signpost on the journey toward tanks and to modern snowmobiles. His war service was framed by his involvement with Antarctic exploration. Initially, because he had some experience in Antarctica as a dog-handler, he became involved with noted surgeon Sir Frederick Treves and the Red Cross’s plan to use dogs “at the front to sniff out wounded men”, but this scheme worked out badly in practice and he then enlisted in the Royal Engineers.12 In late 1914 his experience of motor-sledges led to his being granted a temporary commission in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) and serving with 5 Squadron Royal Navy Air Service (RNAS) (Armoured Car Division). The squadron had some success on the Western Front in the first half of 1915, but as Cherry’s biographer Sara Wheeler notes, “once the battle lines had been established and the trenches dug, opportunities for vehicles that had to stick to roads were severely limited”.13 Some armoured cars were sent to Gallipoli and Egypt, but 5 Squadron was returned to Britain to await instruction and was eventually disbanded. Cherry was not to see further active service owing to ulcerative colitis, which he had contracted in Antarctica.14 If advancement in technology was a feature that defined the First World War, then for Cherry his experiences of such technology in Antarctica opened up to him opportunities different from many of those who served, but the medical condition he contracted in Antarctica ultimately curtailed his service. Sara Wheeler concludes that it was his time in Antarctica, and not the war, that created a breach with his past: The expedition cut like a canyon between Cherry’s childhood and the rest of his life, and when he looked back beyond it to his youth he saw, dimly, 10

Bernard C. Day, a motor mechanic on the expedition, and William Lashly, the expedition’s chief stoker and in charge of a motor sledge. 11 Winston Churchill had resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty in October 1915 after the failure of the Gallipoli campaign. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, letter to The Times, 10 October 1919, 6. 12 Wheeler, Cherry, 172. 13 Ibid., 177. 14 Ibid., 180.

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Figure 9.1: Lieutenant Commander Apsley Cherry-Garrard, RNVR, 1915 Courtesy Hugh Turner the lost world of Rupert Brooke, the flaxen-haired poet who, rightly or wrongly, came to embody the romantic, self-sacrificing ideal of the young Englishman of Cherry’s generation.15

Ranulph Fiennes, in his biography of Scott, Race to the Pole, notes that “through two world wars, the Scott story was used as a heroic example of how to live and how to face death when fighting for your country”.16 It is 15 16

Ibid., 165. Fiennes, Race to the Pole, 2.

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also reported that the widowed Kathleen Scott received many letters from servicemen telling her that “they could never have faced the dangers and hardships of the war had they not learned to do so from her dead husband’s teaching”.17 It would be interesting to know if the tone of these letters changed during the war, but the story of perceived heroic sacrifice and endurance in the face of a hopeless situation proved a comfort to some. Cherry voices similar sentiments in the introduction to a biography of “Birdie” Bowers: “But there is something in this story [of the polar party] which lives through unimaginable miseries and horrors; partly as an example, as I believe: and partly as a help.”18 The endurance of a small group of men in Antarctica went on to help others endure the war. Yet inspiration did not come only in the form of endurance. Stephanie Barczewski in Antarctic Destinies and Max Jones in The Last Great Quest,19 have both examined the legacy of the Terra Nova expedition during the First World War and focused on the theme of sacrifice: The Scott story was thus readily available to provide symbols of Christian sacrifice when the First World War broke out a year after the news of the tragedy reached Britain. As such, the story suited the wartime context perfectly, and Scott’s death (and those of his companions) found a new, more profound resonance for the millions of Britons seeking an explanation and solace for the deaths of the loved ones.20

The film of the expedition, taken by photographer Herbert Ponting, was shown to over 100,000 officers and men during the war. In response, the Senior Chaplain to the Forces, the Reverend F.I. Anderson, sent Ponting a letter of appreciation: I cannot tell you what a tremendous delight your films are to thousands of our troops. The splendid story of Captain Scott is just the thing to cheer and encourage out here … The thrilling story of Oates’ self-sacrifice, to try 17 Sara Wheeler, Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica (New York: Random House, 1996), 52; Fiennes, Race to the Pole, 357. As well as designing various war memorials, Kathleen Scott was also involved during the war in New Zealand-born Harold Gillies’s pioneering work on facial reconstruction, making models of injured men’s faces to aid surgeons and as a record. See Louisa Young, A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen Scott (London: Macmillan, 1995), 187– 89. 18 Apsley Cherry-Garrard, introduction to George Seaver, “Birdie” Bowers of the Antarctic (London: John Murray, 1938), xi. 19 See Max Jones, The Last Great Quest: Captain Scott’s Antarctic Sacrifice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 200) ch. 8, “So Many Heroes”, 253–84. 20 Barczewski, Antarctic Destinies, 143.

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and give his friends a chance of getting through, is one that appeals so at the present time. The intensity of its appeal is realised by the subdued hush and quiet that pervades the mass audience of the troops while it is being told. We all feel we have inherited from Oates and his comrades a legacy and heritage of inestimable value in seeing though our present work.21

A Biblical quotation (John 15:13) that has been associated with Oates, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”, was also used as a memorial inscription on many Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstones, a notable example being the grave of double Victoria Cross winner Captain Noel Chavasse, who is buried at Brandhoek New Military Cemetery in Belgium.22 This phrase is a tangible link between the Oates legend and countless examples of sacrifice during the war. His influence was also felt by those on the Terra Nova expedition. In the introduction to his unpublished wartime memoir Tryggve Gran records: For days a dreadful storm had raged over the desert of ice and our tent sank deeper and deeper into the snowdrifts. Captain Oates, Lieutenant Bowers and I had been passing the time discussing politics. For the sake of argument I drew attention to Germany’s growing strength—in her army and navy. [On went the discussion and Bowers said] “You know, Titus— for so he called Oates—if there is a war and you a general—both Trigger and I will join up with the Inniskilling Dragoons.” “Nonsense” replied Oates, “all foreigners are anti-British and your Norwegian ski expert is pro-German as well.” Bowers lapped up his soup, which exuded an appetising smell up under the roof of the tent. “I bet you my portion of soup, Oates, that if war comes Gran will volunteer with us against the Germans.” “Will you?” asked Oates. “Of course,” I answered and shook him by the hand.23

After the expedition returned, the adventurous Gran, who was also a champion skier, learned to fly and on 30 July 1914, in a Blériot monoplane, became the first person to fly across the North Sea. Not 21

Herbert Ponting, The Great White South, (London: Gerald Duckworth and Co., 1950), 292. 22 Jones, The Last Great Quest, 244; Commonwealth War Graves Commission, “Captain Noel Godfrey Chavasse, VC and Bar, MC, RAMC. (1884–1917) ‘A Gallant and Devoted Officer’”, accessed 2 October 2013, http://www.cwgc.org/media/11560/chavasse_pdf.pdf. 23 Tryggve Gran, Under the British Flag (Privately published typescript, 1919) Royal Air Force Museum, 3–4.

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surprisingly this feat was overshadowed by the countdown to war. Gran, possibly remembering his promise to Oates, applied to join the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) but at that stage was turned down on account of his nationality. Instead he joined the newly founded Norwegian Flying Corps. He was stationed at an airfield in the west of Norway, monitoring the North Sea: It was a wonderful evening. The sky was glitteringly clear and the sea so calm that it reflected the heaven’s colour spectacle. The aeroplane “Nordsjoen” (“North Sea”) took us high up but there was nothing to see but a lonely fishing boat which lay gently bobbing near the land. All the same, in spite of the divine peace of nature that night, the war clouds had in fact gathered near the Norwegian coast. England had declared war on Germany and the North Sea had become the theatre of war where the whole world expected a bloody decision between Europe’s mightiest states to take place. But the days passed and nothing remarkable happened.24

Figure 9.2: Captain Tryggve Gran, RFC, 1917 Courtesy Royal Aero Club Trust 24

Gran, Under the British Flag, 5.

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Strings were pulled by Scott’s second in command Captain Edward “Teddy” Evans, who was a serving naval officer, and after a period observing the RFC on behalf of the Norwegians, Gran was eventually accepted into the RFC in October 1916, using the name Teddy Grant. Initially, he spent time with Home Defence squadrons night flying against Zeppelin incursions. It was probably during this time that he came to the attention of Cecil Lewis, author of the classic account of life in the RFC, Sagittarius Rising, who records that “a good-looking Norwegian, who somehow or other had joined the RFC was the host in one of the many parties we used to hold in town on our off-night”.25 But though Gran was a good party host, he was not free of suspicion: “that Norwegian [remarked Lewis’s friend one day] he’s a spy. He’ll go. You’ll see.”26 Gran moved on from home defence and served overseas with 101 Squadron, a night bomber unit equipped with two seat FE2Bs. However, Gran was issued with a single-seat Sopwith Pup Scout and assigned special duties, although he still took part in some bombing raids. The Pup appears to have had some kind of side-car fixture on the fuselage, which may have been used to drop spies off behind enemy lines. In early 1918 he was awarded the Military Cross “for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. He bombed enemy aeroplanes with great success, and engaged enemy searchlights, transport and other targets with machine gun fire. He invariably showed the greatest determination and resource.”27 In late 1918 Gran found himself promoted to acting major and served briefly with the Allied Intervention Force, which was supporting Czarist forces against the Bolsheviks in North Russia: Major Muller and I were Force Squadron Leaders and it was intended, sooner or later, that we should take command of the Vologda and Dvina fronts. As it was late autumn, it was clear that there would be little in the way of operations. The equipment we had brought was assembled for the old stuff we found on arrival and was hardly what a modern airman would regard as serviceable. Our overall plan was therefore to make everything ship-shape for the spring offensive.28

He stayed in the RAF after the war, but following a serious motorbike accident in 1921 resigned his commission.29 25

Cecil Lewis, Sagittarius Rising (London: Peter Davis, 1936, 4th ed.), 217. Ibid., 219. 27 Hal Giblin and Norman Franks, The Military Cross to Flying Personnel of Great Britain and the Empire 1914–1919 (London: Savannah Publications, 2008), 226–27. 28 Gran, Under the British Flag, 118. 29 Giblin and Franks, The Military Cross, 227. 26

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Likely influenced by Oates and assisted by Evans, Gran’s war service is arguably the most striking of all those on the Terra Nova expedition. In contrast to Cherry-Garrard, he was able to take full advantage of the opportunities his participation in the expedition brought his way. It appears that rather than enduring the war, Gran made it, along with Antarctic exploration and record-breaking flights, another of his larger than life experiences. Frank Debenham’s war service, although largely on a lesser known front, was perhaps more typical of the experience of many British and empire junior army officers. Debenham, born in New South Wales, was one of the expedition geologists. He went on to study at Cambridge University, only to have his degree interrupted by the war. After joining the 7th (Service) Battalion of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, he was initially posted to France in September 1915 but only a couple of months later they were transferred to the Salonika Front. British and French troops were initially landed in the Greek port of Salonika, in order to assist the Serbs in their fight against the Bulgarians, one of the Central Powers.30 However the Serbs were beaten before the Allies landed and it was then decided to keep them there for future operations against Bulgaria. Debenham’s battalion spent several months after their arrival fortifying the countryside around the city. Even to someone who had been to one of the most alien places on earth, Greece came as a culture shock. Debenham went on to write a chapter for his battalion’s official history and in it he includes himself among those upset by Greek treatment of donkeys: Greek transport struggling along in lines of donkeys overloaded and underfed, carcases of the fallen beasts by the roadside, skinned and left for vultures, deep and odoriferous mud, a large and unkempt cemetery just outside the town and the universal bareness of the hills, all these reminded us very vigorously that we were no longer in fair France … It was therefore hardly to be wondered that most of us who had never been so far afield in the world were thoroughly disgusted with our new home by the time we reached the camp.31

Debenham’s chapter, which covers his battalion’s time building fortifications, gives an evocative picture of their day-to-day activities. The official nature 30

Now Thessaloniki, also referred to by the Allies as Salonica. Major F. Debenham, “The Birdcage Line, November 1915 to July 1916”, in Lieutenant Colonel C. Wheeler (compiled and ed.), Memorial Record of the Seventh (Service) Battalion The Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1921), 41.

31

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and purpose of the piece means, however, that he does not contrast his experiences in Greece with those in Antarctica, even when a blizzard strikes soon after their arrival in Salonika: It began with a cold wind and rain from the north, and soon changed to snow and a searching wind well below freezing point. After Alexandria and Port Said this was contrast with a vengeance, and everyone suffered considerable discomfort, though thanks to the crowded tents there were no casualties worth mentioning due to the cold.32

With his experiences in the harsh conditions of Antarctica, Debenham was likely to have been much better equipped to endure a blizzard than many of his comrades. If not seeing action during the first few months in Greece was frustrating for Debenham he was prepared to be patient. As he notes to Cherry, one of a number of Antarcticans he kept in touch with, “the prospects of a big show here later are good enough to be worth waiting for”.33 The battalion eventually moved up country at the end of July towards the border with modern-day Macedonia, which was then part of occupied Greater Serbia. Debenham was badly wounded during an action on Horseshoe Hill in August 1916, invalided back to Britain and spent the rest of the war on home duty, mainly training recruits and keeping up with Antarctican gossip. The big show on the Salonika Front did eventuate in May 1917 with the First Battle of Doiran. In another letter to Cherry, Debenham matter-of-factly tells him that “most of my battalion was wiped out the other day in Salonica. Only 3 officers left.”34 Could the tragedy of the polar party have helped Debenham to endure this new loss? In his letters to Cherry, Debenham is easily able to switch between discussing the war and the latest news of expedition members. There is no obvious attempt to contrast his experiences of exploration and of war. In 1920, however, when he is pondering what to do with the remainder of funds raised for a memorial to the polar party and starting to plan what would eventually become the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, he notes that “the war and its own memorials have made a difference to people’s views to some extent and the fact that there is a statue

32

Ibid., 43. Frank Debenham, letter to Apsley Cherry-Garrard, 10 May 1916, 1, MS559/ 57/1, Scott Polar Research Institute. 34 Frank Debenham, letter to Apsley Cherry-Garrard, 7 June 1917, MS559/57/3, Scott Polar Research Institute. 33

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Figure 9.3: Major Frank Debenham (seated), Canadian General Hospital, Salonika, 1916 Imperial War Museum HU97414

to Scott in London seems to satisfy others”.35 Debenham’s war service, unlike that of Cherry and Gran, appears to have been little affected by his association with Antarctica. Many on the expedition, such as its officers and the crew of the Terra Nova, were serving naval men and effectively went back to their day jobs. Harry Pennell, the captain of the Terra Nova, went down with the battle cruiser he was commanding, HMS Queen Mary, at the Battle of Jutland in May 1916; he was thirty-four years old.36 Victor Campbell, the ship’s first officer, served at Gallipoli and with the Dover Patrol, including taking part in the Zeebrugge Raid in April 1918.37 He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and bar and also, like so many other Antarcticans, spent time in North Russia. “Teddy” Evans, who came close to dying of scurvy in Antarctica, resumed his navy service in the Dover Patrol. He went on to be awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his command of the 35 Frank Debenham, letter to Apsley Cherry-Garrard, 30 May 1920, 6, MS559/57/9, Scott Polar Research Institute. 36 Jones, The Last Great Quest, 258. 37 H.G.R. King, “Campbell, Victor Lindsey Arbuthnot (1875–1956)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), online edition, last modified January 2011, accessed 4 Oct 2013, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/62513.

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destroyer HMS Broke. Together with another ship, in April 1917 Broke engaged six German destroyers about to attack Dover. Max Jones records what happened next: after some bloody hand to hand fighting, three of the German destroyers were sunk, three retreated and more than 100 prisoners were taken. “Remember the Lusitania!” Evans was reported to have shouted to the Germans clamouring to be rescued from the sea.38

As Debenham noted to Cherry in a letter dated 5 May 1917, “What ho, the Broke! Have you heard any details?”39 Edward Atkinson, the naval surgeon who assumed command of the Terra Nova expedition after Scott’s death and Teddy Evans’s evacuation to New Zealand, had an eventful war. He served with the Royal Naval Division at Gallipoli, fought on the Somme and also spent time in North Russia. While serving on HMS Glatton in Dover Harbour in 1918 he was badly injured when the ship was torpedoed. He treated and rescued others before he himself escaped and was awarded the Albert Medal.40 Yet Cherry-Garrard wonders if the time he became lost in an Antarctic blizzard might have been his worst experience. As he records, Atkinson went out to read one of the thermometers and lost his bearings: The snow was a blanket raging all around him, and it was quite dark. He walked on and found nothing … Hour after hour he staggered about: he got his hand badly frost-bitten; he found pressure [ridges]: he fell over … he was crawling in it, on his hands and knees. Stumbling, tumbling, tripping, buffeted by the endless lash of the wind, sprawling through miles of punishing snow, he seems to have kept his brain working.

Eventually, after many hours, he found his way back to the hut. Since then he has spent a year of war in the North Sea, seen the Dardanelles campaign, and much fighting in France, and has been blown up in a monitor. I doubt whether he does not reckon that night the worst of the lot.41

38

Jones, The Last Great Quest, 257. Frank Debenham, letter to Apsley Cherry-Garrard, 5 May 1917 MS559/57/2, Scott Polar Research Institute. 40 Katherine Lambert, The Longest Winter: The Incredible Survival of Captain Scott’s Lost Party (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004), 204. 41 Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey, 180. 39

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Whether Atkinson agreed with Cherry’s speculation is unknown, but his experience suggests that in the Antarctic it can be nature which is the enemy to be endured. This theme of Antarctic warfare was picked up by Sir Ernest Shackleton, who dedicated, South, his 1919 account of the Endurance expedition, to “my comrades, who fell in the white warfare of the south and on the red fields of France and Flanders”.42 Shackleton’s aim on this expedition, the third he had been involved in, was to make the first crossing of the Antarctic continent. The main body of the party would go south via South America, start their crossing from the Weddell Sea area and make towards the Ross Sea. There another small party of men, sailing south via Sydney and Hobart, Tasmania, on the Aurora, whose chief task would be to lay supply depots, would be waiting for them. However, as is well known, the Endurance became trapped in pack ice, was crushed and eventually sank. The main party made their way to Elephant Island, off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, where they were eventually rescued after an incredible open sea voyage by Shackleton, Frank Worsley, Tom Crean and three others in the 23ft (7m) whaler James Caird to South Georgia to raise the alarm.43 Although everyone in the main Endurance party was rescued, there were casualties in the Ross Sea party. In May 1915 they found themselves stranded with minimal supplies when the Aurora blew out to sea in a blizzard and became trapped in ice for almost year before freeing herself and retreating to Port Chalmers near Dunedin. Making use of supplies left behind by previous expeditions, the Ross Sea party continued with their depot laying, journeying far from their base and staying out on the ice for weeks at a time, not knowing that Shackleton’s main party would never need them. All the men out on the ice were suffering from scurvy and the party’s chaplain, Arnold Spencer-Smith, died of the disease.44 Two other members of the depot laying party, Aeneas Mackintosh, commander of the Ross Sea party, and Victor Hayward, made a desperate attempt to return to their base, but a blizzard blew up during their journey and they were never seen again.45 These are the three men Shackleton describes as having fallen in the white warfare of the south. The Aurora, with Shackleton aboard, came back to rescue the survivors in January 1917. 42

Ernest Shackleton, South!: The Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition 1914–1917 (London: Heinemann, 2012), dedication. 43 Barczewski, Antarctic Destinies, 87–113. 44 Kelly Tyler–Lewis, The Lost Men: The Harrowing Story of Shackleton’s Ross Sea Party (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 191. 45 Ibid., 196–97.

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The First World War and the Endurance expedition are closely intertwined. It was on 1 August 1914, the same day Germany and Russia declared war on each other, that the Endurance sailed from the East India dock in London. Shackleton sent a telegram to the Admiralty, offering the services of the ship and men to the war effort, but was told to proceed. He later recorded: According to many the war would be over within six months. And so we left, not without regret that we could not take our place there, but secure in the knowledge that we were taking part in a strenuous campaign for the credit of our country.46

The war was never far from the thoughts of the expedition: We hoped that the Germans had already been driven from France and that the Russian Armies had put a seal on the Allies’ success. The war was a constant subject of discussion aboard the Endurance, and many campaigns were fought on the map during the long months of drifting.47

After their epic open boat journey and trek over the mountainous interior of South Georgia, Shackleton, Crean and Worsley walked into the whaling station at Stromness on 20 May 1916 asking to see the man in charge. It was not long before the war was mentioned: “Tell me, when was the war over? [Shackleton] asked. The war is not over, he answered. Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad.”48 The influence of propaganda can be seen in the news of the war, as retold to them by those at the whaling station, from newspapers and other sources available in South Georgia. The reader may not realise quite how difficult it was for us to envisage nearly two years of the most stupendous war of history. The locking of the armies in trenches, the sinking of the Lusitania, the murder of Nurse [Edith] Cavell, the use of poison-gas and liquid fire, the submarine warfare, the Gallipoli campaign, the hundred other incidents of the war, almost stunned us at first, and then our minds began to compass the train of events and develop a perspective. No other civilised men could have been as blankly ignorant of world-shaking happenings as we were when we reached Stromness Whaling Station.49

46

Shackleton, South!, 179–81. Ibid., 27. 48 Ibid., 116. 49 Ibid., 119. 47

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The members of the Endurance expedition eventually made it back to Britain in September 1916, and the survivors of the Ross Sea party in April 1917. There was brief press coverage of their return but with so many other earth-shattering events going on at the same time they were quickly overshadowed. The mood had changed since 1914 and it was felt, as Stephanie Barczewski puts it, that “Shackleton had had no business going off on a frivolous expedition to a useless frozen wasteland at a time of national crisis”.50 This reaction may explain, in part, why Shackleton appears so keen in South! to allude to the expedition in terms of warfare and to justify it: There are chapters in this book of high adventure, strenuous days, lonely nights, unique experiences, and, above all, records of unflinching determination, supreme loyalty, and generous self-sacrifice on the part of my men which, even in these days that have witnessed the sacrifices of nations and regardlessness of self on the part of individuals, [which] still will be of interest to readers who now gladly turn from the red horror of war and strain of the last five years to read, perhaps with more understanding minds, the tale of the white warfare of the south. The struggles, the disappointments, and the endurance of this small party of Britishers, hidden away for nearly two years in the fastnessess of the polar ice, striving to carry out the ordained task and ignorant of the crises through which the world was passing, make a story which is unique in the history of Antarctic exploration.51

There was little choice but for the expedition members to join the war effort. Again there were those who went back to their day job in the navy. Tom Crean, who had also been on both of Scott’s expeditions, was a career navy man. Following many heroic Antarctic exploits, he had a quiet war, mainly patrolling the waters off South-West Ireland.52 Alf Cheetham, one of the oldest explorers, who served on both of Scott’s expeditions and two of Shackleton’s, served with the Mercantile Marine and at the age of fifty-one went down with his ship when it was torpedoed by a U-boat.53 Frank Hurley, the expedition photographer, who had also been to Antarctica as part of Douglas Mawson’s 1912–13 Australian expedition,

50

Barczewski, Antarctic Destinies, 134. Shackleton, South!, 70–77. 52 Michael Smith, An Unsung Hero: Tom Crean – Antarctic Survivor (London: Headline, 2001), 266. 53 Jones, The Last Great Quest, 258. 51

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was appointed official war photographer to the Australian Imperial Force in 1917. He took many well-known images of the Third Battle of Ypres.54 Another member of the Ross Sea Party was Irvine Owen Gaze. Originally from Western Australia, he was a cousin of Arnold SpencerSmith and signed on as a general assistant at the last minute. He was the only Antarctic explorer of that era to lose a family member in Antarctica. After arriving back in Australia in 1917 he soon travelled to Britain and in August that year joined the Royal Flying Corps, which became the Royal Air Force on 1 April 1918. He trained as a pilot and on 4 October 1918 was posted to 48 Squadron, Which was then based at the French town of Sainte Marie Cappel on the Western Front, near the Belgian border.55 On 29 October he and his observer, Second Lieutenant C.W. Newstead, were on a line patrol and were forced by anti-aircraft fire to land in friendly territory.56 On 4 November, exactly one week before the Armistice, Gaze and Newstead were shot down again, this time near Lessines, while taking part in the last significant air fighting of the war. On this occasion they were taken prisoner. Gaze had already been awarded his Polar Medal and wore the ribbon on his tunic. When his captors noticed the ribbon and found out he had been part of Shackleton’s Endurance Expedition, a dinner in his honour was held in the officers’ mess, during which it appears that Gaze encountered Hermann Goering, then an Imperial German Air Service fighter ace.57 After 23 days as a prisoner of war, he was repatriated on 27 November and arrived back in London shortly afterwards.58 Being shot down and incarcerated had taken its toll: a medical board held the day after his repatriation graded him as unfit for general service for four weeks.59 We cannot know if Gaze compared his imprisonment with his Antarctic experiences, but such thoughts may have been likely. Shackleton, who had a heart condition, repeatedly tried to be posted to the front, but ended up boosting British propaganda in South America and 54 See Robert Dixon, “Spotting the fake: C.E.W. Bean, Frank Hurley and the Making of the 1923 Photographic Record of the War”, History of Photography 31:2 (2007), 165–79. 55 I.O. Gaze, AIR/76/178, National Archives. 56 Trevor Henshaw, The Sky their Battlefield: Air Fighting and the Complete List of Allied Air Casualties from Enemy Action in the First War: British, Commonwealth, and United States Air Services 1914 to 1918 (London: Grub Street, 1995), 454. 57 Stewart Wilson, Almost Unknown: The Story of Squadron Leader Tony Gaze OAM DFC**: Australian Spitfire Ace and Racing Driver (Lane Cove, NSW: Chevron Publishing Group, 2009), 5 and Tyler–Lewis, The Lost Men, 268. 58 I.O. Gaze, casualty form – officers, 2, RAF Museum. 59 I.O. Gaze, medical card, RAF Museum.

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also had a brief stint in North Russia. His final thoughts on the Endurance expedition further blur the line between the expedition and the war: “Taking the expedition as a unit, out of fifty-six men three died in the Antarctic, three were killed in action and five have been wounded, so that our casualties have been quite high.”60 He died of a heart attack in South Georgia in 1922, while leading another Antarctic expedition. In the introduction to a biography of his great friend, “Birdie” Bowers, Cherry, in his own inimitable style, pays tribute to Bowers and to all those ordinary individuals who endure: It is the same story essentially as that of many others who went through a bad time and did not fail: of man holding on when all hope was gone; of man suffering—and dying—at this very moment. It is the spirit of men leading forlorn hopes; of men surrounded and not surrendering; of men digging in their toes and saying you can win if only you will go on, as Lloyd George did in the war; … of Mustafa Kemal saving the Dardanelles (if Birdie had been in authority there he wouldn’t have had the chance).61

This has been a relatively brief discussion of the main themes that have come out of initial research into Antarcticans and the First World War. There are pre-war tensions making their way to the ice and promises made there seem to have been honoured. There are hints of parallels in the language of memorialization in the aftermath of the Terra Nova expedition and during and after the First World War. Wartime technology may have had antecedents on Antarctic expeditions, but such undertakings, against the backdrop of war, can change from being a source of national pride to something that needs justification. It is also noticeable that many explorers spent time in North Russia. Whether such postings were by accident or by design is as yet unclear, but their experiences in extreme conditions likely made them ideal candidates to take part in the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. In certain instances explorers’ Antarctic experiences were worse than those they endured during the war. In other cases they partly defined what happened to them during the war, and helped them to endure it. Many others quietly served their country. This chapter has begun the deserved detailed research and analysis of Antarcticans in the First World War.

60 61

Shackleton, South!, 192. Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey, introduction, xx.

CHAPTER TEN ENDURING MEMORIES: SAMUEL HURST SEAGER AND THE NEW ZEALAND BATTLEFIELD MEMORIALS OF THE GREAT WAR1 IAN LOCHHEAD They came from safety of their own free will To lay their young men’s beauty, strong men’s powers Under the hard roots of the foreign flowers Having beheld the Narrows from the Hill.

John Masefield’s poem, On the Dead in Gallipoli, poignantly evokes the experience of all those who died in the unsuccessful battles of the Dardanelles campaign, including the New Zealand soldiers who won and briefly held the ridge at Chunuk Bair between 8 and 9 August 1915. It was these men who first saw the Straits of the Dardanelles, control of which was the ultimate objective of the British landing on the Gallipoli Peninsula.2 For a brief moment the door towards this goal seemed to open, only to be slammed shut as the relief the Auckland and Wellington Mounted Rifles so desperately needed, failed to materialize. As Christopher Pugsley argues, the capture of the ridge at Chunuk Bair “was a New Zealand battle” that changed the way in which the nation thought of itself: “Of all the days of battle in our history, if we as New Zealanders have a day and a dawn that is uniquely ours, it is 8 August 1915, the day 1

I am grateful to the School of Humanities, University of Canterbury, for financial assistance with the cost of research, and to Douglas Horrell, who scanned the lantern slides, the discovery of which was the starting point for my research on New Zealand’s First World War battlefield memorials. 2 For a detailed account of the New Zealand involvement in the Gallipoli campaign see Christopher Pugsley, Gallipoli: The New Zealand Story (Auckland: Hodder & Stoughton, 1984).

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we saw the Narrows from the hill.”3 For Ormond Burton, a member of the New Zealand Medical Corps, it was the defining moment of the campaign for the New Zealand contingent: the way men died on Chunuk Bair shaped the deeds yet to be done by the generations still unborn … . When the August fighting died down there was no longer any question but that New Zealanders had commenced to realise themselves as a nation.4

Burton’s account contributed to the mythology that saw a military defeat form part of New Zealand’s national identity.5 The casualty statistics of the battle for Chunuk Bair tell their own story. Eight hundred and fifty-two New Zealand soldiers died in the battle, their names recorded on a stone plinth close to the memorial that was erected a decade later. Only ten known New Zealanders are buried in the vast, stone-walled cemetery that lies just below the ridge. The battlefield memorial is, therefore, a collective gravestone for all the New Zealanders who died there and whose final resting place is unknown, and a commemoration of the achievements of every New Zealand soldier who fought on the peninsula. Of all the battlefield memorials on Gallipoli, the New Zealand memorial on Chunuk Bair is one of the most visible and can be seen from far out to sea. Its architect was a New Zealander, Samuel Hurst Seager (1857–1931), but when the monument was unveiled on 12 May 1925 he was already at sea on his journey home. Seager had spent the previous four years based in London, designing and supervising the construction of battlefield memorials in France and Belgium, as well as that at Gallipoli. He had been present at the earlier unveilings of battlefield memorials on the Western Front but described his absence from the unveiling ceremony at Chunuk Bair, which marked the culmination of his work as a designer of New Zealand First World War battlefield memorials, as “one of the greatest disappointments of his life”.6 He clearly saw this commission as among the most significant designs of his whole career. He would also have been well aware of the national significance of the event: the battle for Chunuk 3

Chris Pugsley, L.H. Barber and the Auckland War Museum, Scars on the Heart: Two Centuries of New Zealand at War (Auckland: David Bateman in association with the Auckland War Museum, 1996), 89. 4 Ormond Burton, quoted in Pugsley et al., Scars on the Heart, 89–90. 5 Keith Sinclair, A Destiny Apart: New Zealand’s Search for National Identity (Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 170–71. 6 “On Chunuk Bair: A Magnificent Memorial,” Evening Post, 8 July 1925, 9.

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Figure 10.1: Unveiling of the Chunuk Bair Memorial, Gallipoli, 25 May 1925 Art History and Theory Visual Resources Collection, University of Canterbury

Bair was one of the most heroic engagements in a theatre of war that was filled with heroic achievements. Seager’s wide-ranging involvement with the architectural issues of his time made it almost inevitable that he should take an interest in the design of war memorials after 1918.7 He was a leading member of his profession 7

Ian Lochhead, “Seager, Samuel Hurst,” in The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Volume Three, 1901–1920 (Auckland: Auckland University Press and Department of Internal Affairs, 1996), 463–64. Also available at: http://www.teara. govt.nz/en/biographies/3s8/seager-samuel-hurst (accessed 1 May 2014).

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and had been instrumental in the foundation of the New Zealand Institute of Architects in 1905, as well as being a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). Seager emigrated to New Zealand with his family in 1870. They settled in Christchurch, where he began his architectural training in the office of the leading Gothic Revival architect, Benjamin Mountfort. Seager studied at Canterbury College between 1879 and 1882 before returning to Britain to continue his architectural education at University College, London, the National Art Training School, the Architectural Association and the Royal Academy of Arts. He was an outstanding student and immediately after completing his studies he was invited to lecture at the National Art Training School in South Kensington from 1883 to 1884, the year in which he became an Associate of the RIBA. He travelled extensively in Europe before returning to New Zealand in 1885, where he achieved immediate success with his competition-winning design for the Christchurch Municipal Chambers (1885).8 During New Zealand’s Long Depression, Seager spent the years from 1891 to 1893 working in Sydney, where he also established himself as a leading figure in his profession.9 Following his return to New Zealand he became recognized as a designer of large Arts and Crafts inspired houses, but he increasingly focused his attention on the emerging discipline of town planning, culminating in his role as convenor of the first New Zealand Town Planning Conference in 1919. He also developed an international reputation for his research on the lighting of art galleries and as an expert on the safety requirements of theatres. By 1920, when he was appointed to the role of architect of New Zealand’s battlefield memorials, he was probably the country’s best-known architect and his reputation extended well beyond its shores.10 Seager’s approach to the design of the memorials demonstrated his strong commitment to architecture as a social art and to the need for 8

See Ian Lochhead, “‘Distinctly in a Nineteenth Century Style”: Samuel Hurst Seager’s Christchurch Municipal Offices”, in Christine McCarthy (ed.), Architectural Style Spreads its Wings: New Zealand Architecture in the 1880s (Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington, 2013), 41–47. 9 Robin Skinner, “An Architect Abroad: Hurst Seager in New South Wales 1890– 1893”, in Christine McCarthy (ed.), “Strident Effects of Instant Sophistication”: New Zealand in the 1890s (Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington, 2007), 71–78. 10 Seager’s international reputation derived in particular from his research on the lighting of art galleries. See Kit Cuttle, “T.S.L. Revisited … The Top-Side Lighting Method of Samuel Hurst Seager”, New Zealand Architect (5, 1985), 40–44 and Christopher Cuttle, Light for Art’s Sake: Lighting for Art Works and Museum Displays (Burlington: Taylor & Francis, 2007), 99–103.

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design to be supported by detailed research. This was demonstrated in 1920 when he organized for an exhibition of around 800 items to be sent to New Zealand from England illustrating examples of “memorial statuary, monuments, and tablets, and also a number of original designs and other reproductions …”.11 The exhibition, which was shown at the Dominion Museum in Wellington and subsequently in Auckland, Christchurch and Dunedin, was intended to develop an informed understanding of the requirements for war memorials. Throughout his career Seager had tirelessly lectured and written about architecture as he was committed to the belief that public education was essential if standards of design were to be raised. The New Zealand Government’s decision to erect battlefield memorials to commemorate the most significant engagements in which the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, and subsequently the New Zealand Division, were involved was a direct response to the establishment in 1919 of the British Battlefields Exploits Committee. “Our task,” wrote Lord Riddle to Winston Churchill in 1920, “is to erect suitable memorials of the British effort in France and Belgium—the combined effort of the dead and the living which led to victory.”12 By 1921, however, this policy had been modified to take into account the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission and to avoid duplication of effort. In the case of the New Zealand memorials, there was a conscious desire to avoid any sense of triumphalism and at Gallipoli great care was taken to adopt inscriptions that would not offend the former enemy. At Longueval, which commemorated the New Zealand Division’s contribution at the Battle of the Somme, the inscription on the New Zealand memorial was revised in order to avoid any hint of colonial “skiting”.13 From the outset Seager insisted that the memorials should avoid overt references to historic styles of architecture. Let us for once try to express ourselves, not to hide the truth in stereotyped forms of ancient art, but to say what we mean and what we feel as simply and as forcibly as we can. The Memorials should tell their story—the story of sacrifices made and deeds nobly done—and provide not only a

11

“War Memorials: Exhibition at Museum”, Evening Post, 12 July 1920, 8. Quoted in D.W. Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia and Canada, 1919–1939 (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 123. 13 High Commissioner to Acting Prime Minister, 20 November 1923, Archives New Zealand (ANZ), ACGO 8333 IA1/1694, 32/3/136. For the discussion of the Longueval inscription see ACGO 8333 IA1/1692, 32/3/66. 12

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These comments reflect the ideas that were being developed by the Imperial War Graves Commission, which had been established in May 1917 at the instigation of Sir Fabian Ware. Seager was well aware of the commission’s decision that there should be no distinction between ranks and nationalities in marking war graves in British battlefield cemeteries.15 This concept had been developed by Sir Frederic Kenyon, Director of the British Museum, who felt that “where the sacrifice had been common, the memorial should be common also”. He also emphasized the need to express the unity of the empire by limiting insignia on gravestones to a simple regimental badge or, in the case of New Zealand soldiers, a silver fern within a circle, the insignia of the New Zealand Division. The cemeteries would thus become a “symbol of a great Army and a united Empire”.16 Simplicity, dignity and equality of treatment were to be the overriding qualities of the cemeteries and these ideals were also to be central to Seager’s approach. Following his appointment as official architect for New Zealand’s battlefield memorials, Seager travelled regularly to France and Belgium as well as to the Dardanelles in order to select appropriate sites, develop his designs and then to supervise contractors and liaise with artists and stone carvers. During the northern summer of 1921 he visited Gallipoli as the guest of the Imperial War Graves Commission in order to survey the ground and select a site. He concluded that Chunuk Bair, as the highest point to be held by British forces for any length of time, was the most appropriate. Its height of 856ft (260m) meant that it would be visible to ships passing through the busy sea lanes of the Narrows as much as 8.5 miles (13.6km) away.17 14

Samuel Hurst Seager, “War Graves and Memorials”, typescript, [1920], Christchurch, Macmillan Brown Library, University of Canterbury, Architectural Archives, Item ID 137102, 8. 15 For the history of the Imperial (later Commonwealth) War Graves Commission see G. Kingsley Ward and Edwin Gibson, Courage Remembered: The Story Behind the Construction and Maintenance of the Commonwealth’s Military Cemeteries and Memorials of the Wars of 1914–1918 and 1939–1945 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1995). 16 Sir Frederic Kenyon, War Graves: How the Cemeteries Abroad Will be Designed (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1918), 6. 17 “War Memorials: Hurst Seager’s Visit to Gallipoli. The Chunuk Bair Monument”, Press, 24 September 1921, 9. See also Samuel Hurst Seager, “Sites for Proposed War Memorials in Gallipoli”, typescript, 6 June 1921, Christchurch,

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In order to ensure maximum visibility the monument was to be 60ft (18.2m) high and in the form of a Greek cross, with tapering cross-arms forming buttresses with splayed faces between each projection. The crossarms were oriented near to the points of the compass, meaning that the southern buttress was highlighted whenever the sun shone, while the adjacent buttresses were cast in shadow; the contrast of light and shade thus increased the memorial’s visibility from a distance. Although it was faced with local limestone, the inner construction was of concrete with a void at the core to save on materials.18 As Seager concluded, “it can, in fact, be seen from any point on the peninsula, or the sea, at which the outline of the Sari Bair range itself can be distinguished.”19 Seager’s emphasis on simplicity and timelessness also avoided any suggestion of triumphalism or nationalism in the design of the memorial.20 Indeed, specific references to New Zealand are kept to a minimum and are restricted to the briefest statement of its purpose: IN HONOUR OF THE SOLDIERS OF THE NEW ZEALAND EXPEDITIONARY FORCE, 8TH AUGUST 1915.

This is followed by the phrase common to all the New Zealand memorials: FROM THE UTTERMOST ENDS OF THE EARTH.21

Macmillan Brown Library, University of Canterbury, Architectural Archives, Item ID 137102, 2–8. 18 A construction drawing of the memorial, along with two perspective views, were published in The Builder. See “Illustrations: The New Zealand Memorial at Gallipoli”, The Builder, 24 October 1924, 634. Four of Seager’s architectural drawings are held in ANZ, ACGO 8368 IA36/19/149. 19 “Battle Memorials: Road Difficulties at Gravenstafel. Work at Messines and Gallipoli”, Evening Post, 14 June 1924, 7. 20 The tone for British war memorials had been set in 1919 by Sir Edwin Lutyens’s design for the Cenotaph, initially erected as a temporary structure in Whitehall in London. Such was the response to the elemental classicism of Lutyens’s design, which eschewed “any visible emblems or symbols … representing Triumph, or Heroism or Victory”, that it was re-erected in stone as the nation’s principal First World War memorial. See Gavin Stamp, The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme (London, Profile Books, 2006), 43. 21 The phrase is derived from Isaiah, 24:16. See John H. Gray, From the Uttermost Ends of the Earth: The New Zealand Division on the Western Front 1916–1918 (Christchurch: Willson Scott, 2010), 4.

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Figure 10.2: Chunuk Bair Memorial and Cemetery, Gallipoli. Art History and Theory Visual Resources Collection, University of Canterbury

At Chunuk Bair there is a complete absence of the imagery found on memorials in France and Belgium. These were easily accessible by road, whereas the Chunuk Bair memorial was in a remote location and was primarily intended to be seen from a distance, meaning that detailed carving would have little impact. Nevertheless, the idea of the site being a part of New Zealand “in a foreign field”, was conveyed by the planting of a New Zealand native, manuka (Leptospermum scoparium), which was carefully acclimatized to the harsh environment of the exposed ridge.22 Standing alone on an exposed summit, the memorial was nevertheless positioned to take account of the cemetery situated immediately below, designed by the British architect, Sir John Burnet, who was in charge of the design of all the war graves on Gallipoli. Burnet’s cemeteries were characterized by a centrally located cross and war stone bearing the text, “Their name liveth for evermore”, with enclosing walls supporting tablets bearing the inscribed names of the dead whose burial site was unknown. At Chunuk Bair the war stone was situated on the axis of Hurst Seager’s monument, so that the higher structure seems to grow out of the massive 22

“On Chunuk Bair: A Magnificent Memorial”, Evening Post, 8 July 1925, 9.

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stone below, the smooth ashlar of the war stone in the cemetery contrasting with the rusticated limestone of Seager’s memorial. Burnet was well satisfied with the relationship achieved between the two monuments, the result of early recognition of the need for complementarity. Seager achieved a similarly sympathetic relationship between his memorials in France and Belgium and those of the architect with overall responsibility for the British war graves in those countries, Sir Edwin Lutyens.23 For the New Zealand soldiers who survived Gallipoli, the battlefields of the Western Front were to be a very different experience. The sodden, undulating landscape of northern France and Belgium was a complete contrast to the parched, mountainous terrain of Gallipoli, and a slow war of attrition replaced the comparatively brief campaign in the Dardanelles. In a recent guide to the New Zealand battlefields of the Western Front, John Gray has suggested that, in comparison with the current focus on commemoration of Gallipoli, the role of New Zealand soldiers in France and Belgium has been neglected.24 Yet the importance of the New Zealanders’ role was clearly recognized at the time, as Seager’s battlefield memorials at Messines and Gravenstafel in Belgium and at Longueval and Le Quesnoy in France make clear. The designs for these monuments were contemporaneous with that at Chunuk Bair, but local circumstances, in particular the torturous negotiations for the purchase of some sites, meant that the process of construction was often delayed.25 Of the four memorials, those at Messines, Gravenstafel and Longueval are closely related, while the fourth, at Le Quesnoy, is as unique as the military action that it commemorates. Longueval, which marks the New Zealand Division’s role in the Battle of the Somme, was the first to be unveiled, on 8 October 1922, followed by Messines on 1 August 1924 and Gravenstafel the following day. The central feature of each memorial was a square obelisk 23 Lutyens was responsible for the design of the New Zealand Memorial to the Missing at Grévillers; that at Caterpillar Valley is by Herbert Baker while those in Belgium at Polygon Wood and Messines are by Charles Holden. See Gavin Stamp, The Memorial of the Missing of the Somme (London: Profile Books, 2006), 96 and Tim Skelton and Gerald Gliddon, Lutyens and the Great War (London: Frances Lincoln, 2008), 131. For a comprehensive survey of all Lutyens’s First World War cemeteries see Jeroen Geurst, Cemeteries of the Great War by Sir Edwin Lutyens (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010). 24 Gray, From the Uttermost Ends, 19–20. 25 At Gravenstafel, for example, it was necessary to negotiate with five different landowners, one of whom refused to sell. See Sir James Allen to Prime Minister, 8 June 1923, ANZ, ACGO 8333 IA1/1692, 32/3/66.

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of Nabresina marble from a quarry near Trieste but, as the London correspondent for Christchurch’s Press reported, an endeavour has been made to break away from the conventional type. It has a curved and moulded base, reaching to a height of nine feet. From this base on the front projects a large table on which will be cut the New Zealand badge—the fern leaf—and the words “New Zealand” in a circle, surrounded by carving of New Zealand flora, the whole contained in an oblong panel. At the base the obelisk is six feet wide, and tapers to a width of three feet four inches at the top, which is 30 feet from ground level. On the face, three feet from the top, will be carved, in relief, a laurel wreath.26

Figure 10.3: Detail of the New Zealand Division Battlefield Memorial, Messines, Belgium Art History and Theory Visual Resources Collection, University of Canterbury 26 “War Memorials: Hurst Seager’s Visit to Gallipoli. The Chunuk Bair Monument”, Press, 24 September 1921, 9.

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What this description does not mention is the decision, made at a later date, to support the circular New Zealand badge on crossed taiaha linked by a border of MƗori pattern. The design was provided by the New Zealand sculptor, Alexander Fraser (1877–1953), who was then working in London, but the reason for the change in design remains unclear.27 However, the inclusion of these motifs indicates a marked shift in Seager’s thinking about MƗori art, which he had described just over twenty years earlier as “scarcely suitable as standards on which to found our national taste”.28 In this, as in so much else, the experience of the First World War caused a fundamental change in attitudes and increasingly, during the 1920s, MƗori motifs would appear in the works of Pakeha architects. The growing sense of a distinct national identity, which the experience of the Gallipoli campaign had done much to foster, was already beginning to bear fruit. In a parallel development, the interior decorative programme of the Auckland War Memorial Museum, designed by Grierson, Aimer and Draffin in 1922, was also based on motifs derived from MƗori art forms.29 The principal differences between the New Zealand battlefield memorials on the Western Front resulted from their locations. The Longueval memorial was situated at the junction of roads from Flers, Courcelette and Longueval, and the circular site was to be surrounded by New Zealand native shrubs and framed by avenues of trees bordering the converging roads. This is shown in a contemporary perspective view but in reality the alignment of the roads and landscaping was never carried out.30 The Gravenstafel monument was situated on a ridge at a crossroads, 2km from Passchendaele, the actual site being a rhombus to the north of the road. The Gravenstafel spur was successfully captured by men of the New Zealand Division on 4 October 1917 as part of the Passchendaele offensive: 320 New Zealand lives were lost in the course of advancing 1000m. 27 The earliest appearance of this changed design is recorded in a photograph of Fraser’s plaster model, included in Sir James Allen’s report on the memorials at Longueval and Le Quesnoy, sent to the Prime Minister on 12 January 1922. ANZ, ACGO 8333 IA1/1692, 32/3/66. 28 S. Hurst Seager, “Architectural Art in New Zealand”, R.I.B.A. Journal (Third Series, VII, 19, 29 September 1900): 490. See also Seager’s comments in “Notes on MƗori Art” in Canterbury Old and New (Christchurch: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1900), 171–77. The emblem is reproduced in Ian McGibbon, New Zealand Battlefields and Memorials of the Western Front (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 2001), 7. 29 See Neill Grant, “Auckland’s War Memorial Museum”, New Zealand Historic Places 39 (December 1992), 16–19. 30 McGibbon, New Zealand Battlefields, 56. The perspective drawing is held at ANZ, ACGO 8333 IA1/1692, 32/3/66.

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Figure 10.4: View of the New Zealand Division Memorial at s’Gravenstafel, Belgium Art History and Theory Visual Resources Collection, University of Canterbury

In placing all the memorials particular attention was given to protecting the sites from the encroachment of future development. This was already a problem at Gravenstafel, as the site originally chosen was found to have been covered by houses constructed since the end of the war. These appear in contemporary photographs of the memorial, strung along the ridgeline on either side of Seager’s obelisk. In this expansive agricultural landscape, which so recently been a battlefield in which hundreds

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Figure 10.5: Samuel Hurst Seager, Perspective View of Proposed New Zealand War Memorial at Messines Looking Towards Mount Kemmel Macmillan Brown Library, University of Canterbury, 1418/1/10/2

of men had fought and died, the ordinariness of these buildings inevitably seems intrusive.31 At Messines, scene of some of the most intense fighting experienced by New Zealanders on the Western Front, the site was rectangular and located on “the road up which the central line of attack [on German lines] was made” during the Battle of Messines.32 The site also included the remains of two German pillboxes. A contemporary description noted that “the two pill-boxes will be utilized as viewpoints, and seats erected upon them”, perhaps an unconscious testament to the strategic location of these fortifications.33 As at the other memorial sites, planting of New Zealand natives was also a feature, a list of plants suitable for conditions in France and Belgium having been supplied by David Tannock (1873–1952), 31

The Gravenstafel memorial stands today on a semi-circular grassed plot framed by an arc of Lombardy poplars and a background of open farmland. It is located at the intersection of Roeslarestraat/s’Graventafel and Keerselaarstraat/Schipstraat, 1.4km west of Tyne Cot. Houses stand on the adjacent street corners and extend along the roads to either side. 32 McGibbon, New Zealand Battlefields, 30. 33 “War Memorials: Hurst Seager’s Visit to Gallipoli. The Chunuk Bair Monument”, Press, 24 September 1921, 9.

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Director of the Dunedin Botanic Gardens.34 Experience was to show that flax (Phormium tenax) and other plants susceptible to cold conditions did not thrive, although the hardy hebes (Veronica) acclimatized well and grew vigorously.35 The extent to which the decision to plant New Zealand natives was Seager’s is not entirely clear, although his detailed planting plans for the memorials at Gravenstafel and Messines survive, and show a range of New Zealand shrubs, including hebes and flax, framed by European trees, including poplars and birches.36 Seager was well aware of the growing scientific recognition of the unique characteristics of New Zealand’s flora. As architect to Harry Ell’s Summit Road Association, Seager would have known the distinguished botanist, Leonard Cockayne (1855-1934), who played a key role in promoting understanding of the distinctive ecology of Christchurch’s Port Hills. A leading figure in the early twentieth-century movement to promote greater appreciation of New Zealand’s indigenous vegetation, Cockayne was an influential advocate for greater protection of native bush.37 The emerging awareness of New Zealand’s unique plant and bird life formed part of the wider consciousness of a distinct national identity that New Zealanders’ experiences at Gallipoli and on the Western Front also did much to foster.38 The decision to plant New Zealand natives around the battlefield memorials also finds a parallel in R.A. Lippincott’s scheme for planting natives around the arts building he had designed for Auckland University College (1920–26). The building’s decorative carving also depicted both indigenous plants and native birds.39 34

Ibid. Battle Memorials: Thriving Veronicas”, Evening Post, 29 July 1924, 5. At Le Quesnoy a “Garden of Memory” made up of New Zealand plants was formed within the ramparts of the town, adjacent to the New Zealand memorial. Evening Post, 29 August 1923, 12. 36 The plans are held at ANZ. The Gravenstafel plan is at ACGO 8333 IA1W2578/46, 32/3/137 and that for Messines at ACGO 8368 IA36/19/151. 37 Ian Lochhead, “The Architectural Art of Samuel Hurst Seager”, Art New Zealand 44 (Spring 1987): 99. See also Tony Nightingale and Paul Dingwall, Our Picturesque Heritage: 100 Years of Scenery Preservation in New Zealand (Wellington: Department of Conservation, 2003), 17. 38 See Lynne Lochhead and Paul Starr, “Children of the Burnt Bush: New Zealanders and the Indigenous Remnant 1880–1930”, in Tom Brooking and Eric Pawson (eds), Environmental Histories of New Zealand (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002), 128–32. 39 See C. Vernon, “Roy Alstan Lippincott: From the Prairies to the Antipodes, Auckland, New Zealand”, in J. Walsh (ed.), Roy Lippincott: The Architect of the Tower: Roy Lippincott’s Design for the University of Auckland’s Arts Building 35

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The fourth of the Western Front memorials commemorated the liberation of the French town of Le Quesnoy by New Zealand troops led by Lieutenant Leslie Averill of the 4th Battalion of the 3rd New Zealand Brigade on 4 November 1918. With six men Averill scaled the town’s seventeenth-century ramparts and took the German occupiers unawares. This daring exploit in the final days of the conflict almost certainly saved the town and its inhabitants from a protracted and bloody battle. The form of the Le Quesnoy memorial reflected the dramatic nature of the event and was the only New Zealand memorial to incorporate a sculptural group depicting a specific action. Seager designed a simple aedicule as a frame for the relief sculpture, which shows Averill and his men climbing the walls, depicted in low relief on the left side of the panel, while to the right stands a monumental figure of Peace Victorious, holding a laurel wreath in her extended right hand while raising an olive branch with the other. The composition was devised by Seager in conjunction with the sculptor, Alexander Fraser, but its execution in marble was carried out in the Paris studio of the prominent French academic sculptor, Félix-Alfred Desruelles (1865–1943).40 Desruelles’s involvement was the result of a suggestion from the Mayor of Le Quesnoy, Daniel Vincent, and Sir James Allen, the New Zealand High Commissioner in London, was unwilling to reject the offer as long as the French sculptor agreed to adopt the design that Seager and Fraser had developed.41 The Desruelles studio was given examples of New Zealand uniforms and equipment in order to ensure that the depiction of the assault was accurate. The representation of the action was itself based on a painting by the Italian artist, Fortunio Matania, published in the English magazine, The Sphere, on 18 January 1919.42

1921–1926 (Auckland: AGM, 2004), 1–2. For a concise biography of Lippincott see Ian Lochhead, “Lippincott, Roy Alston”, in Joan Marter (ed.), Grove Encyclopaedia of American Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), Vol. III, 171–72. 40 For a concise biography of Desruelles see Pierre Kjellberg, Les Bronzes du XIXe Siècle: Dictionnaire des Sculpteurs (Paris: Editions de l’Amateur, 1987), 287. 41 Extract from High Commissioner’s letter, 25 August 1921, ANZ, ACGO 8333 IA1W2578/45, 32/3/125. 42 See Samuel Hurst Seager, “Report on Sites for Memorials in Le Quesnoy”, 6 June 1921, ANZ, ACGO 8333 IA1W2578/45, 32/3/125.

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Figure 10.6: Relief sculpture for the New Zealand Memorial, Le Quesnoy, France, in the Paris studio of Félix-Alfred Desruelles Art History and Theory Visual Resources Collection, University of Canterbury

Le Quesnoy may have been exceptional among the New Zealand battlefield memorials in its depiction of a specific, heroic, incident, yet here, too, there is relatively little to identify the troops as New Zealanders. The only references to the nationality of the protagonists are the inscriptions, in French and English, which flank the sculpture and the presence of the insignia of the New Zealand Division, while the fern leaves that surround the letters “NZ” are so stylized as to be almost unrecognizable. The sculptural group does, to some extent, belong to what Seager had earlier described as the “snapshot” approach to war memorials—military figures arrested in the midst of violent actions. Nevertheless it meets his other criterion, that symbolism be “simple and direct—if a verbal interpretation is necessary—then it fails in its purpose

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Figure 10.7: New Zealand Memorial, Le Quesnoy, France Art History and Theory Visual Resources Collection, University of Canterbury

…”.43 The Le Quesnoy memorial also stands apart from Seager’s other battlefield memorials not just because it is different in form but also because it commemorates an action that almost certainly saved many civilian lives in the occupied town. Seager’s simple obelisks at Messines, Gravenstafel and Longueval, and the Chunuk Bair memorial, are also distinctive because of what was eliminated from their designs rather than what was included. Unlike the Australian Gallipoli Memorial at Lone Pine, a tapering monolith with a centrally positioned cross, Seager’s New Zealand memorials contain no overt religious symbolism.44 In this regard they can be compared with Lutyens’s austere War Stones, which form a central element of British cemeteries on the Western Front.45 Lutyens’s concept was powerful

43

Seager, “War Graves and Memorials”, 1920, 6–7. The memorial stone in the New Zealand cemetery at Hill 60 on Gallipoli, designed by Sir Herbert Baker, does, however, incorporate crosses in relief on each of its four sides. 45 Lutyens was utterly opposed to the use of overt Christian symbolism in war memorials and was antagonistic to the ideas of his rival, Hebert Baker, who argued for the inclusion in cemeteries of the cross as a symbol of Christian sacrifice. See 44

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because it was susceptible to multiple meanings, ranging from a simple “memorial stone” or “an altar, one of the most ancient and general of religious symbols” to a more specific representation of the communion table of Christian ritual.46 The Imperial War Graves Commission nevertheless recognized the need for specific Christian symbolism and included memorial crosses, designed by the British architect, Sir Reginald Blomfield, in each cemetery. However, the commission acknowledged that although the British Empire was predominantly Christian it also embraced many religions and so allowance was also made for structures that met the needs of other faiths. The closest Seager came to incorporating the cross in any of his designs was at Chunuk Bair, where the plan and section of the monument is in the shape of a Greek cross.

Figure 10.8: Australian Memorial, Lone Pine, Gallipoli, designed by Sir John Burnet Art History and Theory Visual Resources Collection, University of Canterbury Christopher Hussey, The Life of Sir Edwin Lutyens (London, Country Life, 1950), 372–76. 46 Kenyon, War Graves, 10.

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Before he began the design of the New Zealand memorials Seager had specifically referred to Lutyens’s Cenotaph in Whitehall and his proposed War Stones as exemplary models for war memorials. No wealth of sculptured story, no flamboyant imagery, could have made that strong appeal to the nation which was made by the simple force and dignity of the Whitehall Cenotaph with its deeply impressive inscription “Our Glorious Dead”; equally impressive will be the simple Altar-stone, or Stone of Remembrance, to be placed … in all the cemeteries in France.47

Seager’s belief in the eloquence of simplicity underpins all his battlefield memorial designs. “The simpler the forms both in material and inscription the more artistic it is likely to be. The value of works of art is often in inverse ratio to the amount of money expended on their production.”48 There is an implicit recognition in such statements that the First World War had brought about a fundamental change in the way ideas could be expressed through the medium of the visual arts. In the face of such unparalleled loss of life, and the recognition that mechanized warfare had the potential to cause almost unlimited destruction, traditional means of expression appeared to have lost their capacity to convey the horror of modern warfare. Confronted with such total annihilation and overwhelming loss of human life, the eloquent silence of simplicity and abstraction seemed the only possible response. The grandiose classical rhetoric of memorials such as Sir Reginald Blomfield’s Menin Gate had no place in Seager’s designs. After four years in England, during which most of his time was taken up with work on the New Zealand battlefield memorials, Seager returned to New Zealand in October 1925, bringing with him a collection of 220 lantern slides showing the sites, construction and unveiling ceremonies of the monuments.49 An indefatigable public speaker, Seager used the slides in lectures throughout the country, giving New Zealanders, most of whom would never visit the war cemeteries and battlefield memorials, an opportunity to see how the country’s sacrifice had been commemorated. In 1927, Seager presented 250 lantern slides of war memorials to the New Zealand Government so that they could be made available to returned servicemen’s associations and others for display.50 The present whereabouts of these are unknown but luckily a smaller collection of sixty 47

Seager “War Graves and Memorials”, 1920, 6. Ibid., 7. 49 “Battle Memorials: Remarkable Series of Illustrations to be Seen in the Dominion”, Evening Post, 12 May 1925, 7. 50 “War Memorials: Collection of Slides”, Evening Post, 9 December 1927, 11. 48

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Figure 10.9: Louvencourt Cemetery (Somme), with Cross designed by Sir Herbert Baker Art History and Theory Visual Resources Collection, University of Canterbury

slides of Seager’s war memorials survived in the collection of the former Canterbury College School of Art, where Seager had taught between 1893 and 1918.51 These images, like the monuments themselves, powerfully convey the architect’s design credo. If we commemorate, let us commemorate by a memorial which makes its appeal to our imagination through the sense of sight in the most direct and simple way; by a memorial which, by reason of its simplicity and force, 51

These lantern slides now form part of the Art History and Theory Visual Resources Collection, University of Canterbury.

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Figure 10.10: Stone of Remembrance (War Stone), British New Buttes Cemetery, near Ypres, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens Art History and Theory Visual Resources Collection, University of Canterbury can be easily and gratefully remembered, and let its influence be deepened by a simple inscription which makes its appeal direct to the heart.52

This recognition that, to be successful, memorials needed to be reduced to their simplest form, clearly made an immediate impression on all who saw them. Speaking at the unveiling of the Longueval Memorial, Allen paid tribute to Seager: “His fine taste, excellent judgement and unbounded enthusiasm have produced a work which … is a memorial worthy of the highest praise we can bestow.”53 These sentiments were echoed almost 52 53

Seager, “War Graves and Memorials”, 1920, 5–6. Sir James Allen (at the memorial), ANZ, ACGO 8333 IA1/1692, 32/3/66.

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two years later when General Sir Alexander Godley, who had led the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, and then the New Zealand Division from the beginning of the war to its end, reported to the Prime Minister, William Massey, on the unveiling of the Messines and Gravenstafel Memorials on 1 and 2 August 1924. I have seen, and taken part in many unveilings of a great many War Memorials, and I have no hesitation in saying, that there are none, which to my mind, are so nice or so suitable as those of the New Zealand Division, and none which are better sited … . We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Sir James Allen for the amount of trouble which he has taken to ensure that the best possible sites were selected and acquired, and to Mr. Hurst Seager for the beautiful designs of the monuments themselves … . if it was all wiped out, and we could begin again with a clean slate, I could not think of, or suggest, any possible improvement, either of the sites or of the memorials themselves.54

Ninety years after they were first unveiled, and almost a century after the battles were fought, New Zealand’s First World War battlefield memorials have lost none of their power to evoke enduring memories of past conflicts and lives lost.55

54 Alexander Godley to the Prime Minister, 3 August 1924, ANZ, ACGO 8333 IA1W2578/46, 32/3/137. 55 In memory of the author’s great-uncles, Albert Walter Findlater (1886–1918) and Clement Rothery McLachlan (1894–1918), who both served in the New Zealand Rifle Brigade and died on the Western Front in 1918.

SECTION IV RACE AND ENDURANCE

CHAPTER ELEVEN ENDURING SILENCES, ENDURING PREJUDICES: AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL PARTICIPATION IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR NOAH RISEMAN On 17 February 1917 the Brisbane Courier published a letter with the heading “Open Letters, No. 22 To Queensland’s Half-Caste Aboriginals”. It used Aboriginal efforts to enlist in the First Australian Imperial Force (AIF) as propaganda to encourage more white men to sign up: The “Big Phfeller” thinks the time hasn’t come yet when we should ask you to go away and fight for our little white children, and so the only thing you can do is to stay back and shame the superior white man who can go, and ought to go, but won’t.

The author acknowledged widespread Aboriginal enthusiasm for fighting in the war, attributing this to “the love for one’s native land that passes the understanding of all but those who know and feel it”.1 Yet there was no challenge to regulations against Aboriginal enlistment in the AIF. Instead, the letter reinforced Aboriginal people’s inferior status in Australian society through demeaning language and stereotypical caricatures; the rejected Aboriginal applicants were being used merely to disgrace white men who had yet to enlist. The letter probably had little influence on white enlistment rates, but it drew attention to high Aboriginal rejection rates. Aboriginal men across Australia were ready and willing to enlist in the AIF throughout the First World War. At the outbreak of war, military authorities and the Australian Government were uncertain about whether Aboriginal men—particularly men of mixed descent (so-called “half-castes”)—should be allowed to join 1

“Recruiting Officer”, State Recruiting Committee, “Open Letters, No. 22 To Queensland’s Half–Caste Aboriginals”, Brisbane Courier, 17 February 1917, 9.

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up. Amendments to the Defence Act in 1909 exempted Aboriginal people from compulsory military training because they were “not substantially of European origin or descent”, but whether they could still voluntarily enlist was an ambiguous matter.2 There were even proposals early in the war to employ Aboriginal people from remote communities “with specially-made weapons, with which he could do quite as deadly work as the Ghurka [sic] can do, up to a range of 150 yards”.3 But the Minister of Defence declined such offers; unlike New Zealand’s MƗori Pioneer Battalion, there was never any Aboriginal-specific unit. In fact, the AIF actually interpreted the Defence Act as precluding any Aboriginal enlistment. The military recruiters’ handbook explicitly stated “Aborigines and halfcastes are not to be enlisted. This restriction is to be interpreted as applying to all coloured men”.4 This approach contrasted with the policies of other Commonwealth dominions, Canada and New Zealand, as well as the United States. In those comparable settler societies, Indigenous people could enlist and eventually were even subject to conscription. Moreover, whereas in those nations tribal or iwi affiliations played a role both in government policies and Indigenous responses, in Australia there were no significant differences across regions or clan identities.5 The Australian regulation reflected the racial sentiments of the time where, as Hugh Smith writes, it was the “government’s determination to preserve a White Australia and an even whiter army”.6 Notwithstanding the prejudicial regulation, by the end of the First World War, as we shall see, approximately 800–1,000 Aboriginal men had 2

Australia, Defence Act (as amended 1909), section 61(h). “Aboriginal Warriors. Offer Declined”, Sydney Morning Herald, 28 June 1915, 8. 4 In Timothy Winegard, Indigenous Peoples of the British Dominions and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 87. See also Rod Pratt, “Queensland’s Aborigines in the First Australian Imperial Force”, in P. Whitney Lackenbauer, R. Scott Sheffield and Craig Leslie Mantle (eds), Aboriginal Peoples and Military Participation: Canadian & International Perspectives (Kingston, ON: Canadian Defence Academy Press, 2007), 221–22. 5 See Winegard, Indigenous Peoples; Timothy Winegard, For King and Kanata: Canadian Indians and the First World War (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2012); Christopher Pugsley, Te Hokowhitu a Tu: The MƗori Pioneer Battalion in the First World War (Auckland: Reed, 1995); Thomas A. Britten, American Indians in World War I: At Home and at War (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997). 6 Hugh Smith, “Minorities and the Australian Army: Overlooked and Underrepresented?” in Peter Dennis and Jeffrey Grey (eds), A Century of Service: 100 Years of the Australian Army. The 2001 Chief of Army’s Military History Conference (Canberra: Army History Unit, Department of Defence, 2001), 132. 3

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served overseas. Each had his own story, including upbringing, reasons to enlist, experiences during the war and a difficult readjustment to civilian life. Even so, the limited newspapers, service records, correspondence and oral testimonies paint a collective picture. Though their actual combat and soldier experience was similar to their non-Indigenous comrades, Aboriginal servicemen confronted enduring prejudice at an institutional level both during and after the war. This manifested itself in several ways. First and foremost was the issue of enlistment. Even when amendments in March 1917 permitted the enlistment of Aboriginal men of mixed descent, government policies continued to discriminate against Aboriginal servicemen and their families. Prejudice was also present in the media’s portrayals of Aboriginal servicemen, either using them as a form of propaganda or making spectacles of them. The snippets of information available reveal that Aboriginal soldiers’ participation in the First World War was generally disregarded and forgotten. Structural and legal discrimination against Aboriginal people endured, and war service neither shielded Aboriginal veterans from prejudice nor convinced governments to grant civil rights to Aboriginal Australians.

I. Aboriginal motivations to enlist Aboriginal motivations to serve varied depending on individuals, and in many cases are difficult to identify in the records. Yet newspaper articles, correspondence and oral testimonies suggest various reasons for enlistment, many of them not dissimilar to those of non-Indigenous servicemen. Among these were seeking adventure, escaping the boredom of daily life or the supposed glamour of military service. More common rationales included better wages, loyalty and hopes for a better lot after the war either as individuals, or for all Aboriginal people. For instance, in 1914 the average wage an Aboriginal man earned in civilian life was seven shillings and sixpence per week; in the army, a man earned six shillings per day.7 The increased wages could also be sent back to dependants in Australia. Doreen Kartinyeri of Point McLeay Station in South Australia has recalled a story told by an Elder, Uncle Bill Karpany: 7

Peter Austin, Luise Hercus and Philip Jones, “Ben Murray (Parlku-nguyuthangkayiwarna)”, Aboriginal History 12: 2 (1988): 160; Winegard, Indigenous Peoples, 135; David Huggonson, “Aborigines and the Aftermath of the Great War”, Australian Aboriginal Studies 11:1 (1993), 3–4; David Huggonson, “The Dark Diggers of the AIF”, Australian Quarterly 61:3 (Spring 1989), 354.

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There were several Aboriginal men sitting down at the River Torrens one day. Some men in uniform came up to them and asked them if they would like to join the Army, that if they did they would get paid and so would their families. This offer seemed a good chance for them to travel and get paid. None of the men really knew what the war was really like so these men enlisted.8

The notion of loyalty is the other most cited reason for Aboriginal men to enlist. Sometimes this was to individuals, such as friendly station managers who became recruitment officers.9 More often, though, loyalty referred to what historian David Huggonson describes as a “bizarre sense of patriotic duty to white Australia”.10 Service records include letters with references to the Union Jack and the Crown. Veterans and their families writing to government officials often referred to loyalty to “King and country”. For instance, William Castles died at sea in October 1917 of nephritis as a consequence of injuries sustained in France. His next-of-kin, Aunt Darcy Webb, wrote a letter to the Australian Red Cross asking for his belongings as “a dear keep sake knowing my dear nephew died through wounds fighting for his King and Country which he was eager to do”.11 After the war, loyalty also became intertwined with Aboriginal calls for equal rights. For example, William Cooper of the Australian Aborigines’ League wrote to the Minister for the Interior of his son dying for “for his King on the battlefield”, and in a letter to Prime Minister Joseph Lyons in 1938, he said: For instance, at least a thousand Aborigines were among the first to enlist in the defence of the British Empires in the 1914–18 war and for which Empire they gave their lives. It was a thankless task for them, no thanks being given for the valuable services rendered. We get no encouragement, and the result of this neglect

8

Doreen Kartinyeri, Ngarrindjeri Anzacs (Adelaide: Aboriginal Family History Project, South Australian Museum and Raukkan Council, 1996), 9. 9 Walter Newton, in Jeremy Beckett, “Marginal Men: A Study of Two Half Caste Aborigines”, Oceania 29:2 (December 1958), 104. 10 Huggonson, “The Dark Diggers”, 353. 11 Mrs Darcy Webb, to Australian Red Cross, 13 November 1917, in National Archives of Australia ( NAA) Canberra, series B2455, item CASTLES W: Castles William.

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The Aborigines Progressive Association’s short-lived newspaper, The Australian Abo Call, highlighted discrimination against a veteran and similarly argued, “As there are many Aboriginal Returned Soldiers, we now call upon the Returned Soldiers’ League to take up the case of Tom Robinson and of all other Aborigines.”13 Other invocations of loyalty simply asked for the preservation of Indigenous communities. In a 1926 letter to the Sydney Morning Herald pleading for the government not to close Warangesda Mission and evict its residents, Aboriginal man James Murray wrote: During the Great War a number of our boys from Warangesda went overseas in khaki, and some did not come back—a nephew of mine amongst them. Do you think, Sir, it was for this they died? Our old home is to be thrown open for selection at the end of this month, and it will know us no more unless you, Sir, and the people step in and prevent it. I would also appeal to the returned soldiers to use their influence on our behalf, the weakest of their countrymen.14

More often than not, references to Aboriginal loyalty appeared after the war. This suggests that while loyalty was certainly a motivating factor for some Aboriginal men to enlist, it was more often highlighted retrospectively to argue for Aboriginal rights.15 Usually such appeals came from Aboriginal people petitioning as individuals; calls for collective Aboriginal rights came primarily from the few Indigenous rights organizations such as the Aborigines Progressive Association. Of course Aboriginal ex-servicemen were not the only veterans who used war service to argue for better treatment, but the legal discrimination under which Aboriginal people lived was unique. Rarely did the invocation of

12

William Cooper, to the Minister for the Interior, John McEwan, 3 January 1939, reproduced in Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, Thinking Black: William Cooper and the Australian Aborigines’ League (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004), 112; William Cooper, to the Prime Minister, Joseph Lyons, 31 March 1938, reproduced in Attwood and Markus, Thinking Black, 92–93. 13 “Returned Soldier Victimised”, The Australian Abo Call, May 1938, 2. 14 James Murray, “Warangesda Aboriginal Reserve”, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 June 1926, 17. 15 Philippa Scarlett, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Volunteers for the AIF: The Indigenous Response to World War One (Macquarie, ACT: Indigenous Histories, 2011), 39.

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Aboriginal loyalty successfully influence government policies or decisions during the interwar period.16

II. Loosening restrictive rules From the formation of the First AIF in August 1914 until March 1917, being Aboriginal was rarely mentioned explicitly in the records as grounds for rejecting recruits; instead, racial rejections usually came under the category “medical grounds”. Historian Philippa Scarlett notes that common expressions in the records included “deficient physique” or “not of substantial European origin”. Only occasionally was information listed under disability such as “no white parentage”, “unsuitable physique aboriginal” or “unsuitable physique colour”.17 Notwithstanding the regulations against Aboriginal enlistments, a number managed to circumvent the rules. Some men pretended to be MƗori, Indian or Italian in order to enlist. There were also instances when recruiting officers, determined to secure large quotas, simply overlooked the racial restrictions.18 After the devastating 23,000 casualties at Pozières and the failure of the first conscription referendum, regulatory changes in March 1917 allowed Aboriginal men with one white parent to enlist. These reforms resulted primarily from the need to boost numbers in the face of worries that the AIF would lose its position as an independent force within the British Empire. Queensland’s Chief Protector of Aborigines, J.W. Bleakley, sent a memo to all local protectors on 11 May 1917 to find out how many “half-castes” in their areas would be willing to enlist in the next three months. He wrote: Large numbers immediately volunteered, all claiming to come within that category (“half caste/part-Aborigine”). The recruiting officers scratched their heads, as one said, “some of these are the blackest half-castes I’ve ever seen.” It seems a shame to disappoint them, but most, if not all, wormed themselves in at other centres and got into uniform eventually.19

16

See John Maynard, Fight for Liberty and Freedom: The Origins of Australian Aboriginal Activism (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007). 17 Scarlett, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Volunteers, 11–13. 18 Pratt, “Queensland’s Aborigines”, 225; Winegard, Indigenous Peoples, 162. 19 J.W. Bleakley, The Aborigines of Australia (Brisbane: Jacaranda, 1961), 170. See also Alick Jackomos and Derek Fowell, Forgotten Heroes: Aborigines at War from the Somme to Vietnam (South Melbourne: Victoria Press, 1993), 10; Pratt,

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The new Aboriginal soldiers came from across Australia, with the notable exception of Western Australia, where recruiters continued to follow the pre-March 1917 regulations. In fact, after the war the Western Australian government denied that any Aboriginal men from the state had served, which was untrue.20 Numerically, however, the majority of Aboriginal soldiers came from New South Wales and Queensland. Even in Victoria, which had a smaller Aboriginal population, Richard Broome estimates that one in three Aboriginal men of enlistment age served—the same proportion as Victoria’s non-Indigenous population.21 Of the 545 Aboriginal soldiers Timothy Winegard identified: “83 were killed, 123 wounded and another 17 became prisoners of war. Including the POWs, the casualty rate is 41 per cent as compared to 65 per cent across the entire AIF.”22 Loosening restrictions on enlistment was certainly a boon for Aboriginal people because military service offered new employment prospects. Nonetheless, the military and the Commonwealth Government by no means endorsed a principle of equality or even improved rights for Aboriginal servicemen; they wanted only to increase troop numbers. Furthermore, the military hoped to propagandize Aboriginal service in order to recruit more white Australians. For instance, a May 1917 story in the Brisbane Courier reported on the recruitment of Aboriginal men at Barambah Station (renamed Cherbourg in 1932). The final section of the article had an Aboriginal man allegedly remarking: “My word, though, when our Barambah boys get into Brisbane on the 24th (meaning Empire Day), they’ll make some of the beer bums leaning against the veranda posts look up. That’ll shame em, eh?”23 One recruitment campaign in Queensland in 1917 incorporated an Aboriginal man in uniform carrying a placard that read “By Cripes! I’ll fight for white Australia”.24 In Victoria and South Australia, newspapers pointed to specific Aboriginal enlistments as models of commitment to the war. In May 1917 Adelaide’s “Queensland’s Aborigines”, 223–24; Winegard, Indigenous Peoples, 161–62; Huggonson, “The Dark Diggers”, 353. 20 Winegard, Indigenous Peoples, 230; Huggonson, “The Dark Diggers”, 353; a comprehensive list of Western Australian Aboriginal ex-servicemen and women, including from the First World War, is available from Jan “Kabarli” James, Forever Warriors (Perth: Scott Print, 2010). 21 Richard Broome, Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800 (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2005), 201; Scarlett, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Volunteers, 15. 22 Winegard, Indigenous Peoples, 230. 23 “Half-caste Recruits”, Brisbane Courier, 15 May 1917, 7. 24 Pratt, “Queensland’s Aborigines”, 226.

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Advertiser described the enlistment of five Gunditjmara brothers named Lovett, from Heywood in Victoria, as “A striking example to eligible white men … furnished by a half-caste family”.25 A 1918 article in the same newspaper, entitled “The Call for Men”, included a subheading, “Patriotic Natives”, above a list of Aboriginal servicemen from Point McLeay Mission in South Australia.26 Consistently, these headlines were less about promoting Aboriginal rights or recruiting further Aboriginal men than about targeting white Australian men, using Aboriginal volunteers to disgrace those who had not signed up; any appreciation for Aboriginal service was strictly secondary.

III. Challenging racism on the front Service records and the limited writings about Aboriginal service suggest that the experiences of Indigenous and non-Indigenous soldiers were similar once they were in the AIF. Aboriginal men, too, experienced the horrors of trench warfare; they were gassed, maimed, shot and suffered high casualty rates. They were captured and lived as prisoners of war in Palestine and Germany. They wrote to their families, expressing their homesickness. They formed bonds of mateship with other diggers, sharing a sense of duty, adventure and esprit de corps. They got up to mischief when they were on leave, caught venereal disease, married war brides or learned that their wives in Australia left them for other men.27 The few recorded Aboriginal testimonies from combat are nearly impossible to distinguish from non-Indigenous accounts. For instance, when describing the experience of arriving at Gallipoli, Ben Murray remarked: When we got there, just like a tree standing, all along on the banks [cliffs]. I see one dropping down … “Hello! Oh!”, I sing out to the others: “Shoot the trees, that’s where the bullet come from”. We told the sergeant major, “Shoot at them trees!”. “No, no, that way the bullet come from” [he said] … He didn’t even take notice. He got shot anyway, he was too smart. “You’ll get hit directly” [Ben said] … and he did … “Yeah, I bet your time will come”. His time didn’t waste time! His time come alright, drop him dead too, right on the bank! We start shooting at the trees then. You see the

25

“Five Half–caste Brothers Enlist”, Advertiser (Adelaide), 22 May 1917, 9. For more on the Lovett brothers, see Jackomos and Fowell, Forgotten Heroes, 1. 26 “The Call for Men”, Advertiser (Adelaide), 29 October 1918, 9. 27 See Winegard, Indigenous Peoples, 198–99; Huggonson, “Aboriginal Diggers of the 9th Brigade, First AIF”, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 79 (December 1993), 216–17; Beckett, “Marginal Men”, 104.

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There were some reported incidents of racial prejudice in the First AIF. Doreen Kartinyeri has related a story about her Uncle Eustace Garnet “Garney” Wilson when he visited a nightclub in Paris: Uncle Garney asked for two beers but when he was getting served one of the military policemen told the barman not to serve uncle Bill as he was an Aboriginal from Australia and was under the Aboriginal Act, and Aborigines were not allowed to be served alcohol. This angered uncle Garney and uncle Bill, and a fight would have started if the military police had not stepped in.29

“Tiger” Stamford Simpson from Kangaroo Island used to say that he was forced to work in the cookhouse because he was black.30 Chris Saunders, a Gunditjmara man whose son Reg became the most high profile Aboriginal serviceman serving in the Second World War and Korea, recalled a man on his ship refusing to sit next to him because he was black. Saunders confronted the man and Next day he came looking for me, and we sat down to eat together. He turned out to be the best mate I had on the ship. We went through a fair bit of action together, and we stayed good friends after the war until he died.31

These stories tend to be isolated incidents amid wider tales of camaraderie. What is noteworthy is that none of them happened in combat. The wartime experience of common danger, need for group cohesion, reliance on each other for survival and emotional support represented a new social paradigm in which there was little room for racial discrimination. 28

Ben Murray, in Austin, Hercus and Jones, “Ben Murray (Parlku-nguyuthangkayiwarna)”, 160–62. 29 Kartinyeri, Ngarrindjeri Anzacs, 43–44. In South Australia the Aborigines Act (1911) gave the chief protector the power to remove all Aboriginal people to reserves and restricted their rights to own property. The Licensing Acts Further Amendment (No. 2) of 1915 criminalized Aboriginal people consuming alcohol in South Australia. Though this was technically separate legislation, in all states and territories the respective Aborigines Acts symbolize all restrictions on equal rights, including the right to drink. 30 Rebe Taylor, Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island (Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press, 2002), 272. 31 Chris Saunders, in Harry Gordon, The Embarrassing Australian: The Story of an Aboriginal Warrior (Melbourne: Cheshire-Lansdowne, 1962), 36–37.

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Aboriginal men received significant praise for their work during the First World War. Fifty-eight per cent of known Aboriginal soldiers served in infantry battalions and 26 per cent in mounted units. The disproportionately high percentage of Aboriginal men serving in mounted units such as the Light Horse was probably a consequence of many having worked as labourers or police trackers in rural areas. Aboriginal men, especially in the mounted units, received praise for their keen eyesight and hearing abilities.32 In other ways, too, Aboriginal men’s pre-service lives prepared them aptly for the AIF. Ben Murray’s pre-war experience working with Afghan cameleers provided him with some basic knowledge of Islamic prayers and customs. This came in handy when he was taken prisoner of war in Palestine. He befriended some of his Turkish captors, who would discuss with him their distaste for war.33 Of Aboriginal soldiers, Captain J. Sydney Bartlett later wrote: In the early days of the war they were looked upon by many officers and Diggers as being undependable under heavy fire, but this opinion was soon brushed aside after the hard fighting in Palestine, and the [A]boriginals received the respect of all their fellow Diggers.34

By the end of the war, of the identified Aboriginal men who served, three were awarded the Distinguished Combat Medal, nine the Military Medal, three were Mentioned in Dispatches and one received the Military Cross. Winegard argues that there would have been more medal winners had Aboriginal men been allowed to enlist earlier in the war.35 Recently, University of Tasmania PhD student Andrea Gerrard identified Second Lieutenant Alfred Hearps from Tasmania as the first known Aboriginal commissioned officer. This new research revises the historiography of Aboriginal military service, which has consistently conferred this distinction on Second World War soldier Reg Saunders. Given the contemporary myth that Aboriginal Tasmanians were extinct, it is doubtful that military officials ever knew that Hearps was Aboriginal. It is also possible that he did not disclose his ethnicity to other soldiers.

32

Winegard, Indigenous Peoples, 198–99; Pratt, “Queensland’s Aborigines”, 226– 29; Huggonson, “Aborigines and the Aftermath of the Great War”, 5. 33 Austin, Hercus and Jones, “Ben Murray (Parlku-nguyu-thangkayiwarna)”, 162. 34 J. Sydney Bartlett, Captain 11th A.L.H., A.I.F., “Queensland Aboriginals. A.I.F. Diggers”, Townsville Daily Bulletin, 3 February 1933, 9. 35 Winegard, Indigenous Peoples, 237.

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Hearps served at Gallipoli and on the Western Front, where he was killed in action in 1916.36

IV. Ongoing prejudice at home While barriers were being broken overseas, racial discrimination endured at home, affecting Aboriginal servicemen’s families. The discrepancies in Aboriginal policies across the states and territories accounted for variations in treatment. For instance, in South Australia Aboriginal men under the age of twenty-one required the consent of the Chief Protector of Aborigines to enlist.37 Part of Aboriginal Queenslanders’ pay was set aside in accounts under control of the Department of Native Affairs and the restrictions on accessing these accounts extended to the wives of Aboriginal soldiers. Most veterans and their families never saw this quarantined money and it formed part of unpaid wage or government entitlements collectively known as the stolen wages.38 In Victoria, war widows such as Julia Thorpe of Lake Tyers were not allowed to access widows’ pensions because they were living on Aboriginal reserves.39 In South Australia, the pensions for deceased servicemen’s children were placed in trust funds. Aileen Rigney had to apply to the Repatriation Department for cash until she was twenty-one. When she asked for the balance of the pension to be transferred to her own bank account, the Deputy Commissioner of Repatriation wrote: Mr. McLean, the Protector of Aboriginals, is of the opinion that it would be a mistake to hand over a large sum of money to any of these people and on

36 See Michelle Paine, “Tales of illegal heroes”, Mercury (Hobart), 9 November 2012, 23; NAA Canberra, series B2455, item HEARPS A J 2ND LIEUTENANT. On Reg Saunders, see Gordon, The Embarrassing Australian; Robert Hall, Fighters from the Fringe: Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders Recall the Second World War (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1995), 61–89; NAA Canberra, series B2458, item 337678: SAUNDERS, Reginald Walter. 37 Kartinyeri, Ngarrindjeri Anzacs, 34, 36. 38 Pratt, “Queensland’s Aborigines”, 231–32; Winegard, Indigenous Peoples, 248– 49. For the stolen wages, see Rosalind Kidd, Trustees on Trial: Recovering the Stolen Wages (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006); Andrew Gunstone and Sadie Hackenberg, The Government Owes a Lot of Money to Our People: A History of Indigenous Stolen Wages in Victoria (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009). 39 Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, 201–02.

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the other hand, the girl herself says that she is getting no benefit by receiving it in small amounts as at the present time.40

Both institutional and individual discrimination endured for Aboriginal veterans. They and their families were still segregated or denied access to public spaces such as hospitals, sporting facilities or schools. It was still illegal for Aboriginal veterans to consume alcohol, even though many had grown accustomed to drinking in France and Britain.41 Some veterans applied for exemption certificates so that they could enjoy the privileges afforded to non-Indigenous Australians. There is at least one documented case where an Aboriginal veteran protested when he was denied an exemption certificate in Queensland. The chief protector called him an agitator and threatened to banish him to the Aboriginal penal settlement at Palm Island, feared among Queensland’s Aboriginal community because its reputed horrific conditions.42 In a case in New South Wales, when exserviceman Mick Flick complained about the segregation of his children at Collarenebri Public School, the Aborigines’ Protection Board threatened to remove them if he persisted.43 The threat of child removal was real, and some Aboriginal soldiers’ children were forcibly removed while they were serving overseas.44 Aboriginal veterans were, not surprisingly, unhappy with the enduring prejudice they confronted in their daily lives. One Cherbourg resident wrote in 1935: There were three of us went to the great war out of my family one was killed. I always thought that fighting for our King and country would make me naturalise[d] british [sic] subject and a man with freedom in the country but … they place me under the act and put me on a settlement like a dog. It seems as if the chief protector thinks that a returned soldier doesn’t want justice.45

40

In Kartinyeri, Ngarrindjeri Anzacs, 30–31. “Soldiers Disabilities. Position of Aborigines. Pensions and Deductions”, Brisbane Courier, 24 June 1919, 4; Scarlett, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Volunteers, 49–51; Winegard, Indigenous Peoples, 249. 42 Pratt, “Queensland’s Aborigines”, 233. 43 Huggonson, “Aborigines in the Aftermath of the Great War”, 5–6. 44 Maynard, Fight for Liberty and Freedom, 39. For the history of child removal, see National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (Australia), Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997). 45 In Scarlett, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Volunteers for the AIF, 41. 41

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The most blatant display of discrimination against Aboriginal veterans was seen in the denial of benefits. There were conflicting policies on Aboriginal eligibility for veterans’ benefits, summarized best in a memo from the Ministry of Defence: The fact of an [A]boriginal having served with the A.I.F. does not remove him from the care or supervision exercisable by the Board appointed for the protection of Aborigines under the Aborigines Act. [N]either does it relieve that Board of its duties towards the aboriginal. An [A]boriginal who has served as an Australian soldier is entitled to the benefits under the Australian Soldiers” Repatriation Act and nothing in the Aborigines Act [NSW] denies the right to such aboriginal of the full use and enjoyment of any benefits granted to him by this Department.46

Essentially, Aboriginal veterans were technically entitled to benefits but they were also still “under the act”. From a practical standpoint, this meant that state laws effectively denied Aboriginal people access to benefits. For instance, Rufus Gordon Rigney’s 1925 application to the Repatriation Commission for a pension was rejected on the grounds that he had free rent, firewood and milk on the reserve at Point McLeay Mission Station in South Australia. Veteran Ben Murray testifies that he did not receive a veteran’s pension until the 1960s. Many Aboriginal soldiers did not receive the funeral benefits or military burials accorded to non-Indigenous servicemen. Aboriginal veterans had difficulties accessing war gratuities because of state restrictions against Aboriginal people handling money.47 The franchise—the symbol of equal citizenship rights and access to the political system—continued to be denied to Aboriginal veterans. During the 1921 Commonwealth election campaign, Queensland Premier Ted Theodore supported the extension of the vote to Aboriginal veterans. In a campaign stop in the western Queensland town of Mitchell, Theodore remarked, “No doubt, the matter should be considered when any amendment of the Electoral Act was being dealt with. Only a limited number of blacks would benefit by the privilege”.48 Theodore 46

Memorandum from Comptroller, Department of Repatriation, Melbourne, to Department of Repatriation, Sydney, 12 April 1919, in NAA Canberra, series A2487, item 1919/3202. 47 Kartinyeri, Ngarrindjeri Anzacs, 35; Austin, Hercus and Jones, “Ben Murray (Parlku-nguyu-thangkayiwarna)”, 184; Winegard, Indigenous Peoples, 248–49; Pratt, “Queensland’s Aborigines”, 232. 48 “Votes for Aboriginals”, Townsville Daily Bulletin, 29 July 1921, 4; “Aboriginals and the Franchise” Brisbane Courier, 29 July 1921, 6.

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acknowledged that Aboriginal military service should be rewarded while concurrently assuring white residents that it would apply only to a small number of Aboriginal men. His speculation proved incorrect: the Commonwealth franchise was extended to Aboriginal veterans in 1949 and to all Indigenous Australians in 1962.49 The most blatant denial of veterans’ benefits was evident in soldier settlement schemes. During the war, every state parliament passed legislation to provide returned servicemen with the opportunity to apply for land grants. In Victoria and New South Wales especially, some of the land set aside for returned servicemen had previously been Aboriginal reserves, closed and sold off by the state governments against the wishes of the Aboriginal residents. Because soldier settlement schemes were controlled by state governments, Aboriginal people’s status under state protection acts effectively denied them access to these. Only two Aboriginal veterans are known to have been granted soldier settlement blocks. One was George Kennedy of the 6th Light Horse, who was granted 17,000 acres (6880ha) at Yelty, 7 miles (11km) from Ivanhoe in New South Wales.50 The other identified Aboriginal man was Percy Pepper, a Kurnai-Gurnai man from Gippsland in Victoria. Kennedy and Pepper were able to benefit from soldier settlement schemes only because the authorities did not realize that they were Aboriginal when they applied. Indeed, none of the support letters in Percy Pepper’s application, nor his own statements, mentioned that he was Aboriginal. Yet even after he obtained his soldier settlement land, Pepper had to write to the Victorian Board for the Protection of Aborigines to ask if his family could stay at Lake Tyers Reserve until his house was built.51 Both Kennedy’s and Pepper’s land failed—which was also common for non-Indigenous soldier settlers, since they were often granted poor land or lacked adequate agricultural knowledge. What set Pepper and Kennedy apart from those other men, though, is that when their soldier settlements failed, they remained under the control of the state Aborigines Protection Boards. 49

See John Chesterman and Brian Galligan, Citizens without Rights: Aborigines and the Australian Constitution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 157–58. 50 Eliza Kennedy and Tamsin Donaldson, “Coming up Out of the Nhaalya: Reminiscences of the Life of Eliza Kennedy”, Aboriginal History 6 (1982), 14–15; Winegard, Indigenous Peoples, 249; Huggonson, “Aborigines in the Aftermath of the Great War”, 7. 51 Various primary source documents about Percy Pepper’s soldier settlement reproduced in Simon Flagg and Sebastian Gurciullo (eds), Footprints: The Journey of Lucy and Percy Pepper (Canberra: National Archives of Australia and Public Record Office Victoria, 2008), 64–78.

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V. Loyalty forgotten In the years immediately after the war, there were some individual advocates for the rights of Aboriginal veterans. More often than not, these were the white men who had fought alongside Aboriginal soldiers and advocated for them to be treated with respect. Such supporters were bravely fighting against generally accepted societal norms that excluded Indigenous Australians from equal rights and the fair go. For instance, a June 1919 conference of the Northern Rivers District sub-branch of the Returned Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Imperial League (now known as the Returned and Services League or RSL) took up the issue of discrimination against Aboriginal veterans. The conference passed a motion calling upon “the Minister for Defence to adopt necessary measures to secure full civil rights to aborigines and half-castes of the Commonwealth who have served or are serving with the A.I.F. or any branch of the naval or military forces in recent or previous campaigns”.52 It was an RSL representative who, in 1921, first posed the question about extending the franchise to Aboriginal ex-servicemen to Queensland Premier Theodore.53 The City of Sydney sub-branch of the RSL passed a resolution in April 1938 demanding “That all men of Aboriginal blood who served in the A.I.F. be granted full citizen’s rights, and all social services be made available to them”.54 At an Anzac Day service in Healesville, Victoria in 1932, the local newspaper reported on one of the white speakers describing his relationship with an Aboriginal soldier: One of the speaker’s best friends during the war was a Queensland aborigine, whom he taught to read and write. He had become his brother, and was his brother still. No one fully understood the wonderful bond existing between the men of the A.I.F.. The wonderful message of the A.I.F. was not forgotten, and the bond became yearly stronger.55

Scarlett argues, though, that examples of RSL members fighting for the rights of Aboriginal people were exceptions to the norm. Most RSLs took little, if any, interest in the rights of Aboriginal veterans. In some rural areas especially, the RSLs were active in campaigns for discrimination and segregation of public facilities such as schools. There is also evidence of RSLs not admitting Aboriginal veterans at all or allowing them to enter 52

“Soldiers Disabilities. Position of Aborigines. Pensions and Deductions”, 4. “Aboriginals and the Franchise”, 6. 54 “Returned Soldier Victimised”, 2. 55 “Anzac Day. Healesville Observance”. Healesville and Yarra Glen Guardian, 30 April 1932, 2. 53

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only on Anzac Day.56 Aboriginal family members were often ignored at commemorative ceremonies, and were not comforted like the families of non-Indigenous servicemen. Aboriginal men were usually relegated to the back of Anzac Day marches, if they were allowed to participate at all.57 Occasionally, individual RSL members protested publicly against the discrimination practised within the organization. Ex-Private James Bennett of Cooktown wrote to the Cairns Post, opposing the local RSL’s decision to support the segregation of state schools: The Returned Soldiers’ Association is non-political, non-sectarian; let it be also a non-racial association. As a soldier who has been in the 15th Battalion of the A.I.F. and served on the Peninsula of Gallipoli, France, Belgium, I object very strongly to the slur cast upon my half-caste comrades of the 15th Battalion, some of whom paid the supreme penalty, both in Palestine in the light horse units and other spheres of the war.58

The RSL as an institution formally recognized Aboriginal service when it published a list of known Aboriginal members of the AIF from Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales in two editions of Reveille in 1931 and 1932.59 This was the only formal recognition that Aboriginal servicemen received; subsequently, Aboriginal contributions to the First World War became another part of the “Great Australian Silence”.60

VI. Conclusion Despite Aboriginal soldiers providing valiant service and being treated as equals on the battlefield, Australian society was not prepared to accept them as equals after the war. For some veterans this meant a gradual descent into depression; other Aboriginal servicemen survived as they were accustomed to before the war, with their kin as support, while navigating the restrictions imposed by white Australia. As Scarlett notes, 56

Scarlett, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Volunteers, 63–65. Huggonson, “Aborigines and the Aftermath of the Great War”, 2–3; Scarlett, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Volunteers, 47. 58 James Bennett, Ex Pte. 15th Battalion A.I.F. of Queensland, Cooktown, to the editor, “A Returned Soldier’s Protest”, Cairns Post, 28 January 1933, 11. 59 “Many Served: A.I.F. Aborigines”, Reveille, 30 November 1931, 22; “A.I.F. Aborigines: N.S.W.”, Reveille, 31 January 1932, 20. 60 The Great Australian Silence refers to anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner’s characterization of Aboriginal Australians being absent from Australia’s history. See W.E.H. Stanner, After The Dreaming: Black and White Australians—An Anthropologist’s View (Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1969). 57

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Chapter Eleven While at least some Aboriginal men had the expectation of changed conditions, the willingness to recruit Aborigines on the part of sections of the white community was more often than not merely pragmatic and coloured by racism and Aboriginal enlistment was never seen as a pathway to change.61

Though many Aboriginal veterans became disenchanted after the war, this did not take away from their valiant war work and the pride they maintained in their service. Rebe Taylor writes of veteran “Tiger” Stamford Simpson: “John Cornelly told me there were ‘two things’ that were an ‘obsession’ with Tiger as he got older: being an Anzac and having an ‘Aboriginal background’.”62 When the Second World War broke out, some Aboriginal veterans signed up again.63 Some families, such as the Lovetts and Saunders, continued family traditions of military service through the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam and even as recently as Afghanistan. Other Aboriginal communities, such as Point McLeay Mission, also developed strong military traditions.64 By the early 2000s, Aboriginal organizations emerged across Australia devoted to commemorating Indigenous military service, both within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and in mainstream Australia. Since 2007 the Department of Veterans’ Affairs has organized commemorative services honouring Indigenous military service during Reconciliation Week. On Anzac Day, Aboriginal ex-service organizations march or organize Indigenous Anzac marches. They purposely schedule these later in the day so that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ex-servicemen and women can still march with their units as well. This affirmation of pride in their identities as Australian ex-service people and as Indigenous Australian ex-service people has generally been well received by the Australian public.65 These are efforts to rectify the enduring silences about 61

Scarlett, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Volunteers, 61. Taylor, Unearthed, 272. 63 Philippa Scarlett, The Lock Family in World War One: How Service Records Contribute to Darug History (Macquarie, ACT: Indigenous Histories, 2008), 8; Kartinyeri, Ngarrindjeri Anzacs, 44. 64 Kartinyeri, Ngarrindjeri Anzacs, 27. 65 For some of these recent commemorations, see The Forgotten, directed by Glen Stasiuk, originally aired as an episode of Message Stick on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), 27 April 2003, videocassette; “The Last Post”, Message Stick, directed by Adrian Wells, produced by the ABC, 2006, DVD; “Indigenous Commemorative Events,” Australian Government: Department of Veterans’ Affairs, online, available from: http://www.dva.gov.au/benefitsAnd Services/ind/Pages/ice.aspx (accessed 2 Nov 2012). 62

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Aboriginal contributions to Australia’s defence. No longer is Aboriginal military service considered an aberration, propaganda or a spectacle; rather, it is slowly being acknowledged as an integral part of Australian history.

CHAPTER TWELVE “AN IDEAL LIFE”: ANGLO-INDIANS IN THE NEW ZEALAND EXPEDITIONARY FORCE JANE MCCABE This chapter explores themes of transnationalism and endurance through the experiences of a group of Anglo-Indian migrants who served in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) during the First World War.1 This conflict is often linked to the development of nationalism and national identity, and these migrants were indeed implicated in a postwar nationalist movement—namely the quest for the “right to fight” by AngloIndians in India. But here, in a case where war service was used to intensify claims for citizenship in a settler colony other than their place of birth, the focus is necessarily broadened to an imperial framework. Moreover, these Anglo-Indian men were ultimately seeking social integration with the white settler majority, and as such, we find them on the other side of the nation-building debate often associated with the First World War—that is, the view that war saw the development of distinctive national identities in the Dominions. The experiences of this small but significant group will also be shown to unsettle a unitary national viewpoint by signalling the array of cross-cultural encounters that overseas

1

“Anglo-Indian” is used here to refer to the mixed-race community of India. The term replaced “Eurasian” in 1911 as the official category for people of mixed parentage who had a male European ancestor. This was reinforced by the constitutional definition at Independence in 1947: “a person whose father or any of whose other male progenitors in the male line is or was of European descent but who is domiciled within the territory of India and is or was born within such territory of parents habitually resident therein.” See Laura Bear, “‘Anglo-Indian’: Historical Definitions” in The Jadu House: Intimate Histories of Anglo-India (London: Transworld Publishers, 2000), 287–91.

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service entailed—not only between soldiers and overseas populations, but within and between national regiments. Beginning with an outline of the scheme that brought the young men from the St Andrew’s Colonial Homes in Kalimpong, northeast India, to labouring in rural New Zealand, the chapter then examines the migrants’ enlistment, service abroad and resettlement after the war. This longitudinal structure sets the physical and psychological endurance of war within lives that were already sharply disrupted by imperial anxieties and expediencies. Using excerpts from letters written back to the St Andrew’s Homes, colonial masculine ideals are identified as an important means of meeting the challenges of war and furthering social integration.2 The excerpts, taken from the Homes Magazine, are of course skewed by the selection criteria of staff at the institution, not to mention the men’s desire to communicate the proper sentiment of worthy imperial citizens as instilled in their training at Kalimpong. Despite these biases, the hardy attitude and humour discernible in their letters can certainly be linked to colonial masculinity and the developing stereotype of the Pakeha male, which they had already encountered in the very raw setting of labouring in rural New Zealand.3 Here the move from farm work to war service is mobilized as a way of thinking through what those respective roles offered recent migrants searching for a place in colonial hierarchies.4 The sources used here themselves reflect the theme of endurance, in the archival persistence of otherwise hidden connections between New Zealand and India. The larger project looking at this migration scheme has made extensive use of sources in India and Scotland, particularly the Homes Magazine and the Kalimpong Papers at the National Library of Scotland, and the St Andrew’s Homes archive in Kalimpong.5 It was, however, in the process of enlisting for war that the emigrants to New Zealand were first documented by the state, and so the First World War 2

For a discussion of war as an opportunity to “reinvigorate” manliness amid concerns about feminization, materialism and urbanization see Mark Moss, “Manliness and Militarism: Educating Young Men for War in the Province of Ontario, 1867–1914” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1998), ch. 1. 3 Jock Phillips, A Man’s Country? The Image of the Pakeha Male: A History (Auckland: Penguin, 1987), passim. 4 The fear of physical decline in urban centres that underwrote claims of the benefits of colonial labouring in “frontier” settings was also deployed in the call for volunteers for the First World War. See Moss, “Manliness and Militarism”, 30; Phillips, A Man’s Country?, 145–46; and Martin Crotty, Making the Australian Male: Middle Class Masculinity 1870–1920 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001), 19–20. 5 Details of the project are available at: www.kalimpongkids.org.nz.

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personnel files have added a crucial dimension to the reach of the study. Because many of the Kalimpong emigrants later maintained a stubborn silence about their background, war records have been a key source for descendants looking to confirm, and in some cases reconnect with, their Indian heritage. From a scholarly perspective, the practice of updating the personnel files with postwar residences, medical procedures and notifications of death has greatly assisted the recovery of life histories and enabled the assessment that follows—of the degree to which race affected the experiences of the Anglo-Indians who served with the NZEF.

I. Producing imperial citizens The object of our scheme is to develop grit and resource … Yes, there is a probability of our boys developing into fine fighting material. Even now some go into the army and others into the navy, besides a large percentage being trained for the mercantile marine. Gratifying reports have come to hand concerning them. John Graham, Otago Witness, 19096

The twenty-two Anglo-Indian men who served in the NZEF were all sent to New Zealand as adolescents, having spent a decade or more growing up at the St Andrew’s Colonial Homes in Kalimpong, situated close to Darjeeling in the foothills of the Himalayas. The institution was founded in 1900 by John Graham, a Scottish Presbyterian missionary who had worked in the region for the previous decade. His visits to the many isolated tea plantations of Darjeeling and neighbouring Assam convinced him of the need to make social and educational provision for the mixed race offspring of British planters and Indian women workers. By the end of the nineteenth century such relationships were strongly discouraged by British authorities in India and moral campaigners at “Home”.7 As a consequence, mixed race children could no longer be sent to Britain for schooling, and faced highly segregated lives as part of the much maligned 6

“The Land of the Sahib: ‘Kim’ and His Sisters”, Otago Witness, 1 September 1909, 52. 7 Scholars date this fundamental change in sentiment to the 1857 Indian rebellion, before which interracial relationships were encouraged by the East India Company as a means of integrating into local communities. See Lionel Caplan, Children of Colonialism: Anglo-Indians in a Post Colonial World (New York: Berg, 2001), 1– 2. Durba Ghosh argues that anxieties over racial mixing began to appear much earlier: Sex and the Family in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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Anglo-Indian community in India.8 Graham’s proposed solution was long term. He set out to permanently remove the children from the plantations, immersing them instead in European norms in Kalimpong, with a vision of emigration to settler colonies upon reaching working age. The boys were trained for farm work, and the girls for domestic service, with a view to filling colonial labour shortages. The homes were one of many child “rescue”, removal and migration schemes that sought to make useful imperial citizens from marginal populations. Indeed Graham was strongly influenced by both the Barnado scheme and the Quarrier Homes in Scotland.9 As Graham’s quote in the Otago Witness attests, rural labour was not the only way that his male graduates might be useful to the settler colonies. All of the boys, he stated in the same 1909 interview, were prepared for war service at the homes, where “every boy capable of shouldering a rifle joins the cadet corps”.10 Graham was in Dunedin to visit the first four young men to emigrate there. Like all who would follow, they arrived to prearranged housing and employment with families connected to Graham through the Presbyterian Church. This developing network was of crucial importance in facilitating the scheme, especially in light of increasingly restrictive immigration policies. The perceived shortage of willing labour to fill farm and domestic positions was equally important in getting the graduates into the colony. Despite significant social and economic fluctuations over the next thirty years, all sixty-eight men who settled in New Zealand via the scheme began as rural labourers. Equivalent numbers of women emigrated as domestic servants. A notable point of gender difference in the scheme, therefore, was the added opportunity for social advancement through war service for the men.11

8

Several key studies chart the segregation of the Anglo-Indian community in India: Laura Bear, Lines of the Nation: Indian railway workers, bureaucracy, and the intimate historical self (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Caplan, Children of Colonialism; Satoshi Mizutani, The Meaning of White: Race, Class and the Domiciled Community in British India 1858–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 9 James Minto, Graham of Kalimpong (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1974), 60–61; Simon Mainwaring, A Century of Children (Kalimpong: Dr Graham’s Homes, 2000), 8–9; Mizutani, The Meaning of White, 141–42. 10 “The Land of the Sahib: ‘Kim’ and his Sisters”, 52. The homes, of course, were not alone in bringing militarism into schools. See, for example: Crotty, Making the Australian Male, ch. 3. 11 Crotty discusses this gender imbalance in “Australian Troops Land at Gallipoli: Trial, Trauma and the ‘Birth of the Nation’”, in Martin Crotty and David Andrew

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Table 12.1: Summary of emigrants to New Zealand Compiled from reports in the Homes Magazine (National Library of Scotland), 1908–38

Year of arrival 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1914 1915 Pre-war total 1920 1921 1923 1925 1926 1928 1929 1938 Total

Number of emigrants 2 3 5 5 13 5 10 43 13 6 3 23 18 5 5 14 130

Men 2 2 5 4 7 3 4 27 6 1 3 15 7 0 0 9 68

Women 1 1 6 2 6 16 7 5 8 11 5 5 5 62

Destination Dunedin Dunedin Dunedin Dunedin Dunedin Dunedin Dunedin Dunedin Dunedin Auckland Wellington Wellington Wellington Wellington Wellington

When war broke out in 1914 there were twenty-three Kalimpong men settled in New Zealand (see Table 1). Another four arrived in 1915. Graham would later state that all twenty-two of his graduates who were fit to do so volunteered for the NZEF and served overseas.12 All had arrived at Port Chalmers in Dunedin, owing to the presence of the Reverend James Ponder in the Waitahuna parish in rural Southland. Ponder knew of Graham’s work through his brother, who was on the staff at Kalimpong. Given his Scottish origins and education, having visited India himself and then serving a parish of mostly Presbyterian farming families, Ponder was well placed to be of great assistance to Graham.13 Arrival in Dunedin did not imply settlement there, however. About a third of the emigrants were instantly dispersed around the greater South Island and as far north as Roberts (eds), Turning Points in Australian History (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2009), 108. 12 John Graham, “The Call of India”, Wellington broadcast, 4 July 1937, Acc: 6039:8:1, National Library of Scotland (NLS). 13 Register of New Zealand Presbyterian Ministers, http://www.archives. presbyterian.org.nz/Page191.htm (accessed 14 Oct 2013).

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Wellington. This was intentional, to reduce the visibility of these often noticeably different men, and to encourage the graduates to merge fully into their local communities. Thus the men enlisted from various locales around New Zealand, and many were in a sense brought together by war. As Table 1 shows, the destination of the emigrants changed significantly after the war, owing to Ponder’s death in 1920 and the passing of the Immigration Restriction Amendment Act in the same year.

II. Enlistment in New Zealand We have been profoundly disappointed by the obstacles put in the way of Anglo-Indian lads joining the fighting forces in India. There seems to be some antiquated Army Regulation blocking the way. Had our lads gone to New Zealand or Britain, they would have been enlisted at once as their comrades have been. Homes Magazine, January 191614

There is no evidence to suggest that the Kalimpong men encountered any difficulties when enlisting in the NZEF. As the above quote suggests, however, the possibility of mixed-race British subjects enlisting for service in other parts of empire was by no means guaranteed. Though several scholars have looked at the particular discrimination endured by AngloIndians in India, little attention has been paid to the debate around their right to enlist in India, or their subsequent inclusion in the British Army and contribution to the Allied cause. The matter was resolved soon after Graham aired his concerns in the Homes Magazine article cited above. Within several months the same publication reported that the “great boon” had been won and Anglo-Indians were permitted to enlist.15 Subsequent issues of the magazine nevertheless reveal that they enlisted for a separate Anglo-Indian force within the British Army.16 While such segregation was accepted in the Indian context, it was not what Graham was seeking for his graduates in New Zealand. Full social integration was the primary reason for emigration to the settler colonies, and registering for war service was an important test of the boundaries of that ideal. The relative ease of enlistment in New Zealand was hence perceived and publicized by Graham as proof of the Dominion’s suitability as a destination for Anglo-Indians. From a broader perspective, it demonstrates 14

“Obstacles to Enlisting Anglo-Indians”, St Andrew’s Colonial Homes Magazine (SACHM), 16:1 (1916), 3. 15 “Anglo-Indian Recruiting”, SACHM, 16: 2 (1916), 19. 16 “An Anglo-Indian Company”, SACHM, 16: 3/4 (1916), 32.

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the divergence of practice between settler and non-settler colonies in the race-based application and development of British citizenship, as well as the differing claims for autonomy that unfolded in each during the war.17 In a sense the Kalimpong men were caught in two crucial imperial dynamics of the First World War. On the one hand, they were a racially marginal group who hoped for improved conditions by proving their loyalty to empire. On the other, with their desire to be integrated into the colonial majority, they were implicated in the purported development of a distinctive New Zealand identity, and the Dominions’ continuing demands for autonomy within imperial rule.18 Important distinctions between race, indigeneity and colour need to be drawn here, particularly considering that MƗori, like Anglo-Indians in India, were “somewhat grudgingly” enlisted in the separate Pioneer MƗori Battalion in the NZEF in what was supposed to be a “white man’s war”.19 Quiet inclusion in the regular forces thus suggests that the Kalimpong men were being counted on the side of the white majority, at least on paper. There was little to indicate the mixed-race status of the Kalimpong men as they enlisted. The only unusual aspect of their attestation forms were declarations of their place of birth and previous military service in India. The men had anglicized names and answered “Yes” to being British subjects. There was no question about racial identity on the attestation form, nor in any other documentation, which Noah Riseman has found was also the case in Australia.20 Turning to the “Description on Enlistment” form, which was filled out by a “Medical Officer” and included a “Medical Examination”, affords an interesting consideration of the face-to-face interaction that accompanied the filing of paperwork.21 17

Rieko Karatani, Defining British Citizenship: Empire, Commonwealth and Modern Britain (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003), 71–72. 18 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds critically evaluate the “nationalist myth” about Anzac in What’s Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010). 19 Christopher Pugsley, Te Hokowhitu A Tu: The MƗori Pioneer Battalion in the First World War (Auckland: Reed Publishing, 2006), 20–21; Matthew Wright, Shattered Glory: The New Zealand Experience at Gallipoli and the Western Front, (Auckland: Penguin Books, 2010), 48; Laura Tabili, “We Ask for British Justice”: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 16. Pugsley also points out that MƗori were “already ashore before the MƗori contingent arrived”, having enlisted under Anglicized names: Pugsley, Te Hokowhitu A Tu, 34. 20 Noah Riseman, Chapter Eleven in this collection. 21 Craig Robertson’s The Passport in America: History of a Document (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) has been valuable in considering wartime

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Despite considerable variation in their appearance—reflecting the varied circumstances of their parentage disguised by the “Anglo-Indian” classification—many of the Kalimpong men did have noticeably different physical features and skin colour. In every case other than Richard May, who was described as “full-blooded Parsee (Indian)”, there are no indications that their recorded “dark” complexions caused any concern.22 Nor is there any sense that the Kalimpong men attempted to mask their (paternal) Indian connections. The majority listed their place of birth as “India”; others were more specific and listed as addresses in Assam or Darjeeling, as well as surprisingly diverse locales such as Travancore, Lucknow, Meerut and Hyderabad. The “History Sheet”, which recorded activity during the war, also required next of kin. The form specified that if next of kin was not local, soldiers should list their “nearest relative” in New Zealand. Viewing the original files suggests this was the most problematic part of the form-filling process for the Kalimpong men. In many forms the initial responses are crossed out. Some listed Graham in Kalimpong, or tea-planting fathers with generic addresses such as “Bengal, India”. A common and satisfactory response was to list family in India (usually a sister, occasionally a father), with a “friend” in New Zealand (usually their employer) to satisfy the requirement to have a New Zealand relative. These responses signalled the persistent “in-between” status of the migrants, and points again to the key question of the extent to which subsequent war service would potentially give them a more solid colonial identity. The enlistment process made visible aspects of these young men’s training and experience in India which positively differentiated them from other farm labourers. Educated at the homes until the age of fifteen or sixteen, many had attained high standards in the British examination system. All answered “Yes” to having passed the “fourth educational standard”. As Jock Phillips has suggested, the developing colonial stereotype of the Pakeha male made a negative association between masculinity and intellectualism, and the Kalimpong men had likely encountered such attitudes in their farm work.23 War provided the opportunity to list education as a positive trait, and for several, war service assisted them into white-collar careers when they returned to civilian life. Previous military experience was another advantage that became visible bureaucratic practice and invoking scenes of examination for identity purposes: 5, 105. 22 Description on Enlistment, Richard May, NZDFPR: AABK 18805 W5549 0079619, Archives New Zealand (ANZ). 23 Jock Phillips, A Man’s Country?, 24.

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upon enlistment. Eight of the Kalimpong men listed service with cadets or volunteer forces in India, as well as training in local regiments in New Zealand. Sydney Williams, for example, listed “about 3 years Northern Bengal Rifles” and “about 1½ years in 10th (N.O. [North Otago]) Regiment”.24 The war files, therefore, make an important statement about the status of these recent migrants. When enlisting for the regular forces, there was no need for a declaration of their Indian ancestry, but there was an opportunity for positive framing of their unusual backgrounds: British fathers who were tea planters in India, a high standard of education and military experience.

III. “The Homes and the War” Taking things all round however, things might be a lot worse. It is absolutely different to what we expected. We are all well fed and clothed and get ample sleep, and adventures in all shapes and forms. This is an “Ideal” life. There is not the demoralised state of affairs one might expect—just the reverse. Everything is looked at from a humorous point of view. Ernest Hughes, Homes Magazine, July 191625

In January 1916 the Homes Magazine carried the first news of the Kalimpong men serving with the NZEF. Their reports were immediately suggestive of the multiple ways in which they related to other soldiers— childhood bonds with others who grew up at Kalimpong, a strong sense of imperial loyalty and a desire to be included with their colonial counterparts. Llewellyn Jones wrote from Trentham Camp of rigorous training and his pride at the hearty response of both the “young men of New Zealand” and the “Homes’ boys” to the “call of the Motherland”.26 Jones acknowledged their upbringing as the reason that “now we lack nothing and we are not ashamed to do things for ourselves”.27 In Egypt, Hamilton Melville reported from Zeitoun that he had “met no Homes’ boy there” but had heard that Leonard Williams was wounded and recovering in England.28 Melville was soon to be joined by Patrick Savigny, who wrote first from the Dardanelles and then from Zeitoun, where he met Melville and “had a good long yarn with him and was not surprised at all 24

Attestation of Sydney Williams, NZDFPR: AABK 18805 W5557 0123010, ANZ. 25 “Some Letters From Our Soldier Boys”, SACHM, 16:2 (1916), 31. 26 “Training in New Zealand”, SACHM, 16:1 (1916), 11. 27 Ibid. 28 “Egypt and the Dardanelles”, SACHM, 16:1 (1916), 11.

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to see the boys turning out to do their bit”.29 Richard Hall wrote from a convalescent home in Alexandria of recovering from illness and frostbite suffered “after the snow came on when I was in the trenches”.30 Hall had also seen Melville, who was to become the chief reporter on the Kalimpong men at war. In the next issue he wrote that there were “at least ten of us around here”.31 A column entitled “The Homes and the War” appeared for the first time in the April 1916 issue of Homes Magazine, replacing the “For the Old Boys and Girls” column. By this time, most of the men were in France and had a well-established chain of communication, seeking each other out and reporting on their various experiences. Hughes was not alone in his positive assessment of life at the front. Savigny wrote from Egypt that although there were “days of nervous strain and anxiety … army life is not so strenuous as most people believe it to be”.32 “A great deal” depended upon “the conditions of a man’s spirits” as well as “the character of a man”.33 Like Hughes, he referred to the importance of humour in keeping spirits high: “a good voice is very much appreciated in this Camp and songsters (comic or otherwise) are generally favourites among us.”34 Clarence Sinclair wrote of visiting a former homes housemother in England, whom he informed that he had done so well in New Zealand “just because she was hard on me … . I am not frightened of hard work, and in NZ the man who is frightened of hard work has not the slightest hope of getting on.”35 Sinclair thus linked the physical toughness required for labouring on New Zealand farms with the battlefields, both of which he believed benefited from his hardy upbringing at Kalimpong. Although the Kalimpong men wrote of “close bonds” with others from the homes, they increasingly identified, and were referred to, as “colonials” and “New Zealanders” in the Homes Magazine.36 In 1918 Richard Hall wrote from hospital in England that he was “enjoying myself thoroughly here. The hospital is full of New Zealanders and the Medical Staff are all from New Zealand, so we make a happy family.”37 In the same year, greetings were sent from “Four Anzacs in France: Dick Hall, 29

Ibid. Ibid. 31 “The Homes and the War”, SACHM, 16:2 (1916), 19. 32 “An Optimist in Egypt”, SACHM, 16:2 (1916), 18. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 “The Homes and the War”, SACHM, 16:2 (1916), 19. 36 “A New Zealander on Leave”, SACHM, 16:2 (1916), 19. 37 “The Homes and the War”, SACHM, 18:1/2 (1918), 2. 30

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Hamilton Melville, Adrian Andrews and Tom Brooks.”38 Hamilton Melville wrote that he got through Messines and Passchendaele “without a scratch, though many of my mates were killed … I will now close with best wishes to all in Kalimpong and a carry on to the boys in Mesopotamia from the Anzacs in France.”39 Family, mateship and Anzac allies were important new terms in making sense of the war experience. Social acceptance through war came at a cost, and as the years passed several of the Kalimpong men were seriously wounded and two were killed. In 1917 the Homes Magazine reported that “more of our New Zealanders have been wounded and invalided home”.40 “Home” had come to mean New Zealand, where all of the Kalimpong men would return upon completing their war service. Among the wounded was Robert Ochterlony who, according to his medical report, had sustained a gunshot wound “in the left lumbar region size of palm of hand, going through the lateral abdominal muscles and showing iliac bone, part of which has been shot away”.41 Despite being classified unfit, Robert spent only six months in New Zealand before heading back to the front. In the same 1917 report, Miss Fowles, a former housemother at the homes who visited those hospitalized in England, wrote that Stuart Lemare was “seriously hurt” and Henry Holder “had received no less than 40 wounds”; Hamilton Melville reported that Charlie Lawless was missing.42 Lawless was later located alive but wounded, and Llewellyn Jones was invalided back to Dunedin. These life-altering costs of inclusion were balanced by opportunities for decoration and promotion. Just as there is no evidence that race affected their enlistment, the war records show that the Kalimpong men were not excluded from advancement within the NZEF. Robert Ochterlony and Henry Holder were promoted to corporal, Ernest Hughes to lancecorporal and Sydney Williams and Patrick Savigny to sergeant. In 1917 James Bishop wrote that he was “proud of Pat Savigny’s Military Medal”.43 Savigny was the first of the Kalimpong men to be decorated, and his good reputation apparently went beyond his own network. Bishop wrote that in Dunedin he had met “a N.Z. returned soldier who was in the same camp as Pat of whom and his doings he told me a lot. He said that

38

“Birthday Greetings”, SACHM, 18:3/4 (1918), 19. “The Homes and the War”, SACHM, 18:1/2 (1918), 2. 40 “The Homes and the War”, SACHM, 17:3/4 (1917), 15. 41 Medical Report of an Invalid, 23 June 1917, NZDFPR: AABK 18805 W5549 087538, ANZ. 42 “The Homes and the War”, SACHM, 17:3/4 (1917), 15. 43 Ibid. 39

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Pat was a non-smoker, non-drinker, and jolly decent fellow.”44 There was, then, a place to be found in colonial hierarchies that did not require conformity to stereotypical masculine behaviours such as drinking alcohol. Bishop himself was awarded the Military Medal a year later, as was Sydney Williams. Hamilton Melville, the most frequent correspondent of the Kalimpong men, was awarded the Military Medal in May 1918 for “acts of gallantry in the field”, and three months later the Distinguished Conduct Medal.45 As the next section will demonstrate, such recognition was held up by John Graham as testament to the success of the emigration scheme, and carried the promise of reward, be it economic or social, for the individuals concerned.

IV. Postwar integration Every one of our boys who were in New Zealand before the days of conscription and who were physically fit volunteered for the war … no less than four gained Military Medals and one of them in addition a D.C.M. and our boys fill New Zealand graves in Europe. Surely these have won the rights of equal citizenship in the Dominion. Homes Magazine, June 192146

The above quote is from an article written in response to the enactment of the 1920 Immigration Restriction Amendment Act in New Zealand, which caused great anxiety about the future of the Kalimpong scheme. In this and subsequent attempts to promote continuing emigration, Graham would use war service as the prime example of his graduates’ worth as citizens. Indigenous communities in various colonies used war service as a vehicle for substantiating claims for self-rule or at least greater autonomy, and the perceived “broken promises” after 1918 were a catalyst for a rise in nationalism throughout the British Empire.47 In India, heavy-handedness by the British was unacceptable, given the war service of over a million

44

“The Homes and the War”, SACHM, 17:3/4 (1917), 15. Statement of the Services of Hamilton Melville, NZDFPR: AABK 18805 W5549 0080084, ANZ. 46 “New Zealand and our Emigrants: Will there be Exclusion?”, SACHM, 21: 1/2 (1921), 5. 47 Rudolf von Albertini, “The Impact of Two World Wars on the Decline of Colonialism”, Journal of Contemporary History, 4:1 (1969), 18–21; Richard Smith, Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War: Race, Masculinity and the Development of National Consciousness (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 4; Laura Tabili, “We Ask for British Justice”, 16–17. 45

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Indians.48 These claims were echoed by the Anglo-Indian community in India, and in Graham’s calls for “full citizenship” as reward for war service.49 The expression of this in the case of Kalimpong graduates in New Zealand, however, was an appeal for colour-blindness on the part of immigration authorities, and full integration into the communities to which they returned. In terms of the continuation of the scheme, Graham’s fears proved unfounded. Emigration resumed in 1923 when a former tea planter in Auckland gained permits for three male graduates.50 They were followed by several large groups emigrating to Wellington in the mid-1920s. It was the upbeat reports of these recent arrivals, rather than the more sombre news of returned servicemen, that came to dominate the pages of the Homes Magazine. An exception to this appeared in 1930, when a letter from Llewellyn Jones was printed in full; the editors noted that he had been “badly gassed” in the war. Jones reported working on a “large sheep and cattle farm, after doing nothing for a long time”. Finding himself alone in a hut on a remote part of the property, Jones felt that he was “not alone for I have God and the dear old Magazine with me”. He reflected, “Much has happened since I was in old Kiernander Cottage”—one of the cottages at the homes.51 Jones’s words were a poignant counterpoint to his proud 1915 letter from Trentham. When John Graham toured New Zealand in 1937 to visit his former students, he found Jones in Christchurch’s Sunnyside mental asylum. Graham recorded in his private diary that Jones had “suffered a lot” from war wounds, and had been “unable to make an independent living”. But, he explained, “he is not a lunatic by any means … he is a voluntary patient at Sunnyside and can leave at any time he likes, but he doesn’t feel he could bear the strain of the outside world and he feels happier where he is.”52 Graham’s 1937 diary entries counter the positive and celebratory content and tone of the Homes Magazine reports. With what appears to be a genuine paternalistic concern for his former charges, Graham encountered first-hand the realities of injuries his graduates had sustained twenty years before. Hamilton Melville, he recorded, was “badly gassed in the war and suffered from asthma and occasional fits”. While he was 48 Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf, A Concise History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 163–67. 49 “New Zealand and our Emigrants: Will there be Exclusion?”, 5; John Graham, “The Call of India”, Wellington broadcast.. 50 “New Zealand Emigration”, SACHM, 24: 1/2 (1924), 11. 51 “From a New Zealand Farm”, SACHM, 30: 1/2 (1930), 21. 52 John Graham, “Pour Les Intimes”, 6039:7, NLS.

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“much broken down”, Graham found him “full of interest in world affairs and most intelligent”, the proud owner of a wireless which he was paying off with “6s a week extra allowance because of the D.C.M.”. Robert Ochterlony was in an “untidy” state when he met Graham in the small South Island town of Picton. Formerly a noted football player, “a strong temperance man and … a fine worker on a farm”, Ochterlony was living the “hard and lonely life” of a gold miner. Graham added that he was “seriously wounded in the Great War”.53 As Gwen Parsons has noted, there has been a tendency to attribute all postwar ills to the conflict.54 In line with this argument, Graham mentioned the negative impact of war in all cases where he found returned servicemen in less than ideal circumstances. Parsons’s work is useful in considering a second aspect of Graham’s call for “full citizenship”, namely the availability of postwar benefits to the Kalimpong men. Llewellyn Jones was institutionalized voluntarily and had presumably been supported during his extended period of “doing nothing” after the war; Melville received an extra allowance for his DCM; others were listed as “war pensioners” in electoral rolls. Reading Parsons’s findings with this in mind suggests that the Kalimpong men were included and excluded from postwar benefits on the same terms as the wider community of returned servicemen.55 In a third and related test of the citizenship claim, Graham’s diary shows a notable preoccupation with community involvement and family life as a measure of success. In Melville’s case, for example, ill-health and an inability to work did not exclude him from domestic happiness. He was married to “such a nice woman”, Graham wrote, and their son was “a fine boy. His wife owns their good house and garden.”56 This entry alludes to the importance of marriage as a means of social integration. The high marriage rate of the Kalimpong men after returning from war supports the argument that war service advanced their social status.57 53

Ibid. Gwen A. Parsons, “‘The Many Derelicts of the War’? Great War Veterans and Repatriation in Dunedin and Ashburton, 1918 to 1928” (PhD thesis, University of Otago, 2008), 12. 55 Ibid., 131–59. See also Michael Roche, “World War One British Empire Discharged Soldier Settlement in Comparative Focus”, History Compass, 9/1 (2011), 1–15. 56 John Graham, “Pour Les Intimes”, 6039:7, NLS. 57 Only one of the Kalimpong men married before the First World War. Of a total of fourteen known to have married afterwards, six did so between 1918 and 1920, and a further six by 1930. A similar pattern was identified after the Second World War. 54

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A source outside the Kalimpong archive attests to recognition of Melville’s war contribution in the wider community. Helen Thompson, in her 1949 history of the Strath Taieri, a farming district west of Dunedin, wrote that it was “pleasing to be able to place on record particulars of awards to men of this district for distinguished service with the Forces”.58 Melville was one of nine decorated men listed. There is no mention of his Indian background—he was as much “of” the Strath Taieri as any other. Many of the men who enlisted for the First World War were itinerant labourers, or recent migrants, without lengthy connections to any particular area, but, like Melville, were “claimed” by communities after the war. As with any public success, communities wanted to identify as their own those who were decorated. Thompson listed Melville’s Distinguished Conduct Medal and Military Medal, and noted that he was a member of the famous “Travis Gang”.59 This was a group of soldiers who, under the leadership of Richard Charles Travis, became known for “scouting enemy defences and capturing enemy troops for interrogation”.60 Comparing a brief biography of Travis with the profile of the Kalimpong emigrants helps to tease out the distinct yet overlapping factors of race and marginality. Travis was born in the Bay of Plenty, to an Irish father and Australian mother. He left school after completing the fourth standard to work on the family farm. At the age of twenty-one, after fighting with his father, Travis left for Gisborne, where he worked as a farmhand and driver, and continued to polish his skills as a first-rate horsebreaker. Further trouble there led to complete estrangement from his family. He travelled the length of the country to Winton, a small farming community in Southland, changed his name—he was born Dickson Cornelius Savage—and told locals he was from Gisborne “and even the United States”. When he enlisted in 1914 he named his next of kin as his fiancée, Lettie Murray, the daughter of the local farmer who employed him. Like the Kalimpong men, Travis had turned up in a rural southern community looking for a new beginning. Being without family ties did not prevent him securing employment. He likely saw war as a good opportunity after more than a decade of acquiring a range of rural skills 58

Helen M. Thompson, East of the Rock and Pillar: A History of the Strath Taieri and Macraes Districts (Christchurch: Capper Press, 1977, reprint of edition published in Dunedin: Whitcombe & Tombs Ltd, 1949), 184–85. 59 Ibid., 185. 60 Aaron P. Fox, “Travis, Richard Charles”, from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Te Ara – the Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, updated 30 Oct 2012, http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/3t40/travis-richard-charles (accessed 27 June 2013).

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and still labouring as a farmhand. Travis took to war with relish. Promoted to sergeant in 1916, he was the recipient of numerous decorations, including the Victoria Cross after he was killed in battle on 25 July 1918.61 It is not surprising that Melville teamed up with a spirited colonial like Travis; both were remembered for their war efforts after modest and mobile beginnings.

V. Memorialization and transnational legacies The Kalimpong men were memorialized in similar ways to their New Zealand counterparts. Returned servicemen who eventually died were buried in the war section of local cemeteries with their regiment recorded on their headstones.62 The two killed in action, Ernest Hughes and Richard May, were both buried in France and recorded on memorials there.63 The Auckland War Memorial Museum’s Cenotaph database displays the Auckland Weekly News portrait of Ernest Hughes (Fig. 1).64 Hughes’s History Sheet included numerous references to his Indian connections. It was his sister, working as a nurse at the homes in Kalimpong, who was ultimately informed of his death and received his medals. The only references to India in Richard May’s documentation were his birthplace of Assam, and the note previously mentioned about his being a Parsee.65 May listed his next of kin as “W Harrison (friend)”, of Dipton, in Southland. His medals and effects were forwarded to William Harrison, a well-known farmer in the district and May’s former employer.

61

Ibid. The author has visited the graves of the Kalimpong men buried in Dunedin. Some images are available on the Dunedin City Council online cemetery database. See, for example, the headstone of 1911 Kalimpong emigrant John Mackay, http:// www.dunedin.govt.nz/facilities/cemeteries/cemeteries_search?recordid=18940&ty pe=Burial (accessed 14 Oct 2013). 63 Hughes was memorialized on the Grévillers (New Zealand) Memorial at Pas-deCalais and Richard May on the Caterpillar Valley (New Zealand) Memorial at Somme. Information accessed 27 June 2013 via the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database at http://www.cwgc.org/. 64 “Hughes, Ernest Herbert”, Cenotaph record, accessed 27 June 2013, http://www. aucklandmuseum.com/130/cenotaph-database. 65 Description on Enlistment, Richard May, NZDFPR: AABK 18805 W5549 0079619, ANZ. 62

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Figure 12.1: Ernest Hughes Figure 12.2: Richard May Auckland Weekly News, 29 August 191866 Otago Witness, 8 September 191667

Details of May’s connection to the Harrison family have been greatly enriched by access to the Harrison archive. William Harrison’s great-greatgranddaughter, Michelle Sim, came across documents and photographs relating to May while organising her forebears’ archive. Her queries about May to older family members revealed a persistent familial memory, of an Indian farm worker whom Harrison’s daughter Carrie was “quite keen on”.68 According to the family story, any romantic relationship was discouraged because of May’s Indian ancestry.69 A letter from May to Mary, Harrison’s wife, provides an intimate glimpse into the strength of his relationship to the farming family. Written shortly after his arrival at Zeitoun Camp in Egypt, the lengthy letter gave a detailed account of life as a soldier in a foreign land: “You do not know how grateful I am for all you have done for me, and the thought of you and Mr Harrison, Carrie, Jean, 66

Auckland Libraries, Sir George Grey Special Collections: AWNS-19180829-41-

7. 67

Sourced and reproduced with permission from the Onward Project. Details at www.fairdinkumbooks.com. 68 Email from Michelle Sim, 29 January 2013. 69 Ibid.

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Bob and Jackie and all Grassmead in general is proof against every temptation in this city.”70 Criticising the drunken behaviour of the Australian troops in the town, May admitted there were also “a few New Zealanders … who carry on something damnable”. For this young man, the protective bonds of a colonial farming family gave continuity to the values he grew up with in Kalimpong. May’s letter makes apparent the numerous cultural encounters that overseas service entailed. These are of particular interest, given the life trajectories of the Kalimpong men and their ambiguous racial status. “The towns over here are very pretty,” he wrote, “and the people of many nationalities rushing about the streets in all sorts of costumes, make it very interesting”. Despite the presence of Europeans, he noted, “everything is carried out in a Eastern fashion”. Gesturing towards his own cultural background, May enclosed with his letter some trinkets from an “Indian curiosity shop”. He then described at length an intriguing encounter with some Indian troops. Upon noticing some “stalwart Rajputs”, he approached and “spoke to them in Hindi”. After recovering from their initial shock, they responded with salutes and “plenty of hand shaking”. Encouraged, May noted that “it was wonderful how that language came back to me, and I waxed very eloquent”. A crowd of officers and men of his squadron gathered around and May was soon acting as interpreter. Again, through war, the cross-cultural heritage of the Kalimpong men became visible and was valued. “What a lot I’ll have to tell you when I get back,” May wrote, “but then that’s only a chance.”71 His death had a lasting impact on the Harrison family. Carrie Harrison kept two photographs of him, the letter to Mary and newspaper clippings reporting his death.72 One of these noted that he was “born at Assam, and was educated at Darjeeling, Northern India” and was “offered the position of interpreter to Indian troops, with the rank of Sergeant, but declined promotion and went on to France with his unit”.73 In celebrating May for prioritising colonial loyalty over personal gain, the report also communicates his acceptance as a New Zealander. The persistence of his story through five generations of the Harrison family is testimony not only to the relationship between May and his former employers, but also to the power of the war experience. The tragedy of a 70

Richard May to Mary Harrison, 24 September 1915, Harrison Family Archive (hereafter HFA). 71 Ibid. 72 “For the Empire’s Cause”, and “Signaller R.S. May”, Newspaper clippings (unknown publication), HFA. 73 “Signaller R.S. May”, HFA.

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lost love, or simply grief for a young man who had become part of a colonial family, was enough to ensure that this connection between New Zealand and India is still remembered almost a century later.

VI. Conclusion The Kalimpong men were settlers in a settler colony, and like other migrants or lone labourers, they joined in the war effort with hopes of improving their social and economic standing. Race made them marginal, but cannot be said to have excluded them from enlisting, being promoted and being rewarded in postwar life. As happened with other racially disadvantaged groups who challenged their position in the British Empire as a result of their war service, Graham sought improved conditions on behalf of Anglo-Indian returned servicemen. For the Kalimpong men the evidence of such improvement would be acceptance from the white majority. Enduring the conditions of war service was an important part of that lifelong quest. Graham’s use of their service to further not only for their own social inclusion, but the continued immigration of others from Kalimpong, reveals the broader implications of their contribution. In effect, the war service of the early emigrants was used to boost the scheme as a whole, and to support Graham’s theory of the usefulness of mixedrace imperial subjects. The cost of inclusion has been illuminated here by several case studies. Those who returned, like other servicemen, lived with the long-term psychological and physical scars of battle. But for the Kalimpong men, those costs were endured in the context of lives that were already dramatically affected by imperial realities. The silence about their Indian heritage was even more pervasive than that which has so often marked the lives of returned servicemen. War records and war stories have played a crucial role in countering that silence and making visible a significant and enduring transnational connection.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN PICTURING THE EMPIRE: ENDURING IMPERIAL PERCEPTIONS AND DEPICTIONS IN BRITISH FIRST WORLD WAR PHOTOGRAPHIC PROPAGANDA GREG HYNES The impact of the First World War on the British Empire was complex. While participation in the war vivified the imperial vision for many, particularly in Britain and the settler Dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, it also gave newfound confidence to colonised peoples in the empire, breaking traditional precedents by involving nonwhite, indigenous populations in a British war for the first time.1 However, these changes in racial perception and identification were not reciprocated in white British and Dominion attitudes, which remained largely unchanged.2 This chapter therefore examines the endurance of traditional attitudes in cultural constructions of the British Empire, specifically through the lens of British wartime propaganda. It explores how traditional exclusionary and racially hierarchical imperial views survived in the face 1

John M. Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 3; George Robb, British Culture and the First World War (Basingstoke and New York, NY: Palgrave, 2002), 10–25; R.F. Holland, European Decolonization 1918– 1981: An Introductory Survey (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985), 1–2; for the war’s impact on nationalism in the Dominions see, W. David McIntyre, Dominion of New Zealand: Statesman and Status, 1907–1945 (Wellington: New Zealand Institute of Internal Affairs, 2007), 62–80. 2 Andrew Stewart, “The ‘Bloody Post Office’: The Life and Times of the Dominions Office”, Contemporary British History 41:1 (2013), 45–46; McIntyre, Dominion of New Zealand, 64–80; see also, The National Archives: Public Record Office, Kew (TNA: PRO), CAB19/199 – “The Future of the Imperial Cabinet System”, 2–6.

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of significant changes to colonial self-identification brought about by the war.3 To explore the endurance of traditional racial constructions of empire, this chapter looks specifically at an example of official British wartime propaganda: a collection of 220 lantern slides containing official British photographs of the imperial war effort, created by Britain’s Department of Information in 1917. This collection was distributed throughout the empire by the female imperialist patriotic society, the Victoria League, the Canterbury branch of which in turn donated the collection to the University of Canterbury’s Macmillan Brown Library.4 Recently the images have been given a new life through digitization. As the focus of an exhibition website, “Imperial Identities: Revealing the Victoria League’s First World War Images”, the images can be seen and explored by a wide audience, for perhaps the first time since the war.5 The collection provides an overview of the British Empire at war, particularly during the 1916 Somme Offensive, and suggest the ways that the empire, and racial difference within it, was perceived and constructed in Britain. By examining the creation, distribution and content of this collection, specifically through comparing its depictions of white and non-white imperial troops, this chapter argues that traditional racially exclusive and hierarchical attitudes endured, in British and Dominion views of the empire, throughout the war. Accordingly, instead of merely noting the contents of the collection, this chapter delves more deeply into what visual historians have termed the “social life” of the images. As visual historians such as Elizabeth Edwards, Janice Hart and Ludmilla Jordanova argue, visual sources must be examined as historical objects, existing and operating in their own 3

See Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 113–19; Katie Pickles, Female Imperialism and National Identity: Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 37–39; David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2001), esp. 122; Douglas Lorimer, “From Victorian Values to White Virtues: Assimilation and Exclusion in British Racial Discourse, c.1870–1914”, in Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis (eds), Rediscovering the British World (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005), 110–11. 4 Macmillan Brown Library, Christchurch (MBL), MB367 Victoria League for Common Wealth Friendship Archives. 5 Greg Hynes and Erin Kimber, “Imperial Identities: Revealing the Victoria League’s First World War Images” Exhibition website; http://www.canterbury. ac.nz/imperial/. All the images discussed in this chapter can be seen on this digital resource.

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diverse contexts, invested with meaning and significance by their creation, uses and reinterpretations, and so must be analysed as such.6 Therefore, the ways in which and reasons why this collection was compiled, organized, distributed and understood by and for British imperial audiences will be examined to demonstrate its significance.

I. Imperial propaganda organization and the creation of the collection Both the contents and organization of Britain’s imperial wartime propaganda suggest that the understanding of the empire as comprising a “central community” of Britain and the Dominions, defined by whiteness, continued throughout the war. Such a traditional construction of the empire is evident in the collection of lantern slides compiled by Britain’s Department of Information and distributed to the Victoria League in 1917. Although the collection does reflect the endurance of traditional imperial perceptions, it was also the result of major innovation and change in Britain’s wartime propaganda. It is an example of one of the first major outputs of British official photography. After initially being suspicious of photography early in the war, by 1916 the British High Command began to take it seriously, with the appointment of the first official British photographer at the front, Lieutenant Ernest Brooks. The aim of this appointment was to ensure maximum exposure of, and accordingly public response to, the ultimately costly Somme Offensive.7 The compilation and distribution of the collection was also a result of organizational changes to British propaganda. From 1916, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George took action to “rationalize” Britain’s propaganda organizations for greater efficiency and impact. The creation of this collection demonstrates the operation of these changes: it was a product of Wellington House, an established propaganda organization since the beginning of the war, which became the pictorial and literature branch of the newly centralized British

6

Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, “Introduction: Photographs as Objects”, Photographic Histories: on the Materiality of Images (London: Routledge, 2004), 2; Ludmilla Jordanova, “Approaching Visual Materials”, in Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire (eds), Research Methods for History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 41–42; Ludmilla Jordanova, The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 4–5. 7 Jane Carmichael, First World War Photographers (London: Routledge, 1998), 48–49.

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Department of Information.8 By 1917, the department utilized the wealth of new photographic propaganda at its disposal, by organising images into collections to be sent throughout the Dominions, mainly for exhibition through patriotic societies. Lantern slide lectures were a familiar feature of British propaganda, and an established method of publicity and education for patriotic societies like the Victoria League.9 This collection was distributed through the league’s central office in London in early 1917, which then sent collections to the various imperial branches as “gifts”.10 Despite its official origin, no instructions regarding the use of the collection were included; the league’s London office only suggested their use in fundraising for the Victoria League’s scheme of providing education and entertainment to convalescent soldiers in British hospitals, through funded lectures.11 Once the slide collections arrived in New Zealand, the various local branches of the league used them in public lectures, and private fundraising events, although there is little evidence to show whether the Canterbury branch used their collection extensively, if at all. The Macmillan Brown collection is a very revealing piece of evidence concerning the wartime relationship between Britain and the Dominions. In one sense, the slides illustrate the established, informal but familiar nature of the imperial relationship between Britain and the Dominions. For the first half of the war, trusting in the Dominions, and their “familial” association, Britain maintained a “hands-off” approach to propaganda in the Dominions and left it to operate informally, mostly via voluntary 8

TNA: PRO, INF 4/1B – “The activities of Wellington House during the Great War, 1914–1918”; “Ministry of Information as at September 1917”; M.L. Sanders and Phillip Taylor, British Propaganda during the First World War, 1914–1918 (London: Macmillan, 1982), 65–67; David Monger, Patriotism and Propaganda in First World War Britain: The National War Aims Committee and Civilian Morale (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 17–18; Gary S. Messinger, British Propaganda and the State in the First World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 126–27; David French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1916–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 62–64. 9 Sarah M. Dowling, “Female Imperialism: The Victoria League in Canterbury, New Zealand, 1910–2003” (MA thesis, University of Canterbury, 2004), 40; Julia Bush, Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power (London: Leicester University Press, 2000), 195–99. 10 Victoria League Central Office Archives, London (VLA), Sixteenth Annual Report of the Victoria League Head Office (1917), 18. 11 VLA, Sixteenth Annual Report of the Victoria League Head Office (1917), 18; Hocken Library, Otago (HL), 96-057 – Otago Branch of the Victoria League Minute Books, 3 December 1917.

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patriotic societies such as the Victoria League.12 Such organizations, which also included the Navy League and Canada’s Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, were central to the formation of important public networks of imperial interaction, and reinforced imperial relationships. As such, they were extremely active during the war.13 They were a key part of Wellington House’s method of imperial propaganda distribution; using notable imperial public figures and the networks of patriotic societies as distribution lines was seen as not only effective and practically useful, but also helpful in maintaining the secrecy of British propaganda. The Victoria League, which counted notable British propagandists and their wives among its members, was ideal in this regard.14 Such informality of approach was also evident in New Zealand, as Gwen Parsons argues; a belief in the voluntary spirit was strong among the New Zealand public, with the fiercely enthusiastic local elite and middle class controlling patriotic activity through a multitude of patriotic funds and fundraising events.15 In another sense, however, the slide collection also represents a 12

French, Strategy of Lloyd George, 62–64. Pickles, Female Imperialism, 4–8, 16–17; Katie Pickles, “A Link in ‘The Great Chain of Empire Friendship’: The Victoria League in New Zealand”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 33:1 (2005), 29–32; Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 3; Matthew C. Hendley, Organized Patriotism and the Crucible of War: Popular Imperialism in Britain, 1914–1932 (Montreal: McGill– Queen’s University Press, 2012), 3–4, 7–10; Glen O’Hara, “New Histories of British Imperial Communication and the ‘Networked World’ of the 19th and Early 20th Centuries”, History Compass 8:7 (2007), 611–13; Duncan Bell, “Dissolving Distance: Technology, Space, and Empire in British Political Thought, 1770– 1900”, Journal of Modern History, 77:3 (September 2005): 524–25; Dowling, “Female Imperialism”, 40; Bush, Edwardian Ladies, 195–99. 14 VLA, Sixteenth Annual Report of the Victoria League Head Office” (1917), 18; TNA: PRO, INF 4/5 “Report on the work of the Bureau established for the purpose of laying before neutral nations and the Dominions the case of Great Britain and her Allies”, (15 July 1915); “John Buchan’s report on the workings of the Ministry of Information” (September 1917); INF 4/1B “The activities of Wellington House during the Great War”; See also, Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 152; Messinger, British Propaganda, 12–14; Gerard J. De Groot, Blighty: British Society in the Era of the First World War (London: Longman, 1996), 174. 15 Gwen Parsons, “The New Zealand Home Front during World War One and World War Two”, History Compass, 11:6 (2013), 419–20; Erik Olssen, “Waging War: The Home Front 1914–1918”, in Judith Binney, Judith Bassett and Erik Olssen (eds), The People and the Land: An Illustrated History of New Zealand, 1820–1920 (Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1990), 308; Pickles, “Victoria League”, 34–35; Chris Pugsley, L.H. Barber and the Auckland War Museum, Scars on the Heart: Two Centuries of New Zealand at War (Auckland: David Bateman in 13

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shift in British propaganda under the Lloyd George government, towards more actively bolstering domestic and Dominion enthusiasm for the war. This was part of a wider change in approach to the war from 1916, which prioritized British imperial aims and intentions, to ensure a successful postwar settlement for Britain, above both its enemies and European allies. As trusted, central members of the empire, the Dominions were central to this policy; as well as encouraging Dominion governments to contribute as much as possible, the Lloyd George administration made significant propaganda approaches towards the Dominions to raise morale.16 As such, the slides represent both the changing nature of the relationship between Britain and the Dominions, and the endurance of an abiding trust and familiarity between them.

II. British propaganda and racial imperial depictions The established familiarity and trust between Britain and the Dominions is also evident in the collection’s contents. Despite the numerous practical changes that the First World War brought to inclusion of non-white populations in the British Empire, traditional exclusionary and hierarchical racial perceptions and understandings of the empire persisted, as the depictions of imperial racial difference in these lantern slides illustrate.17 Racial difference was not strictly obscured, but excluded: white British and Dominion soldiers were portrayed as forming the inner “British” sanctum of the empire, with non-white native, indigenous and colonial troops on the periphery. These depictions reflect longer-term debates about imperial racial inclusion and exclusion, and the place of indigenous peoples in the British Empire. Catherine Hall, in discussing the British West Indies’ relation to the British world, has argued that the latter’s boundaries were fluid, and that indigenous peoples often managed to include themselves through contact, or through self-identification, with imperial Britishness.18 In a association with the Auckland War Museum, 1996), 51; Dowling, “Female Imperialism”, 40; Bush, Edwardian Ladies, 195–99. 16 Bell, Greater Britain, 113–19; French, Strategy of Lloyd George, 62–64; Cate Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning: Propaganda in the First World War (London: Allen Lane, 1977), 39. 17 Cannadine, Ornamentalism, 122. 18 Catherine Hall, “What did a British World mean to the British?: Reflections on the Nineteenth Century”, in Buckner and Douglas (eds), Rediscovering the British World, 25–26; see also Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich, “Mapping the British World”, in Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich (eds), The British World: Diaspora,

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certain sense, such inclusivity was somewhat realized during the First World War simply through the participation of non-white populations in front-line fighting, which set a precedent for the empire, and allowed these people to engage in wider imperial patriotisms.19 Nonetheless, Phillip Buckner argues that most British imperialists were not cultural relativists, and an inherent belief in the superiority of “white Britishness” was common, particularly around the turn of the century.20 Crucially, nonwhite, indigenous populations ran into problems when they attempted to define themselves as “racially British”. This was especially true in the Dominions where, as Buckner argues, distance from “Home”, and close contact with native populations, made strict identifications of white “racial Britishness” even more pronounced among white settler populations.21 Although indigenous populations often did feel validated by their war experience, and were eager to identify with and defend the empire, such attitudes were rarely reciprocated by British and white Dominion minds.22 The Macmillan Brown lantern slides clearly show that British propagandists limited the “central” British community to Britain and the Dominions. Non-white soldiers were certainly depicted in the slides, but as different, and less assured. There was still worth in portraying non-white colonial troops, to emphasize the size, strength and apparent inclusive morality of the British war effort and empire,23 but they were kept on the periphery.24 This racially hierarchical and exclusionary view of the British Empire is evident through comparing images in the collection of white British and Dominion troops, and non-white troops from colonial locations. The first Culture and Identity (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 3; Phillip Buckner and R. Francis Douglas, “Introduction”, in Buckner and Douglas (eds), Rediscovering the British World, 14. 19 Robb, British Culture, 10–25. 20 Phillip Buckner, “Whatever Happened to the British Empire?”, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 4:1 (1993): 27–28; see also Alan Lester, “British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire”, History Workshop Journal 54 (Autumn 2002), 25, 29, 37–39; Lorimer, “Victorian Values”, 110–11. 21 Buckner and Douglas, “Introduction”, 15; Stuart Ward, “Imperial Identities Abroad”, in Sarah Stockwell (ed.), The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 219; Bridge and Fedorowich, “Mapping the British World”, 3; Andrew Smith, “Patriotism, Self-Interest and the ‘Empire Effect’: Britishness and British Decisions to Invest in Canada, 1867–1914”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 41:1 (2013), 59–80. 22 Robb, British Culture, 7–8, 11–12. 23 Ibid. 24 Cannadine, Ornamentalism, 5.

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point to note is the diversity and volume of depictions of white British troops. Of the 220 images, 68 per cent contain white imperial troops— British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand—while only 7 per cent contain non-white imperial troops, incidentally the same percentage as depictions of German prisoners in the collection, and certainly disproportionate to non-white troops’ involvement in the war. Furthermore, the depictions of white soldiers are also highly varied, and inclusive; those of non-white soldiers are far more scarce, and thematically restricted. White troops are shown in a wide variety of ways: performing various duties at the front, at rest, on parade, tending to the injured, receiving medicine, playing games and performing trench duties; there are also posed group photographs.25 These images have a strong thematic cohesion, and sense of unity. White troops from Britain and the Dominions are shown doing the same sorts of work, and often interacting easily with one another, as a “generalized” white British community or family, with few details, besides specifics of uniform, and occasional unit and battalion insignia, graffiti or decoration, distinguishing their particular national origin.26 One photograph, taken by Lieutenant Ernest Brooks, typifies such interaction. It shows a New Zealand soldier posing with five British Royal Artillerymen, leaning on a shell dump, near Bécourt Wood, France, in 1916 (Figure 13.1). In one sense this image, dominated by the large pile of shells, presents an argument for the size and durability of the imperial war effort, to lift confidence and morale throughout the empire. More broadly, however, it also typifies the collection’s general tone of friendly cooperation, familial association and equality between white British and 25 For examples of such images see the collection exhibition website, in particular: MBL, MB367/148954 (Australian chaplain standing in a trench, wearing a box respirator gas mask); MB367/148906 (Three soldiers resting in a trench); MB367/148905 (An informal group portrait of a group of soldiers celebrating); MB367/148895 (A group of soldiers standing outside a damaged building); MB367/148876 (A soldier being treated for a leg wound at a front-line dressing station); MB367/148845 (Wounded Canadian soldiers being taken from the front line to a dressing station); MB367/148843 (British soldiers lining up to receive medicine at an army dispensary); MB367/148826 (A British Army riverborne hospital at Vaux-sur-Somme); MB367/148868 (Four members of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps playing cards on top of a dump of trench mortar ammunition); MB367/148920 (Canadian troops in front-line trenches in Belgium); MB367/ 148891 (1st Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers being addressed by General Henry de Beauvoir de Lisle), http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/imperial/. 26 See for example MBL, MB367/148970 (Members of the Australian 2nd Division on a horse-drawn cart); MB367/148993 (Canadian gunners chalking graffiti messages on 15in (30cm) howitzer shells), http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/imperial/.

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Figure 13.1: British artillerymen with a New Zealand trooper, leaning on an 18pounder shell dump near Bécourt Wood MBL, MB367/148991, Victoria League of New Zealand Records, Five Royal Field, photograph by Lieutenant Ernest Brooks, Bécourt, Pas-de-Calais, France, 1916

Dominion troops. The figures are also generalized, with the New Zealand soldier in the centre distinguishable only by his distinctive New Zealand “lemon-squeezer” hat. This inclusion of white British and Dominion soldiers in the general “British” effort is also evident in other aspects of Britain’s imperial propaganda such as news reports from the British Press Bureau.27 Ironically, this generalising approach caused a degree of tension: there were complaints that it obscured the specific achievements and characters of each Dominion. This reaction hints at the complex impact of the war on Dominion attitudes, at once strengthening confidence in the imperial

27 TNA: PRO, CO 537/1119 – Recognition of Australian Troops (May 1917), 1–3, 8–9.

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community, and increasing independent national confidence.28 Regardless, this approach only emphasizes that British propagandists were more comfortable constructing a central imperial community comprising only white members of the empire. By contrast, depictions of non-white colonial troops in the collection are more limited and uniform. Essentially, non-white, indigenous troops are typically depicted as isolated, distinct and often as somewhat “exotic”. They are not shown as active participants in the war, interacting and integrating into a wider imperial community, but merely as a supplementary feature of the empire, portraying its size and diversity. This is typified in a photograph of West Indian soldiers cleaning their rifles on the Albert-Amiens Road in France, in August 1916 (Figure 13.2). In this photograph the West Indian soldiers are isolated, and distinct, interacting only with each other. Such isolation is explicable by the division of units and battalions according to point of origin, but it is notable that the collection also depicts broad interaction between white troops beyond the empire—such as between Australian and French troops, and even between British and captured German troops.29 Non-white members of the empire were kept at more of a distance, and the only notable depictions of their interactions with white troops were at the highest level, such as through inspections with generals, such as South Africa’s Jan Smuts.30 Other depictions of non-white imperial troops in the collection go so far as to emphasize “exotic” elements of dress, particularly in images of Indian troops.31 Exclusionary attitudes to racial difference in the empire penetrated much more deeply than simply the contents of this particular collection; they represented wider understandings of race and the empire. In 1917, for example, there was a complaint by Leo Amery, then an undersecretary in 28

TNA: PRO, CO 537/1119 – Recognition of Australian Troops (May 1917), 1–3; see also John Darwin, “Britain’s Empires”, in Stockwell (ed.), The British Empire, 16; Jeffrey Grey, “War and the British World in the Twentieth Century”, in Buckner and Douglas (eds), Rediscovering the British World, 223–50. 29 See, MBL, MB367/148944 (An Australian soldier talking to a French stretcher bearer), http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/imperial/. 30 See, MBL, MB367/148800 (General Jan Smuts inspecting a South African native labour unit); MB367/148804 (Officer inspecting Indian troops), http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/imperial/. 31 See, MBL, MB367/148913 (Forward scouts of the Indian cavalry regiment 9th Hudson’s Horse); MB367/148914 (Group of mounted Indian soldiers), http://www. canterbury.ac.nz/imperial/; see also, “Imperial Legacies” exhibition website, especially, http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/imperial/picturing_legacies/6_148915.shtml.

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Figure 13.2: British West Indies troops cleaning rifles MBL, MB367/149021, photograph by Lieutenant Ernest Brooks, Albert–Amiens Road, France, August 1916

the Lloyd George government, over the continued involvement of the Colonial Office in Dominion affairs during the war. Amery argued that the inclusion of the Dominions in the Colonial Office’s work insulted Dominion pride, as they were “grouped with non-self governing dependencies and with backward populations of all sorts of races”, which negatively influenced the tone of the office’s relations with the Dominions.32 This issue was partly one of Dominion status, but also strongly illustrates a concomitant belief in the innate racial superiority of “white Britishness”, which was clearly manifest in the collection.33

III. Imperial unity and monarchy It is important to note, however, that native and indigenous populations were not completely obscured in the Macmillan Brown slide collection. 32

TNA: PRO, CAB 17/190 Memoranda on Imperial Coordination by Leo Amery, 1917, 19; see also Stewart, “The “‘Bloody Post Office’”, 45. 33 Pickles, Female Imperialism, 37–39; Buckner, “Whatever Happened”, 27–28; Lorimer, “Victorian Values”, 110–11.

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There was still propaganda value for Britain in depicting non-white imperial participation in the war effort, not only for internal imperial cohesion and morale, but also for external, particularly neutral, audiences, to emphasize the size, scale and power of the British Empire. Crucially, depictions of non-white members of the empire supported broader British propaganda rhetoric of the morality of the British Empire, and by extension the British war effort, as opposed to the atrocity propaganda that cast Germany as an inherently uncivilized, immoral and barbaric power.34 This impulse is clear in a 1918 report into the work of Britain’s Ministry of Information: [I]t comes within the province of the Ministry of Information to advertise the British Empire, for the purpose of making known to all neutral countries—and, for that matter, also to our Allies—what it stands for, and what our system of self-government means; to explain the vastness of our resources, our commanding control over great many raw materials … and the way we have built up a free commonwealth of nations by freedom, instead of by force … There could be nothing objectionable from the neutral’s point of view in the exhibition of maps showing area of the British Empire, populations, races, natural resources etc.35

While this demonstrates the perceived worth of depictions of non-white imperial populations to British propagandists, particularly later in the war, it also suggests that they were considered more as subject matter, or evidence towards a broader positive depiction of the empire, rather than as active, patriotic, British members of the imperial community.36 There is,

34 Robb, British Culture, 10–25; Nicoletta Gullace, “The Blood of Our Sons”: Men, Women and Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 25, 31; Katie Pickles, Transnational Outrage: The Death and Commemoration of Edith Cavell (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 60–66; Beth S. Bennett and Sean Patrick O’Rourke, “A Prolegomenon to the Future Study of Rhetoric and Propaganda”, in Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell (eds), Readings in Propaganda and Persuasion: New and Classic Essays (London: Sage, 2006), 159; Monger, Patriotism and Propaganda, 115–16; Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: Literature as Propaganda 1914 and After, (London: B.T. Batsford, 1989), 27–28; Katie Pickles, “Mapping Memorials for Edith Cavell on the colonial edge”, New Zealand Geographer 62 (2006), 14. 35 TNA: PRO, INF 4/8 – “Advertising the Empire”, 19 March 1918. 36 See, Cannadine, Ornamentalism, 122.

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though, in the collection, a limited appeal to, and depiction of, a broader imperial racial unity.37 The most potent symbol of this is the British monarchy, specifically in the person of King George V. The monarchy’s association with imperial patriotism is well established in scholarship. David Cannadine and Paul Ward, among others, have highlighted the British monarchy’s interaction with an imperial identity as part of a wider redevelopment of its cultural significance to British society and national identity from the mid to late nineteenth century.38 The monarchy’s role as an apolitical symbol of consensus and unity, both domestically and imperially, became even more pronounced during the war, notably through its strong philanthropic role.39 George V in particular slipped easily into the role of the benevolent soldier-king, making frequent visits to the front, in uniform, interacting with troops and wounded men in military hospitals.40 Images of such visits, with George V conversing with nurses and convalescent soldiers in France, are included in the Macmillan Brown collection.41 During the war

37

See for example MBL, MB367/148915 (for West Indian troops); MB367/148913 (for Indian troops); MB367/148819 (for members of the King’s African Rifles); MB367/148817 (for troops from the Malay States); MB367/148902 (for members of the MƗori Pioneer Battalion), http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/imperial/. 38 Paul Ward, Britishness Since 1870 (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004), 14–28; David Cannadine, “The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition’, c.1820–1977”, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); David Cannadine, “From Biography to History: Writing the Modern British Monarchy”, Historical Research 77:197 (August 2004); Neville Meany, “Britishness and Australia: Some Reflections”, in Bridge and Fedorowich (eds), The British World; Clarissa Campbell Orr, “The Feminisation of the Monarchy 1780–1910: Royal Masculinity and Female Empowerment”, in Andrzej Olechnowicz (ed.), The Monarchy and the British Nation 1780 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 92. 39 Frank Prochaska, Royal Bounty: The Making of a Welfare Monarchy (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1995); Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 112. 40 Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 96–97; Prochaska, Royal Bounty, 184–85. 41 See MBL, MB367/148821 (George V with a convalescent soldier); MB367/148820 (George V conversing with a field nurse), http://www.canterbury. ac.nz/imperial/.

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the monarchy became a symbol of consensus and social unity, something of the ideal British family.42 This wartime royal identity was also applied more broadly, to appeal to wider imperial unity, significantly, across racial boundaries. There was frequent mention in the British press of George V’s enthusiastic reception by various troops and delegations of different imperial races and nationalities, from South African troops cheering his arrival during a visit in France with a Zulu war cry, to his meeting Indian troops at a field hospital.43 Such depictions not only demonstrate a perceived strong imperial loyalty and enthusiasm among the different members of the empire, but also suggest a form of close imperial association and unity through the person of the king. An account of a visit by George V to an Indian field hospital illustrates the significance of the monarchy as a symbol of imperial consensus: It was here [that] an Indian rose from his bed and called out “God save the King.” It was the only English he knew and quite unrehearsed. The spontaneous tribute of the men in this tent may have perhaps been more affecting to his Majesty than all the applause of a royal procession.44

During the war the king was often used a symbol of imperial unity, a focal point of imperial patriotism and loyalty for all members and races of the empire, sometimes even on a personal level, superseding the racial boundaries established elsewhere in the collection.45 It is significant that photographs in the Macmillan Brown collection of George V inspecting imperial troops are largely uniform, regardless of the race of the troops in question. In one image, for instance, George V, with Queen Mary looking on, is inspecting and speaking to a row of Indian troops (Figure 13.3). Although this depiction of imperial unity is at a high, official level, rather than the easy familiarity displayed in the photographs of white imperial troops, it does suggest that a broad level of imperial unity and inclusion was possible through the person of the king. This photograph is similar to those of the king with white imperial troops, such 42

Prochaska, Royal Bounty, 184; Ward, Britishness, 20; Phillip Williamson, “The Monarchy and Public Values 1900–1953”, in Olechnowicz (ed.), The Monarchy and the British Nation, 240; see also “The King Among His People: Visits to Hospital, Mine and Workshop”, Daily Mirror, 3 June 1915, 6; “British Politics and the War”, Evening Post, 13 November 1914, 6. 43 “King George in the Battle Line”, Daily Express, 17 August 1916, 1; “The King’s Visit to the Army”, Manchester Guardian, 2 December 1914, 7. 44 “The King’s Visit to the Army”, Manchester Guardian, 2 December 1914, 7. 45 See Prochaska, Royal Bounty, 184–85; Ward, Britishness, 20.

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as the image of George V, with Generals Godley, Plumer, and Harper, inspecting assembled cheering New Zealand soldiers (Figure 13.4).46 There are many such photographs in the collection, showing the monarch with imperial troops of different races.47 In all cases, the relationship between imperial troops and the king is the same. George V’s unifying role qualifies the racial construction of the empire in the collection; despite the existence of a racially exclusive “inner family” of the empire, the various disparate peoples of the empire had a single focus for their imperial loyalty and patriotism.48 This suggests that contemporary understandings of the empire were complex, and in one sense were tiered according to race. A degree of inclusion of non-white imperial populations was evident in the collection, and potentially useful, but it had clear limitations.

Figure 13.3: King George V and Queen Mary inspecting Indian troops MBL, MB367/148806, British Official Photographer, Somme, France, August 1916 46

For further information see also “Imperial Legacies” exhibition website, especially, http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/imperial/picturing_legacies/4_148958.shtml. 47 See, MBL, MB367/149026 (George V with New Zealand soldier); MB367/ 148822 (Queen Mary visiting cheering soldiers), http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/ imperial/. 48 Ward, Britishness, 14–28.

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Figure 13.4: King George V, with Generals Godley, Plumer, and Harper, inspecting cheering New Zealand troops MBL, MB367/148958, British Official Photographer, Somme, France, August 1916

IV. MƗori depictions and racial theory This issue of imperial racial inclusion and exclusion took on a new dimension and relevance in New Zealand, because of the presence of MƗori.49 Depictions of MƗori in the collection show something of the complexity of the established racial hierarchy of the British Empire in the early twentieth century, and the nineteenth century racial theory that 49

MƗori inclusion and exclusion in New Zealand society is a much wider story. For further discussion see James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000 (Auckland: Allen Lane, 2001), especially chs 6–7; James Cowan, MƗori in the Great War (Christchurch: Willson Scott, 2011); Franchesca Walker, “‘Descendants of a Warrior Race’: The MƗori Contingent, New Zealand Pioneer Battalion, and Martial Race Myth, 1914–19”, War and Society 31:1 (March 2012).

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underpinned it. MƗori occupied a unique position in the established imperial racial hierarchy; unlike other non-white imperial groups, they were rhetorically “included” to a greater degree, but still excluded from the “white” British imperial family, and seen as inherently different. Although MƗori were something of an anomaly in New Zealand’s view of itself as “racially British”, they were also considered highly compared with other indigenous peoples encountered by British settlers, and generally considered the easiest to “civilize”. This led to attempts to “assimilate” or “whiten” MƗori in late nineteenth-century New Zealand, rather than excluding them altogether.50 This approach, while inherently racist, showed the variation in British imperial racial perceptions. Institutionally, however, MƗori were still excluded in the same way as other non-white imperial populations. The New Zealand Government initially refused the offer of a separate MƗori battalion, owing to an established British imperial prejudice about using non-white troops against a white enemy.51 (The Colonial Office had vetoed a MƗori Contingent in the South African War, though many MƗori enlisted and fought, just as many successfully joined regular New Zealand contingents between 1914 and 1918.) The offer of a MƗori battalion in the First World War was eventually accepted only because of the precedent set by the use of Indian soldiers to hold the Suez Canal.52 MƗori responses to the war were equally complex. As in the South African War, certain iwi (the term for the largest unit of MƗori social organization and tribal allegiance) eagerly volunteered out of loyalty to the Crown, mostly those who had fought for the British in the New Zealand

50

Belich, Paradise Reforged, 189–90, 106–207; see also Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke and New York, NY: Palgrave, 2002); Christina A. Thompson, “A Dangerous People Whose Only Occupation is War: MƗori and Pakeha in 19th Century New Zealand”, Journal of Pacific History 32:1 (June 1997), 109, 111–14. 51 Ashley Gould, ““Different Race, Same Queen”: MƗori and the War”, in John Crawford and Ian McGibbon (eds), One Flag, One Queen, One Tongue: New Zealand, the British Empire and the South African War (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003), 119–20; Walker, “Warrior Race”, 2; Christopher Pugsley, “Images of Te Hokowhitu A Tu in the First World War”, in Das (ed.), Race, Empire and First World War Writing, 197; P.S. O’Connor, “The Recruitment of MƗori Soldiers, 1914–1918”, Political Science 19:48 (1967): 49; see also Robb, British Culture, 8; Cowan, MƗori in the Great War, 15–21. 52 O’Connor, “Recruitment of MƗori Soldiers”, 49; Walker, “Warrior Race”, 2; Cowan, MƗori in the Great War.

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Wars of 1845 to 1872.53 Te Arawa, a confederation of MƗori tribes in the Rotorua and Bay of Plenty areas of the North Island, even published a pamphlet supporting MƗori conscription.54 Alongside this, however, significant MƗori resistance was still evident; MƗori in the Waikato region were particularly uncompromising, maintaining very low enlistment numbers, particularly among iwi with long-standing grudges against British rule, and those who had suffered extensive land confiscation.55 This resistance was at least partly a result of their perception that this was a British war, which, alongside long-simmering tensions over MƗori land confiscations under the Treaty of Waitangi, led to ideological exclusion and disillusionment, and a sense that MƗori did not have an interest in the war. This is illustrated well in a letter from a MƗori citizen, E. Karetai, to the Otago Daily Times in 1915: The MƗori understands that England has gone to war for honour’s sake— that Germany violated a “scrap of paper”, which her representative had signed for the protection of a small country. So far so good. But the mere MƗori mind cannot help asking, where is Britain’s honour? What about the “scrap of paper” Britain signed for the protection of a small people, and the promises contained therein? Why has Britain allowed the New Zealand Government to violate that “scrap of paper”, called the Treaty of Waitangi? Did I hear the Minister say those injustices were past? No; they live to-day, and will live for ever, a blot on New Zealand’s history, and—shall I say it?—on Britain’s honour and her much-vaunted fairplay.56

Echoing the general scarcity of depictions of MƗori in New Zealand war propaganda, there are only two photographs of MƗori in the collection, both showing members of the MƗori Pioneer Battalion, distinguishable by their New Zealand “lemon-squeezer” hats.57 The working battalion, which was used for such tasks as digging and making trenches, was established in 1916 from the front-line fighting Native Contingent, partly because of fears about the survival of the MƗori race, given heavy losses already sustained. These images, are notable for their 53 Cowan, MƗori in the Great War; Gould, “Different Race”, 120; see also James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (Auckland: Penguin, 1998). 54 TNA: PRO, CO 209/297 – 29649 “Pamphlet on the subject of conscription”, 17 June 1918, 439, 513–20. 55 Walker, “Descendants”, 4; O’Connor, “Recruitment”, 49, 65–67. 56 “MƗori Loyalty”, Otago Daily Times, 6 September 1915, 2. 57 See MBL, MB367/148902 (Member of the MƗori Pioneer Battalion at work); MB367/148903 (Member of the MƗori Pioneer Battalion conversing with a local woman), http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/imperial/.

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similarity to depictions of white British soldiers in the same circumstances. One in particular demonstrates the distinctiveness of depictions of MƗori compared with those of other non-white imperial groups. A MƗori soldier has stopped work to talk with a local French woman (Figure 13.5). While this image does not portray the same levels of inclusion as those showing white New Zealand soldiers, particularly given the racial dimension to the decision to reform the MƗori contingent into a pioneer battalion, it has similarities to some depictions of white imperial soldiers, specifically British troops interacting with local children.58 These images also align with a wider feature of British propaganda, that Britain’s war effort was defined by moral, just masculinity, against German barbaric masculinity. This atrocity narrative is another strong focus within the slides, with images of the destruction of French cathedrals, and one particular image of a postcard showing German troops inside a captured cathedral, to portray the German war effort as against civilization.59 This was a central rhetorical feature of British atrocity propaganda, particularly with regard to the German invasion of Belgium, which was depicted as tantamount to rape, accentuated by lurid, sexualized and, as Nicoletta Gullace argues, often pornographic, stories of the rape, mutilation, torture and murder of Belgian women and children by German soldiers.60 Conversely, “British” soldiers (implicitly white soldiers from the British Isles and the Dominions) were portrayed as ideals of masculine morality, bastions and protectors of civilized national values, defenders of women, children, family and home, and undeniably on the side of right.61 Photographs of imperial troops, whether white or MƗori, interacting with women and children 58 See, MBL, MB367/14897 (Australian soldiers at a water pump with French children); MB367/148951 (Australian troops having lunch with a group of French boys by a roadside), http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/imperial/. 59 See for e.g., MBL, MB367/149002 (Ruined interior of Notre Dame Cathedral); MB367/148984 (German postcard showing German desecration of a captured church), http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/imperial/; see also, “Imperial Legacies” exhibition website, especially, http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/imperial/picturing_ legacies/2_149002.shtml. 60 Gullace, Blood of Our Sons, 25, 31; Pickles, Transnational Outrage, 60–66; Monger, Patriotism and Propaganda, 115–16; Buitenhuis, War of Words, 27–28; Pickles, “Mapping Memorials”, 14. 61 Monger, Patriotism and Propaganda, 86; Gullace, Blood of Our Sons, 33; Buitenhuis, War of Words, 11–12; Olssen, “Waging War”, 302; Keith Scott, Dear Dot, I Must Tell You: A Personal History of Young New Zealanders (Auckland: Activity Press, 2011), 423–24; Pickles, “Mapping Memorials”, 14; Pickles, Transnational Outrage, 60–61; Nicola Lambourne, “Production versus Destruction: Art, World War I and art history”, Art History 22:3 (September 1999),

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Figure 13.5: A member of the New Zealand MƗori Pioneer Battalion conversing with a local woman MBL, MB367/148903, British Official Photographer, France, August 1916

supported this image. MƗori were not fully included in the central, white British family of the empire, but they were portrayed as much more active than simply imperial adornments. This inclusion of MƗori fits within broader attempts of both British and New Zealand propagandists to “reconceptualize” MƗori as racially “acceptable”. In particular, this was achieved through the application of the nineteenth-century racial theory of the “martial race” myth,62 which accommodated MƗori involvement and success in the war, and characterized depictions of MƗori in New Zealand’s wartime propaganda.63 During the Gallipoli campaign, for example, New Zealand newspapers emphasized the warrior-like qualities of the MƗori race, with depictions of MƗori soldiers cast as traditional warriors, or strongly linked to the spirits of their ancestors, overwhelming Turkish resistance through an innate skill in 352–53; Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 62 Walker, “Warrior Race”, 2, 15; O’Hara, “Networked World”, 612; Lester, “British Settler Discourse”, 25, 29. 63 Thompson, “A Dangerous People”, 109, 111–14.

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battle.64 British depictions of MƗori did the same; images of MƗori soldiers performing the haka were particularly popular in the British press.65 Though positive, this characterization was fundamentally distinct and separate, emphasising “exotic” aspects of MƗori culture.

V. Conclusion Despite being innovative in terms of the material and organization of Britain’s imperial propaganda campaign, the Macmillan Brown collection of First World War lantern slide photographs reflects the endurance of a traditional, exclusionary and racially hierarchical construction of the British Empire, in official British imperial war propaganda. Indigenous, non-white imperial troops are certainly visible in the collection, but the nature of their depiction suggests that, despite the war’s impact on the selfconfidence and self-perception of such populations, this change was not generally reciprocated by Britain and the Dominions. White members of the empire dominate the portrayal of the imperial war effort, and photographs emphasize an easy, close and familial relationship between them, a shared whiteness and Britishness. Non-white imperial troops are isolated, distinct and occasionally presented in an “exotic” manner, not interacting with white troops, or engaged in the same types of work, but merely as passive subject matter helping to represent the size, diversity and morality of the British Empire. Although this was not an absolute division, with symbols such as the British monarchy allowing for the depiction of imperial unity, and although some photographs, of MƗori for example, crossed the racial boundaries somewhat, there is still an obvious difference between these people and the white “core” of the empire. Particularly when set against racist and exclusionary attitudes evident in the organization of British imperial propaganda, the collection’s relevance is clear. It shows the endurance of traditional understandings of the British Empire in British imperial First World War propaganda, thus qualifying and complicating the idea of the conflict as a harbinger of imperial change and racial inclusion.

64

Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington (ATL), A-312-1-088 – Blomfield, William, “The Spirit of his Fathers”, New Zealand Observer, 25 December 1915; “The MƗoris at Gallipoli”, Free Lance, 23 December 1915, 9. 65 Pugsley, “Images of Te Hokowhitu”, 196, 200.

SECTION V MEMORIALS

CHAPTER FOURTEEN ENDURANCE, EPHEMERALITY AND NEW ZEALAND’S 1919 PEACE CELEBRATIONS1 IMELDA BARGAS The advent of peace was duly celebrated at the summit of Mount Maunganui; where a party of enthusiasts assembled to perform the mystic rites of fire worshippers. At 7.30 proceedings were commenced by a brilliant display of rockets, and punctually at 8 o’clock the beacon fire was lit … The first answering flash to be recognised was Omanawa. … Eyes were strained towards Waihi and Te Aroha but no answering flash appeared. … To the fourteen pioneer communities of the Bay of Plenty who participated in this little function we tender our felicitation and congratulations on the celebrations of peace. “The bonfires”, Bay of Plenty Times, 25 July 1919

The peace celebrations held throughout New Zealand in July 1919 were the country’s formal, official marking of the end of the First World War and among its most significant public events. They outshone earlier Armistice celebrations, not only because of the greater time and money expended but also because they involved groups excluded earlier by absence or illness. They also surpassed other similar events, reaching into communities that generally had to travel to take part in such occasions. As the above extract from the Bay of Plenty Times indicates, communities in the Bay of Plenty region lit beacon fires on various local peaks. Many places planted trees or unveiled memorials—either at the time or afterwards. The Bay of Plenty community erected a memorial on Mount Maunganui (Mauao) early the following year commemorating the lighting 1

Thanks to Neill Atkinson, David Green, Sarah Murray, David Monger and one anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on a draft of this chapter. Thanks also to Jamie Mackay, Tim Shoebridge and Peter Thomson for use of their photographs.

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of the beacon fires for peace.2 Yet despite their significance and these surviving physical reminders, these 1919 celebrations are largely forgotten. Some of these memorials were soon indistinguishable from war memorials, and to modern eyes the term “peace” can be misconstrued as something “anti-war”. This chapter examines influences on the structure and form of the celebrations, explores New Zealand’s peace celebrations in July 1919 and their surviving physical reminders and looks at the importance of the celebrations and considers why memory of them, and their original meaning, have proved more ephemeral than enduring.

I. The coal shortage, confusion and change New Zealand held its official peace celebrations in July 1919, many months after the German Armistice on 11 November 1918, to mark the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and the official end to the First World War. Almost immediately after they learned of the armistice, communities began to plan elaborate celebrations to be held once peace was confirmed. The Treaty of Versailles, the best known of the series of peace treaties signed between the Central and Allied Powers at the end of the war, was signed on 28 June 1919. In accordance with a proclamation from King George V following the signing, New Zealand held a day of thanksgiving on Sunday 6 July. Subsequently, celebrations were held throughout the country later in the month. Why did New Zealand decide to hold nationwide celebrations rather than events in one or more of the main centres? Why did most New Zealanders decide to hold three, or even four, days of celebration rather than one or two days? These decisions resulted in a display of nearly everything communities had to offer, and a flurry of memorial planting, unveiling, beautifying and planning. Yet the rationale was decidedly mundane. A worsening coal shortage and confusion over, and changes to, official plans played key roles. When the First World War broke out New Zealand was still dependent on coal. As well as being widely used for heating and cooking, coal powered the railways and shipping. It also powered gas and steam plants,

2

“The Bonfires”, Bay of Plenty Times (BPT), 25 July 1919, 3; “Local and general”, BPT, 13 August 1919, 2; “Peace celebration fires”, BPT, 11 September 1919, 2; “Local and general”, BPT, 19 February 1920, 2; “Local and general”, BPT, 8 March 1920, 2; “Mount Manganui Domain”, BPT, 25 March 1920, 3.

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which generrated electricityy for many ho ouseholds and industries.3 Difficulties D maintaining coal suppliees for these services s began an almost imm mediately after the deeclaration of war w in Augusst 1914. A shhortage of miiners and strike actionn disrupted innternal produ uction, while supplies coulld not be imported ow wing to a shoortage of shipping and heeavy demand in other countries. T The problems in maintainin ng supply weere compound ded by an increase in demand forr coal from the military.. After the influenza pandemic sstruck New Zealand in October 19118 the coal shortage worsened. M Mining areas were w badly afffected, leavinng the workfo orce even more depleteed, and quaranntine regulatio ons further dissrupted shippiing.4

Figure 14.1: M Memorial to beacon fires, Mou unt Maunganui Courtesy of T Tim Shoebridge,, Manatnj Taong ga/Ministry forr Culture and Heritage H

3

Megan Coook. “Energy suupply and use – Coal and ccoal gas”, Te Ara A – the Encyclopediaa of New Zeaaland, updated 13 July 201 2, http://www w.teara.govt .nz/en/energyy-supply-and-usse/page-7 (accesssed 25 July 20013). 4 “Report of tthe railway tim metable commisssion”, Appendiices to the Jourrnal of the House of Reppresentatives (A AJHR), D-2A, Wellington: Goovernment Prin nter, 1919; “Munitions aand Supplies Department”, D AJHR, A H-24, W Wellington: Go overnment Printer, 1917–1919; Kennetth Ian Bullock,, “The 1919 cooal crisis”, New w Zealand Railway Obseerver, 276 (Aprril/May 2006), 26–29. 2

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The government initially wanted to “centralize the celebrations as much as possible in order to make them more impressive”, but the coal shortage meant it was not viable to transport large numbers of people to the main centres.5 Because of the uncertainty surrounding rail services, the government gave more responsibility to local bodies to organize their own peace celebrations. In early December 1918 the Minister of Internal Affairs, George Russell, wrote to local bodies to advise that the government was granting them “full liberty” to make their own arrangements for peace celebrations, with its own proposals to come “in due course”.6 The celebrations subsequently took place across the country, everywhere from the main centres and their surrounding suburbs, to small towns and rural areas. Why, though, were the celebrations held over three days when surely one would be sufficient? In this case local communities appear to have been influenced by celebrations planned elsewhere in the country and the British Empire, and a lack of decisiveness on the part of the New Zealand and British governments. The Australian federal government announced its plans in mid-December, calling for three days of celebrations—a day of thanksgiving, a day of rejoicing and a children’s day. These plans were widely reported in New Zealand and were announced before the government had sent details of its proposal.7 The idea of a children’s day was not new. Days had been specially set aside for children at events and exhibits in the country in the past, notably during the 1913 visit of HMS New Zealand, the battlecruiser the country had gifted to the Royal Navy. Authorities set aside such days for practical reasons, such as controlling visitor numbers on any one day, but also to impress particular messages 5

Memoranda from J. Hislop, Under-Secretary, Department of Internal Affairs to Minister of Internal Affairs, 27 August 1919, 12 September 1919, “War [Subsidies to local bodies]”, ACGO 8333 Record group IA1 Box 1652 Record no 29/135/9, Part 2 (R12333449), Archives New Zealand (ANZ). 6 Letter, G.W. Russell, Minister of Internal Affairs to various councils/ boards, 2 December 1918, “Folder of notes on Peace Celebrations as they were held after the First World War for the Second World War celebrations”, ACGO 8366 Record group IA34 Box 13 Item 75 (R18919890), ANZ. 7 “Peace celebrations: Federal Committee to arrange”, Argus (Melbourne), 22 November 1918, 7; “Peace celebrations to extend over three days”, Argus, 12 December 1919, 7; “Australian news: peace celebrations”, New Zealand Herald (NZH), 13 December 1919, 7; “Celebration in Australia”, Evening Post (EP), 13 December 1919, 7; “Peace celebrations”, Press, 13 December 1919, 7; “Peace celebrations in Australia”, Otago Daily Times (ODT), 13 December 1919, 5; Letter, G.W. Russell, Minister of Internal Affairs to various councils/ boards, 2 December 1918, “Folder of notes on Peace Celebrations”.

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upon the children.8 Research by Charlotte Bennett into New Zealand children’s responses to crises between 1914 and 1918 highlights how they were also a significant focus of “war-related discourses” in school and at home during the First World War.9 On the same day that news of Australia’s plans came through Auckland announced that the city council had adopted its plans for three days of celebrations.10 A Peace Celebration Committee met to discuss proposals for the celebrations in late November, even before local bodies received notice of their “full liberty”.11 Its members initially looked to the government for advice “as to the length and form of the celebrations”, but on announcing their adopted plans in mid-December they commented that they had failed “to obtain any guidance or information in regard to the matter”.12 They noted the similarity of their plans to Australia’s, and contrasted their action with the government’s inaction.13 Auckland’s haste to get under way may be explained by the fact the city had to cancel or defer earlier Armistice celebrations because of the 1918 influenza pandemic. Like Australia’s plans, Auckland’s were widely reported throughout the country. Some reports made reference to the city’s problems during the pandemic and described its plans as “postponed peace celebrations”.14

8

“HMS New Zealand: Day for city children”, NZH, 26 April 1913, 8; “Children’s Day”, NZH, 28 April 1913, 5; “The New Zealand: Children’s Day aboard”, NZH, 6 May 1913, 8; “HMS New Zealand: Children’s Day”, Auckland Star (AS), 5 May 1913, 7; “Children’s Day”, Press, 15 May 1913, 7; “The New Zealand: visit of Dunedin children”, ODT, 21 May 1913, 6. 9 Charlotte Jayne Sylvia Bennett, “Now the War is Over, We Have Something Else to Worry us”: New Zealand Children’s Response to Crises, 1914–1918” (MA thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2012). And see chapter six. 10 “Peace celebrations: a suggested programme”, AS, 13 December 1919, 6; “Peace celebrations: proposals in Auckland”, NZH, 13 December 1919, 6. 11 “Peace celebrations: a programme outlined”, AS, 28 November 1919, 2; “Peace celebrations: proposals in Auckland”, NZH, 28 November 1919, 4. 12 “Peace celebrations: uniformity advocated”, NZH, 5 December 1919, 5. 13 “Peace celebrations: a suggested programme”, AS, 13 December 1919, 6; “Peace celebrations: proposals in Auckland”, NZH, 13 December 1919, 6. 14 “Peace celebrations: Auckland’s deferred plans”, Colonist, 29 November 1918, 6; “General news”, Press, 29 November 1918, 6; “Auckland: postponed peace celebrations”, Nelson Evening Mail (NEM), 28 November 1918, 5; “Peace celebrations”, Dominion (Dom), 29 November 1918, 4; “Peace celebrations”, EP, 28 November 1918, 7; “Joy for peace: what will be done here? Auckland’s plans”, EP, 17 December 1918, 10.

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Figure 14.2: IInscription on memorial m to beaacon fires, Mouunt Maunganui Courtesy of T Tim Shoebridge,, Manatnj Taong ga/Ministry forr Culture and Heritage H

Wellingtton’s initial plans for peacee celebrationss, discussed in n January 1919, appeaar to have beenn influenced by b those of A Auckland and Australia, A to which theey bore a stroong resemblan nce, includingg the format of o each of the three daays.15 So tooo did the New w Zealand goovernment’s proposals p when they w were announcced later the following fo monnth. Circulated d to local bodies in M March 1919, annd reported in n newspapers, they outlined d a trio of 15

Report, Finnance and Propeerty Committeee, January 15, 11919, “Peace ceelebrations – Minister off Internal Affairss, 1918–1939”, Wellington Citty Archives (W WCA).

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objectives for the celebrations, aligned to the now familiar three days of activity: (1) To express our gratitude for victory; (2) to recognise the splendid services of our soldiers; (3) to specially impress the minds of our children with the great event celebrated.16

The government’s proposals for three days of celebrations influenced communities that had not already followed the lead of Australia, Auckland and Wellington. They offered certainty about the structure and form the celebrations would likely take and, more crucially, offered generous subsidies towards them.17 This certainty was short-lived. In the months that followed the release of its proposals the government often altered or abandoned arrangements once it got information from its British counterpart. After preparing its own plans it asked the British Government whether the peace celebrations should occur after the preliminary or final peace. They failed to get an answer and, wanting to provide some certainty to the public, made their own decisions.18 In April 1919 Acting Prime Minister Sir James Allen announced Cabinet’s decision that the celebrations would occur on the Sunday, Monday and Tuesday after the announcement that preliminary peace had been signed.19 Despite its good intentions, this idea proved unpopular. Several local bodies expressed concern that it would not give them sufficient time to prepare, so in mid-May it was decided that peace celebrations would occur on the second Sunday, Monday and Tuesday

16

“For joy of peace: suggested celebrations”, EP, 18 February 1919, 8. The same proposals appeared under “Peace days in New Zealand”, Dom, 19 February 1919, 8. 17 Letter and booklet, G.W. Russell, Minister of Internal Affairs to various councils/ boards, 15 March 1919, “Folder of notes on Peace Celebrations”. 18 New Zealand was not alone in finding it difficult to get information out of the British Government about the peace celebrations. Questions asked in the British House of Commons in March, April and May 1919 elicited no further information about the government’s plans, other than that a Committee of the Cabinet was considering the matter. “House of Commons: Peace celebrations”, The Times, 13 March 1919, 14; “House of Commons: Peace celebrations”, The Times, 15 April 1919, 16; “House of Commons: Peace celebrations”, The Times, 13 May 1919, 16. 19 The Governor General of New Zealand to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 12 March 1919, “Ceremonies, entertainments, etc – celebrations – Peace Day – Proposals”, AAYS 8638 Record group AD1 Box 755* Record no. 15/183 (R22430145), ANZ; “Peace celebrations to follow preliminary treaty”, EP, 25 April 1919, 7.

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after the announcement.20 By this time information from London indicated that Britain intended to hold peace celebrations in July or August.21 It was not until mid-June that the British Government officially notified New Zealand of its plans, which by then involved four days of celebrations in August: a military pageant, a day of thanksgiving, a naval display and a children’s or general rejoicing day. Initially Cabinet agreed to fall in with the British plans and on 23 June advised the public that its previous plans would be abandoned. Just two days later the government announced that it would revert to its original plan and also suggested an activity for the day before the celebrations began—when the British Government planned to hold a “Naval Day”. Since New Zealand did not have a navy, and the season proved unsuitable for any sort of marine display, the government recommended that communities use the day before the celebrations to plant memorial trees. It encouraged local authorities, the Education Department, regional education boards and the Forestry Department to lend assistance.22 When it was decided in Britain, with the sanction of King George V, that all celebrations should be held on 19 July, the New Zealand government was notified of these revised plans by coded telegram early in the month. It explained that the dates had been altered in order to have the date of thanksgiving, 6 July, as close as possible to the actual signing of peace, and that general opinion supported bringing forward the date of the celebrations. When Cabinet met on 3 July it again agreed to follow Britain’s lead and abandon its previous plans, notably subsidies for Children’s Day.23 Many communities who had planned three days of celebrations were unhappy with this decision. Following protests Cabinet agreed to extend the subsidy to cover Children’s Day on 21 July as well as

20

IA Circular no. 109, Minister of Internal Affairs, 12 May 1919, “Ceremonies, entertainments, etc – celebrations – Peace Day – Proposals”, ANZ; “Days of celebration: a further week’s notice”, EP, 8 May 1919, 8. 21 “Peace celebrations, Dom, 29 April 1919, 5; Peace celebrations: provisional dates, Dom, 17 May 1919, 7; Peace celebrations: the British programme, Dom, 30 May 1919, 5. 22 “War [Subsidies to local bodies]”, ANZ; “Ceremonies, entertainments, etc – celebrations – Peace Day – Proposals”, ANZ; “Peace celebrations: new proposals approved”, EP, 23 June 1919, 8; “Peace celebrations: old arrangements cancelled”, Dom, 24 June 1919, 6; “Peace celebrations”, EP, 26 June 1919, 6; “Peace celebrations: a three-days’ programme”, Dom, 26 June 1919, 6. 23 “War [Subsidies to local bodies]”, ANZ; “Ceremonies, entertainments, etc – celebrations – Peace Day – Proposals”, ANZ; “Celebration arrangements”, EP, 3 July 1919, 8; “Peace celebrations: old programme cancelled”, Dom, 4 July 1919, 6.

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19 July.24 The two days were officially gazetted as public holidays on 16 July.25 After much confusion, the dates for the celebrations were finally set. Most communities subsequently followed a three-day programme along the lines of their initial plans and the government’s first proposals. This included holding a second day of thanksgiving in addition to the one they were asked to hold on 6 July. Many also went ahead with the tree planting previously recommended by the government—on Soldiers’ or Children’s Day, or in the weeks that followed.

II. Processions, proclamations and peace memorials Most communities celebrated Soldiers’ Day on Saturday 19 July. The main event was generally a procession through the main street or streets, usually held in the morning and involving both military and civilian participants. This was an opportunity to demonstrate and acknowledge the contribution of various groups to the war effort, from wounded and returned soldiers to patriotic organizations and businesses. The main centres were able to call on large numbers to participate in their processions, but those in smaller communities were no less impressive. Masterton’s mile (1.6km)-long procession included large models of a tank, a minesweeper and HMS New Zealand.26 The processions generally halted sometime before noon to allow people to accede to the government’s request for five minutes’ silence at midday.27 The pealing of bells, the firing of guns and/or buglers playing the “Last Post” generally signalled the beginning and/or the end of the period of silence.28

24 “Peace celebrations: question of expenses: protest to Minister”, Press, 7 July 1919, 7; “War [Subsidies to local bodies]”, ANZ; “Peace celebrations: continuation on Monday”, EP, 7 July 1919, 8; “Peace celebrations: about the celebrations”, Dom, 8 July 1919, 6. 25 “Public Holiday: Peace Celebrations”, New Zealand Gazette, 16 July 1919, 2398. 26 “Peace celebrations”, Wairarapa Daily Times (WDT), 21 July 1919, 5; “Peace: At Masterton”, Wanganui Chronicle (WC), 21 July 1919, 5. 27 “Peace celebrations”, New Zealand Gazette, 16 July 1919, 2379. 28 “Official programme”, NZH, 19 July 1919, 11; “Wellington’s Victory Celebrations”, EP, 21 July 1919, 3; “Saturday’s rejoicings”, WDT, 21 July 1919, 5; “Eltham”, Hawera & Normanby Star (HNS), 21 July 1919, 5; “The country centres”, NZH, 22 July 1919, 8; “In Invercargill”, Grey River Argus (GRA), 23 July 1919, 4; “Victory and Peace: celebrations in Dunedin”, ODT, 21 July 1919, 5–6.

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Some communities, such as Christchurch and Dunedin, had other events in the morning and held their processions in the afternoon,29 but most places devoted the second part of the day to sporting activities, ranging from track and field events and football matches to more lighthearted activities like pillow fights. In Middlemarch in Otago, for example, the afternoon’s events included “children’s races, returned soldiers’ race, serpentine race, tent pegging, lemon cutting, various races for adults and motor obstacle driving”.30 The appearance of sporting activities on such a “soldier-orientated” day was not unusual; sport had long been an important element of military service. During the First World War New Zealand troops took part in sports while in training and once overseas,31 and sports meetings were also frequently staged in New Zealand for fundraising purposes. Bunnythorpe held several patriotic sports meetings during the war with similar activities, from races for children to tug of war for adults.32 The planting of peace or victory trees was another popular activity on both Soldiers’ and Children’s Day. Most communities planted individual peace trees or pairs of peace and victory trees. There are a number of surviving examples. One is the oak “planted in commemoration of the signing of Peace after the Great War 1914–1918” by Temuka’s mayoress at Victoria Park (now Temuka Domain).33 And in Ashburton Domain stand a peace oak planted by the mayoress, and a victory oak, planted by a local woman who sent six sons to the war and lost two.34 Other communities planted groves and avenues of trees. On Soldiers’ Day 29

Christchurch held a military procession on the afternoon of 19 July but held their civic procession after their children’s procession on 21 July. Returned soldiers also took part in this much larger procession. “Peace acclaimed”, Press, 21 July 1919, 7; “Peace jubilations”, Press, 22 July 1919, 7; “Victory and Peace: celebrations in Dunedin”, ODT, 21 July 1919, 5. 30 “Victory and Peace: celebrations in Dunedin”, Otago Witness (OW), 23 July 1919, 21. 31 Ian McGibbon. “Military and sport – Military and sport overview”, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 9 July 2013, http://www.teara.govt.nz/ en/military–and–sport/page–1 (accessed 31 Oct 2013). 32 “Bunnythorpe”, Feilding Star, 15 January 1915, 4; 2 March 1917, 1; 21 February 1918, 2. 33 “Peace celebrations: Temuka”, Press, 24 July 1919, 10; Peter Thomson, Horticulture Officer, Parks and Recreation Unit, Timaru District Council, email message to author, 7 December 2012. 34 “Local and general”, Ashburton Guardian (AG), 22 July 1919, 4; David Askin, Manager of Parks and Recreation, Ashburton District Council, email message to author, 17 January 2013.

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Methven reesidents plantted six comm memorative ooak trees: to “Peace”, “British”, “F French”, “Bellgian”, “Victo ory” and “Emp mpire”. Severall of these appear to haave survived, including “Peeace” in front of the Holmees bequest reserve, now w the site of Methven’s Memorial M Halll, and “Victorry” at the intersection of McKerroow Street an nd Forest D Drive. At som me point “Empire”, aat the corner of McMillan an nd Chapman streets, was reeduced to a stump.35

Figure 14.3: ““Peace” tree at Victoria Park (n now Temuka D Domain) Courtesy of P Peter Thomson, Timaru Districct Council 35

“Methven’ss festival”, AG, 22 July 1919, 2. 2 David Askin,, email messagee.

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It seems likely that thhere were seveeral influencess behind this memorial m tree plantingg. Individual trees, groves and avenues had long been n planted for commem morative purpooses both interrnationally annd nationally, including during the w war to mark events such as the return of the counttry’s first wounded frrom Gallipoli.36 The gov vernment hadd also suggested tree planting as an activity for fo the celebraations. Recennt research by y Jo-anne Morgan on trees and coommemoration ns outlines seeveral reason ns for the planting of war memoriaal avenues, which w also appply to individ dual trees. They were ““generally quuick and easy to arrange … and did not incur the acrimony thhat accompaniied many otheer types of waar memorials” and they had the advvantage of “achieving both memorialiization and vegetative v enhancemennt”.37 The ideea of a livin ng, growing m memorial to peace or victory mayy also have beeen important, perhaps expllaining their popularity p on Childrenn’s Day. Thiss idea is men ntioned in a rreport in Welllington’s Dominion nnewspaper reggarding the planting of peaace trees in Newtown N Park and thee Botanic Garddens:

Figure 14.4: IInscription undeer “Peace” tree at Victoria Park rk (now Temukaa Domain) Courtesy of P Peter Thomson, Timaru Districct Council 36

“Country nnews”, NZH, 16 July 1915, 10; 1 “Local and general”, WDT, 16 July 1915, 4. 37 Jo-anne Maary Morgan, “A Arboreal Eloqueence: Trees andd Commemorattion” (PhD thesis, Univerrsity of Canterbbury, 2008).

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Chapter Fourteen There is perhaps no more beautiful or serviceable way of celebrating peace than to plant a tree, one that can be referred to and looked upon in future years as having been given life to in the year of the peace made and ratified in the Treaty of Versailles.38

Some communities took steps towards erecting war memorials. For example during celebrations in Hokitika on 19 July locals turned the first sod for the Scots’ Memorial Church and laid a foundation stone for a memorial wing at Westland Hospital (since demolished).39 The church, now known as St Andrew’s United, was not erected until 1935 and was built on a different site to where the first sod was turned.40 As evening fell the activities continued in most communities, with dances, torchlight processions, bonfires and fireworks the most popular entertainments. Because of a coal shortage the government ruled that “illuminations” involving the consumption of coal would not be allowed.41 In areas that received electricity from another source many buildings were illuminated and touring illuminations was a popular night-time activity. Christchurch, which took its electricity from the power station at Lake Coleridge, had an extensive display.42 In areas that were dependent on coal

38

“Planting peace trees”, Dom, 21 July 1919, 8. Wellington City Council has been unable to confirm whether these memorial trees survive. Winsome Shepherd and Walter Cook’s book on Wellington’s Botanic Gardens does not refer to these trees but does note that many older trees were destroyed or removed following the Wahine storm in 1968. Winsome Shepherd and Walter Cook, The Botanic Garden, Wellington: a New Zealand history 1840–1987 (Wellington: Millwood Press, 1988). 39 “The celebrations: Hokitika’s celebrations”, GRA, 19 July 1919, 3; “Westland Memorials”, AS, 19 July 1919, 7; Joy Johnston, “Consider the Years”: St Andrew’s Presbyterian Parish: Hokitika and Kumara: A Centennial History (Hokitika, Kumara: St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, 1966), 32; Various pamphlets: “Scots Memorial Church Committee, 1919–1935”, P14003, Hokitika Parish, 1995/13/7, ZA 1/14, Presbyterian Archives of New Zealand.; “Westland war memorial hospital,” NZHistory, http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/media/photo/hokitika-hospitalwar-memorial (accessed 25 July 2013); Mary Rooney, Collections Curator, Hokitika Museum, email message to author, 29 November 2012. 40 Johnston, “Consider the Years”; “St Andrew’s United Church (Presbyterian/ Methodist),” http://www.historic.org.nz/TheRegister/RegisterSearch/RegisterResults .aspx?RID=5013 (accessed 25 July 2013). 41 “Illuminations restricted”, Dom, 8 July 1919, 6; “War [Subsidies to local bodies]”, ANZ. 42 “ In the evening: Fairyland” “City illuminations”, Press, 21 July 1919, 7, 10; “Fairyland” “Illuminations”, Weekly Press (WP), 30 July 1919, 43, 45.

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for electricity, such as Wellington or Auckland, there were few illuminations.43 Several communities interchanged the days on which they celebrated Soldiers’ and Children’s Day, but the day of thanksgiving, where celebrated, was almost always on Sunday 20 July. Most had already held a thanksgiving day on 6 July, but this did not deter them from carrying out their existing plans, which many had spent several months developing.44 The format was fairly similar on both days. Communities generally held special services at all churches and many also held large combined services; these were well attended in all the main centres. Thousands took part in a “peace thanksgiving service” at Christchurch’s King Edward Barracks. The Bishop of Christchurch led the service, while an orchestra of eighty instruments and a 500-voice choir led the singing of songs that included the national anthem and Handel’s Hallelujah chorus. As The Press reported, ‘It will be an unforgettable memory to those present to hear that huge assemblage rendering homage to the Almighty, to hear 15,000 throats pouring forth thanksgiving.’45 On this day some churches took steps towards erecting war memorials. The Anglican Bishop of Auckland, Dr Alfred Averill, laid the foundation stone for the St Paul’s Parish Memorial Tramway Shelter.46 The shelter, dedicated “to the men and women of the parish who gave their lives in the war”, was completed in 1920. By 1971 it had ceased to be used, was in disrepair and was demolished.47 The events held in communities on Children’s Day probably varied the most of all the peace celebration days. Many communities began the day 43 “ In the evening: Fairyland” “City illuminations”, Press, 21 July 1919, 7, 10; “Fairyland” “Illuminations”, WP, 30 July 1919, 43, 45; “The lights at night: a patchy brilliance”, AS, 19 July 1919, 7; “Advent of peace: the illuminations”, AS, 22 July 1919, 8; “Night scenes”, Dom, 21 July 1919, 8. 44 “Ministerial files – peace messages”, ADBQ 16145 Record group ALLEN1 Box 5 Record no. M2/85 (R22319766), ANZ; “War [Subsidies to local bodies]”, ANZ; “Ceremonies, entertainments, etc – celebrations – Peace Day – Proposals”, ANZ; “Peace celebrations”, Dom, 4 July 1919, 6; “Peace Sunday”, Dom, 7 July 1919, 6; “Offering praise for the victory”, AS, 7 July 1919, 7; “Thanksgiving services”, Press, 7 July 1919, 7; “Peace celebrations”, ODT, 7 July 1919, 8. 45 “Thanksgiving services”, Press, 21 July 1919, 7. 46 AS, “Peace celebrations: St Paul’s War Memorial”, 16 July 1919, 5; “Peace celebrations: in memory of the dead: St. Paul’s Parish Memorial”, 22 July 1919, 7; “Memorials to fallen: St Paul’s Anglican Parish”, NZH, 22 July 1919, 8. 47 “Memorial to fallen: shelter by wayside”, NZH, 29 March 1920, 6; “The men who died: war memorial unveiled”, AS, 29 March 1920, 4; “Old Memorial Stone Shelter to be Demolished”, NZH, 30 December 1971, 1.

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with a children’s procession, though some combined these with the soldiers’ and civic processions on another day. Some activities had educational purposes; others were pure entertainment. Educational activities included gathering children together to listen to the king’s peace proclamation and speeches from local or central government officials, and the singing of patriotic songs, especially the national anthem. In Dunedin children cheered and applauded the standard speeches, such as a lengthy one on “a healthy mind in a healthy body”. They responded even more enthusiastically to the entertainment, which included a leopard being led about the building.48 Children’s Day entertainment ranged from sports and games to picture shows, concerts, lunches and afternoon teas. Dunedin’s leopard may have been the most exotic entertainment, but children in parts of Auckland may have been equally excited to see Father Christmas turn up after missing out the previous Christmas because of the influenza pandemic.49 Some schools unveiled honours boards. At Wellington’s Karori School local MP R.A. Wright unveiled a board containing some 200 names.50 As noted, tree planting was also popular on Children’s Day, though many of the trees were dedicated to a school’s fallen rather than to peace or victory. Communities continued to unveil or plant memorials in association with the peace celebrations in the months and years that followed. A number of these survive. The most notable example is the memorial erected on Mount Maunganui (Mauao) in March 1920 to commemorate the lighting of the beacon fires for peace.51 Other communities appear to have used the term or name “peace”, on what could equally have been or later became “war” memorials, because they began or progressed their plans around the time of the peace celebrations. Le Bons Bay residents on Banks Peninsula had long felt the need for a library but had neither money nor land for it and “upon the coming of war” put off work towards it. They reinitiated plans for it during the peace celebrations, deciding it would be a “peace memorial library”. It was completed by late 1919 and includes a dedication to Peace Day, 19 July that year, above the front door.52 Ormondville’s “peace memorial” 48

“Victory and Peace: celebrations in Dunedin”, OW, 23 July 1919, 20. “Monday’s festivities: entertaining the children”, AS, 22 July 1919, 8. 50 EP, “Karori Peace Celebrations”, 10 July 1919, 7; “Karori’s memorial unveiled”, 21 July 1919, 8; “Peace days: At Karori”, 22 July 1919, 3. 51 See n. 2. 52 Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser (AMBPA) “Peace memorial”, 1 August 1919, 2; “New library”, 23 September 1919, 2; “Le Bons Bay Road Board”, 25 May 1920, 4; “Le Bons Bay News”, 27 August 1920, 3; “Local and 49

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hall, completed in 1921–22, and Hawera’s “peace memorial” arch, finished in 1924, were similarly conceived during discussions or planning of the peace celebrations.53 Wairau Valley in Marlborough opened a memorial hall on the anniversary of the celebrations, dedicating it to “the happiest event of their lifetime—Peace Day”.54 Other examples where there is not a link to the celebrations or where the link is not clear, including the Clarkeville Peace Hall, completed in 1921, the Kowai County Council Peace Memorial, completed in 1922 and the Ophir Peace Memorial Hall, completed in 1926. In their history of New Zealand war memorials, The Sorrow and the Pride, Chris Maclean and Jock Phillips do not devote a lot of attention to peace memorials, which they describe as “another common name” for war memorials. They do not outline, or perhaps did not appreciate, the relationship between these memorials and the country’s peace celebrations. Significantly they do explain that they were not called peace memorials “because of any anti-war sentiments”.55 Some peace or victory trees were planted as part of delayed peace celebrations.56 Other communities, particularly schools, also planted such trees during their Arbor Day celebrations. This may have been influenced by the Education Department’s decision to observe Arbor Day on 23 July, close to the peace celebrations. In practice schools observed the day at various times from July to September. But the proximity of the date to the celebrations, and the end of the war more generally, seems to have led a

general”, 19 July 1921, 2; Margaret Jenner, Small Libraries of New Zealand (Tauranga: Bay of Plenty Polytechnic, 2005), 64–65. 53 Dannevirke Evening News (DEN), “Ormondville”, 17 July 1919, 4; 27 April 1921, 3, 15 November 1921, 5; 4 January 1922, 5–6; 26 April 1922, 5; “Entertainments”, 9 November 1921, 1; F.O. Playle, 101 Years of Ormondville (Ormondville: Ormondville Centennial Committee, 1978), 125. “Peace memorial”, HNS, 20 February 1919, 5; “The Great War: unveiling of memorial arch”, HNS, 12 June 1924, 10. Articles in the DEN indicate the Ormondville Hall was in use by 1921 but it is possible this was an existing hall on the site that was temporarily renamed. 54 Murial Lott, Old Hillesden (Blenheim: A.E. Cresswell Ltd, 1977); “Peace memorial”, Marlborough Express (ME), 20 July 1920, 5. 55 Chris Maclean and Jock Phillips, The Sorrow and the Pride: New Zealand War Memorials, (Wellington: Historical Branch, Department of Internal Affairs and GP Books: 1990), 72. 56 AG, “Peace Oak planted at Hampstead School”, 15 August 1919, 3, “Lismore and Carew”, 6 September 1919, 5, “Lowcliffe”, 22 September 1919, 7; AMBPA, “Akaroa Peace Celebrations: Planting of Memorial Oaks”, 5 August 1919, 4, “Planting of Peace Oaks”, 12 August 1919, 2.

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Figure 14.5: L Le Bons Bay Peeace Memorial Library Courtesy of JJamie Mackay, Manatnj M Taonga a/Ministry for C Culture and Herritage

number to decide to plaant trees ded dicated to peaace, victory or o to the fallen.57

III.. Elaboratee, extensive and all enccompassing g The sparse ccoverage of the celebration ns in New Zeealand’s historriography fails to refllect their signnificance. They were partticularly signiificant in comparison with earlier Armistice A celeebrations, giveen the negativ ve impact of the influeenza pandemicc on celebratio ons in some pparts of the cou untry and the return oof many of thhe country’s soldiers by tthe time of the t peace 57

“Local andd general news””, HNS, 19 May y 1919, 4; “Genneral news”, Prress, 5 July 1919, 8; “Aveenue of trees pllanted at New Brighton”, B Presss, 28 July 1919, 8; “The country”, Preess, 6 August 1919, 3; “The country”, Prress, 9 Augustt 1919, 3; “Auckland Edducation Boardd”, Northern Ad dvocate, 12 Jully 1919, 4; “Arrbor Day”, Ohinemuri G Gazette, 14 Julyy 1919, 3; “Local and general””, AG, 8 Augusst 1919, 4; “Rakaia”, AG G, 2 Septemberr 1919, 5; School Journal, W Wellington: New w Zealand Education Deepartment, Julyy 1919, 131. For further inform mation on Arbo or Day and the planting oof memorial treees more generally see Morgann, “Arboreal Elo oquence”.

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celebrations. They also surpassed other similar events if only because of geographic spread. By the time of the peace celebrations in July 1919 New Zealanders had already celebrated the “end” of the war four or five times. Before the Armistice with Germany on 11 November 1918 they had held enthusiastic celebrations following armistices with Bulgaria, the Ottoman Turkish Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and a premature armistice. But the spontaneous nature of these armistice announcements left little or no time to plan celebrations,58 although more preparation went into celebrations following the well-anticipated November 1918 event. Communities took such preparations to an entirely new level for the peace celebrations. In Christchurch one committee was involved in planning the city’s celebrations following the German armistice; six were involved in preparations for its peace celebrations.59 Time was not the only factor that allowed communities to expand their celebrations. The government also provided a generous subsidy to help local bodies meet celebration costs.60 The amount eventually paid ranged from a few pounds for small local bodies, such as the Katikati Road Board, to several hundred pounds for large councils, such as Wellington City Council.61 Extra time and money meant that the peace celebrations could surpass earlier events in style and scale, and allowed communities to produce lasting souvenirs ranging from booklets outlining the celebrations to individually named certificates for Children’s Day.62 Earlier celebrations, particularly in Auckland, had also sometimes been constrained owing to the influenza pandemic that struck the country in 1918.63 By late October influenza had reached epidemic proportions in 58

“Armistice Day”, NZHistory, http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/war/armistice-day (accessed 29 July 2013). 59 “When Germany surrenders”, Press, 11 November 1919, 10–11; City of Christchurch, NZ: peace celebrations (Christchurch: Peace Celebrations Committee, 1919). 60 Letter and booklet, G.W. Russell, Minister of Internal Affairs to various councils/ boards, March 15, 1919, “Folder of notes on Peace Celebrations”. 61 Memorandum, Accountant, Department of Internal Affairs to The UnderSecretary, Department of Internal Affairs, 28 January 1920, “War [Subsidies to local bodies]”, ANZ; Letter, The Under-Secretary, Department of Internal Affairs to Town Clerk, Wellington City Council, 16 December 1919, “Peace celebrations – Minister of Internal Affairs, 1918–1939”, WCA. 62 City of Christchurch, NZ: peace celebrations; “Children’s Day peace souvenir certificate”, 1919, Tauranga Heritage Collection. 63 Geoffrey Rice, Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2nd rev. ed., 2005).

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Auckland and though there were some celebrations of the various armistices, particularly the false armistice on 8 November, there were no official public gatherings.64 On the day the city received news of the real German armistice the only visible sign of celebration were the many flags hanging from the city’s buildings, and some of these were at half-mast in acknowledgement of the death from influenza of former city councillor, Maurice Casey.65 The pandemic also influenced celebrations elsewhere on the day news of the real German armistice was received. Featherston residents changed their plans for “a fully-organized procession of motor-cars”, out of respect for several soldiers from the military camp who had died of the flu being laid to rest that day with full military funeral honours.66 Some communities postponed children’s gatherings until the situation in their area improved. Christchurch abandoned their plans for local children but agreed that they would make up for this later, pledging to give “the children the biggest part in the proceedings to take place on the final Peace Day”.67 And children did play a large part in Christchurch’s peace celebrations: there were special thanksgiving services at various churches for children on the day of thanksgiving and a children’s procession on Children’s Day.68 Most of New Zealand’s troops could not participate in the earlier armistice celebrations. Although some 30,000 men had returned to New Zealand since 1915, in November 1918 over 50,000 remained overseas.69 64 “The news in Auckland”, NZH, 2 November 1918, 10; “Rejoicing in Auckland”. NZH, 5 November 1918, 6; “The day: rejoicing citizens: frantic crowds in the streets”, AS, 8 November 1918, 4. 65 “The armistice: news received quietly: health officer’s request observed: no public rejoicing”, AS, 12 November 1918, 4; “Untimely holiday: public services suspended”, “Cessation of hostilities: the news in Auckland: no public demonstration”, NZH, 13 November 1918, 6. 66 “Armistice Day: celebrations in Featherston”, Dom, 14 November 1918, 9. 67 “No children’s demonstration: banned by health authorities”, Press, 12 November 1918, 8. 68 “Thanksgiving services”, Press, 21 July 1919, 7; “Peace jubilations: Christchurch en fete: the children’s demonstration”, Press, 22 July 1919, 7. 69 New Zealand Official Yearbook (Wellington: Government Printer, 1919), 257: 52,123 men overseas at declaration of Armistice; Lt H.T.B. Drew, The War Effort of New Zealand (Auckland: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1923), 164: 28,182 returned by 31 December 1918, at Armistice 56,684 men yet to be returned to their homes; New Zealand Expeditionary Force: Its provision and maintenance (Wellington: Government Printer, 1919), 49–51: same as New Zealand Yearbook but total of 56,436 including 3313 “on water”, and 24,015 returned to 12 November 1918;

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The Defence Department could not initiate demobilization immediately after the Armistice; it was an armistice, not peace.70 The remaining men returned gradually over the next few weeks, months and years, though the vast majority came home during 1919.71 When the men arrived in New Zealand they were generally taken home from their port of disembarkation with little ceremony. This occurred not only because they returned gradually, but also because the Defence authorities gave priority to getting them to their families and discouraged formal welcomes and speech making. Notable exceptions included the first large group of Main Body men, the New Zealand (MƗori) Pioneer Battalion and the handful of Victoria Cross winners.72 By July 1919 the bulk of the troops had returned and the peace celebrations provided an opportunity for the community to recognize them in a way they had not yet been able to. In its proposals the government requested that during the celebrations “all returned soldiers will wear their uniforms and be placed in positions of honour”, in line with its second stated objective “to recognize the splendid services of our soldiers”.73 “Demobilisation – Return monthly – disposal men return to New Zealand 1919– 1919”, AAYS 8638 (AD1) Box 1055 Record no. 75/56 (R22436505), ANZ: monthly breakdown – 26,000 returned by November 1918. 70 “Demobilisation – Weekly press and Parliamentary summary – War Office”, AAYS 8638 Record group AD1 Box 1051 Record no. 75/13/1 (R22436437), ANZ; “Reports by Gen. Richardson in UK No. 23–32 Nov–1917–Feb 1919”, ACID Record group WA Series 231 Box 11, ANZ; “Demobilisation: notes for the troops: expectation in England”, EP, 23 January 1919, 7; “Return of Expeditionary Force”, New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 183, 955–956, 1918. 71 “Demobilisation – Return monthly – disposal men return to New Zealand 1919– 1919”, ANZ; “Register of returning drafts, Jan 1917–Mar 1921”, ACID Record group WA Series 231 Box 14, ANZ; “Demobilisation of HQ [Headquarters] NZEF [New Zealand Expeditionary Force] in United Kingdom”, AAYS 8638 Record group AD1 Box 1054 Record no. 75/44 (R22436487), ANZ. 72 Research on demobilization completed for chapter on the end of the war in upcoming book by Imelda Bargas and Tim Shoebridge, working title “New Zealand’s First World War Heritage”, due to be published by Exisle Publishing in 2015; “Local and general”, EP, 22 January 1919, 6; “Returning troops and public receptions”, AS, 25 January 1919, 4; “Returning soldiers”, Press, 28 January 1919, 6; “Returning men: their welcome home: the authorities troubles”, Dom, 5 February 1919, 6; “Ceremonies, entertainments etc – reception sick and wounded returning”, AAYS 8638 Record group AD1 Box 753 Record no. 15/58 (R2243011), ANZ; John Barr, The City of Auckland, New Zealand: A history, (Christchurch: Capper Press Ltd, 1985), 225–26. 73 Letter and booklet, G.W. Russell, Minister of Internal Affairs to various councils/ boards, 15 March 1919, “Folder of notes on Peace Celebrations”.

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They were honoured at and involved in most peace celebration activities around the country, particularly on Soldiers’ Day. Their parades elicited cheers and exclamations; they were fed at luncheons and banquets, and entertained with dances and concerts. A number of newspaper reports, however, suggest that some returned men were reluctant to “don” their uniforms and take part in the military processions and that they participated, or were persuaded to participate, more for others than for themselves.74 Finally the geographic spread of the celebrations was unusual. For similar public occasions people in small communities were taken to larger centres, such as during the 1913 tour of HMS New Zealand.75 Even the Prince of Wales’s extensive tour of the country in 1920 did not reach into as many small communities as the peace celebrations.76

IV. Ephemeral or enduring? Despite the extent of peace celebrations in July 1919, their significance at the time and the surviving physical reminders, they have proved largely ephemeral. Few scholars have written about them to any great extent since they were staged.77 Within New Zealand historiography the celebrations are mentioned occasionally but are generally not discussed or analysed in any detail. Broad histories of the country normally dedicate only a few pages to the First World War and usually conclude these sections with the impact of the 1918 influenza pandemic rather than the celebrations.78 74

“Children’s Day”, AS, 4 July 1919, 6; “Returned soldiers” association”, AG, 8 July 1919, 3; “Honour the uniform”, WC, 9 July 1919, 4; “Returned soldiers and peace”, 14 July 1919, 4. 75 Neill Atkinson, Trainland: How Railways Made New Zealand (Auckland: Random House, 2007), 87. 76 Guy H. Scholefield, Visit of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales to the Dominion of New Zealand April–May 1920 (Wellington: Government Printer, 1926). 77 For celebrations in England see “Aftermath: Peace Day 19 July 1919”, Aftermathww1, accessed 29 July 2013, http://www.aftermathww1.com/peaceday. asp; For celebrations in Ireland see Nuala Christina Johnson, Ireland, the Great War and the Geography of Remembrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 56–79. 78 James Belich, A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000 (Auckland: Allen Lane, 2001); Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 2003); Geoffrey Rice (ed.), The Oxford History of New Zealand, Second Edition (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1992). There is a brief mention of planned celebrations in Matthew Wright,

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Histories focused on military history or the First World War also give little or no space to the celebrations. The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Military History does not contain a “peace celebrations” entry.79 Michael King’s New Zealanders at War includes a photograph of Christchurch’s celebrations but contains no explanatory text beyond the caption, “War’s end and the return of the surviving troops brought a series of victory celebrations”.80 Stevan Eldred-Grigg’s history The Great Wrong War: New Zealand Society in WWI probably provides the most extensive discussion and analysis of the celebrations, devoting a little over a page to what he calls “Peace Day”. He gives an interesting description of dissent towards the celebrations from such groups as the Labour Federation, but does not explain basic details such as the relationship of “Peace Day” to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, or that there were three days of peace celebrations, not only “Peace Day” (a common term given to the main day of celebrations on Saturday, the Soldiers’ Day).81 Damien Fenton’s New Zealand and the First World War 1914–1919 does not discuss the celebrations at any length but does provides some of the basic details. He draws attention to the connection between the celebrations and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles by placing them in a section explaining the various peace treaties signed from 1919 onwards.82 The celebrations are mentioned more frequently in local histories.83 Yet, like many of the histories that refer to them, they often fail to explain or understand the relationship between the celebrations and the signing of peace. For example, a caption to a photograph of the celebrations in Sally Parker’s Reed Illustrated History of New Zealand (Auckland: Reed Publishing (NZ) Ltd, 2004), 272. 79 Ian McGibbon (ed.), The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Military History (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 2000). 80 Michael King, New Zealanders at War (Auckland: Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 2003), 159. 81 Stevan Eldred-Grigg, The Great Wrong War: New Zealand Society in WWI (Auckland: Random House New Zealand, 2010), 416–17. 82 Damien Fenton, New Zealand and the First World War 1914–1919 (Auckland: Penguin Group (NZ), 2013), 102–03. 83 Some local histories that mention or discuss the peace celebrations include: S.G. Laurenson, Rangitikei: The Day of Striding Out (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1979), 109; B.H. Bull, The Years Between: Greytown Borough Centennial 1878–1978 (Carterton: Roydhouse Publishing Ltd, 1986), 62–63; John Wilson, Cheviot Kingdom to County (Cheviot: Cheviot Historical Records Society Inc., 1993), 212; Henry D. Kelly, As High as the Hills: The Centennial History of Picton (Queen Charlotte Sound: Cape Catley Ltd, 1976), 196–97; Barr, The City of Auckland, 224–25.

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1986 history of Cambridge could be read as suggesting that the celebrations were simply some sort of delayed Armistice celebrations, not separate events in their own right.84 The celebrations are, in the main, absent from most local histories. This absence from New Zealand historiography could be attributed to the time that has elapsed since the celebrations occurred, but the same cannot be said for the war itself, the Armistice or the 1918 influenza pandemic. Even just a year later only a handful of areas marked or remarked upon the anniversary of the peace celebrations.85 A critical factor appears to have been that they were not held until a few weeks after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, and so were not linked in a continuing way to that historic event. In contrast the country celebrated immediately after receiving the news of the German armistice, and that event came to be commemorated annually on 11 November. Even if the celebrations had been more closely linked to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, this event did not have lasting meaning for New Zealanders in the same way the war and the Armistice did. The war saw thousands of New Zealanders separated from their families for service at home or overseas, many never to return. Whereas the Armistice largely bought about an end to the heavy casualties and meant that the country’s surviving soldiers would eventually return home, the treaty did not deliver such immediate or individual costs or benefits. Its legacy to the country was largely economic, in the form of a booming superphosphate industry made possible because New Zealand was given access to the huge phosphate deposits on the island of Nauru.86 It was the treaty’s failure to secure lasting peace, rather than its signing, that had a greater impact on New Zealand. Within twenty years New Zealanders would be heading overseas to fight in another world war. Where they are remembered, the July 1919 peace celebrations are also sometimes confused with earlier Armistice celebrations. Film footage and photographs of the celebrations are often misidentified as dating from November 1918.87 They celebrated similar events—the signing of 84

Sally K. Parker, Cambridge: An Illustrated History 1886–1986 (Cambridge: Cambridge Borough Council, 1986), 76, 82. 85 “Peace memorial”, ME, 20 July 1920, 5; “Local and general news”, NZH, 19 July 1920, 4. 86 Fenton, New Zealand and the First World War, 103. 87 Examples include a caption to a video of the Dunedin’s peace celebrations on Te Ara the Online Encyclopedia of New Zealand that describes the events as taking place after the signing of the Armistice: Nancy Swarbrick. “Public holidays – Celebrating imperial ties”, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated

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armistice agreements and of a peace treaty—and also involved the same activities, from parades and gatherings to patriotic speeches and songs, though the peace celebrations were on a much grander scale. A detail that probably contributes to the confusion is the fact that the earlier Armistice celebrations were also commonly referred to as “peace celebrations” at the time.88 With no ongoing link to a historic event, or at least not one with lasting meaning to New Zealanders, memorials to the celebrations did not become rallying points for individual or community remembrance. The country’s many war memorials, however, became both places for individuals to mourn sons, fathers, brothers or friends, and for communities to honour the fallen on such occasions as Armistice Day (11 November) and Anzac Day (25 April).89 Many of these memorials continue to be used in this way more than a century after the beginning of the First World War. The nature of the memorials chosen to mark or commemorate the peace celebrations also contributed to their being overlooked, or confused with earlier events. The devolved structure of and participation in the celebrations led individual communities to develop discrete memorials within their own areas. And these tended to be on a modest scale, notably through the planting of memorial trees. These were the most popular choice for memorials, and are less identifiable than, for example, a stone obelisk or a statue of a soldier. Also, as Morgan argues in her recent research into commemorative trees, such trees are at great risk of being removed as a result of ageing, weather and development and of losing 3 July 2013, http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/video/32469/armistice-celebrations (accessed 31 October 2013). A number of aspects indicate that this film is of the July 1919 peace celebrations rather than the 1918 Armistice: the elaborate nature of the floats in the parade, the leafless wintry trees and the presence of ferns (a feature of the peace celebrations). Newspaper accounts of each event confirm that floats prominent in the video, such as that with the banner “The Peace Makers”, were in the peace celebrations not Armistice processions (“Germany signs the armistice”, ODT, 13 November 1918, 3; “Victory and Peace”, ODT, 21 July 1919, 5). Another example is a photograph of Masterton’s peace celebrations captioned in National Library’s catalogue as “Armistice Day parade” http://natlib.govt.nz/ records/22905230. It shows a large model of a tank, which was a feature of the town’s peace celebrations (“Celebrations in Masterton”, WDT, 13 November 1918, 5; “Peace celebrations”, WDT, 21 July 1919, 5). 88 “Peace celebrations”, Press, 2 October 1918, 7; “Peace celebrations”, Te Puke Times, 8 November 1918, 2; “Peace celebrations”, AG, 13 November 1918, 3; “Peace celebrations”, HNS, 12 November 1918, 5; “Peace celebrations”, AMBPA, 12 November 1918, 2. 89 Maclean and Phillips, The Sorrow and the Pride, 70–71.

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their meaning as people die or move away from an area or when “identifying markers” have been removed.90 Yet even memorials to peace and victory built of more permanent materials have done little to increase awareness of the celebrations. The Bay of Plenty region’s monument on the summit of Mount Maunganui, which consists of a large block of marble, is easier to identify as a memorial, but it is placed well out of the everyday view of the community. A number of the other more obvious memorials—the various buildings dedicated to or conceived during the peace celebrations—were at the time, or have become, nearly indistinguishable from war memorials. Some had become known as such by the time they were opened and were dedicated to the fallen rather than to peace or to the celebrations. Others came to include elements characteristic of war memorials, such as rolls of honour. Those that have retained the name “peace” are sometimes mistakenly read as memorials to a modern interpretation of the word.

V. Conclusion The peace celebrations held in New Zealand in July 1919 could be looked upon simply as the country’s formal marking of the official end of the First World War. Although they were immense, with events taking place across the country over three days, their structure and form were decided upon for relatively mundane reasons—a coal shortage and celebrations planned elsewhere in the country and the empire. Yet the celebrations were nevertheless significant. As well as signalling the cessation of hostilities, they were an opportunity to do justice to the end of a war that had touched everyone’s lives for the previous long four years. Time and money could be spent on fitting celebrations and those who survived the war and the influenza pandemic, but who had missed out on earlier celebrations through absence or illness, could take part. The enormous amount of coordination, energy and funds New Zealanders put into celebrating the end of the war is testament to its impact. The celebrations also allowed the participation of communities generally excluded from such occasions, owing to their relative geographic isolation. Yet despite their significance, without a lasting association with an historic event or enduring meaning for New Zealanders, the peace celebrations in July 1919 are not well remembered. Their memorials have also proved ephemeral; many have survived but they, and their connection to the celebrations, are not easy to identify and are often overlooked or misinterpreted. 90

Morgan, “Arboreal Eloquence”.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN THE MATERIAL OF REMEMBRANCE: THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE? KINGSLEY BAIRD For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their whole country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men.1 Pericles, Thucydides, Funeral Oration

In his funeral oration for the dead of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), the Athenian statesman Pericles refers to conventional, permanent forms of memorialising in stone and inscribed text as well as those that are intangible and transitory, residing in “the hearts of men”. This chapter explores the enduring and evanescent qualities of two remembrance forms, Sir Edwin Lutyens’s Stone of Remembrance “altar”, found in Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries, and Tomb, a temporary sculpture I constructed at France’s First World War museum, Historial de la Grande Guerre in 2013.2 Along with the recollection of related personal memories, these two memorials will be examined against a backdrop of conventions, symbolism, materiality and politics associated with the role of monuments in expressing and maintaining memory from the First World War to the present. Tomb, based on the dimensions of Lutyens’s altar, comprised 1

Pericles’s funeral oration, “Thucydides, Funeral Oration”, University of Minnesota Human Rights Library, http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/education/ thucydides.html (accessed 6 Aug 2013). 2 The Commonwealth War Graves Commission commemorates the 1.7 million men and women of the Commonwealth forces who died in the two world wars. Established by Royal Charter in May 1917 as the Imperial War Graves Commission, it now cares for cemeteries and memorials at 23,000 locations, in 153 countries. http://www.cwgc.org/about-us/history-of-cwgc.aspx. Historial de la Grande Guerre is one of France’s leading First World War museums. Located in Péronne in the Somme, it was opened in 1992. http://www.historial.org.

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approximately 18,000 biscuits in the shape of New Zealand, French, German, and Australian soldiers of the First World War.3 It is one of a series of recent memorial works in which I have used ephemeral materials to challenge the conflation of physical permanence and fixed meaning.4 Carved into the face of Lutyens’s stone is the biblical phrase selected by British author, poet and Nobel Laureate, Rudyard Kipling: “Their name liveth for evermore.”5 The message conveyed by both the words and the robust materiality of the memorial, projects the aspiration of enduring memory. Similarly, the line from Laurence Binyon’s Ode of Remembrance, “We will remember them”, enjoins those present at remembrance ceremonies to preserve the memory of the fallen.6 On these occasions in New Zealand the words are repeated in response, often emphasising the obligation: “We will remember them.” While these commitments, recited at commemorative events or carved into the stone of memorials, are expressions of duty and gratitude, they are also tinged with anxiety: “Lest we forget.”7 At the centenary of the First World War it is reasonable to ask 3

Coincidentally, about this number of New Zealanders died in the First World War. http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/war/first-world-war (accessed 1 May 2014). 4 Other memorial projects in which impermanent materials have been used include Diary Dagboek (wool, lace and ceramics; In Flanders Fields Museum, Belgium, 2007) and Serve: A new recipe for sacrifice (biscuits; National Army Museum Te Mata Toa, New Zealand, 2010–11). My 1914 Stela project at Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr, Germany, also used biscuits to construct a memorial. These artworks are part of my New Memorial Forms project in which I explore materiality as an expression of memory, critiquing traditional notions of a “memorial” by challenging fixity of meaning and conventional perceptions of permanence and monumentality. More on these projects can be found at http://www.kingsleybaird.com. 5 Their name liveth for evermore” is a shortened version of that suggested by Rudyard Kipling, who was a member of the Imperial War Graves Commission and acted as their literary adviser: “Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.” (Ecclesiastes 44:14). Later Kipling told Lutyens that the Stone, which he described as “an inspiration”, needed no inscription: Tim Skelton and Gerald Gliddon, Lutyens and the Great War (London: Frances Lincoln, 2008), 34. 6 The last line of the fourth stanza of Laurence Binyon’s poem, “For the Fallen” (1914). Jon Stallworthy (ed.), The Oxford Book of War Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 209. 7 The phrase, “Lest we forget”, is the refrain from Kipling’s prayer, “Recessional” (1897). Although the original meaning referred to Christ’s sacrifice, after 1918, especially in Commonwealth countries, it became a plea not to forget the sacrifices of soldiers who died in combat. The words are spoken at remembrance ceremonies and also commonly used as text on war memorials.

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Figure 15.1: Sir Edwin Lutyens, The Stone of Remembrance (detail), Caterpillar Valley Cemetery, Longueval, France Photograph by Kingsley Baird

how long will we remember the dead of that conflict? Meanwhile, as New Zealanders continue to die in combat, what form will the honouring of their memory take?

I. Conflation of past and present At recent Anzac Day commemorations thousands of New Zealanders have gathered to recognize the sacrifice of the country’s armed services in the First World War and the conflicts that have followed. Despite occurring a century ago, the 1914–18 war has not been expunged from our consciousness and consigned to the archives—rather, it remains a living history. Certainly, in terms of scale, it was a conflict that can claim global proportions detaching itself from its normal location in chronology and its accepted set of causes and effects to become Great in another sense—all-encompassing, allpervading, both internal and external at once, the essential condition of consciousness in the twentieth century.8 8 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 321.

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With the very significant loss of New Zealand lives in the First World War and the size of the force enlisted in relation to the nation’s population, it would not be surprising if that conflict were perceived as the defining moment in the creation of the country’s martial national identity.9 For commemorative purposes, however, the war is not seen in isolation, but included with subsequent conflicts. Following 1945, the memorials of the First World War were “reinscribed and recoded to accommodate the casualties of the Second World War”.10 This merging of conflicts, along with the significant number of familial links, would suggest that memories of the First World War will remain though commemorative rituals for some time to come. The seamless amalgamation of remembrance practices is exemplified by New Zealand’s Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, dedicated in 2004. Though the Wellington memorial contains the remains of one soldier who perished almost 100 years ago during the Battle of the Somme, he represents all New Zealanders who have died serving their country in combat. For example, at the time of writing, the tomb was at the centre of the sixtieth anniversary commemorations at the National War Memorial marking the end of the Korean War. As New Zealand’s history is punctuated by regular involvement in overseas wars, fresh imperatives for remembering will almost inevitably arise.

II. The penetration of memory The centenary of the First World War presents an opportunity not only to reflect on the legacy of the conflict, but also to ask when that past, in L.P. Hartley’s words, will become a “foreign country”.11 There is a popular perception that though the last soldiers of the 1914–18 conflict have died, as have many who knew them, in recent years numbers attending public commemoration events continue to grow. A key factor in maintaining the memory of this conflict are the fresh “penetrations”, both metaphorical and literal, that keep it in our consciousness. I am using the term “penetration” to describe the “reminders” of the First World War which 9

Out of New Zealand’s total population of just over one million in 1914, 120,000 would eventually enlist and 103,000 served overseas, http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/ media/photo/war–census–and–conscription (accessed 1 May 2014). 10 Nuala C. Johnson, “Public Memory,” in James Duncan, Nuala C. Johnson and Richard H. Schein (eds), A Companion to Cultural Geography (Blackwell Companions to Geography), (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 325. 11 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), xvi.

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keep us aware of the conflict. As “surfacing memory”, these aidesmemoires continue to rise to and “penetrate” the surface metaphorically and—in the case of the remains of combatants and the matériel of war— literally. The former include the building of recent monuments such as the New Zealand memorials in Canberra (2001) and London (2006) and the Unknown Warrior’s Tomb; the current construction of the memorial park at the National War Memorial in Wellington; and the Ministry for Culture and Heritage’s WW100 New Zealand First World War online resource. All these serve to keep the memory of war alive and, consequently, the contribution of war to our sense of national identity.12 Penetrations also include the deaths and associated language of remembrance of New Zealanders in contemporary conflicts, as well as the discovery of the remains of combatants and the matériel of former wars. In August 2012, the bodies of two New Zealand soldiers killed in fighting in Afghanistan were returned home. At the commemorative service the Governor-General, Sir Jerry Mateparae, promised that their names “will not be forgotten”.13 Other forms of continuity are expressed as anniversaries, most notably Anzac Day. Additional penetrations continue to occur as the past insistently asserts itself in the present. In April 2012, for example, the remains of an unknown New Zealand soldier of the First World War were discovered at Messines in Belgium. He was reburied with ceremonial honours in a Commonwealth War Graves cemetery with his comrades who were also killed during that battle. Some of these reminders of the past are seemingly ubiquitous. In the same month as the soldier’s remains were discovered, I visited some First World War memorial sites in the Somme region. At the New Zealand Memorial at Longueval, my guide commented that the surrounding fields are full of the matériel of war. Digging in some earth between the road and an adjacent planted field, within seconds he had retrieved two pieces of rusted metal which he identified as shrapnel from 1914–18. Recently, a First World War metaphor appeared in Wellington’s Dominion Post newspaper when a sports commentator contrasted the commitment of two All Blacks by drawing parallels between their actions on the field with those of combatants in the war. One player was described as being “never 12 The National War Memorial Park is due to be completed for Anzac Day commemorations on 25 April 2015. 13 Governor-General, Sir Jerry Mataparae, “A speech on behalf of the nation”, Military Commemorative Service for Lance-Corporal Pralli Durrer and LanceCorporal Rory Malone, 11 August 2012, https://gg.govt.nz/content/militarycommemorative-service-lcpl-pralli-durrer-and-lcpl-rory-maloneretrieved (accessed 6 August 2013).

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the first in line to throw himself on the barbed wire” while the other was “always the first man over the top”.14 While on an artist’s residency at In Flanders Fields Museum in Belgium in 2007, I experienced my most powerful and compelling personal example of a reminder of the First World War—one that contributed to the inspiration of Tomb. I was privileged to attend the recovery of the remains of a First World War soldier from a cleared field destined for industrial use near the town of Boezinge. Undertaking earthworks at a former battle site such as this requires caution because of the possibility of uncovering unexploded bombs. The metal detectors of “The Diggers”, a group of dedicated amateur archaeologists, had revealed the probable presence of human remains about half a metre below the surface. First, they discovered a water canteen, then part of a human skull. Slowly and carefully The Diggers revealed a pelvis, then the bones of the legs, ribs and arms. Shortly after this a busload of “dark tourists” pulled up. (Also known as “black”, or “grief” tourists, these people travel to sites associated with death, tragedy, atrocity and disaster such as battlefields and concentration camps.) Their guide had apparently been alerted that The Diggers were in action and, hoping to give his charges a more visceral experience than that offered by restored trenches and the dioramas of war museums, decided to stop and ascertain the cause of the excavation. Alighting from the bus into the newly exposed mud, some of the passengers bemoaned their lack of appropriate footwear. Reconciled by the prospect of a hot shower at the day’s end, they carefully but irresistibly made their way across the boggy ground to the site of exhumation. My newly arrived companions and I stood enthralled as The Diggers continued their delicate operation. With the darkened bones were remnants of uniform material, which disintegrated when handled, and some dark hair from around the skull. As his skeleton lay in a British trench from the 1915 lines, it was considered very likely that he was a British soldier. As more clues appeared, The Diggers refined their detective work. A whistle lying among the bones suggested these were the remains of an officer. Demonstrating the relief of gallows humour in what was a grim and extraordinary event, one of The Diggers cried, “Over the top, boys!”, followed by awkward, restrained laughter from some of his associates. The respectful approach with which these weekend archaeologists undertook their mission was not diminished 14

Mark Reason, “Comment” (“Sport” section), Dominion Post, 19 September 2012, 11. In response to an enquiry from the author, Reason confirmed his analogy was in reference to the First World War (personal communication, 9 October 2013).

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by the ninety years that separated them from this man’s violent death. We privileged witnesses stood in collective silence, seeing not a skeleton but a man. Briefly, time was compressed as the years 1915 and 2007 converged.15 Among the soldier’s remains was a pocket watch. This and other “evidence” would be taken away from the scene for police forensic testing. Once opened the watch might reveal who the buried soldier was. Confirming his identity would determine whether his name was carved into a Commonwealth War Graves headstone or the words, “A soldier of the Great War Known unto God”. Later, The Diggers’ equipment detected close by more probable human remains. This time it appeared the bodies were lying on top of each other. At that moment it struck me this landscape was not only an informal mass burial ground but that the earth beneath contained, along with undetonated bombs and other war paraphernalia, strata of human remains, victims of that conflict. The image of layered bodies beneath the earth would become manifest in the layered construction of soldier-shaped biscuits in the Tomb sculpture. The exhumed remains of a First World War soldier in Belgium and pieces of shrapnel on the roadside of rural France are not only forms of penetration in a memorial landscape but also in our consciousness. For some, these mnemonic experiences and objects have familial attachments— in my case a maternal grandfather who left little of his First World War experience behind.16 He did not sit me on his knee and regale me with captivating war stories, nor reveal the scars of his physical wounds. However, one traumatic story of violence repeated with sufficient regularity became an embedded, vicarious memory of my own. I did use his rusty bayonet—or a bayonet that he might have “souvenired” and I have since inherited—to slash at the “enemy” acanthus during childhood war play on the hill behind my grandparents’ home in Evans Bay. This and other material artefacts—a painting of my grandfather in his hospital “blues”, his service record and medals, and my unreliable memories—are all that survive. “What happens,” asks Alice Yeager Kaplin, “to the

15 For more of this incident see Kingsley Baird, “Diary Dagboek, 16 June 2007”, in Piet Chielens (ed.), Diary Dagboek: 2007 Artist in Residence In Flanders Fields Museum (Ieper, Belgium: In Flanders Fields Museum, 2007), 51–55. 16 My grandfather, Albert George Grant, who fought at the Somme, was discharged on Anzac Day 1917, “on account of illness … & wounds”. Later that year the New Zealand Division suffered heavy casualties at the battles of Messines and Passchendaele.

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Figure 15.2: Exhumation of a First World War soldier, Boezinge, Belgium, 16 June 2007 Photograph by Kingsley Baird

memory of history when it ceases to be testimony?”17 Despite the existence of these few aides-memoires from my grandfather and the reluctance of veterans like him to discuss their war experience, there has been an intergenerational transmission of family history. This is a “vicarious past”, according to James E. Young, in which the witness’s (my grandfather’s) memory becomes what Marianne Hirsch has termed “postmemory” (my memory).18 The centenary is another penetration that causes us not only to reevaluate the enduring impact and legacy of the First World War but also to ask when this event will pass out of our time and into a dissociated history? There seems no respite; if anything the momentum of the war’s memory boom continues unabated finding manifestation in both high and popular culture. War Horse, a play based on Michael Morpurgo’s novel, has been performed in London since 2007, and was made into a film in 2011, while Private Peaceful, also adapted from a Morpurgo novel, 17

In James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 1. 18 Ibid., 1-2.

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screened in New Zealand cinemas during 2013.19 More literature, films, television documentaries, exhibitions and internet sites are being generated and new museums are built while old ones are refurbished.20

III. Lutyens and the materiality of permanence When reflecting on the war’s persistent memory, it is appropriate to examine the means by which remembering is both expressed and maintained through commemorative forms and rituals. Before the conflict ended it was recognized that the warring nations had indeed, in the words of Rupert Brooke, “poured out the red sweet wine of youth” to unimaginable excess.21 The magnitude of death and the destruction or erasure of so many bodies necessitated new ways of approaching the burial of the dead.22 Jay Winter argues that during and directly after the First World War archaic memorial forms may no longer have sufficed, and a “modern memory”—“a new language of truth-telling about war in poetry, prose, and the visual arts”—would arise; one without animosity or the glorification of victory and the military.23 He also maintains that commemoration was a universal preoccupation after the 1914–18 war. The need to bring the dead home, to put the dead to rest, symbolically or physically, was pervasive. … [and] faced staggering problems. There was the scale and chaos of the battlefields at the end of the war; there was as well terrible

19 War Horse first premiered at the Royal National Theatre in London on 17 October 2007. Morpurgo’s novel was adapted for the theatre by Nick Stafford and performed off West End from 2007 to 2009. At the time of writing it has been staged at New London Theatre since 28 March 2009. 20 A new First World War museum, Musée de la Grande Guerre in Meaux, France, opened on 11 November 2011. There has been significant refurbishment and refreshing of scenography at London’s Imperial War Museum, In Flanders Fields Museum in Belgium and the Historial de la Grande Guerre in France. 21 From Rupert Brooke’s 1914 poem, “The Dead (I)”, in Jon Stallworthy (ed.), Anthem for Doomed Youth: Twelve Soldier Poets of the First World War (London: Constable, 2002), 18. 22 Ken Worpole, Last Landscapes: The Architecture of the Cemetery in the West (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), 163–64. 23 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2. Winter uses Paul Fussell’s term “modern memory” from Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory.

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The imperatives of cost and the equality of treatment of the fallen and their relatives led the British Government to conclude that the repatriation of bodies would be impractical. In some countries, including Britain, France and United States, tombs of unknown soldiers would symbolically represent the dead.25 In 1917 the Imperial War Graves Commission, renamed the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in 1960, was established to acquire land for the construction of cemeteries and monuments and to raise funds for their maintenance, which would remain the commission’s responsibility after the war. Architect Edwin Lutyens was requested to visit war-torn France to provide advice on the design of future war cemeteries and monuments. He would become, in the words of contemporary architect, Jeroen Geurst, “the spiritual father of the major principles” that were followed in the design of all the commission cemeteries.26 Lutyens and his colleagues, principally Herbert Baker and Reginald Blomfield, established the architecture, language and landscape of remembrance which were to become ubiquitous symbols of post-war British society: the headstones, the Cross of Sacrifice [designed by Blomfield] and the Stone of Remembrance within a landscaped garden.27

Eschewing the “pantomime of allegory” and “rhetorical, relig-i-ose symbolism”, Lutyens applied what his biographer, Christopher Hussey, described as an “Elemental Mode” of “pure architectural forms”.28 He would “reinvent and develop inherited [Classical] architectural forms both to reiterate their familiar meanings or to give them new meanings …”.29 For the cemeteries’ principal monument, the Stone of Remembrance, Lutyens decided on an “elementary and timeless design”:30

24

Ibid., 98. Ibid., 27. 26 Jeroen Geurst, Cemeteries of the Great War by Sir Edwin Lutyens (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010), 8. 27 Bob Bushaway quoted in Worpole, Last Landscapes, 166. 28 Worpole, Last Landscapes, 168, 167. Christopher Hussey quoted in Skelton and Gliddon, Lutyens and the Great War 8. Gavin Stamp, “Foreword”, Skelton and Gliddon, Lutyens, 8. 29 Skelton and Gliddon, Lutyens, 8. 30 Geurst, Cemeteries, 183. 25

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Figure 15.3: Sir Edwin Lutyens, Stone of Remembrance, Caterpillar Valley Cemetery, Longueval, France Photograph by Kingsley Baird On platforms made of not less than 3 steps the upper and the lower steps of a width twice that of the central step, to give due dignity, place one great stone of fine proportion 12 feet long set fair or finely wrot, without undue ornament and trickery and elaborate carvings, and inscribe thereon one thought in clear letters so that all men for all time may read and know the reason why these stones are so placed throughout France … .31

In human history there is a long association between the material properties of objects and what they symbolize. The Stone of Remembrance possesses the aura of longevity both in concrete form and symbolism. From ancient times humans have understood and expressed the relationship between physical materiality—what Daniel Miller describes as the “merely apparent”—and immateriality, “that which is real”.32 Cultures make things of stone when they want them to endure. Miller proposes that it is the ancient Egyptians’ faith in the “potential of 31

Letter, 27 May 1917, from Lutyens to Fabian Ware, Vice-Chairman of Imperial War Graves Commission, quoted in Skelton and Gliddon, Lutyens, 24. It was decided that the Stone would not be placed in cemeteries containing fewer than 1,000 graves as it would otherwise be out of scale. 32 Daniel Miller, in Daniel Miller (ed.) Materiality: An Introduction (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 1.

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monumentality to express immateriality that has created their legacy as a material presence in our own world”.33 Recent archaeological interpretations of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in Britain and northwest Europe also suggest a relationship between endurance in material terms and meaning: “the hardness and durability of stone was symbolic of the fixed nature of ancestors and ancestral powers and in opposition to wood, associated with the living”.34 For Miller, the “very massivity and gravity” of monuments “becomes their source of power”.35 He identifies the relationship between materiality and metaphor. The Stone is a metaphor for endurance: it is robust, long-lived and explicitly seen as such. Weight, hardness and strength describe metaphorical as well as real qualities. In a time of upheaval and loss, the Stone was literally and symbolically a rock. The permanence of memory is expressed by its materiality and reinforced by the inscribed epithet: “Their name liveth for evermore.” The ancient biblical origin of the text, which is literally carved in stone, and Christian expectation of everlasting life reinforce the eternal. Even the serif font suggests classical origins.36 Paradoxically, despite these allusions to the past and because Lutyens’s designs transcend his time, Geurst argues they will not become outdated. Given that other signs of the war in the landscape have disappeared, cemeteries and monuments are all the more important.37 Without memory the Stone has no purpose and without the Stone memory is bereft of a locus. According to Chris Tilley, ‘Monuments are powerful because they appear to be permanent markers of memory and history and because they … can evoke feelings through their materiality and form as well as 33

Ibid., 16. The work of Mike Parker Pearson and Ramilisonina (1998) is cited in Mike Rowlands and Chris Tilley, “Monuments and Memorials”, in Chris Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Kuechler, Mike Rowlands and Patricia Spyer (eds), Handbook of Material Culture (London: Sage), 507. 35 Miller, introduction, Materiality, 16. 36 I am grateful to the detective work of my colleague in Massey University’s College of Creative Arts, Lee Jensen, for trying to identify the idiosyncratic expression of the font: “Technically, I’d be looking at a Transitional serif, a departure from the more delicate earlier Venetian and Garalde Renaissance styles (like Garamond), but not yet a NeoClassical form. You might start with Caslon or some other variation (and it is definitely not Times)”, personal communication, 25 July 2013. Whether or not the Stone’s lettering is a formal font, it suggests a “Roman” style that would be in keeping with Lutyens’s aspirations for a “Classical” and “timeless” monument. 37 Guerst, Cemeteries, 181-3. 34

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symbolize social narratives of events and sacrifices retold in public rituals”.38 He contends that “memory objectified in material culture becomes an active agent with therapeutic powers”.39 Are stone memorials, including both the altar and individual headstones in the Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries, solid, durable forms where survivors and family can find solace and the memory of the deceased loved ones can reside? Miller suggests that such objects have the potential to operate as a “shamans”, drawing out illness and “thereby making the cause of the affliction manifest”.40 Loss becomes tangible in stone memorials; it has weight, gravity, volume, substance. Its invisibility acquires a material presence. However, Françoise Choay disputes the authority and veracity of human-made commemorative forms. In reference to the Second World War and the Holocaust she contends the only “authentic monuments” are those things and places directly associated with the memory: “it is the concentration camps themselves, with their barracks and their gas chambers, that have become monuments”:41 No artist intercessor will have been needed, only a simple metonymic operation. The weight of the real, or of a reality intimately associated with that of the events commemorated, is more powerful here than any symbol would be.42

The return of the bodies of soldiers killed in Afghanistan, the unearthed remains of a First World War soldier, pieces of shrapnel on the roadside—these are enduring penetrations in our consciousness. Such physical reminders of the human cost of war and the matériel that sustained it—“the weight of the real”—are cause for reflection on war. Perhaps it is these penetrations in the memorial landscape, not grand monumental gestures, that guarantee “we will remember them”. It could, however, be argued that the “weight of the real” can be conferred by the location of the Stone in the landscape of conflict. The Stone has the capacity to contain and express memory by its very presence in a place “designed to perpetuate a consciously held sense of the past”.43 Similarly, 38

Tilley, Handbook, 500. Ibid., 501. 40 Miller, Materiality, 29. 41 Françoise Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, trans. Lauren M. O’Connell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 11. 42 Ibid., 12. 43 Tilley, Handbook, 503. My opinion is contrary to that of Pierre Nora, who proposes that, with the demise of peasant culture, “true” or “spontaneous” 39

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the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, as the grave of a soldier, could possess the “weight of the real” in a way that the cenotaph in Wellington cannot because it is an “empty tomb” thousands of kilometres from the conflict it “remembers”. The commemorative monument without a body must rely on “the rhetorical force of a representational strategy—where no body exists, one must be metaphorically summoned”.44 The Stone of Remembrance is not an isolated object carrying the burden of memory alone. As well as being contained within, and affected by, the wider landscape of the 1914–18 conflict, it is located within the complex, miniature, memory landscape of the Commonwealth War Graves cemetery. Although memory symbolically resides in the overt manifestations of remembrance such as the Stone, Cross of Sacrifice and individual headstones, it is also expressed through human intervention and transitory memorial forms. While the dominant physical language of remembrance is expressed in the permanent memorials, regular tending of nature—cutting the grass and planting flowers—as well as replacement or repair of damaged stonework, engenders a living memory of the First World War. The perpetuation and nurturing of memory is apparent in the form of rituals, both officially sanctioned and informal, performed by human actors. Descendants and others, concerned to keep memory alive, leave tributes such as cut flowers, artificial poppies, miniature wooden crosses and handwritten messages.

IV. Tomb and the ephemerality of remembrance In addition to providing solace and enabling “individual people—mothers, fathers, wives, sons, daughters, and comrades in arms—to accept the brutal facts of death in war”, the political function of war memorials and other monuments, particularly in relation to the formation and sustenance of national identity, has received considerable critical attention.45 According to Jeffery K. Olick, this intrinsic relationship between memory and the nation has been acknowledged in scholarly and political realms

memory—that “experienced from the inside”—no longer exists or else resides in “lieux de mémoire” (sites of memory) such as museums, monuments and archives. See Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”, trans. Marc Rousebush, Representations (1989): 13. 44 Richard M. Sommer, “Time Incorporated”, Harvard Design Magazine, 9:2 (1999): 38. 45 Winter, Sites, 94.

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Figure 15.4: Reninghelst New Military Cemetery, Reninghelst, Belgium Photograph by Kingsley Baird

since at least the nineteenth century.46 Monuments are not “innocent, aesthetic embellishments of the public sphere”, observes Nuala C. Johnson; rather, they play political and cultural roles in the formation of social memories.47 They do so by fixing a stable history and thereby, according to Tilley, affirm immutable identity, and as M. Christine Boyer proposes, as “rhetorical topoi [traditional themes]”, they play an instructive role informing citizens of national heritage and civic duty.48 Because monuments and memorials have been used to maintain political hegemonies and promote ideologies, many have been regarded with derision and suspicion.49 Used and abused by dictatorships, including fascist and communist, many traditional memorial forms became discredited, unable to serve as loci of authentic memory. Nowhere is the critical appraisal of monuments more evident than in post-Second World 46

Jeffery K. Olick, “Introduction”, in Jeffery K. Olick (ed.), States of Memory: Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations in National Retrospection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 1. 47 Johnson, Companion, 316. 48 Tilley, Handbook, 501, and James E. Young, “Memory and Counter-Memory: The End of the Monument in Germany”, Harvard Design Magazine, 9:2 (1999): 6; Johnson, Companion, 316. 49 Tilley, Handbook, 504–05.

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War Germany. The challenge of distancing memorialization from the politically charged monuments of the Nazi era, as well as responding to the horror of the Holocaust, led to new ways of representing memory. “The process of breathing life into the symbolic language of romantic, classical, and religious reference, so visible after 1914, was much more difficult after 1945.”50 However, post-Second World War artists and architects faced similar problems to Lutyens and his contemporaries: the horror associated with both conflicts required new ways of comprehending the expression of memory. While Lutyens’s response was to enable the grieving to imagine the possibility that their loved ones’ memory would be preserved, the counter-monuments created in post-1945 Germany were intended “more radically [than their predecessors] to destabilise the basic premise that the past is stable and enduring”.51 Indeed, James E. Young rejects the notion that permanent monumental forms can assure immutable memory: “It is as if once we assign monumental form to memory, we have to some degree divested ourselves of the obligation to remember.”52 He resists attempts to draw “a bottom line” under terrible events such as the Holocaust, instead suggesting “perpetual irresolution, that only an unfinished memorial process can guarantee the life of memory”.53 It is against this backdrop of the “cataclysmic events” of the twentieth century—“the World Wars, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust and the Gulag”—and ensuing revisioning of memorial forms, along with personal experience and vicarious memory, contemporary aesthetic concerns, the examination of national identities and mythologies and the First World War centenary, that I proposed a new temporary memorial at the Historial.54 Tomb was based on the 1:1 dimensions of Lutyens’s Stone of Remembrance but there the physical similarity between the two forms ends. Almost a century after the beginning of the war, and given the changing roles and perceptions of memorials since the Second World War, Tomb has a different function to that of the Stone. The latter was a spiritual,

50

Jay Winter, “Remembrance and Redemption: a Social Interpretation of War Memorials,” Harvard Design Magazine 9:2 (1999): 76. 51 Tilley, Handbook, 505. 52 Young, “Memory and Counter-Memory”, 6. 53 Young discusses the possibility of an unfinished memorial process to ensure the continuation of memory in relation to artist Horst Hoheisel’s proposal to blow up the Brandenburg Gate for the 1995 competition for a German memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe. Young, “Memory and Counter-Memory”, 5. 54 Nancy Levinson, editor’s introduction, Harvard Design Magazine 9:2 (1999): 2.

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Figure 15.5: Kingsley Baird, Tomb, Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne, France, 2013 Photograph by Yazid Medmoun

symbolic and aesthetic response to its time; the certainties of Lutyens’s memorials are ill suited to our “doubting and secular” age.55 The Stone persuades viewers of the permanence of its physical presence, of the enduring memory of those who have died and the obligation of the survivors to remember them. In marked contrast, Tomb was explicitly transitory: the sculpture’s life, and the lives of its individual 55

Levinson, introduction, Harvard Design Magazine: 2.

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components, ended when the seven-month exhibition was over.56 It was also an ambivalent work. On the one hand its mimetic form paid homage to the symbolic (universal) and aesthetic (formal) principles of the original. On the other, it deliberately contrasted the mass and robustness of the Stone through its composition of multiple, ephemeral forms: approximately 18,000 biscuits in the shapes of soldiers of the First World War. Unlike the Stone’s closed form, the spacing between the stacked biscuits renders Tomb’s form permeable, thus, according to Winter, “leading us into a space the density of which is defined by its absences”.57 The missing are represented by these voids. Each biscuit is individual despite there being only twelve cookie cutter shapes. The four armies represented comprise three body contours: one with all limbs, one missing an arm and the other without a leg. The biscuits were produced by seven bakeries each employing different approaches: variations on the recipe, thickness, baking temperatures, floured or not, and so on. Whereas Lutyens’s memorial is concerned with universal redemption, Winter observes that Tomb represented a “return to the challenge of imagining the dead each in his own integrity”.58 The dead to whom Winter refers are not only those of the First World War but all dead of subsequent wars, who are collectively remembered at memorials such as Lutyens’s Stone. By drawing attention to individual sacrifice, including that of contemporary combatants—through the form of “consumable” soldiers—Tomb’s purpose was to encourage visitors to the Historial, and readers of the exhibition catalogue, to reflect on the accountability of contemporary generations for the fate of the armed services personnel we send to war.59 It envisages a time when the penetrations of conflict are historical, memorials in New Zealand or foreign lands will no longer be built and those that remain will commemorate only wars of the past. Meanwhile, a well-resourced governmental programme of commemorative events, stimulated by the centenary, will sustain awareness of the war. Successive anniversaries of battles and campaigns 56

Tomb was displayed at Historial de la Grande Guerre from 23 April to 24 November 2013. 57 Jay Winter, “Les Fils Disparus: La Guerre Comme Acte de Disparition, Missing Sons: War as a Vanishing Act”, in Kingsley Baird (ed.), Tomb: Kingsley Baird: Artist in Residence at Historial de la Grande Guerre (Péronne and Wellington: Historial de la Grande Guerre and Massey University, 2013), 10. 58 Winter, Tomb, 11. 59 See Baird, “In Memoriam: Le Present et L’absent, In Memoriam: The Present and the Absent”, Tomb, 23–24.

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Figure 15.6: Kingsley Baird, Tomb (detail), Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne, France, 2013 Photograph by Yazid Medmoun

that have contributed to New Zealand’s sense of national identity and demonstrated a degree of independence from the Mother Country, including Gallipoli, the Somme, Passchendaele and Le Quesnoy, will punctuate the years 2014–18. Inevitably, when these commemorations are concluded, the First World War will be recalled again during the forthcoming eightieth anniversary of the Second World War. The centenary also fuels a memory boom: in the writing of histories alone new publications are being generated that present both unexplored or neglected material and fresh perspectives on old stories. First World War fatigue can also be anticipated. Perhaps the centenary will be a last hurrah before the conflict fades into a distant past, although the experience of the last 100 years suggests otherwise. It is likely that memorial forms, whether permanent or more ephemeral, will continue to serve as sites of remembrance long after the centenary has concluded. On

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Figure 15.7: Kingsley Baird, Tomb (detail), Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne, France, 2013 Photograph by Yazid Medmoun

occasion, the remains of soldiers from the First World War will be unearthed and, as long as governments continue to support the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, buried in one of their cemeteries beneath a headstone facing a Lutyens memorial. The architect’s aspiration to design a receptacle of permanent memory and therapeutic powers after the devastation of the war is entirely comprehensible. However, the Stone’s seemingly straightforward meaning stands in contrast to contemporary war memorials. The latter, responding to the apocalyptic events and political turmoil following the First World War, are necessarily more nuanced, even ambivalent. Ultimately, the memory of the First World War may persist in material form and reside “in the hearts of men” as Pericles proposed, to be “taken out, burnished, and contemplated” by subsequent generations who will

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fashion new commemorative forms according to their experience.60 Their memory, aroused by personal motivations and connections to the war and framed within both consistent and ever-changing national identities, suggests that myriad expressions of remembering the First World War, including memorials, will endure for some time to come.61

60

A.S. Byatt and H.H. Wood (eds), Memory: An anthology (London: Chatto & Windus, 2008), xii. 61 At the time of writing I was supervising a Master of Fine Arts student whose creative work was generated by letters she wrote to her great-grandfather whom she had never met. She recognized, however, that she is a part of his legacy as an individual who fought in the First World War and the impact of that conflict on the nation’s, and therefore, her identity. Another student, in the initial stages of a creative practice PhD, was exploring similar themes inspired by a New Zealand soldier’s letters, diaries and effects.

CONTRIBUTORS Kingsley Baird is a visual artist and academic whose work represents a long-standing and continuous engagement with memory and remembrance, and loss and reconciliation through making artefacts and writing. Major examples of his work are the New Zealand Memorial in Canberra (2001, with Studio of Pacific Architecture); the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior (2004); the international Nagasaki Peace Park sculpture, The Cloak of Peace (2006); and Tomb (2013) at France’s Historial de la Grande Guerre. In 2014 he is exhibiting a new memorial work, Stela, at the Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr in Germany. Kingsley Baird is the board chair of WHAM (War History Heritage Art and Memory) Research Network; was the co-convenor of Contained Memory Conference 2010 and is the General Editor of Memory Connection journal. Imelda Bargas is a senior historian in the Ministry for Culture and Heritage’s History Group. She is co-writing a book with Tim Shoebridge on New Zealand’s First World War heritage, due to be published in 2015. Imelda Bargas joined the History Group in 2008, working primarily to provide content for NZHistory.net.nz. Prior to this she worked as a registration advisor within the New Zealand Historic Places Trust. She has a Master of Museum and Heritage Studies from Victoria University. Charlotte Bennett is a DPhil candidate at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. She has a longstanding interest in youth responses to international crises; her doctoral project explores children’s experiences of empire and conflict in New Zealand and Ireland during the 1910s. Her article on New Zealand children’s lives during the First World War and the 1918 influenza pandemic was published in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth in 2014. John Crawford is the New Zealand Defence Force historian and has written on many aspects of the history of the New Zealand Armed Forces and defence policy. His most recent major publication is (with Peter Cooke) The Territorials: The History of the Territorial and Volunteer Forces of New Zealand. His other books include The Devil’s Own War (an edition of the First World War diary of Brigadier-General Herbert Hart), New Zealand’s Great War: New Zealand, the Allies and the First World

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War, edited with Ian McGibbon, To Fight for the Empire: An Illustrated History of New Zealand and the South African War, 1899–1902 and Kia Kaha: New Zealand in the Second World War. Greg Hynes is a history tutor at the University of Canterbury. His research focuses on national and imperial identities in Britain and the selfgoverning Dominions during the First World War. He is also interested in visual history. His recently completed master’s thesis, for which he won the James Hight Memorial Prize, looked at First World War propaganda in Britain and New Zealand, and its relevance to imperial identities. He commences doctoral research at the University of Oxford in late 2014. Ian Lochhead taught in the Art History department at the University of Canterbury from 1981 to 2014. He has written extensively on the history of New Zealand architecture and his book, A Dream of Spires: Benjamin Mountfort and the Gothic Revival, was published in 1999. Steven Loveridge works from the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. As well as writing several scholarly articles on cultural aspects of the Great War, he is the author of Calls to Arms: New Zealand Society and Commitment to The Great War. Jane McCabe is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of History and Art History at the University of Otago. Jane completed undergraduate degrees at Otago in History (1996) and Clothing and Textile Sciences (2005), and spent several years working in museums in New Zealand, and 18 months living and working in China. A trip to India in 2007 to research her family history brought Jane to the topic of her recently completed doctoral thesis, which examined the lives and labours of 130 Anglo-Indian adolescents raised at St Andrew’s Colonial Homes in Kalimpong and resettled in New Zealand between 1908 and 1938. She is currently teaching on Modern India and Migration. David Monger is a Senior Lecturer in modern European History, and has taught at the University of Canterbury since 2010. He previously studied at the University of York and King’s College London. His research focuses primarily on ideas of patriotism and national identity during the First World War. Patriotism and Propaganda in First World War Britain: The National War Aims Committee and Civilian Morale, was published by Liverpool University Press in 2012. His journal articles have addressed representations of sport and home in propaganda for soldiers and the

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patriotic depiction of wartime women, and he is currently working on British propaganda related to the Armenian Genocide. Katherine Moody is originally from Lincolnshire and has a master’s degree in museum studies from University College London. In Britain she worked for the Department of Research and Information Services at the Royal Air Force Museum and the respective Departments of Printed Books at the National Army Museum and Imperial War Museum. In New Zealand she has worked briefly for the Macmillan Brown Library and Canterbury Museum. Now working as an information librarian at Christchurch City Libraries, she is currently involved in various First World War centenary projects. Sarah Murray is Curator Human History at Canterbury Museum in Christchurch. Her previous publications have focused on the history of the First World War as well as sport and identity in New Zealand. She has curated several exhibitions, including Quake City in the Re:Start Mall in Christchurch and Rise: Street Art in Canterbury Museum, Christchurch. Sarah has an MA in history from Victoria University of Wellington and previously worked there as a research assistant and tutor in the history department. She is currently part of the collaborative group Canterbury100 and involved in the First World War centenary commemorations in Canterbury. Paul O’Connor is head of History at Burnside High School in Christchurch and has twice been Chairperson of the New Zealand History Teachers’ Association. He has written and published many educational resources for history through Emerald Press. He is the author of the school’s jubilee history, Choosing the Right Path, (2009), and has written a short volume contributing to a combined New Zealand–Belgian study, Our Soldiers, about the New Zealand Division in the First World War (2010). In 2011 he wrote The Glorious Dead, a study of the war memorial in Akaroa for the Banks Peninsula War Memorial Society. The following year he was awarded the Rhodes Memorial Medal for ‘outstanding contribution to History in Canterbury’. Gwen Parsons is a tutor in the History Department at the University of Canterbury. She completed a PhD in history at the University of Otago in 2009, examining the development of repatriation policy and the experiences of New Zealand veterans during the postwar decade. Her MA, undertaken at the University of Canterbury, examined the Christchurch home front during the Great War. She has published papers on the New

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Zealand response to shell shock and the Christchurch home front, and presented seminars and conference papers on the development of repatriation policy and veterans during the 1920s. Katie Pickles is Associate Professor in History at the University of Canterbury. She is the author of Transnational Outrage: The Death and Commemoration of Edith Cavell (2007) and Female Imperialism and National Identity (2002/09). The study of the First World War is an important part of her work on patriotism, Britishness and cultural hegemony. 2015 will see the publication of her fifth edited collection, New Zealand’s Empire, co-edited with Catharine Coleborne, and a text about history in the wake of the Canterbury earthquakes. Noah Riseman is a Senior Lecturer in History at Australian Catholic University in Melbourne where he specialises in the history of marginalized groups in the Australian military. He is chief investigator on two Australian Research Council projects examining the history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander military service. He is the author of Defending Whose Country? Indigenous Soldiers in the Pacific War and is currently drafting a monograph, co-authored with Dr Richard Trembath, on the post-Second World War history of Australian Indigenous military service. Margaret Tennant is an Honorary Research Professor at Massey University, New Zealand. Her many publications in the areas of women’s history and the history of social policy include The Fabric of Welfare: Voluntary Organisations, Government and Welfare in New Zealand 1840– 2005 (2007), along with articles on charity fundraising, the voluntary sector in New Zealand, children’s health camps and the social work of religious sisterhoods in New Zealand. She has most recently been commissioned to write the history of the New Zealand Red Cross Society. Bart Ziino is a Lecturer in History in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University, Australia. He is the author of A Distant Grief: Australians, War Graves and the Great War (2007), The Heritage of War (co-edited, 2012) and several studies of Australian remembering of the Great War, both by those who experienced it and by their descendants. He is currently researching a history of private sentiment and experience in Australia during the Great War.



INDEX

1914: xiii, 11, 12, 14, 18, 20, 24, 33, 35, 56, 80, 86, 88, 89, 91, 92, 102, 103, 120, 140, 143, 240, 242, 247, 265, 266, 267, 271, 276, 278 1915: 18-27, 28, 30, 37, 40, 61, 70, 80, 88, 89, 90, 93, 94, 107, 113, 120, 140, 146, 150, 155, 161, 183, 200, 208, 210, 231, 232, 256, 268, 269 1916: 17, 27, 28, 29, 38, 52, 61, 68, 70, 90-93, 104, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114, 115, 121, 122, 125, 133, 135, 145, 147, 148, 151, 152, 188, 201, 204, 205, 210, 216, 217, 224, 225 1917: 2, 7, 28, 29, 40, 71, 87, 92, 93, 94, 108, 110, 113, 115, 117, 122, 123, 126-134, 147, 149, 150, 152, 153, 160, 178, 180, 181, 183, 184, 206, 215, 216, 217, 218, 224, 272 1918: xii, xiii, 11, 15, 35, 39, 40, 41, 44, 55, 62, 80, 86, 87, 89, 91, 92, 94, 95-98, 106, 109, 113, 114, 115, 116, 125-135, 145, 148, 149, 157, 169, 185, 205, 207, 211, 226, 231, 239-241, 242, 247, 255, 256, 258, 260, 265, 266, 267, 271, 276 Aboriginal Australians: xiii, 178195 Alcohol: 186, 189 Anzac Day: 192-194 Casualty rate: 184, 185 Civil Rights: 180, 181, 182, 185, 190-192 Commemoration: 194



Discrimination: 178-182, 186, 188-194 Enfranchisement: 190-191, 192 Enlistment: 178-184, 187, 188, 194 Enthusiasm for war: 178-183 Families: 180, 188-189, 193 Gunditjmara: 185, 186 Kurnai-Gurnai: 191 Labourers: 187 Medals: 187 Mixed-descent: 178-180, 183, 185, 192, 193 Motivations for enlistment: 180183 Officers: 187 Participation in First World War: 178-195 Patriotism: 180-183, 184 Pensions: 188 Propaganda: 178, 180, 184-185, 195 Reconciliation Week: 194 Recruiting: 181, 183, 194 Regulations against enlistment: 178-180, 182-184 Reserves: 188, 190, 191 Status in Australia: 178-195 Second World War: 186, 187, 194 Segregation: 189, 190-193 Service records: 180, 185 Soldier settlement schemes: 191 Veterans: 180, 181, 182, 188195 Wages: 180-183, 188 Aborigines Progressive Association: 182

Endurance and the First World War Aborigines’ Protection Board: 189, 190, 191 Adelaide, Australia: 184 Advertiser: 185 Advertising: 35 Aerial combat: 5 Aerial observation: 123 Aeroplanes: 39, 144, 145 Afghanistan: 194, 267, 275 Aitken, James: 89 Agricultural shows: 114 Akaroa, New Zealand: 128 Albert Medal: 149 Alcohol: 19-20, 52, 58, 79, 186, 207, 213 Alexander, Kristine: 93 Alexandra of Denmark: 35 All Blacks: 267 Allen, Charles: 24 Allen, James: xiii, 14-30, 71, 169, 175, 176, 244 1915: 18-27, 28, 30 Acting Prime Minister: xiii, 2829 Background: 15, 22 Conscription: 27-28, 29 Criticism: 20-21, 22, 26, 28 Depictions: 22, 27 Disease outbreaks at Trentham: 22-25, 28 Exhaustion: 19-22, 30 Family life: 22-23, 30 Godley and: 15 Grief: 23, 26 MƗori and: 16 Massey and: 17, 23-25, 27, 28, 30 Minister of Defence: xiii, 14-17, 18-19, 24-25 Minister of Education: 14, 18, 23-24 Minister of Finance: 14 National Government: 26-27 New Zealand Expeditionary Force: 14-17



289

New Zealand national identity: 15, 22 Perception of the war: 22, 29-30 Personality: 15-17, 22, 27 Prevention of venereal disease: 17-18 Religion: 24, 28, 29 Reputation: 16-17, 27 Retirement: 30 Temperance movement: 19-20 Territorial Force: 14 Allen, John: 22-23, 26 Allied Intervention Force: 145 Allied Powers: 92, 101, 108, 133, 146, 151, 154, 201, 220, 226, 239 Ambulances: 34 A Memory of Solferino: 34 Amery, Leo: 224-225 Amundsen, Roald: 138 Anderson, F.I.: 142 Anderson, Frances: 107 Anderson, John: 68 Andrew, Leslie: 125 Andrews, Adrian: 205 Anglo-Indians: xiii, 196-214 Casualties: 204-206 Citizenship: 196, 207-209 Commemoration: 211-214 Education: 203-204, 213 Enlistment: 197, 201, 202, 206, 210, 214 First World War service: 196214 Identity: 196-197, 199, 201, 203, 204, 205, 210, 211, 213, 214 Imperial citizenship: 196-197, 199, 201, 203, 204 India: 196, 198-199, 202 Labouring: 197, 199 Medals: 206-207, 210 Migration: 196, 197, 199, 207208, 199-214 Military experience: 203-204

290 Mixed race: 198-199, 201, 202, 214 New Zealand: 196-214 New Zealand Expeditionary Force: 200, 204 New Zealand identity: 205, 213 Post-war: 197, 203, 207-214 Promotion: 206, 213, 214 Psychological endurance: 197 Segregation: 198-199 Training: 203, 204 Veterans: 207-214 War pensions: 209 War records: 197, 214 War service: 197, 199, 200-214 Antarctica: xiii, 4, 137-143, 146-154 Conditions: 147-150 Exploration: 137-143, 146-154 Antarctic Destinies: 142 Anti-militarism: 68, 71-72 Antipodean: 87, 102 Anxiety: xii, 6, 8, 31, 54, 205, 264 ANZAC: 53, 63, 192-194, 205-206 Anzac Day: 11, 16, 192-194, 261, 267 Arbor Day: 253 Archaeology: 268, 274 Architects: 156-160, 162-163, 165, 168, 172-173, 272, 278, 282 Architectural Association (Britain): 158 Archives: 197, 210, 212, 216, 265 Armentières and the Somme: 122, 134 Armistice: 10-11, 30, 56, 86, 94-96, 99, 116, 153, 239, 242, 254, 255, 256, 259, 260, 261 Armistice Day: 10-11, 261 Celebrations: 260, 261 False armistice: 255, 256 Art: 263-264, 268, 271, 278 Art galleries: 158 Arts and Crafts movement: 158 Artillery: 123, 131, 132, 134, 222, 223 Ashburton, New Zealand: 247



Index Ashworth, Tony: 1 Asquith, Herbert: 8 Asquith, Raymond: 8 Asylums: 112 Atkinson, Edward: 149-150 Auckland, New Zealand: 18, 19, 40, 44, 86, 97-97, 132, 159, 208, 242, 243, 244, 251, 252, 255256 1st Auckland Infantry Regiment: 132 Auckland Education Board: 97 Auckland Mounted Rifles: 155 Auckland University College: 168 City council: 242 Influenza pandemic: 242, 255 Peace Celebration Committee: 242 Peace celebrations: 242-243, 255 Auckland War Memorial Museum: 129, 165, 211 Cenotaph Database: 129, 211 Auckland Weekly News: 211-212 Aurora: 150 Australasia: 5, 15 Australasian home front: 5, 103117 Australia: xiii, 8, 11, 12, 15, 28, 42, 46-47, 71, 103-117, 152, 153, 171, 178-195, 202, 210, 213, 215, 222, 241-244, 263 Aboriginal Act: 186, 190 Aboriginal Australians: 178-195 Chief Protector of Aborigines: 183, 188, 189 Compulsory military training: 179 Conscription: 71, 104, 110, 111, 114, 183 Defence Act: 179 Defence Department: 109 Department of Native Affairs: 188

Endurance and the First World War Department of Veterans’ Affairs: 194 Distance: 58, 61, 93, 105, 107 Electoral Act: 190 Government: 110, 178, 180, 181, 184, 241 Governor General: 111, 115 Minister for the Interior: 181 Minister of Defence: 110, 179, 189, 192 National identity: 11 Peace Celebrations: 241-242 Prime Minister: 110, 181 Racial attitudes: 178-195 Reconciliation Week: 194 Repatriation Department: 188, 190 Soldiers: 213, 224, 263 Voluntary mobilization: 104 White Australia: 179, 181, 184, 193 The Australian Abo Call: 182 Australian Aborigines’ League: 181 Australian Imperial Force: 28, 111, 153, 178, 183, 190, 192 6th Light Horse: 191 15th Battalion: 193 Aboriginal soldiers: 184-195 Casualty rate: 184, 185 Diggers: 185, 186 Enlistment: 178 Infantry: 187 Light Horse: 187, 193 Mounted units: 187 Racial discrimination: 178-188, 190 Recruitment: 178 Reinforcement concerns: 183 Austria: 34 Austro-Hungarian Empire: 255 Averill, Alfred: 251 Averill, Leslie: 169 Avon River, Christchurch: 62



291

Baird, Kingsley: xiii, 9, 10, 12, 263283, 284 Tomb: 263-264, 268, 269, 278283 Baker, Herbert: 174, 272 Baker, Paul: 71 Banks Peninsula, New Zealand: 126, 128, 252 Barnado scheme: 199 Barczewski, Stephanie: 142, 152 Bargas, Imelda: xiii, 12, 238-262, 284 Barnett, Jean: 114 Bates, Arthur: 74 Battles: Broodseinde: 132 Chunuk Bair: 155-157, 160-163, 171, 172 Dorian: 147 Flers-Courcelette: 133 Jutland: 148 Messines: 123, 124, 129, 131133, 136 Passchendaele: 111, 112, 120, 124, 132, 133, 165, 281 Pozières: 109, 113 Solferino: 34 Somme, the: 8, 106, 107, 109, 121-122, 132, 134, 159, 216, 217, 266, 281 Verdun: 122 Ypres, Third Battle of: 153 Bay of Plenty, New Zealand: 210, 232, 238, 262 Bay of Plenty Times: 238 Beacon fires: 238-239, 240, 243, 252 Belgium: 5, 59, 143, 153, 156, 159, 163, 193, 233, 248, 267, 268, 269, 277 Boezinge: 268, 269 Brandhoek: 143 Broodseinde: 132 Brussels: 5 Gravenstafel: 163, 165-166, 168 Lessines: 153

292 Memorials: 156, 163-164 Messines: 123, 124, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 136, 163, 167, 168, 171, 176, 206, 267, 267 Passchendaele: 111, 112, 120, 124, 132, 133, 165, 206, 281 Ypres: 10, 124, 175 Bell, Francis Dillon: 24, 28 Bennett, Charlotte: xiii, 12, 86-102, 242, 284 Bennett, James: 193 Bible: 89, 143, 264, 274 Binyon, Laurence: 11, 264 Birds: 168 Birdwood, William: 28 Biscuits: 264, 280 Bishop, James: 206-207 Blackadder Goes Forth!: 12 Blakemore, James: 124 Bleakley, J.W.: 183 Blenheim, New Zealand: 96 Blizzards: 147, 149, 150 Blockade: 5 Blomfield, Reginald: 172, 173, 272 Bolshevism: 111, 145 Bonar-Law, Andrew: 8-9 Boston, Peter: 76 Bourke, Joanna: 2 Bowers, Henry: 138, 142, 143, 154 Boyack, Nicholas: 53, 74 Boyer, M. Christine: 277 Break of Day: 89 Bridge to Nowhere: 74 Mrs. Briggs: 113-114 Brisbane, Australia: 17, 184 Brisbane Courier: 178, 184 Britain: 1-3, 6, 7, 11, 22, 28, 32, 38, 39, 40, 49, 50, 66, 71, 88, 104, 122, 124, 142, 147, 152, 153, 155, 158, 159, 160, 172, 189, 201, 215-235, 241, 245, 248, 264, 268, 272, 274 (see also England, Scotland) Admiralty: 140, 151



Index Army: 1, 22, 52, 53, 120, 122, 124, 134, 146, 201, 220, 221-224, 233 Colonial Office: 225, 231 Conscription: 88 Declaration of war: 144 Department of Information: 216, 217, 218 Dominions and: 218, 220, 222223, 225 Enlistment: 201 Government: 241, 244, 245, 272 Home Defence: 145 Military Leadership: 67 Ministry of Information: 226 National identity: 227 Peace celebrations: 244, 245 Press: 228, 235 Press Bureau: 223 Propaganda: 215-235 War Office: 19 British Battlefields Exploits Committee: 159 British Empire: xii, 14, 21, 22, 28, 30, 35, 37, 38, 40, 50, 53, 60, 61, 62, 70, 88, 92, 109, 146, 160, 172, 181, 196, 201, 202, 207, 214, 215-235, 241, 248, 262 Colonial soldiers: 220-222, 224235 Depictions: 215, 220-235 Imperial War Cabinet: 28 Morality: 221, 226, 235 Propaganda: 221, 226, 229 Racial attitudes: 215-216, 220, 221-235 Racial unity: 226-229, 235 British Museum: 160 Britishness: 220-221, 225, 226, 229 British West Indies: 220, 224-225 Soldiers: 224-225 British world: 10, 35, 38, 216, 220 Broken Hill, Australia: 106, 117 Brooke, Rupert: 141, 271 Brooks, Ernest: 217, 222

Endurance and the First World War Brooks, Tom: 206 Broome, Richard: 184 Brown, Donald: 125 Bruce, May: 112 Buckner, Philip: 221 Bulgaria: 139, 146, 255 Bunnythorpe, New Zealand: 247 Burke, Mary: 111 Burnet, John: 162-163, 172 Burton, Ormond: 56, 125, 155 Cadets: 91, 199, 204 Cairns Post: 193 Cambridge, New Zealand: 260 Campbell, Victor: 148 Canada: 21, 46-47, 93-94, 179, 215, 219, 222 Canberra, Australia: 267 Cannadine, David: 227 Canteen and Regimental Trust Fund Board (New Zealand): 82 Canterbury, New Zealand: 43, 62, 97, 121, 128, 132, 216 Belfast, Canterbury: 120, 127, 128, 129, 130, 135 Canterbury Infantry Regiment: 121, 124, 130-133 Canterbury Women’s Institute: 69-70 Cape Crozier: 139 Carr, E.H.: 66 Carroll, Lewis: 49 Carruthers, Walter: 55 Cartoons: 22, 59 Casey, Maurice: 256 Castles, William: 181 Casualties: 32, 36, 38-44, 47-48, 50, 56, 58, 67, 86, 89, 206, 260 Casualty lists: 9, 18, 58, 107 Cavalry: 139 Cavell, Edith: 151 Cemeteries: 10, 156, 159, 160, 162, 171-172, 173, 174, 175, 211, 263, 267, 272, 275, 276, 277, 282 (see also War graves)



293

Brandhoek New Military Cemetery: 143 British New Buttes Cemetery: 175 Caterpillar Valley Cemetery: 265, 273 Chunuk Bair Memorial and Cemetery: 162 Grévillers British War Cemetery: 130 Louvencourt Cemetery: 174 Reninghelst New Military Cemetery: 277 Style: 160, 162, 171-172 Tyne Cot Cemetery: 10 Censorship: 6, 68, 71 Centenary: 66, 68, 264, 266, 270, 278, 280, 281 Central Powers: 86, 95, 146, 239 Challinor, Deborah: 87 Chaplains: 51, 56, 142, 150 Charity: 31-48, 77, 79, 83, 227 Britain: 32-33, 39 British War Charities: 39 Charitable Aid Boards: 79, 80 Comforts: 37, 44, 52 Germany: 33 New Zealand: 32-33, 45 Patriotic organisations: 35, 37, 40, 41, 90, 246 State intervention: 32, 41 Women: 32, 36, 38, 48 Chavasse, Noel: 143 Cheetham, Alf: 152 Cherry-Garrard, Apsley: 138-142, 146-150, 154 Children: 6, 17, 18, 42, 43, 44, 46, 80, 82, 112, 189, 198-199, 234, 241-242, 244, 247, 252, 256 (see also Youth) Choay, Françoise: 275 Crean, Tom: 150, 151, 152 Crichton, James: 125 Christian, Doris: 44 Christchurch, New Zealand: xii, 19, 21, 61-63, 71-72, 96, 135, 137,

294 158, 159, 164, 168, 208, 247, 250, 251, 255, 256, 259 Christchurch Municipal Chambers: 158 Christchurch Port Hills: 168 Papanui, Christchurch: 120, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 135 Christchurch Bridge of Remembrance: 61-62 Christmas: 17, 49, 99, 108, 116, 117, 252 Churchill, Winston: 140, 159 Church News: 61 Cinema: 114 Civilians: see Home front Claredge, Hettie: 111 Clark, Catherine: 44 Clarke, Russell: 76, 97 Class: 49, 70-71 Coal shortage: 239-241, 250, 262 Coalition: 8-9 Cockayne, Leonard: 168 Cold War: 12 Collins, William: 43 Colonial Office (Britain): 225, 231 Commemoration: xiii, 9-11, 16, 5963, 71, 154, 155-176, 193-194, 211-214, 238-262, 263-283 (see also Cemeteries, Memorials) Anzac Day: 16 Contemporary wars: 266, 267 Ceremonies: 10-11, 238-262 Dolores Cross Project: 130 Public Commemoration Events: 238-262, 266 Commonwealth: 179 Commonwealth War Graves Commission: 10, 129, 143, 159160, 172, 263, 264, 267, 269, 272, 275, 276, 282 Burnet and: 162-163 Egalitarianism: 160 Imperial Unity: 160 Lutyens and: 163, 171-173, 175 Style: 160, 171-172



Index Communism: 277 Comradeship: 1-2, 55 Conscientious objection: 7 Conscription: 27-28, 29, 68-71, 88, 94, 207, 232 Anti-conscription: 70, 72 Australia: 71, 104, 110, 111, 114 British: 88 New Zealand: 27-29, 29, 94, 207, 232 Organisation: 29 Opposition: 29 Religious exemption: 28, 29 Concentration camps: 275 Convalescent homes: 44, 205 Cooktown, Australia: 193 Cooper, William: 181 Corcoran, E.: 92 Cornelly, John: 194 Corsbie, Richard: 125 Crawford, John: xiii, 8, 14-30, 285 Crime: 88 Crookston, Agnes: 110 Cross: 62 Dardanelles Campaign: 149, 154, 155, 163 (see also Gallipoli) Debenham, Frank: 146-148 Defence Department (New Zealand): 14, 18-19, 29, 41, 50, 257 Criticism of: 20, 22 Recruitment: 19-21, 23-25, 58, 69-71 Training: 19-21 Demobilization: 41-44, 51, 257 Democracy: 8, 92 Department of Health (New Zealand): 41, 97, 98 Department stores: 37 Depression: 101, 193 Derham, Ellen: 105 Derham, Thomas: 116 Desertion: 17, 51

Endurance and the First World War Desruelles, Félix-Alfred: 169-170 Diary: 56, 138, 208 Disability: 43, 44-46, 73, 76, 77-83, 93-94 Disease: 21-22, 24-25, 26, 79-80, 127, 128, 129 Scurvy: 148, 150 Venereal Disease: 17-18, 185 Disillusionment: xii, 2, 7, 53-54, 57 Distinguished Conduct Medal: 125, 207, 210 Distinguished Combat Medal: 187 Distinguished Service Order: 148 Diver, Dick: 49-50, 54, 61 Dixon, G.F.: 25 Dobbs, Frank: 110 Domestic service: 6, 29, 199 Dominions: 1, 23, 26, 41, 77, 81, 86, 179, 196, 202, 207, 215, 218, 221 Colonial Office: 225 Complaints: 223 Dominion Troops: 1 Identity: 196 Race: 221-235 Soldiers: 220, 221-224, 233 War enthusiasm: 220 Wartime relationship with Britain: 218, 220, 222-223 Whiteness: 221, 222-224, 231, 233, 235 Dominion: 249 Dominion Museum, Wellington: 159 Dominion Post: 267 Donson, Andrew: 88 ‘Dot’s Little Folk Page’: 86-87, 90, 91-102 Bereavements: 99-102 Celebration of Peace: 94-96 Influenza Pandemic: 96-102 Older Writers: 87, 92, 93, 98102 Opinion on underage enlistment: 93



295

Understanding of pandemic: 100-101 Youth reactions to pandemic: 98-102 Drill training: 91 Dunant, Henri: 34 Dunedin, New Zealand: 18, 19, 23, 96, 100, 150, 159, 199-200, 206, 210, 247, 252 Dunedin Botanic Gardens: 167 Duty: 22, 29-30, 50, 55, 61, 114, 126, 185, 264, 277 Earthquakes: xii Education: 14, 24, 28, 43, 46, 47, 75, 126, 198, 200, 203, 218, 252 Education Department (New Zealand): 14, 245, 253 Edwards, Elizabeth: 216 Egalitarianism: 53 Egypt: 16, 19-20, 21, 140, 204, 205, 212, 273 Alexandria: 147, 205 Port Said: 147 Sinai: 128 Zeitoun: 204, 212 Eldred-Grigg, Stevan: 74, 259 Elections: 24-26, 71 Elephant Island: 150 Ell, Harry: 168 Empire Day: 184 Empire Service League: 60 Emotions: 2, 23, 38, 49-63, 88-89, 103-117, 186 Enemy: 1, 4, 51, 114, 126, 135, 145, 159, 210 Endurance: xii-xiii Aboriginal Australians discrimination: 178-195 Allen, James: xiii, 14-30 Antarctic explorers: xiii, 137154 Civilian: 86-102, 103-117 Commemoration: 155-176, 238262, 263-283

296 Economic: 104, 110 Forbearance: 31-48 Frontline: 120-136, 137-154, 155-176 Home front: 14-30, 31-48, 4963, 66-85, 86-102, 103-117, 178-195, 196-214, 215-235, 238-262 Memory: xiii, 66-68, 155-176, 238-262, 263-283 Myths: xiii, 66-85 New Zealand-Indian connections: 196-214 Promotion: 120-136 Propaganda: 215-235 Racial prejudice: xiii, 178-235 Red Cross identity: 31-48 Sentimental Equipment: 49-63 Youth: 86-102 Endurance Expedition: 137, 150-54 Aim: 150 Attitudes towards: 152 Beginnings: 150 Casualties: 150 Offer to Admiralty: 151 Press coverage: 152 Return: 152 Ross Sea Party: 150-153 Sinking: 150 Survivors: 150 War news: 151 War service: 152-154 England: 5, 15, 22, 115, 125, 138, 144, 159, 173, 204-206 (see also Britain) Buckinghamshire: 146 Dover: 149 London: 28, 39, 42, 44, 148, 151, 153, 156, 158, 164, 165, 169, 218, 245, 267, 270 Oxfordshire: 146 Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry: 146 Entertainments: 37, 39, 218



Index Ephemera: 238, 258, 264, 267, 269, 281 Etaples Mutiny: 51 Europe: 10, 34, 35, 42, 43, 56-57, 62, 87, 102, 111, 144, 151, 158, 199, 207, 213, 220, 274 Evans Bay, New Zealand: 269 Evans, Edgar: 138 Evans, Edward: 145, 146, 148 Evelyn Firth Home: 44 Exhibitions: 159, 216, 271, 280 Factories: 6 Fairfax, New Zealand: 98 Family: xiii, 2, 8-9, 17, 18, 22-23, 30, 36, 38, 41, 58-59, 88, 93-95, 98, 99, 103-117, 180, 188-189, 193 Anxiety: xii, 103-117 Distractions: 105-107 Grief: 100-117 Loss of income: 110 Care for soldiers at front: 110 War weariness: 110-111 Health: 110-113 Farming: 74, 77, 81, 110, 197, 199, 203, 205, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213 Fascism: 277 Fenton, Damien: 259 Featherston, New Zealand: 256 Feather, Thomas: 126 Ferguson, Niall: 52 Fickleton, Samuel: 125 Fiennes, Ranulph: 141 Film: 44, 142-143, 260, 270-271 Fire Brigade: 37 Firth, Joseph: 90 First Balkan War: 139 First World War: Aboriginal Australians and: 178-195 Allen, James: 14-30 Anglo-Indians and: 196-214

Endurance and the First World War Antarctic explorers and: 137154 British Empire: 215-235 Centenary: 66, 68, 264, 266, 270, 278, 280, 281 Commemoration: 155-176, 238262, 263-283 Contemporary understanding: 67-68, 72, 74, 85, 262-283 Frontline: 120-136, 137-154, 155-176 Home front: 14-30, 31-48, 4963, 66-85, 86-102, 103-117, 178-195, 196-214, 215-235, 238-262 Influenza pandemic: 86-102 Memorials: 155-176 Memory: 66-68 Myths: xiii, 66-85 Officers: 120-136 Origins: 138-139, 143-144 Outbreak: 144, 151 Promotion: 120-136 Propaganda: 215-235 Race: 178-235 Red Cross: 31-48 Sentimental Equipment: 49-63 Technology: xii, 139-140, 154 Youth: 86-102 Fischer, Fritz: 11 Fitzgerald, F. Scott: 49 Flags: 34, 36, 39, 256 (See also ‘Union Jack’) Flanders, Belgium: 150 Flesher, James: 43 Flick, Mick: 189 Foringer, Alonzo: 36 Forsyth, Samuel: 125, 135 Fuller, J.G.: 1, 52 Fundraising: 9, 32, 35-37, 39, 41, 45-46, 69, 90, 93, 218, 219, 247 Fussell, Paul: 53 France: xii, 2, 4, 34, 39, 100, 105, 106, 114, 121, 125, 146, 149, 151, 153, 156, 159, 160, 163, 169, 170, 173, 181, 189, 193,



297

205, 206, 211, 213, 223, 224, 227, 228, 233, 263, 269, 272, 273 Armentières: 121 Beaumont Hamel: 126 Bécourt Wood: 222-223 Courcelete: 165 Flers: 165 Goose Alley: 121 Le Quesnoy: 163, 164, 169-171 Longueval: 159, 165, 267 Marseilles: 49 Memorials: 163 Paris: 169-170, 185 Pozières: 109, 113, 183 Rossingol Wood: 126 Sainte Marie Cappel: 153 Soldiers: 224, 263 Somme: 8, 106, 121-122, 132, 134, 174, 216, 217, 267 Thiépval: 10 Versailles: 11 Fraser, Alexander: 165, 169 Free Herald and Weekly Star: 93 Frengley, Joseph: 97 Freud, Sigmund: 59 Gallwey, Grace: 116-117 Gallipoli: 10, 18, 22, 23, 41, 43, 58, 72, 89, 92, 105, 107, 113, 120, 122, 124, 128, 129, 140, 148, 149, 151, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 162, 163, 165, 168, 171, 172, 185, 188, 193, 234, 249, 281, 234, 249, 281 (see also Dardanelles Campaign) Australian Memorial: 171 Effect on recruitment: 23, 58 New Zealand national identity and: 72, 165, 168 Gardner, W.J.: 24 Gas masks: 91 Gaze, Irvine Owen: 153 Geneva Convention: 34, 39 Geneva, Switzerland: 34, 38

298 Geology: 146 George V: 227-230, 239, 245, 252 Germany: xii, 2, 4, 5, 7, 11, 23, 56, 69, 86, 88, 92, 101, 114, 122, 124, 131, 133, 135, 138, 143, 144, 149, 151, 167, 169, 185, 222, 224, 226, 232, 233, 239, 255, 256, 260, 264, 278 Army: 143 German Empire: 88 Imperial German Air Service: 153 Invasion of Belgium: 233 Morale: 122 Navy: 143 Propaganda: 222, 224, 233 Second Reich: 11 Soldiers: 224, 233, 264 Surrender: 133 Third Reich: 11 War effort: 233 Weimar Republic: 11 Westphalia: 49 Wurtemburg: 49 Gerrard, Andrea: 187 Gibbons, P.J.: 69 Gippsland, Australia: 191 Gisborne, New Zealand: 210 Godley, Alexander: 14, 15, 16, 20, 22, 23, 176, 229-230 Goering, Herman: 153 Gore, New Zealand: 95 Gothic Revival: 158 Gould, Ashley: 76, 81 Graham, Jeanie: 87 Graham, John: 198-201, 203, 207, 208-209, 214 Grant, John: 125 Grant, Peter: 39 Gran, Tryggve: 138, 143-146, 148 Gray, John: 163 Great Depression: 12, 44, 45, 46, 82, 83, 84 The Great War and Modern Memory: 53 The Great Wrong War: 74, 259



Index Greece: 146-147 Ancient Greece: 61 Athens: 263 Salonika: 146-147 Gregory, Adrian: 104 Grief: xii, 8-9, 58-59, 23, 26, 31, 33, 104 Grieves, Keith: 52 Grierson, Aimer and Draffin: 16 Gulag: 278 Gurkhas: 179 Hall, Catherine: 220 Hall, Richard: 205 Handel, George Frederic: 251 Hannon, Albert: 114 Hannon, John: 114 Hannon, Maria: 114-115 Harbour Board (New Zealand): 37 Harper, Montague: 229-230 Harrison, Carrie: 212-213 Harrison, William: 211-213 Hart, Herbert: 56 Hart, Janice: 216 Hartley, L.P.: 266 Hawera, New Zealand: 253 Hayward, Victor: 150 Health: 3, 7, 42, 44-46 Hearps, Alfred: 187-188 Heywood, Australia: 185 Himalayas: 198 Hirsch, Marianne: 270 Historial de la Grande Guerre: 263, 278, 279, 280 Hobart, Australia: 150 Hokitika, New Zealand: 250 Holder, Henry: 206 Holland, Henry: 72 Holman, William: 112 Holocaust: 275, 278 Home front: xiii, 4-6, 14-30, 31-48, 49-63, 66-85, 86-102, 103-117, 178-195, 196-214, 215-235, 238-262 Australia: 103-117

Endurance and the First World War Class divisions: 70-71 Demobilization: 41-44, 51, 116117, 257 Dissatisfaction with government: 68-71, 72-74 Dissent: 68-72, 89, 239, 253, 259 Entertainments: 8, 114, 252, 258 Jingoism: 67-70, 72 New Zealand: 14-30, 31-48, 4963, 66-85, 86-102, 178-195, 196-214, 215-235, 238-262 Patriotism: 68-71, 85, 88 Shirkers: 60, 69 War enthusiasm: 67-72 Homes Magazine: 197, 201, 204208 Honours Boards: 128 Horses: 128 Horseshoe Hill, Macedonia: 147 Hospitals: 34, 44-45, 46, 98, 114, 189, 205-206, 208, 218, 227, 228, 250 Hospital Ships: 43 Howard, Ted: 72 Huggonson, David: 181 Hughes, Billy: 110 Hughes, Ernest: 204, 205, 211-212 Hughes, Frank: 17 Hughes, Louisa: 114 Hughes, Thomas: 106, 108, 114 Humanitarianism: 31, 34 Humour: 3, 52, 56, 59, 197, 205 Hurley, Frank: 152 Hussey, Christopher: 272 Hynes, Greg: xiii, 215-235, 285 Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire: 219 India: 16, 151, 183, 196-204, 207, 208, 210-214, 224, 228, 231 Anglo-Indians: 196-214 Assam: 198, 203, 211, 213 Bengal: 203 Northern Bengal Rifles: 204



299

British Army: 201 British authorities: 198, 207 British colonialism: 198 Darjeeling: 198, 203, 213 Enlistment: 201-202 Hindi: 213 Hyderabad: 203 Indian troops: 213 Kalimpong: 197-211, 213-214 Lucknow: 203 Meerut: 203 National identity: 196 Nationalism: 196, 207-208 New Zealand connections: 197, 213-214 Parsee: 203, 211 Rajputs: 213 Soldiers: 224, 228, 231 Travancore: 203 Volunteer forces: 204 In Flanders Fields Museum: 268 Influenza: 7, 41, 86, 96-102, 240242, 254, 255-256, 258, 260, 262 Influenza Pandemic: xiii, 41, 86-87, 96-102, 240-242, 252, 254, 255, 258, 260, 262 Deaths: 86, 96, 97, 101 Emotions: 86, 99 Publicity: 97 Quarantine: 96-97 Reactions: 86-87, 96-102 Relief work: 97-99 Role of peace celebrations in spread: 101 Spread: 96-98, 100 Youth responses: 86-87, 96-102 Insanity: 7 Insignia: 160, 164-165, 170, 222 Invasion: 4 Invercargill, New Zealand: 99 Ireland: 152, 210 Italy: xii, 34, 51, 111, 169, 183 Army: 51 Caporetto: 111 Italian Front: 111

300 Piedmont: 34 Trieste: 164 Ivanhoe, Australia: 191 Japan: 42 Hiroshima: 278 Nagasaki: 278 Jeroen Geurst: 272, 274 Jingoism: 66-72, 85 Johnson, Nuala C.: 277 Jones, Henry Gwynne: 110 Jones, Llewellyn: 204, 206, 208, 209 Jones, Max: 142, 149 Jordanova, Ludmilla: 216 Judson, Reginald: 125 Kangaroo Island, Australia: 186 Karpany, Bill: 180 Kartinyeri, Doreen: 180, 186 Keast, Jim: 109, 117 Keast, Rose: 106, 108, 113, 117 Kemal, Mustafa: 154 Kennedy, George: 191 Kennedy, Rosalind: 88 Kenyon, Frederic: 160 Khaki: 182 King, Michael: 69, 259 Kipling, Rudyard: 133, 264 Kirkpatrick, Annie: 44 Knitting: 38, 106 Korean War: 186, 194, 266 Kultur: 6-7 Labour: Labour Federation (New Zealand): 259 Labour movement (New Zealand): 70 Labour Party (New Zealand): 83-84, 71-72 Lake Coledridge, New Zealand: 250 Lake Tyers, Australia: 188, 191 Landmarks: 74 Land confiscations: 70, 232



Index Lands Department (New Zealand): 81 Langer Owen, Mary: 11 Lantern slides: 173-174, 216-235 The Last Great Quest: 142 Laurent, Henry: 125 Lawless, Charlie: 206 Le Bons Bay, New Zealand: 252, 254 Lectures: 45, 90, 91, 173, 218 Leed, Eric: 1 Lemare, Stuart: 206 Lewis, Cecil: 145 Lewis, Jessie: 45 Liberal Party (New Zealand): 25-27, 72 Libraries: xii, 197, 216, 218, 221, 225, 227, 228, 235, 252, 254 Liddle, Peter: 122 Lippincott, R.A.: 168 Little River, New Zealand: 126 Liverpool, Lord: 24, 26, 27, 29, 120 Lloyd George, David: 154, 217, 220, 224 Lochhead, Ian: xiii, 9,10, 12, 155176, 285 Lone Pine (see also Gallipoli): 171 Loveridge, Steven: xiii, 1, 49-63, 285 Luckins, Tanja: 8, 112, 115 Luke, Jacobina: 31 Lusitania: 23, 148, 151 Lutyens, Edward: 10, 163, 171-173, 175, 263, 264, 265, 272-276, 278, 279, 282 Impact: 272 Stone of Remembrance: 263, 264, 265, 272-276, 278, 279, 280, 282 Style: 272 War Stones: 171-173, 175 Whitehall Cenotaph: 173 Lyons, Joseph: 181 Lyttleton, New Zealand: 137-138

Endurance and the First World War Macedonia: 147 Mackintosh, Aeneas: 150 Maclean, Chris: 252 Magazines: 44, 89, 91, 97, 102, 169, 197, 201, 208 Makgill, Robert: 97 Malone, William: 55 Malthus, Cecil: 55, 122-123, 134 MƗori: 16, 18, 70, 165, 179, 183, 202, 230-235 Art: 165 Conscription: 70, 232 Depictions: 230-235 Enlistment: 232 Fears for survival: 232 Iwi: 179, 231 Land confiscations: 232 Loyalty: 231 MƗori Pioneer Battalion: 179, 202, 232-235, 257 Native Contingent: 16, 18, 70, 232 New Zealand Wars: 80, 231-232 Propaganda: 230-235 Racial perceptions: 16 Racial theory: 230-231, 233-235 Resistance: 232 South African War: 231 Taiaha: 165 Te Arawa: 231 Maple Leaf Club: 93 Maps: 226 Mary of Teck: 228 Masculinity: 197, 203, 207 Masefield, John: 155 Massey, William: 14, 16, 17-18, 2327, 28, 30, 71, 84, 176 Masterton, New Zealand: 246 Matania, Fortunio: 169 Mateparae, Jerry: 267 Mawson, Douglas: 152 May, Richard: 203, 211-212 Mayors: 31, 71-72, 106, 169, 247 McCabe, Jane: xiii, 3, 196-214, 285 McClintock, A.H.: 15 McCombs, James: 71



301

McCormick, Eric: 58 Medals: 105, 125, 135, 187, 206207, 210-211, 270 Melbourne, Australia: 105, 107 Melville, Hamilton: 204-207, 208, 209, 210-211 Melvin, Margaret: 107 Memorials: xiii, 10, 61-62, 120, 128, 129, 130, 143, 147, 155176, 211, 238-239, 240, 243, 245, 249, 250, 251, 252-253, 261-262, 263, 266, 267, 271, 272, 276, 277, 280, 281, 282, 283 (see also Commemoration, New Zealand Battlefield Memorials) Australian Memorials: 171 Battlefield memorials: 155-176 Belgium: 156, 163-164 British Memorials: 159, 171 Cenotaph: 129, 173, 276 Ceremonies: 173 Chunuk Bair: 156-157, 160-163, 171, 172 Design: 160-163 France: 156, 163-164 Gallipoli: 156, 160, 171-172 Gravenstafel: 163-164, 165-166, 168, 176 Inscriptions: 159, 161-162, 164, 170 New Zealand memorials: 267, 280 Peace memorials: 238-239, 240, 243, 247-249, 252, 253, 261-262 New Zealand Overseas Memorials: 130, 155-176 Longueval: 156, 163-164, 165, 175, 267 Le Quesnoy: 163-164, 169-171 Materials: 161-164, 169 Memorial Halls: 248, 252-253 Menin Gate: 173 Messines: 130, 163-164, 171, 176

302 Negotiations for land: 163 Protection: 166-167 Religious symbolism: 171-172 Sculpture: 169-170, 173 Style: 159-164, 170, 173 Thiépval: 10 Utilitarian memorials: 61-62 Memory: xii, xiii, 9-11, 59, 66-68, 85, 155-176, 212, 239, 263-283 ‘Penetrations’: 266-283 Mercantile Marine: 152, 198 Mesopotamia: 115, 206 Methven, New Zealand: 248 Middle Class: 70, 113, 126, 219 Middlemarch, New Zealand: 247 Migration: 46, 196, 199, 207 Miller, Daniel: 273-275 Military Cross: 145, 187 Military Medal: 126, 187, 206-207, 210 Milne, Edmund: 105, 108 109, 115 Mining: 80, 209, 240 Monarchy: 35, 49, 227-230, 235 British Empire: 227-230, 235 National identity: 227 Monash, John: 110 Monger, David: xi-xiii, 1-12, 285 Montenegro: 139 Montreal, Canada: 93-94 Moody, Katherine: xiii, 4, 137-154, 286 Morgan, Jo-Anne: 249, 261-262 Morpurgo, Michael: 270-271 Mothers: 2, 9, 17, 30, 36, 38, 48, 58, 61, 69, 82, 99, 103-117, 276 Mountfort, Benjamin: 158 Mount Maunganui, New Zealand: 238, 240, 243, 252, 262 Murray, Ben: 185, 186, 190 Murray, James: 182 Murray, Lettie: 210 Murray, Sarah: xi-xiii, 286 Museums: xii, 9, 129, 159 160, 165, 211 263, 267, 270 Mutiny: 51 Myth: 66-85



Index Nansen, Fridtjof: 138 Napoleon III: 34 National Art Training School (Britain): 158 National Government (New Zealand): 26-27, 28, 29 National identity: 11, 15-16, 55-56, 62-63, 72, 156-157, 165, 168, 196, 202, 265, 266, 267, 276, 277, 278, 281, 283 Nationalism: 196, 207 National Service League: 90 Nauru: 260 Navy: 137, 145, 148-149, 152, 192, 198, 245 Navy League: 219 Nazism: 11, 278 Nelson, New Zealand: 36, 129 New South Wales, Australia: 106, 110, 112, 113, 146, 184, 189, 191, 193 Newspapers: 9, 21, 26, 29, 35, 58, 59, 69, 71, 89, 97, 180, 182, 184, 192, 213, 234, 243, 258, 267 Newstead, C.W.: 153 New Zealand: xii-xiii, 7, 8, 10-12, 14-30, 31-48, 49-63, 66-85, 86102, 120-136, 137, 138, 149, 155-176, 179, 196-214, 215235, 238-262, 264-267 Anglo-Indians: 196-214 Antarctic expeditions: 137, 138, 149 Battlefield memorials: 156-176 British identity: 71, 281 Censorship: 89 Coal: 239-240, 250, 262 Conscription: 27-28, 29, 94, 207, 232 Demobilization: 41-44, 51 257 Dissent: 68-72, 89, 239, 253, 259 Forestry Department: 245 Government: 9, 41, 46-47, 6871, 73-74, 76-78, 81-82, 88,

Endurance and the First World War 96-98, 102, 159, 173, 231, 232, 241-246, 249, 250, 255, 257 Governor-General: 35, 39, 120, 267 High Commissioner: 39, 169 Home front: 4-6, 14-30, 31-48, 49-63, 66-85, 86-102, 178195, 196-214, 215-235, 238262 Immigration: 46, 199, 201, 207208 Indian connections: 197, 213214 Influenza Pandemic: 41, 86-87, 96-102, 240, 242, 252, 254256, 258, 260, 262 Jingoism: 67-72 Long Depression: 158 Masculinity: 197, 203, 207 Ministry for Culture and Heritage: xii, 267 Minister for Internal Affairs: 241 National identity: 15-16, 55-56, 62-63, 72, 156-157, 165, 168, 196-214, 231, 265, 266, 267, 281 National memory of First World War: 66-68, 72, 74 National War Memorial: 266, 267 Native plants: 162, 165, 167168 New Zealand Defence Force: xii New Zealand Wars: 80, 231-232 Population: 14, 46, 58, 86, 266 Post-war reconstruction: 32 Propaganda: 89, 215-235 Public health: 44-45 Recruitment: 19-21, 23-25, 58, 69-71 Red Cross: 31-48, 90 Repatriation Department: 76 Second World War: 16, 38, 47, 48, 83,



303

Self-reliance: 77-78, 81, 83 Social welfare: 47, 75-76, 79, 80, 83-84 Soldiers: 16-17, 19-21, 23, 5157, 155, 163, 222-223, 229230, 233, 247, 256, 257258, 264, 267 South African War: 231 Tomb of the Unknown Warrior: 266, 276 Treatment of veterans: 66-68, 72-85 Voluntary spirit: 219 War enthusiasm: 67-72, 88 War regulations: 68 Youth: 86-102 New Zealand and the First World War 1914-1919: 259 New Zealand Army Nursing Service: 44 New Zealanders at War: 259 New Zealand Battlefield Memorials: 155-176 (see also Memorials) Ceremonies: 173 Chunuk Bair: 156-157, 160-163, 171, 172 Design: 160-163 Egalitarianism: 160, 170 Government commission: 159 Gravenstafel: 163-164, 165-166, 168 Imperial Unity: 160 Inscriptions: 161-162, 164, 170 Insignia: 160, 164-165, 170 Le Quesnoy: 163-164, 169-171 Longueval: 159, 163, 165, 175, 267 MƗori details: 165 Materials: 161-164, 169 Messines: 163-164, 167, 168, 171, 176 Planting: 162, 165, 167-168 Protection: 166-167 Religious symbolism: 171-172 Sculpture: 169-170, 173 Style: 159-164, 170, 173

304 Tone: 159 New Zealand Division: 120-136 3rd New Zealand Brigade: 169 Battle of Messines: 167 Battle of Passchendaele: 124-5, 132, 165 Battle of the Somme: 122, 129, 132, 134, 149, 159, 163 Casualties: 122, 124, 156, 165 Commander: 120, 134 Comparison to British division: 121, 135 Disease: 127, 128, 129 Gallipoli: 168 (see also Gallipoli) Growing professionalism: 124 Infantry: 120, 130 Insignia: 160, 164-165, 170 Le Quesnoy: 169-171 Main Body: 120 Medals: 125 Missing: 130 Mortality rate: 127-136 NCOs and Junior Officers: 125 New Zealand Division: 120 New Zealand Rifle Brigade: 120, 131 New Zealand Mounted Rifles: 120, 128 On the Western Front: 163, 165, 167, 168, 169 Organisation: 121-122 Platoon organisation: 123 Privates: 125, 127, 128, 129, 130, 133, 135 Promotion: 120, 126-136 Reinforcements: 120, 122, 135 Size: 135 Tactics: 120-124 Training: 121, 123-124, 126, 133-135 Uniform: 169 Victoria Cross: 125 Wounds: 127, 128, 130 Ypres: 124-125



Index The New Zealand Division 19161919: 121 New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF): 14-30, 50, 66, 69-72, 88, 95, 159, 161, 176 Alcohol: 19-20 Army Service Corps: 28 Base Records: 18, 130 Billeting: 21 Discipline: 16, 17, 51 Disease outbreaks: 21-22, 2425, 26, 28 Egypt: 16, 19, 213 Eighth Reinforcements: 21 Enlistment: 56, 58 Forty-Second Reinforcements: 95 Medical Corps: 28 Pay: 15 Race: 198-214 Recruitment: 19-21, 23-25, 58, 69-71 Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force: 16 Training: 19-21, 204 New Zealand Herald: 26 New Zealand History Online: 69, 75 New Zealand Institute of Architects: 158 New Zealand Medical Corps: 156 New Zealand Mounted Rifles: 120 New Zealand Naval Forces: 14 New Zealand Territorial Force: 14, 22, 126, 127 New Zealand Town Planning Conference: 158 New Zealand War Contingent Association: 39 New Zealand Wars: 80 Neutrality: 33, 34, 226 Nicholas, Henry: 125 Night patrol: 134, 135 Nimrod: 138 Nineteenth century: 32, 34, 77, 198, 227, 230, 231, 233, 277

Endurance and the First World War Nobel Laureate: 264 Nolan, Melanie: 80 Non-commissioned Officers: 120136 Corporals: 123, 125, 128, 135, 206 Death: 122-136 Disease: 127, 128, 129 Education: 124, 126 Experience: 126 Lance Corporal: 125, 126, 135, 206 Lieutenants: 123, 129, 134 Medals: 125 Mortality rate: 127-136 Promotion: 126-136 Recruitment: 125 Responsibilities: 124-126, 133135 Sergeants: 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 134, 135, 206, 210, 213 Territorial Forces: 126-127 Training: 125, 126, 133-134 Wounds: 127, 128, 130 North America: 87 North Island, New Zealand: 21, 232 North Sea: 143-144, 149 Norway: 138, 143-144, 145 Royal Norwegian Flying Corps: 144, 145 Nurses: 36, 44-45, 46, 47, 211, 227 O’Connor, Paul: xiii, 120-136, 286 Ode of Remembrance: 264 Olick, Jeffery K.: 277 Omanawa, New Zealand: 238 Oamaru, New Zealand: 99 Oates, Lawrence: 138, 139, 142144, 146 Ochterlony, Robert: 206, 209 Officers: 2, 19, 187 One the Dead in Gallipoli: 155 Oral testimonies: 180 Order of St. John: 35, 40, 41, 43, 45-46, 47



305

Order of St Michael and St George: 25 Ormondville, New Zealand: 252253 Otago, New Zealand: 90, 91, 128, 130, 247 10th North Otago Regiment: 204 Otago Women’s Patriotic Association: 90 Otago Daily Times: 29, 232 Otago Witness: 86-87, 198, 212 Ottoman Empire: 139, 255 (see also Turkey) Owen, Wilfred: 56 Oxford Companion to New Zealand Military History: 259 Pacifism: 8, 69-70, 72 Painting: 169 Pakeha: 16, 91, 165, 197, 203 Palestine: 185, 187, 193 Palmerston North, New Zealand: 18, 19, 91 Palm Island, Australia: 189 Palstra, Jacoba: 105, 106, 108, 116 Palstra, Wiebe: 116 Pamphlets: 40, 59, 232 Parades: 21, 75, 222 Parker, Sally: 259-260 Parkes, Isabella: 115 Parliament (Australia): 191 Parliament (New Zealand): 22, 2527, 71, 97 Parr, J.H.: 92 Parsons, Gwen: xiii, 3, 66-85, 209, 219, 286 Passchendaele: (see Belgium) Patriotic societies: 35, 37, 40, 41, 71, 90, 216, 218, 219, 246 Patriotism: xii, 7-8, 21, 22, 33, 39, 50, 53, 55-56, 62, 68-72, 88, 103, 113, 221 Peace: 3, 4, 42-43, 60, 62, 94-95, 116, 238-262 Peace Celebrations: xiii, 238-262

Index

306 Children’s day: 241, 245, 246, 247, 249, 251, 252, 255, 256 Coal shortage: 239-241, 250, 262 Costs: 255 Day of rejoicing: 241, 245 Day of thanksgiving: 239, 241, 245, 246, 251, 256 Ephemerality: 238, 258 Government subsidies: 244, 245, 255 Influenza pandemic: 242, 252, 254, 255-256, 258, 262 Local initiative: 241 Pageant: 245 Planning: 239-246, 255 Returned soldiers: 257-258 Soldiers’ Day: 246, 247-248, 251, 252, 258, 259 Souvenirs: 255 Peace Day: 100, 252-253, 256, 259 Peace treaties: 239, 259, 261 Peloponnesian War: 263 Penal settlement: 189 Pennell, Harry: 148 Pensions Department (New Zealand): 41, 79, 80 Pepper, Percy: 191 Pericles: 263, 282 Perth, Australia: 107 Phillips, Jock: 53, 203, 252 Phosphate: 260 Photographers: 142, 152 (see also War photographers) Photography: xiii, 41, 129, 166, 212, 213, 215-235, 259, 260 Pickles, Katie: xi-xiii, 287 Picton, New Zealand: 209 Pinkenba, Australia: 111 Plantations: 198-199 British planters: 198, 203, 204, 208 Plants: 162, 165, 167-168, 238, 239, 245, 246, 247-250, 252, 253254, 261-262, 276



Plumer, Herbert: 123, 124, 229-230 Plunket, Lord: 39 Poetry: 11, 12, 59, 67, 74, 133, 141, 155, 264, 271 Point McLeay Station, Australia: 180, 190, 194 Poison gas: 151, 185, 208 Polar Medal: 153 Polderhoek Chateau: 132, 133 Ponder, James: 200 Ponting, Herbert: 142 Poppies: 276 Port Chalmers, New Zealand: 150, 200 Postal service: 52, 94, 107 Post-traumatic stress: 55 The Press: 128, 164, 251 Prince of Wales: 258 Prime Ministers: 8, 14, 17-18, 2329, 71, 110, 176, 181, 217, 244 Acting Prime Minister: xiii, 2829, 244 Australian: 110, 181 British: 8, 217 Co-Prime Minister: 26 New Zealand: 14, 24-26, 71, 176 Prisoners of war: 32, 41, 122, 134, 135, 149, 153, 184, 185, 187, 222 Processions: 37, 228, 246-247, 250, 252, 256, 258 Promotion: xiii, 120-136, 206 Propaganda: xiii, 7-8, 59, 89, 142, 151, 153, 178, 180, 184-185, 195, 215-235 Aboriginal Australians: 178, 180, 184-185, 195 Atrocity propaganda: 226, 233 British: 215-235 Department of Information: 216, 217, 218 Ministry of Information: 226 Wellington House: 217, 219

Endurance and the First World War Content: 216-217, 220-235 Creation: 216-218 Development: 217, 219-220 Distribution: 216-219 Dominions: 218-220, 222-225 Morality: 221, 226, 233. 235 Photography: 217-235 Race: 221, 222-226 South America: 153 Protests: 68 Public holidays: 246 Public meetings: 68 Pugsley, Christopher: 155 Quarrier Homes: 199 Queen Carnivals: 37 Queensland, Australia: 111, 114, 183, 184, 188, 189, 192, 193 Queenstown, New Zealand: 129 Race: xiii, 16, 50, 178, 196-214, 215-235 Aboriginal Australians: 178-195 Anglo-Indians: xiii, 196-214 Britishness: 220-221, 225, 226, 229 British world: 220, 229 Depictions: 215, 220-235 Indian: 183 MƗori: 16, 18, 70, 165, 179, 183, 202, 230-235 Martial race: 234 Mixed descent: 178-180, 183, 185, 192, 193, 198-199, 201, 202, 214 Whiteness: 217, 221, 222-225, 229, 231, 233, 235 Race to the Pole: 141 Ranfurly, Lord: 35 Rationing: 104 Raurekau, New Zealand: 98 Reconnaissance: 132 Recruitment: 19-21, 23-25, 58, 6971



307

Red Cross: xiii, 31-48, 90, 106, 115, 140 Advertising: 35, 38-39 American Red Cross: 42 Auckland Red Cross: 39 Australian Red Cross: 46-47, 181 British Red Cross: 35, 37, 38, 39, 43, 45, 46 Broken Hill Red Cross: 106 Canadian Red Cross: 46-47 Care of wounded: 32 Care of prisoners: 32 Children: 43-44, 46 Comforts: 37, 38, 39, 44 Disaster relief: 42-43, 47 Efficiency: 37, 38 Emblem: 34-35, 36, 40, 41, 47 Endurance: 47-48 Feminine identity: 36, 38 French Red Cross: 39 Fundraising: 35-37, 39, 41, 45 Humanitarianism: 33-35 International Committee of the Red Cross: 34 International Conference: 42 International presence: 33-35, 47-48 Japanese Red Cross: 42 Junior Red Cross: 44-45, 46, 47 League of Red Cross Societies: 42, 47 London New Zealand Red Cross Committee: 39 New Zealand: 32-48 New Zealand Government and: 46 Nurses: 44-45 Order of St. John: 35, 37-38, 39, 40, 47-48 Origins: 33-34, 40 ‘Our Day’ appeal: 37, 39, 40 Post-war role: 32-48 Principles: 33-35 Public health: 44-45 Red Crescent: 33

308 Red Cross Record: 37-38, 39 Shop and depot: 37, 38 Relationship with the state: 3334, 46-47 Second World War: 47 Veterans: 41-44 Women: 35, 36, 38, 42, 48, 61, 69, 70 Reform Party (New Zealand): 14, 24, 25-27, 84 Coalition: 14, 18, 25-27 Regimental histories: 130 Religion: 6-7, 24, 28, 29, 49, 50, 5657, 61, 70, 89, 97, 102, 107, 109, 114, 115, 171-172, 187, 198, 208, 251, 274 (See also Chaplains) Christianity: 62, 142, 172, 274 Anglicanism: 24, 251 Cathedrals: 233 Catholicism: 29, 114 Churches: 5, 59, 98, 250, 251, 256 Clergy: 29 Methodism: 60 Presbyterianism: 89, 198, 199 Exemption from conscription: 28-29 Islam: 187 Remobilization: 7 Repatriation Department (New Zealand): 76 Resistance: 7-8 Returned Soldiers’ Association (New Zealand): 37, 41, 63, 73, 78, 82-83, 173 Christchurch RSA: 63 Returned Soldiers’ League (Australia): 182, 192-193 Aboriginal rights: 192-193 Discrimination: 192-193 Recognition of Aboriginal service: 193 Reveille: 193 Richardson, George: 42-43



Index Riddle, Lord: 159 Rigney, Rufus Gordon: 190 Riseman, Noah: xiii, 178-195, 202, 287 Rivers, W.H.R.: 54 Robinson, Ira: 55 Robinson, Tom: 182 Roper, Michael: 2, 3, 52, 103, 105 Ross, Malcolm: 57 Ross Sea: 150-152 Rotorua, New Zealand: 232 Rout, Ettie: 17 Royal Academy of Arts: 158 Royal Artillery: 222-223 Royal Engineers: 140 Royal Flying Corps: 114, 123, 143146, 153 Royal Institute of British Architects: 158 Royal Military Academy Sandhurst: 120 Royal Navy: 140, 149, 245 Royal Navy Air Service: 140 Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve: 140 Royal Society: 120 Royle, May: 107, 108 Russell, Andrew: 16, 17, 120, 122, 124, 125, 131 Russell, George: 27, 241 Russia: xii, 20, 111, 145, 148, 149, 151, 154 Army: 20, 151 Civil War: 145, 154 Declaration of war: 151 Dvina: 145 Revolution: 111 Vologda: 145 Ryan, T.J.: 111 Sagittarius Rising: 154 Sailors: 39 Salvation Army: 41 Saunders, Chris: 186 Saunders, Reg: 187

Endurance and the First World War Sacrifice: 7, 49, 55-63, 89-90, 8990, 104-105, 141, 143, 152, 159, 160, 275 Economy of sacrifice: 110 Equality of: 7, 114 Salonika: 146-147 Samoa: Apia: 44 German Samoa: 20 Savigny, Patrick: 204, 205, 206-207 Scarlett, Philippa: 183, 192, 193 Scholarships: 44 School Committees’ Association (New Zealand): 37 Schools: 18, 24, 28, 47, 61, 87, 8993, 97, 98, 102, 129, 135, 189, 192-193, 208, 210, 242, 252, 253 School newspapers: 91-93, 97, 102 Scotland: 197-199 (see also Britain) Dundee: 139 National Library of Scotland: 197 Stromness: 151 Scott, Kathleen: 141 Scott, Robert Falcon: 137-150, 152 Scouts Movement: 37, 98 Sculpture: 165, 169-170, 173, 263264, 268, 269, 278-283 Seager, Samuel Hurst: xiii, 155-166 Background: 157-158 Battlefield memorials: 156-176 Designs: 158 Education: 157-158 Emigration: 157-158 Houses: 158 Lutyens and: 171-173 MƗori art: 165 Religious symbolism: 171-172 Reputation: 158 Research: 158 Sculpture: 169-170, 173 Style: 158-161, 170-171, 173175 Town planning: 158



309

Second World War: 12, 16, 38, 47, 48, 83-84, 186, 187, 260, 266, 275, 277, 278, 281 Secret Defence Committee (New Zealand): 25 Sentimental Equipment: xiii, 49-63 Separation allowances: 6 Serbia: 139, 146, 147 Seventeenth century: 169 Shackleton, Ernest: 137, 138, 150154 Shakespeare, William: 62 Sheffield, Gary: 122-123 Shell shock: 3, 54, 76, 79 Ships: Destroyer: 149 HMS Broke: 149 HMS Glatton: 149 HMS New Zealand: 241, 246, 257 HMS Queen Mary: 148 Shirkers: 60, 69 Shrapnel: 267, 269, 275 The Silent Division: 125 Silver Fern: 160, 164, 170 Simikins, Peter: 53 Sim, Michelle: 212 Simpson, Stamford: 186, 194 Sinclair, Clarence: 205 Skiing: 138, 143 Sling Mutiny: 51 Smith, Hugh: 179 Smith, Leonard V.: 2 Smuts, Jan: 224 Snipers: 133 Socialism: 70-71 Social welfare: 47, 75-76, 79, 80, 83-84 Social services: 32, 42-43, 47 Soldiers: xii, xiii, 1-12, 16-17, 1921, 23, 43, 51-57, 66-68, 70, 7285, 181, 244, 246, 256, 257-258, 264, 266, 268, 269, 275, 276, 280, 282 Anzac culture: 53 Alcohol: 19-20, 52, 58, 186, 189

310 Australian: 130-117, 213, 224, 263 Australian Aboriginal: 184-195 Casualties: 50, 56, 58, 67, 86, 89, 264 Collective identity: 50, 52-55 Comforts: 37, 38, 39, 44, 52 Comradeship: 1-2 Cynicism: 53-54, 57 Death: 55, 59, 61, 112 Demobilization: 41-44, 51, 116117, 257 Desertion: 51 Discipline: 16, 17, 51 Execution: 51 French: 146, 224, 263 Frontline culture: 53-57 German: 224, 233, 264 Humour and irony: 53-54, 56, 57 Indian: 224, 228, 231 Influenza: 256, 258 Leave: 110, 113, 185 Missing soldiers: 41, 206 Mutiny: 2, 51 New Zealand: 16-17, 19-21, 23, 51-57, 155, 163, 222-223, 229-230, 233, 247, 256, 257-258, 264, 267 Parade: 21, 222, 258 Patriotism: 53, 55-56 Post-war social benefits: 60, 62 Repatriation of bodies: 272, 275 South African: 228 Tommy Atkins: 22 Wounded: 8, 112, 140, 147, 181, 204-206, 208-209, 218, 222, 227, 246, 249 Soldiers’ Comforts Fund: 39 Somme: (see France) Songs: 38, 75, 246, 252, 261 South!: 150, 152 South Africa: 215, 224, 228, 231 Soldiers: 228 Zulu: 228 South African War: 139, 231



Index South America: 150, 153 South Australia, Australia: 180, 184, 185, 188, 190 South Georgia: 150, 151, 154 South Island, New Zealand: 200, 209 Southland, New Zealand: 91, 200, 210, 211 The Sorrow and the Pride: 253 Speeches: 252, 257, 261 Spencer-Smith, Arnold: 150, 153 The Sphere: 169 Sport: 2, 37, 52, 128, 209, 247, 252, 267 Spring Offensive 1918: 130, 132, 133 St. Andrew’s Colonial Homes: 197, 198 Stewart, Hugh: 121-122, 125 Straits of the Dardanelles: 155, 160, 204 Strath Taieri, New Zealand: 210 Strikes: 68 Submarines: 23, 151 Suez Canal: 231 Summit Road Association: 168 Surgeons: 149 Switzerland: 34, 40 Sydney, Australia: 105, 106, 112, 114, 115, 150, 158, 192 Sydney Morning Herald: 182 Sydney, Bartlett J.: 187 Tanks: 139-140, 246 Tannock, David: 167 Tasmania, Australia: 187 Tauranga, New Zealand: 129 Taylor, Rebe: 194 Tea: 198 Teachers: 91, 135 Te Arawa: 231 Te Aroha, New Zealand: 238 Technology: xii, 139-140, 154 Television: 74, 271 Temperance Movement: 19-20, 209

Endurance and the First World War Temuka, New Zealand: 247, 248 Tender is the Night: 49 Tennant, Margaret: xiii, 9, 31-48, 287 Terra Nova Expedition: 137-150, 154 Deaths: 138 Failure: 138 Film: 142-143 Influence on servicemen: 142143 Memorial: 147 Propaganda: 142 Return: 139 Scott Polar Research Institute: 147 Tensions in Europe: 138-139 War service: 140-149 Theatres: 158 Ther, Vanessa: 11 Thompson, Helen: 210 Thomson, David: 80 Thorpe, Julia: 188 Tilley, Chris: 274-275, 277 Timaru, New Zealand: 92 The Times: 139 Todman, Dan: 11, 12, 66-68 Tolerton, Jane: 74 Torpedoes: 149, 152 Torres Strait Islands: 194 Total war: 58 Trade Unions: 29, 37 Training Manuals: 134-135 Transnationalism: 33, 37, 38, 40, 42, 44, 48, 196, 214 Travis, Richard: 125, 135 Travis, Richard Charles: 210-211 Treadwell, C.A.L.: 57 Treaties: 59 Versailles: 239, 250, 259, 260 Waitangi: 232 Trenches: 1, 22, 51, 56, 58, 74, 111, 122, 124, 125, 132-135, 140, 151, 185, 205, 222, 232, 268 Trench publications: 56



311

Trentham Camp: 19-22, 24-25, 26, 204, 208 Disease outbreaks: 21-22, 24-26 Treves, Frederick: 37, 140 Tribunals: 7 Troopships: 23, 96, 108, 186 Tuberculosis: 42, 46 Turkey: 95, 234 (see also Ottoman Empire) Twentieth century: 15, 57, 81, 102, 168, 230, 265, 278 Twenty-first century: 67 Typhus: 42 U-Boats: 152 Unemployment: 44 Uniforms: 4, 22, 169, 222-223, 232, 257-258, 268 Union Jack: 181 United States of America: 36, 42, 179, 210, 272 Universities: xii, 46, 120, 146, 147, 158, 187, 216 Auckland University College: 168 Bedford College, London: 44 Canterbury College: 158, 174 University of Canterbury: 120, 216 Macmillan Brown Library: 216, 218, 221, 225, 227, 228, 235 University of Cambridge: 146, 147 University College, London: 158 University of Tasmania: 187 Unknown Warrior, Tomb of the: 266, 267, 272 Uttley, Stephen: 76 Verne, Jules: 49 Veterans: 12, 43-45, 46-48, 53-54, 57, 62, 67-68, 72-85, 180, 181,

312 182, 188, 246, 247, 260, 262, 270 Alienation: 73 Charitable Aid Boards: 80 Criticisms: 73-76, 79, 81 Dependants: 73, 80 Disability: 73, 76, 77-83 Disease: 79 Economic depression: 82, 83 Employment: 73-74, 76-78, 8081, 82-83, 84 Ex-Soldiers’ Rehabilitation League: 82 Ex-Soldiers’ Rehabilitation Commission: 82 Farming: 74, 77 Great Depression: 82, 83 Loans: 76, 81 Medical treatment: 73 Mental health: 73, 76 Pensions Department: 79, 80 Public works: 76 Repatriation: 73-78, 80, 81, 83 Self-reliance: 77-78, 81, 83 Sickness: 73, 76 Soldier settlement scheme: 7374, 76-77, 80-82, 191 Second World War repatriation: 83-84 Tertiary education: 84 Veterans benefits: 190 Vocational Training: 44, 73, 76, 77-78, 80, 84 Wages: 78 War gratuities: 81, 190 War Pension Board: 79 War pensions: 73-74, 76, 78-83 Victoria, Australia: 184, 185, 188, 191, 192, 193 Victoria Cross: 105, 125, 135, 143, 211, 257 Victoria League: 35, Victoria League: 216, 217, 218 Activities: 218 Canterbury branch: 216, 218



Index Lantern slide collection: 216235 London central office: 218 Victory: 122, 244, 248, 254, 271 Vietnam War: 194 Vincent, Daniel: 169 Visual history: 216-235 Voluntary work: 88 Wagga Wagga, Australia: 110 Waihi, New Zealand: 238 Waikato, New Zealand: 232 Waitahuna, New Zealand: 200 Waitaki, New Zealand: 92 Walker, W.: 63 Wanaka, New Zealand: 128 Warangesda Mission: 182 War artists: 9 War correspondents: 57 War Horse: 270 Ward, Joseph: 25-27, 28, 30, 63 Co-Prime Minister: 26, 28 Minister of Finance: 26 Ward, Paul: 227 Ware, Fabian: 160 War Funds Act (New Zealand): 40 War guilt: 11 War graves: 41, 122 (See also ‘Cemeteries’) War news: 107, 151, 223 War Pensions Bill (New Zealand): 23 War photographers: 9, 153, 217-235 Wars of Italian Unification: 34 War weariness: xii, 7, 110-111 Watson, Alexander: 2 Wazzir Riot: 51 Weapons: 122-124, 126, 133-135, 145, 222 Webb, Darcy: 181 Websites: 69, 129, 211, 216, 267, 270 Webster, Edith: 44 Weddell Sea: 150

Endurance and the First World War

313

Wellington, New Zealand: 17, 18, 19, 31, 37, 45, 90, 96, 159, 200201, 208, 243, 244, 249, 251, 252, 255, 266, 267, 276 City Council: 255 Peace celebrations: 243, 244 Wellington Mounted Rifles: 155 Western Australia, Australia: 153, 184 Western Front: 7, 10, 49, 50, 52, 111, 120-136, 140, 153, 156, 163, 165, 168, 171, 188 Whaling: 139, 150, 151 Wharton-Kirke, Ellie: 113 Wheeler, Sara: 140 Whitehall: 173 Williams, Leonard: 204 Williams, Sydney: 204, 206-207 Wilson, Edward: 138 Wilson, Eustace Garnet: 185 Winegard, Timothy: 184 Winter, Jay: 59, 89, 271, 280 Winton, New Zealand: 98, 210 Women: xii, 2, 6, 9, 17, 30, 32, 35, 36, 38, 43, 48, 58, 60, 61, 69, 70, 82, 90, 99, 103-117, 194, 198, 199, 200, 205, 206, 209, 210, 216, 219, 233, 234, 247, 251, 276 Working class: 52, 70-72, 110, 113 Worsley, Frank: 150, 151 The Worst Journey in the World: 138 Wreaths: 164, 169 Wright, R.A.: 252 WW100 New Zealand First World War: 267

Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA): 41 Youth: xiii, 87 Agency: 88 Britain: 88 Canada: 93-94 Concern for family: 93-95, 99 Conscription: 94 Critical opinions of war: 93-94 Definitions: 87 Employment: 91, 97 Enlistment: 87, 91, 93 Fundraising: 90, 93 Germany: 88 Grief: 94, 95, 99 Influenza Pandemic: 96-102 Leisure: 91 New Zealand: 88-102 Patriotism: 89, 92, 94 Peace celebrations: 94-96 Propaganda: 89 Publications: 89, 91-94, 97 Religion: 89 Sacrifice: 90, 92-93 Schools: 89-91 Training: 91 Understanding of death: 93-94, 101 Understandings of war: 88, 9194 Volunteering for enlistment: 93 War news: 89 Wartime social restrictions: 88, 93 Writings: 91-102 Youth associations: 98 Ypres: (see Belgium)

Yeager Kaplin, Alice: 269 Yelty, Australia: 191 Young, James E.: 270, 278

Zeebrugge Raid: 148 Zeppelins: 145 Ziino, Bart: xiii, 8, 103-117, 287 Zoology: 139