WILLIAM Southwick, sixty-nine, had built his fortune on wood and coal. In 1924 he sold his South Yarra business, and now, in semi-retirement, he had established himself as an estate agent, reaping the rewards of his many property investments. His office was on the ground floor of a two-storey building he owned at 36–42 Toorak Road—premises spanning almost the whole block from Caroline to Ralston Streets. He leased the remainder of the ground floor as a garage; the upper floor he was refurbishing for apartments. Genial, avuncular, charitable with his wealth, Southwick was a revered figure among the people of South Yarra and popular with his tenants, who nicknamed him ‘Father’. He owned several cottages in the neighbourhood, and lived with his wife, daughter and son-in-law in his grand residence, ‘Ambitala’, in the suburb’s leafy Rockley Road. Life was good for Southwick until one cold Saturday afternoon—1 August 1925—when he suddenly disappeared.
That morning dawned brightly, sharp with frost. Southwick arrived at his office just before 9 am. He went in and closed the door and attended to paperwork for almost an hour, after which George McAloon, one of the garage proprietors, saw him emerge holding a bunch of keys. McAloon recalled that he seemed ‘very bright and happy’. About noon, Southwick was noticed having a haircut in Toorak Road, and shortly afterward he was seen by another of his garage proprietors, Frank Dupont, with whom he had a short discussion about the upstairs refurbishments.
William Southwick.
It was common knowledge that Southwick, a keen racegoer, would be at the Caulfield races that afternoon. In fact, he had arranged to meet his lifelong friend Alexander Anderson there.
Southwick was never known to forget an appointment, especially one involving the turf, and so his no-show at the racecourse dismayed Anderson. As the race meeting disbanded, he phoned Southwick’s home. Mrs Southwick told him she had not seen her husband since the early morning and that, as far as she knew, he had gone to the races. Anderson could only suppose some important matter of business had suddenly intervened and kept his friend from joining him.
As the hours wore on, Mrs Southwick became anxious. She and her daughter Beryl took it in turns to telephone Southwick’s friends, asking if any had seen him that afternoon or knew his whereabouts. Apart from municipal councillor Josiah Flintoft, who had seen Southwick in the hairdressing saloon about noon, no trace of Southwick was discovered.
At 8.30 pm Beryl tried phoning Frank Dupont, whom she knew as one of her father’s most kindly tenants, but she could not reach him. Finally, the family notified the South Yarra police. Of that long night, Beryl recalled, ‘We did not go to bed … and at 2 o’clock on the Sunday morning … I had a premonition that something had happened to father.’
At 10.30 that same morning Beryl tried Dupont’s number again, and this time he answered. He had not seen Southwick since 12.30 pm the previous day. A longstanding tenant of her father’s, Dupont told Beryl to meet him at her father’s office and they would look for him together.
While waiting for her to arrive, Dupont strolled into the garage. Due to the pressures of business, his colleague McAloon had come into the garage that morning too. The men met just outside the inner door to Southwick’s office, which they noticed was open. Dupont explained that the landlord was missing.
‘The last time I saw him,’ McAloon remembered, ‘was about 10 am Saturday when he came out of his office with a bunch of keys.’ They peered into Southwick’s office—there were no signs of disturbance. The men were about to leave when McAloon noticed the key rack: the hook on which the storehouse keys were usually placed had nothing on it. ‘He passed through the garage’, McAloon reflected. ‘In the direction of the lumber room.’
Behind the garage were a two-storey brick storehouse and a two-room shed: the lumber room. These were separated by a lane† from the buildings facing Toorak Road and were formerly part of Southwick’s distribution centre for wood and coal. The storehouse and lumber room were now storing construction materials for the refurbishment of the storey above the garage. What’s more, the lumber room had a tenant—a returned soldier, whom Southwick was allowing to board in the backmost of its two rooms.
The lumber room behind 36–42 Toorak Road in which Cyrus Braby lived.
McAloon and Dupont went to the shed and knocked on the double doors. ‘Braby!’ they called. ‘Braby, open up!’ But there was no response and the doors were locked. Peering through a grimy side window, McAloon saw what he took to be Braby sleeping on the floor. Dupont looked in. ‘No’, he said. ‘That’s Mr Southwick—he must have fainted.’
Applying their weight to the doors, the men managed to force one of them open and, on entering, found Southwick lying dead, his head severely battered. Dupont returned to the garage and phoned the police while McAloon remained by the body. At the back of the shed, about twelve paces from where the body lay, was a small room with its door closed. McAloon could hear the weight of someone’s body shifting on bedsprings and knew it must be Braby.
It was 10.50 am when Constable Bolton from South Yarra arrived. Confirming it was a case for the CIB, he called Russell Street. Piggott and detectives Ethell and West were appointed to investigate. While Ethell and West were on duty that morning, Piggott was called in from his home.
Beryl Smyth had meanwhile arrived at the front of the building with her husband. She was met by Bolton and Dupont, who broke the news to her and explained the CIB were on their way. The Smyths were ushered into Dupont’s office to await the detectives.
Arriving before Piggott, Ethell and West went straight to the lumber room to inspect the scene.
When Piggott arrived he found a number of Southwick’s tenants and neighbours had gathered around the front of the garage. One tenant, Mrs Hart, approached him to report that on the previous day she had witnessed Braby arguing with her landlord. Piggott noted her name and said he would speak with her once he had inspected the scene. Constables from South Yarra were instructed to keep the crowd from entering the back lane. With Bolton, Piggott strode through the building to join the men in the lumber room. West was standing at the door awaiting them. They joined Ethell inside.
Southwick’s body lay face upwards on the brick floor, his head resting on some lengths of timber. His arms lay by his sides. His left leg was slightly bent, the foot under the calf of his right leg. The body was fully clothed except for a hat, which lay on the timber about a metre away, as if placed to one side. With his overcoat buttoned, Southwick was dressed as if he was about to go out. His spectacles, which were broken, lay about 30 centimetres from his head. Near his right hand was the ring of keys from his office. The head of a tomahawk lay on the floor under his legs. Southwick’s nostrils and mouth had streamed blood, which had pooled to the floor. His head was misshapen from a severe battering and also from swelling, the result of bruising—he had not died instantly.
The scene inside the lumber room on the morning of 2 August 1925, Southwick’s body at centre.
Piggott sent West to take some particulars from the Smyths and to bring Beryl’s husband to the lumber room.
In the meantime, Bolton had taken a wallet from an inner pocket of Southwick’s coat. Piggott examined it. The contents were not disordered, and amounted to over £20. Clearly, theft was not a motive.
Examining the double doors which had been forced by Dupont and McAloon, Ethell pointed out the small wicket door fastened on the outside by a padlock. But the double door had been fastened from the inside by both a bolt at the bottom and also a lever catch. There was no other access to the lumber room. ‘Notwithstanding that the wicket was locked on the outside,’ Ethell suggested, ‘the man inside may have locked the doors on the inside.’
It was time to wake the tenant in the adjoining room. They could hear Braby mumbling beyond the partition, but he had made no effort to emerge and inquire after the goings-on in the neighbouring room. Nor had he tried his door, which Bolton had locked as a precaution against the tenant escaping. Bolton had heard rumours about Braby.
Detective West returned with Beryl’s husband, Weston Smyth. He identified the body as that of his father-in-law, William Southwick. Piggott asked if he would be available for a formal identification at the morgue that afternoon, to which Smyth replied he would. He was told to collect Beryl from the office and take her home.
Meanwhile, Ethell and West had entered the partitioned room, the door of which was about 4 metres opposite where the body was found. This room had in it a single bed, and lying huddled among blankets was a man of around thirty years of age—Cyrus Braby. There was no indication of his having consumed alcohol or drugs—no pill packets lying about, no bottles; nor was the smell of alcohol on his breath—yet he seemed very drowsy. It was only with great difficulty that the detectives roused him and got him up and dressed. They brought him into the bigger room in which Southwick’s body lay and seated him on a chair. He blinked in the dull light.
Bolton escorted Smyth back to his wife and Piggott turned to face the seated man. ‘Do you know who this is?’ he asked, pointing to the body on the floor.
‘No’, answered Braby, continuing to blink. ‘No. But my boss wears clothes like those.’
‘When did you see your boss last?’
‘About two months ago.’
‘Didn’t you have a quarrel with him yesterday?’ Piggott asked.
‘No’, said Braby. He looked around the room. ‘I am 18 hours behind with my sleep and I want some steak.’ He rubbed his face with his hands and suddenly burst into deep, racking sobs.
Ethell and West took Braby into custody, lodging him at the City Watch House on a charge of ‘insufficient means’. Piggott, meanwhile, followed up with the tenant who had approached him earlier to report the argument with her landlord. Piggott learned from their interview the course of events leading up to the disappearance of Southwick the previous day.
She was Mary Ann Hart, a widow living at 39 Caroline Street—a house originally leased by her husband from Southwick in 1920. Three years later, following her husband’s death, Mrs Hart realised the house had become too large for her and knew also that she would struggle on her own to pay the rent. Sympathetic to her plight and with the thoughtfulness that made him so well regarded by his tenants, Southwick devised a solution. Mrs Hart could stay at 39 Caroline Street as his ‘boarding-house keeper’, earning her way by caretaking and cleaning the house, cooking meals and looking after the boarders, a proportion of whose rent was then paid to Southwick. Mrs Hart agreed to this arrangement and in the early spring of 1923 took in a father and son as lodgers. They seemed a respectable duo. Martin Braby, seventy-two, was a widower and retired justice of the peace from Eskdale in northern Victoria. He was a man with firm patriotic convictions and had given three sons to military service, two of whom had survived. The younger of these, Cyrus, was boarding with him.
Cyrus had been to war and seen action on the Western Front. His father explained that his lad had a nervous disposition and was in Melbourne receiving intermittent treatment for shell shock. Mrs Hart felt privileged to have a justice of the peace and a returned soldier under her roof and did everything possible to make father and son welcome and comfortable. On account of his war service, Cyrus was on a part-pension which he supplemented with local gardening jobs on two days a week. His father had taken a position as a house steward to a large Toorak family, with a view to overseeing his son’s needs until such time as the boy was sufficiently well to fare for himself. Southwick met his new tenants and took a personal interest in the plight of the young ex-serviceman, offering him odd jobs at some of the properties he owned in the neighbourhood.
When, in February 1925, it appeared that Cyrus had recovered sufficiently to manage independently, his father left Mrs Hart’s boarding house and returned to Eskdale where another of his sons was running a modest farm. Cyrus continued to board with Mrs Hart and for a few weeks the young man managed his routines satisfactorily. By late March, however, Mrs Hart began to realise something was amiss. Cyrus began seriously neglecting his hygiene—to the discomfit of Mrs Hart and her other lodgers. Moreover, there were days when Cyrus refused to come out of his room except to ask for some meat which, regardless of the cut or its preparation, he invariably referred to as ‘steak’. This and plum cake were the only foods he ate.
‘His behaviour was most strange’, Mrs Hart told Piggott. ‘I did not like the idea of having him in the house with me.’ Once again Southwick came to the rescue. ‘He offered to take Cyrus off my hands,’ Mrs Hart continued, ‘and I, being only too glad of the opportunity to get rid of him, assented.’
In return for Cyrus doing odd jobs, Southwick allowed the man to sleep in the second of the two rooms in the lumber store at the rear of his building. Southwick not only provided the room rent-free, but ‘was good to the man in other ways’, Mrs Hart recalled, ‘sometimes giving him money’.
One of Braby’s responsibilities was to maintain a store of chopped firewood for Southwick’s tenants. During the winter Mrs Hart visited the lumber room regularly for her fuel and observed that Cyrus had ‘altered’ even more. ‘He was not the same boy as he used to be.’
In late June she received a letter addressed to Cyrus from his father. She wrote back advising she had passed on the letter, and explaining that Cyrus was no longer living at her address but in the shed behind Southwick’s garage. When further letters to Cyrus—this time addressed care of the garage—went unanswered, Martin Braby made plans to return to Melbourne. He was highly regarded by solicitor Arthur Outhwaite, for whose family he had served as house steward several months earlier, and Martin arranged accommodation with him for the last week of July 1925. This coincided with an event that Cyrus’s father was anxious to attend. The US Navy’s battle fleet would visit but one Australian port on its transpacific tour: Melbourne.
Southwick had arranged with Mrs Hart that she would move into one of the new flats being built on the first floor of his garage. She would continue her role as housekeeper at the Caroline Street property but could now live off-site. On Friday 31 July the builders completed work on her new flat, and she inspected it the next morning. All was to her liking, but the workmen had left sawdust and grime, even grease marks. She went downstairs to speak to Southwick about it. He was not in his office, but the door was ajar so she knew he could not be far away. Walking through to the rear of the building, she located him in the back lane. It was 12.30 pm and he was about to leave for the races, but he asked how she liked the new flat. She replied that it needed a good scrubout. ‘Let’s see if we can arrange that’, he said.
They crossed the lane, heading towards the lumber room. ‘I’ll get this joker to scrub out your flat’, Southwick said. They reached the double doors of the lumber room, one of which was open. ‘Cyrus!’ Southwick called, entering. Mrs Hart stood at the open door. Cyrus came to the door of the inner room, his bedroom. He looked as if he’d been roused from a deep sleep, and began to swear.
‘Mind your tongue, lad!’ Southwick said. ‘Mrs Hart’s here and I want you to scrub out her flat.’
‘I’ve never scrubbed out a flat before,’ said Cyrus, ‘and I will not do it now.’
‘When I was a boy like you, I could scrub out a town.’
Cyrus had seen towns scrubbed out. ‘Go fuck yourself,’ he answered.
‘Cyrus, you will have to do something. You are living here free.’
‘I don’t fuckin’ care. Get out! Or I’ll fuckin’ kick you out.’
‘Mr Southwick,’ said Mrs Hart, ‘come away. I can scrub out the flat myself.’
‘Well Cyrus,’ said Southwick, ‘you will have to go out on Monday. I won’t have you here any longer.’
Southwick joined Mrs Hart in the lane. As he accompanied her back to the garage gate, she said, ‘You be careful, Mr Southwick. I don’t like the look of Cyrus lately.’ Southwick reassured her, saying he would organise for the flat to be scrubbed out and not to worry.
‘I then went home’, Mrs Hart told Piggott. ‘Mr Southwick said he was going to the races. I did not see him again.’ Piggott thanked Mrs Hart for her information and returned to Russell Street to report.
That night at the City Watch House, Cyrus’s charge of having insufficient means was substituted for one of murder. Martin Braby had been notified by the police and brought in to see his son. They talked in the visitors’ area through a grille in the wall. To those observing, it seemed Cyrus ‘had not realised the deed he had committed’. ‘Hello, dod [sic],’ he greeted his father, ‘I’ll get a rest now.’
The next morning, dishevelled and dirty, the prisoner appeared before the City Court but took no interest in proceedings, staring vacantly about the room. Mr Barnett, a lawyer engaged by Martin Braby to represent his son, explained to the court that the former soldier had shell shock and that this had affected his sanity. ‘It would be idle to place him in gaol’, he suggested. ‘He should be kept under close observation.’ Detective West, prosecuting, agreed, saying he thought Braby ‘quite mad’. Mr Knight, Police Magistrate, remanded the prisoner.
During Cyrus’s remand, Piggott and Ethell again attempted to interview the returned soldier, but to no avail. He spent most of the day in a stupor in his padded cell. ‘Have you caught up on your sleep yet?’ Piggott asked him finally. ‘No’, he said. ‘I am about 100 hours in arrears yet.’
‘His physical condition has improved,’ Ethell told the coroner at the inquest on 25 August, ‘but his mental condition is the same as when I first tried to interview him.’ Cyrus, still looking very unkempt, sat quietly in the court beside his father, his expression registering no engagement with the events proceeding around him.
Dr Mollison gave evidence as to Southwick’s injuries:
A large bruise was found over the left eyebrow; there was another larger bruise above and behind the left ear and a similar one on the opposite side of the head … There was an extensive fracture of the skull extending from behind the left ear round the back of the head to behind the right ear; the brain showed great extravasation [leakage] of blood on its surface, especially on the left side, which showed marked bruising …
Assisting the coroner, Piggott inquired whether Mollison could suggest what caused the injuries. ‘They were not accidental or from a fall,’ he answered, but ‘could have been caused by a blow from a heavy piece of wood.’
‘He is a very bad mental case’, said Ethell, handing the coroner Cyrus’s medical record.
Coroner Daniel Berriman found Southwick died of injuries to the head ‘wilfully caused’ by Cyrus Braby, whom he committed to stand trial in the Supreme Court for murder. The prisoner was taken to Pentridge Prison in Coburg for psychiatric assessment prior to his trial.
Born in December 1894 in the goldmining town of Ravenswood, Queensland, Cyrus Luff Braby was the youngest of four boys born to Martin and Mary Braby (née Brockhurst). Early in Cyrus’s life, the family moved to Eskdale in northern Victoria where Martin, a justice of the peace, established himself as owner of the town’s general store.
Cyrus’s father remembered his lad growing up as ‘always a gentle boy’ though there were times that a question he raised, or his way of speaking, suggested the son had a slightly different comprehension of the world than his father had. ‘His mind was peculiar’, said Martin Braby, years later, explaining the difference.
Nevertheless, Cyrus grew into a fit young man. He assisted his father in the general store and took seasonal work on nearby farms, where he ‘was known as a very hard and intelligent worker’. He had also an outgoing personality marked by cheerfulness. Martin Braby was proud of his sons and Cyrus, the youngest, worked hard to follow in the footsteps of his brothers.
Martin Braby knew the importance of discipline. As a young man in the 1870s he had served with distinction in the Princess of Wales’s Own Yorkshire Regiment, where he attained the rank of Colour Sergeant. He ran a tight ship for his boys and was highly regarded in both the Ravenswood and Eskdale communities. In 1911 his second and third sons, George and Ernest, joined the Royal Australian Field Artillery (RAFA) based in Melbourne. This was a garrison force, a division of the regular army originally recruited to serve in the forts protecting Australia’s coastline.
On the morning of 25 June 1914 Ernest was returning to Victoria Barracks after running a bicycle errand to Government House. It was only 8 am and there was no one on the downhill track leading to St Kilda Road. The young soldier coasted quickly down the path and must have thought he could keep the momentum to shoot briskly across St Kilda Road. A witness saw him ‘lying close down on his handlebars’ as he entered the road’s east lane. The lad guessed he could make it past a fruiterer’s cart—and he did; pedalling fast, he cut sharply in front of the horse, which had to ‘lift its head up’ as he swept past. Obscured by the cart, however, was a cable tram, also heading along the road. ‘I called out to him’, gripman Thomas Grieve remembered. ‘He then noticed his position and tried to get out of it and then leaned over to take the weight of the tram.’ The ‘side of the front of the dummy’ struck the centre of the bicycle, throwing the boy onto the west lane of the road. Ernest never regained consciousness and died in hospital that night of concussion. He was twentythree years old.
Cyrus was nineteen when the accident occurred. Six weeks later came the outbreak of war. Young men were needed at the front and Martin Braby, as local justice of the peace, was appointed as the recruiting attestator for the Eskdale district. According to his father, Cyrus ‘desired to take the place of his brother’ who, his father believed, would have joined the expeditionary force if he had not been tragically killed.
However, to join an artillery division of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), Cyrus had to be aged twenty-one —unless a special permission was granted. His father applied on his behalf. In the meantime, he sent his son to Melbourne where, in March 1915, Cyrus, like his brother before him, joined the RAFA.
Appealing to the Minister of Defence, Martin Braby stressed the eagerness of his youngest son to serve in his dead brother’s place. The minister consented to the application and Cyrus enlisted on 5 July, becoming one of the youngest gunners in the 36th Heavy Artillery Brigade. Twelve days later he left ‘for active service abroad’, heading first to England.
Cyrus had barely arrived when, in mid-September, his father received a cable reporting him ‘admitted hospital London sick will advise on receipt further particulars’. The communication was from Defence headquarters in Melbourne, and endorsed generically as from the ‘Secretary of Defence’. Wanting to know what ailment had afflicted his son, Mr Braby made his own inquiries. He obtained his answer within twenty-four hours, after which he wrote to the Secretary of Defence, advising him:
Dear Sir,
On receipt of your prompt telegraphic message advising that son Gunner Cyrus L Braby was in London Hospital sick, I cabled to the Braby’s (clan) in London—Frederick Braby & Co, iron manufacturers—and received a cable message reply this morning as follows: ‘M. Braby, Eskdale. Cyrus had measles. Now well.’ I thought you would like to know this officially, and we thank you for your kindness in advising us. As Recruiting Attestator here, I have sent you 43 recruits including my own three sons, and Frederick Braby & Co of London gave 573 recruits from their works to Kitchener’s Army and the Navy. With cordial good wishes and assurances we are doing our little bit,
I am sincerely yours,
Martin Braby JP
Recruiting Attestator
and sometime (1876) Colour Sergeant,
Princess of Wales Own Yorkshire Regiment.
Mr Braby also enclosed his card, indicating his membership of the ‘Overseas Club, Melbourne and London’.
While the letter reveals justifiable pride in—and concern for—a son at war, it also shows a measure of self-importance and presumption. It indicates, too, a controlling nature: that the father could exert his influence across such a distance to ascertain his son’s condition. Mr Braby must have been relieved that the affliction was only measles. A cure for venereal disease was still decades away.
After almost a year’s artillery drill in England, Cyrus embarked for France in mid-1916, joining the 54th Australian Siege Battery, with which he would serve for the duration of the war.† This and its compatriot battery, the 55th, were the first Australian units to enter battle on the Western Front.
The 54th was equipped with howitzer cannon that could launch a 90-kilogram shell a distance of 10 kilometres at 500 metres per second. Mounted on a pair of tractor wheels, each 3-tonne gun relied on ramps and a hydropneumatic buffer to help manage its massive recoil. Shells of high explosive, shrapnel, gas or smoke were fired from its 3-metre barrel.
Each howitzer crew comprised eight men who had to perfect in quick time their reloading drill: four men brought the shell to the breech, while the barrel’s elevation had to be levelled to zero every time the gun was reloaded. Most crews managed to reload and fire at the rate of one shell per minute. It was repetitive, strenuous, heavy work. And then there was the blast itself—the almighty thud hitting ‘not just the ears but the whole body as the shock wave passes outwards’. Despite this, the men wore no ear protection and if, when the trigger cord was pulled, they had not jumped sufficiently clear, the shock wave could kick them to the ground.
Problems with the recoil, especially on muddy ground, led to the innovation of a wooden platform that had to be assembled every time the gun was set up. Any substantial change to the firing coordinates required the platform to be re-laid.
The batteries were usually set up well to the rear of the front line and under camouflage to prevent their flash being seen, but once the enemy had their range, the heavy howitzers fastened to their platforms became vulnerable targets. And, if they were set too close to the front line, they risked being overrun should the enemy suddenly advance.
This is what happened to Cyrus at Cambrai, northern France, in November 1917. The town, held by the Germans since 1914, was a major rail junction and HQ centre. Heavily defended, it had two trench systems—front and supporting—along which, at short distances, were machine-gun posts in concrete blockhouses. Belts of barbed wire ‘tens of yards wide’ lay in front of each trench.
The attack was a British offensive supported by Australian artillery. The batteries, including the 54th, were moved into position at night less than a kilometre from the front and the attack was opened with an intensive bombardment lasting several days. This was followed by ‘the curtain of a creeping barrage behind which tanks and infantry followed’. Although initially a successful battle for the Allies, the Germans regrouped and counterattacked, retaking ground and penetrating the lines of allied forces. Many of the British smaller cannon were overrun on the morning of 30 November and the ‘heavies’, including the 54th Battery, were now exposed. With the Germans continuing their advance, the Australians were advised: ‘destroy your guns—evacuate’.
By early afternoon the 54th and its compatriot batteries were under fire. There was no time to destroy the howitzers; they could only disable them. Under increasing fire, the crews dislodged the breech-blocks and buried them. They set fire to the howitzer platforms and retreated, leaving their artillery to the flames and the mud. As it happened, however, the Germans did not reach the guns but were at the last moment driven back. The exhausted gunners returned to their damaged weapons and lugged them back to safety for repair. Ultimately, the battle was a debacle; the combined figure for Allied and German dead, missing and wounded amounted to almost 90,000 souls.
On 31 December Cyrus’s company, refitted and reequipped, joined the Australian Corps on the Belgian–French border. Afterward, the Australian artillery was sent back to northern France.
As the battery crews marched from position to position, Cyrus saw the effects of shelling on the countryside around him: the cratered landscapes; the ashen skeletons of dead trees; and whole towns scrubbed out, their houses flattened into splintered debris, the fractured ruins of civic structures and churches crumbling into dust.
At Méteren in April 1918, the 36th Heavy Artillery Brigade—to which the 54th Battery was then assigned—had twenty guns in action night and day for six weeks, averaging over 100 rounds per gun per day. Sleep was a fitful and a fraught commodity for the soldiers, surrounded as they were by the constant noise of their own firepower and the threat from German artillery.
Subsequently the 54th Battery supported attacks on the River Lys and Comines, and was in position on the River Scheldt on the day the Armistice was signed. After some months of grave-digging and bridge-mending, the men returned to Australia, disembarking at Melbourne on 8 June 1919. Two months later Cyrus was discharged fit from military service: no disability, mental or otherwise, detected.
Martin Braby saw that the son who returned to him at Eskdale was not the same lad he had so proudly given to the King’s service four years earlier. Among the most conspicuous changes in the boy’s personality was the loss of his ‘former extreme cheerfulness’. As the weeks turned into months the young man’s manner became increasingly distant. On cold nights he would rise from his bed and leave the house to go ‘wandering half naked about the countryside’. Neighbours and local townspeople complained. Martin Braby, respected store keeper and local justice of the peace, knew he had to do something.
Through his contacts, Martin knew a military doctor in Sydney and in February 1920 brought Cyrus to him for examination. The doctor said he could not understand how the young man had been discharged fit. He arranged for the lad to be temporarily hospitalised at the military hospital in Five Dock, Sydney, and in the meantime gave his father a letter to the medical authorities in Melbourne, challenging their diagnosis. This was the first step in determining whether Cyrus’s illness was due to his AIF service. If it was, he could receive treatment at a Victorian repatriation hospital and be eligible for a disability pension.
An appointment for medical reassessment was arranged in Melbourne, and Martin attended with his son. There was no doubting Cyrus was in a poor state and the reports from the doctors at Five Dock hinted at a likely diagnosis of neurasthenia. Cyrus was promptly admitted to Mont Park Psychiatric Hospital for further evaluation.
During World War I, the word ‘neurasthenia’ was adopted by doctors to denote an illness which the military did not, at first, credit as genuine: a condition the symptoms of which, though diverse, could include fatigue, hysteria, disorientation, delusions, violent agitation and speech loss. Since sufferers found it difficult to absorb even straightforward instructions, let alone act on them, some British commanders at the front line charged such soldiers with disobeying orders and had them court-martialled and shot.
As the war dragged on, however, military hospitals saw increasing numbers of soldiers presenting with the symptoms, forcing doctors to admit that the condition was indeed real. Sometimes it was referred to as ‘war neurosis’ or, more colloquially, ‘shell shock’. Today, shell shock is recognised as a form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
In the later years of the Great War the condition had gained sufficient recognition that if a soldier of the AIF was suffering from neurasthenia it would be noted on their service file. Such notes were kept in order to assess the validity of subsequent claims by soldiers for disability pensions and for assessing eligibility for treatment in the special hospitals catering for the many shell-shocked soldiers returning home.
Cyrus Braby’s AIF personnel dossier lists several occasions on which he was hospitalised and seen by British and Australian doctors over the course of his service. Apart from his hospitalisation for measles, other stays in hospital were for mumps, severely infected fingers and a severely inflamed elbow. Finally, he was discharged fit. If Cyrus was showing signs of shell shock, why, the repatriation authorities wanted to know, was it not detected and duly noted during his wartime service?
While today we know that PTSD can have a delayed onset, the question was important at the time because it could suggest Cyrus’s condition was not related to his wartime service. Nevertheless, the doctors at Mont Park admitted that a number of Cyrus’s symptoms were consistent with shell shock, in particular his fatigue and his episodes of disorientation. The doctors arranged for his transfer to the neurasthenia ward at Caulfield Military Hospital, where Cyrus remained throughout 1920. During this time, after lobbying by his father, Cyrus was granted a full pension.
In June that year Martin Braby sold his Eskdale general store and its adjoining residence and made arrangements to live in Melbourne. In early 1921 he took up the position of house steward for the Outhwaite family, which entitled him to occupy a modest cottage in the grounds of the family’s property in Walsh Street, South Yarra.
On 2 February Cyrus was discharged from the hospital, his final case note reporting him ‘well-nourished but fidgety’. The doctors considered his shell shock sufficiently treated to enable him to resume life in the community. Accordingly, Cyrus’s pension was reduced by half in an effort to encourage him to find work and integrate back into society.
Martin Braby brought Cyrus to stay with him in the cottage on the Outhwaites’ property. Mr Outhwaite found the young man ‘moody and sullen’. Throughout the next two years Cyrus returned periodically to medical care at Repatriation Commission ‘convalescent farms’ established for shell-shocked soldiers in the hope that the tranquillity of country life coupled with light farming duties might restore their traumatised minds. Between these sojourns in communal living Cyrus lodged with his father, but the lad’s sleeplessness returned and with it the bouts of disorientation. One autumn night in 1923 Cyrus was found wandering seminaked in the grounds of Mr Outhwaite’s home. ‘I could see then,’ Mr Outhwaite later remarked, ‘that Braby should be in some institution.’
Concerned for his wife and children, Outhwaite declared Cyrus must go. Nevertheless, he remained amicable with Martin, whom he respected, and offered to do what he could for Cyrus as a shell-shocked soldier.
Cyrus was admitted to the Bundoora convalescent farm for a month’s reassessment. During this time Outhwaite gave notice that his family was relocating to England for several months, making Martin’s house-steward position redundant.
After examining Cyrus, the doctors reported that he was physically fit and ‘mentally quite clear’. While they noted that they thought him ‘mentally below par’ and ‘slightly restless and inclined to repetition in answering questions’, this would not justify institutionalising him. Nor was it grounds to increase his pension. Martin was informed that his son would be discharged and in September the pair moved into Mrs Hart’s boarding house.
Time and again Martin petitioned the Repatriation Commission to increase his son’s pension. The Commission scheduled a medical reassessment—Cyrus’s last with the department. On 16 January 1925 two doctors, while again acknowledging him to be ‘below par mentally’, found no other defect. They recommended keeping him on the halfpension of £1 1s, which would encourage him to work for a living and, they hoped, spur him to eventually reintegrate into the community and become independent.
Cyrus did gardening and odd jobs to supplement his meagre pension. His father assisted him when necessary, and although the work appeared to make him very tired, Cyrus confided that ‘it seemed to do him good’.
February and March were a period of relative stability and Martin Braby put his faith in the doctors’ exhortations to allow Cyrus to try functioning independently. Having spent weeks coaching Cyrus on his routines in order that the lad could manage in his absence, Martin returned to Eskdale to live for a time on his older son’s farm. It was late June when Mrs Hart wrote advising Martin that his son was now living in a shed behind Southwick’s garage.
Timing his visit to coincide with that of the US war fleet to Melbourne, Martin went to see his son in the lumber room behind Southwick’s garage on the morning of 28 July and was ‘shocked at his appearance’. Cyrus was markedly worse ‘both physically and mentally’ than his father had imagined. His face was stained haphazardly with iodine where a cut on his nose had become infected. ‘He would not talk much,’ Martin recalled, ‘but said he did not get enough sleep.’ His father told him to ‘go to bed and have a good sleep and get something to eat’. He left money with his boy so that he could buy food when he woke. Martin visited again each day that week and went to the Melbourne branch of the Returned Soldiers’ League seeking advice. In the afternoons he inspected the great warships berthed along Princes Pier: the Oklahoma, Nevada, Pennsylvania, bristling with masts and cannon.
Mrs Hart collected wood each day from Cyrus and during that last wintry week of July found him glummer and more irritable than usual. She learnt from Southwick that Cyrus’s father had returned to Melbourne and was making efforts to have Cyrus hospitalised again.
Just after 9.30 am on Saturday 1 August, Martin Braby visited his son and found him lying in a stupor on his bed. He roused his boy and gave him some plum cake he had brought. Shortly before 10 am, Southwick came to the door. He had half-a-dozen sacks he wanted filled with wood shavings. Martin cut short his visit, encouraged his lad to do the work, and said he would visit again tomorrow. As Cyrus got up and started to fill the bags, Martin went outside and spoke with Southwick in the lane, showing him some papers which had come to him in the mail that morning—an application from ‘the Returned Soldiers’ League … to the Repatriation medical authorities to have his son placed in an institution’. After a few minutes the men parted, and Southwick returned to his office. Cyrus filled two of the bags and left them by the door. Then he went back to bed.
At 12.30 pm Southwick returned with Mrs Hart, telling Cyrus to scrub out her flat. After Cyrus’s offensive outburst and Southwick’s threat to put him out on Monday, the landlord re-joined Mrs Hart in the lane and accompanied her to the garage gate, where she warned him, ‘be careful … I don’t like the look of Cyrus lately’.
‘I then went home’, she told Piggott. The detective sergeant asked how it was that she could have known to caution Southwick so presciently.
Mrs Hart explained that collecting wood from the lumber room was not a task she relished at the best of times, but over the last days of that week—‘since his father came back’—she detected a change in Cyrus: his usual poor temper had, as it seemed to her, acquired a focus. He grumbled more about Southwick, whom she knew had conferred with Martin Braby. Cyrus, she told Piggott, had ‘overheard a conversation between his father and Mr Southwick in which it was suggested that Cyrus should be returned to an institution. I think,’ Mrs Hart concluded, ‘that Cyrus resented this and had a grudge against Mr Southwick.’
With this information and the report of Southwick’s injuries, Piggott configured the probable course of events.
Having parted with Mrs Hart, Southwick stood alone in the lane. Dismayed by Cyrus’s outburst, he wondered if he could put things right before going to the races. The door of the lumber room was ajar and he knew the returned soldier was inside. Southwick decided to have another word with him. He walked back down the lane and entered the room. What Southwick did not know was that behind the door on his left, Cyrus was waiting.
‘I am satisfied,’ Piggott told the press, ‘that the weapon used was a tomahawk found near the body. Mr Southwick was taken unawares and struck with the flat side of the blade.’
This was correct as far as it went. However, as Mollison’s inquest reflections later suggested, the attack was apparently continued with a series of blunt-force blows consistent with a piece of wood. While such a piece of wood was not found by the detectives, the smaller room in which Cyrus had his bed had in it a fireplace in which were the remains of a recent wood fire.
Unfit to stand trial, Cyrus was never prosecuted. Instead he was committed permanently to the Kew Mental Hospital. Within a month of his admission, the Repatriation Commission decided finally that his mental state was ‘attributable to war service’ and directed he receive the full pension. It was paid into a trust fund for his institutional care. The remainder of Cyrus’s life passed uneventfully. He was visited regularly by his father until Martin’s death in 1931, and in later years he became, as one supervisor noted, ‘an active helper in ward activities’. While Cyrus’s medical file bears testimony to his scarring from wartime service—and the sluggishness of authorities to acknowledge it—it also indicates some progress over the years in psychiatric diagnosis, noting eventually a complicating condition: chronic schizophrenia.
Cyrus died of a heart attack on 10 April 1970, aged seventy-five. He is interred at Brighton Cemetery in a grave shared by his father and the brother whose place Cyrus took when he went to war.