‘The wrong one came home.’
Elizabeth Annie Searle, mother of Ned Searle
COMPANY SERGEANT-MAJOR NED Searle was one of the 6000 Australian soldiers granted 1914 Leave. He was notified that he was going home on 5 October, the same day that the Australian 2nd Division came out of the line and secret Armistice negotiations began between German and Allied representatives. Ned had helped lead D Company as the 15th Battalion took the village of Cerisy during the Battle of Amiens on 8 August. In September he had steadied his men during a German gas attack when the 15th was advancing near Jeancourt. He had participated in the 18 September assault on the Hindenburg Line.
By 12 October, Ned and other Australians embarking on 1914 Leave were aboard the Canadian troopship Prince George when it sailed from the French port of Le Havre for Southampton on the south coast of England, where they went into temporary camp. On the last day of the month, Ned and his mates boarded the 6500-tonne troopship Port Lyttleton at Southampton, and on 1 November the ship sailed for Australia via the Mediterranean.
It is intriguing to speculate what would have happened had the war lasted into 1919. Had that been the case, the following southern summer the men on 1914 Leave back in Australia would have been required to re-embark for France to join the northern spring campaign against a German Army that had used the winter to regroup. Australians like Ned Searle had given their all in the summer and autumn of 1918, and maybe, just maybe, a good number of them would have had their fill of the killing, and would have refused to return.
As it turned out, the war only had days left to run as the Port Lyttleton entered the Mediterranean. When the remainder of the 4th Division was marching east with General Monash on 10 November, Ned and his comrades aboard the troopship steaming towards the Suez Canal were informed that the Armistice was expected to take effect the following day.
Ned and a number of his mates asked their officers to turn the ship around and head for France so that the 4th Division men could celebrate the end of the war with their comrades. When this request was turned down, larrikin Ned decided to hijack the ship and force the captain to sail it back to France. Ned and several friends dressed in captured German military attire, with Ned looking especially authentic in his German officer’s uniform and jackboots. Armed with his German artillery Luger and a thick German accent, and with his Military Medal pinned to his chest, Ned led the attempt to take over the Port Lyttleton and turn her around.
The hijackers’ disguises proved too good. Word spread like wildfire that German stowaways were trying to take over the ship. Hundreds of Australian soldiers came at the run. Ned and his mates were quickly overpowered and disarmed, and as the venture’s leader he was about to be thrown overboard when his protestations that he was in reality Company Sergeant-Major Ned Searle MM of the 15th Battalion only just saved him from a watery grave. Someone produced a camera, and, all smiles, the ‘hijackers’ and their ‘captors’ gathered for group snapshots. No disciplinary action was taken against Ned or his companions.
Even though the war was now officially over, it wasn’t for Ned and the other 5999 men on 1914 Leave. No one knew for sure whether the Germans would keep to the Armistice agreement and withdraw all their troops back into Germany within two weeks, then disband their army, surrender their navy and make Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicate. After landing back in Australia in December, Ned remained in camp in Melbourne until the following February, when he and his comrades received their discharges. Back home to Westbury in northern Tasmania went Ned, with his Military Medal, but without his two brothers Viv and Ray, who lay buried on distant foreign shores.
Ned was well received back home, with everyone wanting to buy him a drink. As one of just two men in the town who could drive a motor vehicle in 1919, he was soon offered the job of driver of the town’s new motor ambulance. He had learned to drive while doing a stint as a member of a Traffic Control unit, then a form of AIF military police working behind the lines, after he was discharged from hospital and before he returned to the 15th Battalion. Ned, the expert killer, would fulfil this role as Westbury’s ambulance driver, aiding the sick and injured, for years to come.
When the State Governor paid Westbury a visit in 1920, Ned led a parade of local World War One veterans. The Governor came to unveil a monument on the village green that listed local members of the AIF who had lost their lives in the conflict, including Ned’s brothers Viv and Ray. Ned wore his sergeant-major’s uniform, but, because his khaki trousers had worn out, he borrowed a pair of riding breeches from a Westburyite who had served in the Light Horse.
Although he kept a photograph of former girlfriend Win Watson until the day he died, in September 1921 Ned married Westbury girl Agnes Drake, a descendant of noted colonial artist John Glover and daughter of a Westbury baker. Ned and Agnes had two children. To please his mother, in remembrance of one lost brother Ned named his firstborn, a girl, Vivian, a Latin name which, ironically, means ‘alive’. In remembrance of his youngest brother, Ned named his second child, a boy, Ian Ray.
Ned’s mother, Elizabeth Annie, never got over the battlefield deaths of Viv and Ray, and refused to have any dealings with the Australian Government, whom she accused of taking her boys from her. Ned himself cleaned up his act once he married, settled down and had a family. No more drunken antics or larrikin pranks for him. Yet, no matter what Ned did to gain his mother’s approval, Elizabeth Annie never warmed to her eldest son, and never ceased to mourn her lost boys. Years after the war, Elizabeth Annie told her granddaughter Gwen Lovatt, ‘The wrong one came home.’284
In his sixties and seventies, Ned did seasonal farm work in the Westbury district, riding to and from farms on the back of a truck with other locals, who would remember him as a hard worker, and good company with a fine singing voice. Ned rarely spoke about his war experiences, but once in a while, when his grandson Craig Searle prodded him with questions, he would open up.
On one occasion, Ned told the story of the German lighting a cigarette for him in the tunnel beneath Hill 60. On another, he made the confession that he had smashed his own hand to delay his return to the front. He also told Craig about the arrival of the Yanks to fight beside him on the Somme, and recalled a game German soldier who would clamber from his trench on the Western Front some mornings, sit on a chair in the open and shave, before returning to his trench. Ned and his Australian mates so admired the Fritz’s pluck they didn’t have the heart to fire a shot at him.
Ned Searle, one of the heroes of Hamel, passed away in September 1967, at the age of seventy-nine. His funeral was well attended and he was buried in a Westbury churchyard. Ned may well have been heartbroken by his mother’s lack of acceptance once he came home, and if he’d had the opportunity he might have readily changed places with his dead brothers. Instead, Ned lived silently for half a century with the same sort of guilt that haunted many heroes of the Great War who survived to come home when so many friends and loved ones did not.