‘He used to get headaches and really couldn’t do anything physical.’
Frank Dalziel, youngest son of Harry Dalziel VC
AGAINST THE ODDS, Harry Dalziel had survived his serious head wound. But even if he had been entitled to 1914 Leave in October 1918, he would have been too unwell to take advantage of it. As it happened, having enlisted in January 1915, Dalziel fell short of the six-month furlough entitlement by a matter of weeks. Receiving extensive medical treatment in England he remained in hospital until January 1919, when he was finally discharged after nine months, and sent home. The hole in his skull remained, but by this stage skin had grown over it.
Back in Australia, Dalziel was based for several months in Brisbane, where he was discharged from the AIF in July 1919. While undergoing medical treatment in Brisbane, Harry fell for local military nurse Ida Ramsay of the staff of the 17th Australian General Hospital. When Dalziel returned home to Atherton on the Atherton Tablelands by train in the winter of 1919, his fame as a VC winner preceded him, and cheering crowds were waiting to greet him at every station he passed through from Townsville to Atherton.
Unable to resume his physically demanding former job as a fireman on steam locomotives, Harry now worked on ‘Carmelbank’, a small farm outside Atherton, all the time wooing Ida Ramsay in Brisbane. The following year, on 8 April, the couple married at the Congregational manse in South Brisbane. Harry was eligible for a soldier settlement grant, and the newlyweds took up a plot of land beside the railway line to Tolga, calling it ‘Zenith’, and running it as a mixed farm with both crops and a few head of stock. They proceeded to have three children, two sons and a girl.
The problem with soldier settlement plots was that they were always small and often on marginal land, meaning that working them was always hard work and frequently an uneconomic proposition. In Harry’s case there was another problem, his health. ‘He was sick all the time,’ his youngest son, Frank, would later recall. ‘He used to get headaches and he really couldn’t do anything physical.’286
Because the site of his head wound was still sensitive, even though his hair had grown back over it, Harry wasn’t able to properly wash the area, and Ida, the experienced nurse, would carefully clean it. Harry’s sensitive state meant that the children were rarely allowed to have anything to do with him. Nonetheless, Frank would remember being fascinated by the sight of his father’s war wounds as a child – one a scar on the back, the other the injury to the right hand.
Meanwhile, most of the physical work at Zenith fell to Harry’s wife, putting an enormous strain on the marriage. Unable to cope with married life and his inability to contribute to working the farm, within a few years Harry left his wife and children and drifted south into New South Wales. For a time, Harry and his younger brother Vic, who had briefly served as a private in the 9th Battalion towards the end of the war, again teamed up, this time digging for gold at Bathurst.
Failing to strike it rich, Harry ended up working in a Sydney factory. In the early 1930s, as the Great Depression struck, Ida fell ill, and Harry returned to Queensland to help his wife and their children, settling in Brisbane. Out of work for some years, in 1933 Harry joined the Citizens Forces, the army reserve. With the rank of sergeant, he served in the Brisbane-based 9th/15th Battalion, which was a composite of his old battalion the 15th and his brother’s 9th Battalion. Harry always looked forward to the annual Anzac Day commemorations each April, attending the Dawn Service and the subsequent march through the streets of Brisbane, when he was as relaxed and cheerful as his children ever saw him. ‘He loved meeting up with everybody,’ said Frank.287
Harry also served as a member of the King’s Colour escort at the opening of Queensland State Parliament, and in 1938 was a guest in the Anzac Day march through the streets of Sydney. By that stage, Harry had developed a reputation as a songwriter, having written poems and songs during long stints in hospital over the years. Some of his songs, including ‘A Song of the Tableland’ and ‘Love Time, Merry Love Time’, were published in England. He also developed a talent for painting and pottery.
When the Second World War broke out, Harry enlisted in the 2nd AIF, and, with the rank of sergeant, was assigned to the 29th Infantry Training Battalion. As a Victoria Cross winner, he was used primarily by the army to tour around speaking at recruitment and war-bond rallies, and addressing recruits in training camps. On 6 November 1942, with the twenty-fourth anniversary of the end of the First World War looming, Harry sat down and wrote a brief account of the day he became Two-Gun Harry at Hamel in 1918 and won the VC, revealing for the first time the story of how the German soldier thanked him for saving his son’s life that day.
Harry never spoke about the war with his children. They learned from someone else, possibly their mother, that their father had been among a pile of bodies which American troops were burying when he was found to be still alive.
Following the Second World War, in 1956, the year of the Melbourne Olympics, the sixty-three-year-old Harry Dalziel travelled to England aboard the liner Orcades with other Australasian Victoria Cross holders to be among the 301 VC winners from around the British Commonwealth attending Victoria Cross centenary celebrations in London. Following the London event Harry took a side trip to France, on 4 July visiting Hamel and the site of the battle thirty-eight years before. The town of Hamel had long since been totally rebuilt and expanded, and the countryside around it was now lush farmland, with no hint of the death and destruction that had been visited upon this pretty, peaceful corner of France decades before.
After laying a wreath at Hamel’s war memorial, Harry went looking for Pear Trench and other reminders of his desperate and almost fatalistic exploits that 4 July day in 1918 with two revolvers, a dagger and Tilly Lewis. But Harry was disappointed. The trenches had gone. While Hamel Ridge was still there east of the town, there weren’t enough recognisable landmarks from the war days for Harry to be able to pinpoint where he had walked, fought, crawled and almost died.
Returning to Queensland, Harry received a military pension once he retired to the town of Oxley, where he resumed his painting, poetry and pottery. On 24 July 1965, seventy-two-year-old Two-Gun Harry Dalziel, one of the heroes of Hamel, was receiving treatment at the Repatriation General Hospital at Greenslopes, Brisbane, when he suffered a massive stroke and died. He was given a funeral with full military honours, and cremated at Brisbane’s Mount Thompson Crematorium.
Forty-five years later, in 2010, Harry’s by then elderly children put his VC and other service medals, plus the military memorabilia he had collected over the years including the original of his 1942 account of the Battle of Hamel, up for auction. The Victoria Cross being classified Category A by the Australian Government, by law it could be purchased by an overseas buyer but could under no circumstances leave Australia.
In the event, Harry’s VC and collection were bought by West Australian media mogul and philanthropist Kerry Stokes, for $525,000. Stokes donated Harry’s medals to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, where they are today on display. Harry would no doubt have thought that a perfect result.