Chapter Seven

AN HISTORICAL POINT OF VIEW

*

We met Bean and he explained our various duties. Hurley was to photograph scenes suitable for propaganda and press releases, while I was expected to photograph actual front line scenes and incidents, showing everything the camera could represent. That meant I would often have to photograph before sunrise amid the smoke and dust of battle. From a photographic point of view the film would be bad, but from an historical point of view, very valuable.

Wilkins’ manuscript1

In August 1917, the war was still in the trenches. The landscape of the front was flat and desolate. The constant bombardment from both sides had stripped the once-pretty French and Belgian countryside of trees, and had left broken stumps between burnt-out villages. Soldiers moved to and from the front along duckboards (wooden pathways) laid between bomb craters, which filled with water and stank of death and decay.

Under such difficult conditions, the ideal cameras for still photography were roll-film cameras, such as the Vest Pocket Kodak. They were small, did not require a tripod, and, when loaded, could take 16 photographs. But after arriving in France, Wilkins and Hurley used larger glass-plate cameras almost exclusively. Glass-plate cameras were often big, unwieldy, and time-consuming to operate. Rather than using flexible film for a negative, they used a piece of clear glass coated with a silver-nitrate emulsion. These glass negatives were manufactured and sold by companies such as Kodak. Unexposed plates were tightly wrapped in opaque paper, and were shipped in boxes to the photographer. A ‘full-plate’ usually measured 16.5 centimetres by 21.6 centimetres (6.5 inches by 8.5 inches). Manufacturers also offered half- and quarter-plates and, by 1917, a range of sizes was available to suit different model cameras. The advantage of the plate camera was that the bigger negative could be enlarged with a minimal loss of resolution.

Before a photographer could expose a photograph, he needed to unwrap an unexposed plate and load it into a wooden ‘plate carrier’, which looked like a small picture frame. That had to be done in total darkness. Once in the carrier, an opaque ‘slide’ was inserted in front of the plate, ensuring that no light could reach it. Black felt at the edge of the plate carrier also minimised the chance of light entering. Twin slide carriers, which held a glass plate on either side, were common. When setting off for the day, a photographer had to take enough loaded carriers for the photographs he expected to take.

The cameras themself were fragile and lightweight. The carrier with the glass plate(s) usually accounted for about half of the total weight. Emulsion speeds were slow by modern standards, making it necessary for the camera to be held very still while exposing a negative. Tripods were mandatory. Once the camera was mounted on the tripod, the photographer would aim at the subject he wanted to capture. Full-plate cameras usually required the photographer to insert a ground-glass ‘screen’ in the position of the plate carrier. He then covered the back of the camera and his head with a black cloth, and opened the shutter to view an inverted image on the ground-glass. Once the camera was pointed at the desired subject and the lens focussed, the photographer removed the ground-glass and inserted a plate carrier with an unexposed negative. (Graflex half-plate cameras, which Wilkins appears to have favoured, used a small viewfinder, which negated the need for this time consuming process.)

Then, with the shutter behind the lens in the closed position, the slide in front of the glass plate was removed. The photographer adjusted the aperture, opening it wider or closing it down, depending on the amount of ambient light and whether the subject was dark or light. Next, the photographer would decide on the length of time to open the shutter. Light meters had not yet been invented, so decisions on aperture setting and shutter speed were based an ‘exposure calculator’, which attempted to take into consideration the sensitivity of the emulsion, the brightness of the scene, and the settings of the aperture and shutter. It is most likely that when they were working during a battle, Wilkins and Hurley quickly made these calculations based on experience and instinct. Slow emulsion speeds often meant that in low light the shutter needed to be open for one or two seconds, or even more. This usually meant that photographing something moving resulted in the subject appearing blurred.

Immediately the shot had been taken, the slide was reinserted and the carrier and glass negative removed. In the case of twin-plate carriers, the photographer would turn the carrier over and reinsert it to expose the plate on the other side. The carrier was marked to show that the plate had been exposed, and it was placed with other used carriers in a special box. The exposed plates would wait until the photographer was back in the darkroom before they could be removed from the carriers and developed.

Taking photographs outdoors with such cameras was usually a two-person job. One person held the delicate camera, while another lugged the tripod and box of loaded carriers. The difficulties in the process were magnified greatly by battlefield conditions. Wilkins and Hurley would have to climb out of their trench and follow the battle with an assistant (Hurley called them camera-lumpers) to get their shots. After exposing one plate, they would need to duck for cover to change the carrier, before setting up for the next shot. Plate cameras seriously limited their photographic possibilities, while greatly increasing their personal risk. Of more than 6,000 photographs in the AWM’s E series, the majority were exposed on full- or half-plate negatives. A few were taken using special panoramic cameras, which, if anything, were even more bulky and difficult to use. At other times, both Wilkins and Hurley took colour photographs at the Western Front.*

[* The Australian War Memorial has no cameras used by Wilkins or Hurley. Little is known about the specific makes or models they carried. Wilkins, on one occasion, mentions a Graflex half-plate camera and it appears he favoured this model. Some of Wilkins’ early cameras are held at the Ohio State University.]

There are two likely reasons why plate cameras were used rather than small roll-film cameras. First, Wilkins and Hurley were professional photographers. They wanted to produce professional-quality results, and that could only be done with large-format negatives. Second, there’s every possibility that Bean insisted on it. He wanted a photographic record of the war that was both accurate and detailed. Such detail could only be captured with full- and half-plate negatives.

After Bean met Wilkins and Hurley at the docks of Calais, he immediately drove them towards the front. It was late in the day, and Bean took a wrong turn in the fading light. After running over a couple of sheep, and then negotiating a price to pay the farmer, he finally got his photographers to Hazebrouck, where the AIF headquarters was established. There, Wilkins ‘saw for the first time the awe-inspiring display of shellfire and signals against the sky. Hurley and I were mightily impressed.’2 Hurley described it as ‘the most awesome sight I have ever seen.’3 Bean showed them their tents, and Wilkins remembered:

We went to our tents with our equipment, but before we had time to unbuckle even one strap, a German air squadron came roaring over and began dropping bombs. All the experienced men dived into dugouts, but Hurley and I, not knowing where to go, ran out in the midst of the bombing, looking for some kind of shelter. After that, on first arriving at a new place we would quickly learn where safety holes were located. Quite an exciting first night that was. After the air raid we sat up till morning, watching the titanic struggle along the battlefront — countless flashes from the big guns, exploding shells, and signal rockets.4

The next morning, Bean drove them through a deluge of rain to Hill 60 where, ten weeks earlier, the massive explosions in the tunnels had signalled the start of the Battle of Messines Ridge. The fighting continued in the area as the Australians defended the hill against German attacks. Bean showed Wilkins and Hurley the battleground and the conditions under which they had to take photographs. Wilkins saw ‘a morass of slimy mud on either side of the narrow duckboards, which the troops had laid down to make it possible for the men to walk in the rain-soaked trenches’. They spent the night camped in the tunnels of Hill 60. Wilkins remembered that, ‘just north of Zillebeke Lake, the Germans were taking our front-line trenches. Our troops were fighting desperately. Except for the flashes that blazed along the battle line, the night was pitch black.’5 In the morning, Wilkins remembered that they:

Went out for our first inspection of the front lines. The Germans were attacking again. It was like a trip into hell … the air shaking with noise and the earth shaking underfoot. Human beings seemed so little in the midst of a thing like that. It didn’t seem possible that men could go through it alive.

It was not our duty to fight, so we stayed in the trenches and escaped with only a drenching of mud from a bursting shell. Then we helped bring in the wounded. We thoroughly realised we were in the thick of the war and it was a horrible introduction.6

The next day, Bean took the photographers to St Omer, where they purchased personal items, including a camp bed each.

Bean had also arranged for a Nissen hut to be built at nearby Steenvoorde, which would serve as their darkroom and living quarters. After buying a few items, Wilkins and Hurley went to inspect the work being done on their hut. Hurley was upset with the progress when he found, ‘six men on the small job all asleep; and on questioning their lieutenant, [I] was informed they were held up for materials … Oh! The mismanagement and rottenness of military organisation’.7

Hurley was an artist and, like many artists, put his art above all else. He believed he was in France to produce a photographic exhibition about the war, the likes of which had not been seen before. If Ponting’s show about Scott’s Antarctic expedition was considered spectacular, he was about to show the world what he could do. From the moment he arrived in France, he demonstrated no patience for anyone who could not help him achieve that aim. A day after his first visit to the Nissen hut, he returned to find little work had been done, and wrote, ‘My contempt and disgust for army administration increases with every trifling matter.’8

Wilkins, meanwhile, appears to have kept a sense of boyhood wonder about the whole experience. Two weeks after arriving in France, he wrote to his mother:

With regard to our work, Captain Hurley and I work together as much as possible, but occasionally we go on different jobs. My particular work for the time being is to take pictures of every place where the Australian soldiers have been fighting and this means a lot of travelling, of course, practically along the whole of the front line from end to end. It will give me a rare opportunity of seeing things … We have been living for three days with the artillery lately and they are doing wonderfully good work. They were complimented by the Commander-in-Chief the other day. They have a pretty hard time of it too. They get shelled every day by the German big guns and have lost a lot of men.9 [The full text of this letter, which was discovered in the Ross Collection in September 2014, is reproduced as an Appendix.]

On 31 August, the photographers’ hut at Steenvoorde was complete. Hurley christened it ‘Billabong’, complaining, ‘It’s shameful the way both money and men are wasted here. Far better they had been at home on the land than idling their time away here through mismanagement.’10

The Nissen hut measured 7.6 metres x 4.8 metres. It comprised a darkroom, two living rooms, and a workroom. A small cookhouse was erected next to it, along with a shelter for a car. In addition to Wilkins and Hurley, two men to help carry the equipment, a driver, and a darkroom assistant also lived in the hut. Hurley described them as ‘an excellent crowd of fellows and enthusiastic’.11 He also noted that they were located in a ‘warm corner’ because it was difficult to sleep at night due to the constant shelling, and because ‘a number of people were killed in Steenvoorde last night a quarter of a mile away, and the main road bombed’.12

With a darkroom to load carriers and develop negatives, along with a staff to assist them, Wilkins and Hurley returned to Hill 60 and exposed more plates. They photographed troops on parade, artillery teams, shell-bursts on the horizon, Red Cross stations, soldiers in their trenches — in fact, almost every aspect of life behind the lines as the soldiers waited for the next offensive. On 3 September, they drove to Ypres, where they spent the day photographing the bombed ruins of the once-magnificent city. At the end of the day, Hurley noted, ‘We gladly evacuated Ypres, awed and wiser men.’13

Soon after, Hurley learnt another fact about the ‘rottenness of military organisation’. The censor would check the developed plates before they left France. Any photographs that contained sensitive information were marked ‘Passed for Record Purposes Only’ and could not be published. Lists were typed up, and photographs that could not be released were underlined with red pencil, and then marked ‘cannot yet be released for publication, but will probably be reconsidered later’.14 After visiting the censor with Bean, Hurley fumed at the indignity of his work having to pass through the hands of unartistic people:

His duty is to examine all photographs likely to convey any information to the enemy — seemingly in most cases a most absurd proceeding as the enemy is already aware of most if not all the negatives held up. I shuddered when I saw the careless manner in which the negatives are handled and shuffled like a pack of cards — to think that mine must go through the same procedure!15

Hurley was also aware that the British newspapers were paying big money for photographs of the war and that these photographs could not only bring him income, but publicise any exhibitions that he staged. Lord Beaverbrook (Max Aitken), who had established the Canadian War Records Office (CWRO), was the publisher of various English newspapers, including the popular London Evening Standard and the Daily Express. Shortly after establishing the CWRO, Beaverbrook hired Canadian photographers who could produce a record of the war as well as give him a steady supply of photographs for his newspapers. Beaverbrook was also urging the Canadian photographers to make ‘composite photographs’, which combined two or more negatives to produce a more dramatic image. These composites were regularly appearing on the covers of his newspapers.

Hurley observed, ‘Canada has made a great advertisement out of their pictures and I must beat them.’16 After his visit to the censor, Hurley began to devise ways to smuggle his photographs out of France so that he could sell them to the newspapers.

Bean appears to have been aware that Hurley had his own agenda from the outset. He knew that Hurley and Wilkins had taken on their roles as official photographers under very different arrangements. Hurley was in France to create his show. He had not enlisted, but had been hired to do a job, and could resign at any time. Hurley had been given the rank of honorary captain so that he could wear the AIF uniform, which would allow him to move about the battlefields more readily. Wilkins, on the other hand, had enlisted in the AFC, and, as was the practice, had been made a 2nd Lieutenant. When he had arrived in London, he had been told he was appointed to the AWRS. Like all members of the AIF, Wilkins had taken an oath when he enlisted:

I [name] swear that I will well and truly serve our Sovereign Lord the King in the Australian Imperial Force from [date of enlistment] until the end of the war, and a further period of four months thereafter unless sooner lawfully discharged, dismissed or removed therefrom; and that I will resist His majesty’s enemies and cause His majesty’s peace to be kept and maintained; and that I will in all matters appertaining to my service, faithfully discharge my duty according to law. So help me God.

Hurley took no such oath, and Bean understood that Hurley was more interested in gaining aesthetic results and promoting his career. Bean may have also suspected that Hurley intended to smuggle photographs past the censor. Soon after the two photographers arrived in France, Bean largely ignored Hurley’s work, and concentrated on Wilkins to take the photographs for the AWRS. Hurley recorded in his diary that he ‘had a long talk with Captain Bean over affairs generally and the best method of running the department. Wilkins will be operating practically separately … It is therefore necessary that he should have separate equipment …’17

On a personal level, Bean was probably also drawn to the hardworking and modest Wilkins. (Certainly, they remained friends, and corresponded long after the war.) Also, despite his desire to report the war from the trenches, Bean had difficulty talking to the enlisted men. He had criticised their antics in Egypt, where they had brawled and visited brothels, and when his criticism had been published, many of the Anzacs had gone out of their way to ignore the newspaper correspondent. That fact, combined with Bean’s inherent snobbery, meant that he felt more comfortable dealing with officers than with the rough-and-tumble men from the suburbs and country towns of Australia. The arrival of Wilkins, who had a knack of making friends wherever he went, helped Bean enter the world of the common soldier.

From the time of Wilkins’ arrival, Bean’s diaries regularly reported the walks they took together. Bean described one, on 17 September 1917, where they went to the edge of no man’s land and attempted to get photographs in trenches near the Bellevarde Lake:

There was scattered shelling peppering the plain and a couple of men every now and then running across it. We found the trenches on the summit with a whizzing shell continually picking the top of it. In the trenches were the 22nd Battalion holding the whole front for the 2nd Division. We pushed along the battered trench until we found an officer. The men were in little undercut pozzies [positions] in the front side of the trench — we passed two, in neighbouring pozzies with a blood-splashed waterproof sheet covering the entrance and the flies buzzing around the bloodstained legs and putties [boots and leggings] which protruded — otherwise we should not have known they were dead. We came at last to the officer. A poor little startled boy, horrified by the sights and the shelling — they had been bursting in the parados [rear of trench] and killing the men with the back blast.18

In addition to having acquired a friend, Bean finally had a photographer who would tramp about the battlefields with him — not just to the famous landmarks, but to the places where men huddled, day after day in the mud, where bodies lay waiting to be buried, where men struggled to stay warm, forgotten by their commanding officers, where the bloody brutality and misery of the soldiers’ life could be seen in all its stark reality. Bean wanted to ‘write the war from the middle of it’. In Wilkins, he had a photographer willing to record images from the middle of it as well.

Having captured the Messines Ridge in June, Haig set his sights on Passchendaele, a village 11 kilometres to the east of Ypres.* The first step toward that goal was to dislodge the Germans along the road that ran east from Ypres to Menin. Here the trenches were studded with concrete pillboxes from which the Germans could mow down advancing troops with machine-guns. These pillboxes were so thick that it took several direct hits with heavy artillery to even crack them.

[* The ‘step-by-step’ battles of September and October 1917 are collectively known as The Battle of Passchendaele, or sometimes as Third Ypres. The battles were, in order, Menin Road, Polygon Wood, Broodseinde Ridge, Poelcappelle, and Passchendaele.]

Bean awaited the coming Battle of Menin Road with high anticipation. As soon as he learnt of the planned attack, he drove Wilkins to every place along the front he could reach, sketched details in his notebook. and worked out the best way to utilise his two photographers. The day before the planned offensive, Bean took Wilkins and Hurley to the Australian headquarters, where they were briefed on what was about to happen. For the first time, two Australian divisions (the 1st and 2nd) would be fighting side by side. The Anzacs, who around this time began to refer to themselves as ‘diggers’, were boosted in confidence knowing they would be fighting alongside their countrymen.

Also, a new strategy would be employed. Rather than unleashing a wide, massed attack along the front, Haig would employ a ‘step-by-step’ process of capturing and holding sections of enemy territory. A barrage of artillery against the enemy would be sustained, then stopped, and the first wave of troops would rush forward. Once they had reached their first objective, the troops would hold their position, and the guns would begin a barrage against the next objective. As soon as the artillery stopped pounding the enemy, a fresh wave of troops would pass the first and secure the second objective. The strategy would be repeated again, and, it was hoped, the third wave of troops would hold the Menin Road.

After being briefed, Wilkins and Hurley went to Hooge, where they found beds at a Red Cross dressing station, and prepared for the battle that was to commence in the morning. Neither man slept. Around 3.00 a.m. they picked up their cameras and set out along Menin Road. They were near an area called Hellfire Corner when the artillery barrage commenced.

THE PHOTOGRAPHS 17 August–19 September 1917

Information about how numbers were assigned to official photographs, who took them, and how the detailed captions were written after the war, is incomplete. The earliest surviving written record for each photograph are the censor’s lists, which was typed up before the photographic plate was sent to the Australian War Records Section in London. The censor’s lists give only brief details of the subject matter in the photographs, and do not name the photographer. As an example, consider photograph E00698. The censor’s list dates it 2 September 1917. The location is given as Bailleul, and the subject as ‘Australian Field Artillery’. The caption then reads: ‘The 11th Brigade, Australian Field Artillery, out for a brief rest after ten months in the firing line.’

After the censor’s lists, the next earliest information available for each photograph is the caption that was printed in a catalogue to accompany the photographic collection when it was sent to Australia in 1919. These detailed captions, which often give the names and ranks of the men pictured (in some examples, more than 150 men) were compiled in London following the Armistice. For E00698 the caption compiled in London is:

The lines of the 11th Field Artillery Brigade at Bailleul during a brief rest, after ten months in the firing line. Identified: 1020 Driver J B Dodds (centre foreground); 4200 Driver A H Jacobs (slightly to the right behind Dodds); 2368 Driver J Stone (to the right of Jacobs); 3755 Bombardier (Bdr) A Winders (foreground, with back to camera); 27108 Bdr Thomas Samuel Hurley MM (centre background); 4196 Gunner B R Hudson (near Hurley).

Men are identified in the photograph, even though they have their back to the camera, or their face is covered by their hat. Detailed hand-written field notes must have been made at the time the photographs were taken. Copies of the censor’s lists are at the AWM, and Wilkins also kept copies, which are at OSU. The lack of field notes, and the fact that the dates given on the censor’s lists were most likely the date the censor recorded the photograph, rather than the day it was taken, makes it difficult to attribute photographs to particular people. The most detailed description of the process was written by Wilkins in 1929:

At dusk we would return … to headquarters and develop the plates exposed that day. After the plates had been developed and fixed, we would sit down to dinner. After dinner we would examine the prints of the photographs taken the day before, and read the comments of the headquarters staff to whom the prints had been delivered earlier in the day. This meant we would rarely get to bed before twelve or one o’clock in the morning.

Every week it was necessary for us to take our photographs to censorship headquarters and have our pictures censored. Those which were passed for general publication were forwarded to England. The others — showing perhaps some important feature which would be of military value to the enemy, were stored in the library for use in connection with the history of the war being written by Captain Bean.19

If Wilkins had field notes, as he most certainly did, he would have kept them. He probably still had them in 1923 when he annotated Wilkins Volume XII. The probable fate of these field notes is explained in Chapter 17.

The first place Bean took Wilkins and Hurley after their arrival was Hill 60 where, famously, explosions had been detonated in underground tunnels. Wilkins and Hurley photographed the resulting craters, which can be seen in E00580 to E00585. The next 70 photographs in the series were mostly taken before Wilkins and Hurley arrived, and some would have been taken by Baldwin.

E00656 marks the real start of the work of the two Australian photographers. Hurley’s desire, in particular, to take artistic photographs, can be seen immediately. E00656 (credited to Hurley) shows men unloading 9.2-inch (23.4cm) shells from the back of a truck. Hurley has positioned his camera to show the pattern of the shells in the foreground while behind, in posed positions, the men lift and roll shells down a plank to the ground.

From the time of the arrival of Hurley and Wilkins it is only possible, at best, to group photographs in clusters. In early September, the two men visited the city of Ypres, which had been left in ruins. In mid-September, Bean and Wilkins returned to Ypres. The striking images of the devastated Cloth Hall, taken on these trips, have been published repeatedly ever since. They are located throughout the E series, and again demonstrate the difficulty of attributing photographs to either Wilkins or Hurley. E00716, showing Cloth Hall, is attributed to Hurley, and recorded by the censor as having been taken on 3 September. E00717 is recorded as having been taken on 14 September, when Bean and Wilkins — but not Hurley — visited Cloth Hall. Yet the photograph is credited to Hurley. Other photographs of the ruins at Ypres are E00718 to E00721 inclusive, as well as E00730 and E00748.

The problem with assigning photographs to either man, using the date as evidence, can be further illustrated by the photographs of dead horses beside the Menin Road, taken by Wilkins on a walk described by Bean. E00732 and E00734 show the same horses lying beside the same broken wagon, but one photograph is listed as taken on 13 September, while the other is listed as having been taken four days later. As it happens, E00732 appears in Volume XII, and Wilkins has initialled it, indicating that he took the photograph. A similar photograph of dead horses beside the Menin Road is E00700. This photograph is dated 14 September and credited to Hurley; but, as will be shown, Hurley had no reservations about adding his name to photographs taken by Wilkins.

The underground dressing station, where Wilkins and Hurley waited overnight for the Battle of Menin Road, can be seen in E00714 and E00715.

E02929 shows an unidentified photographer’s assistant carrying a box of glass plates.