CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

‘Finest and Most Authoritative Advocate’ for Returned Soldiers:

The aftermath of war

1921–1925

AT NO STAGE during the rest of his parliamentary career did Elliott recapture the prominence he acquired during his campaign about his supersession. On issues of concern to him he continued to be a force to be reckoned with, but higher political honours never looked like coming his way. His 1921 speeches on the Defence Bill left him with a political reputation as an erratic maverick, and he realistically accepted that his forthrightness, independent streak, and uncompromising temperament were incompatible with the front bench.

While Elliott was airing his own perspective on AIF controversies in the Senate, he was wondering what Bean would make of them in the official history. Having someone of Bean’s integrity and industry tackling the AIF story was welcome, but it was a huge undertaking, very different from his everyday journalism. Whether he would be able to handle the daunting combination of large themes, sweeping span, numerous narrative threads, complex analysis, and difficult verdicts on controversial individuals (Elliott very much included) remained to be seen.

Bean had decided to tackle this momentous project by writing six large and immensely detailed volumes himself, two covering Gallipoli and four on the Western Front. In addition, he would be editing other ancillary ones — eventually amounting to eight — dealing with naval, air, and medical aspects of the war, as well as developments in New Guinea, Palestine, and the Australian home front; he was also to annotate a separate volume of photographs. In November 1921, having vetted the final proofs of his first volume, which covered the prelude to the AIF’s involvement in Turkey together with the Gallipoli landing itself, Bean wrote to Elliott about the dramatic event he was planning to start Volume II with, the charge at Krithia. Bean felt that he needed to find out more about what had happened to the 7th Battalion there. Many of its officers had been hit and, partly as a result, information in the war diary was meagre. Although Bean knew Pompey’s wounded ankle had prevented him from being at Krithia himself, the historian wondered if he could suggest which ex-7th officer to approach for more details.

Elliott’s immediate response was to send off a five-page letter packed with valuable help for the historian. It was a remarkably knowledgeable document from someone who had not been at Krithia, underlining his intense interest both in the individuals who had fought under him and in the AIF historical record. Pompey outlined what had happened to the various 7th officers hit during the famous charge, suggested who would be the most worthwhile survivors to contact and how to locate them, and provided some insightful observations of his own about Krithia. Recalling the condemnation of Bean’s role in the pre-landing controversy over AIF misbehaviour in Egypt, Elliott affirmed that this unpopularity ‘was absolutely obliterated by … your own good work at Krithia and attention and service to the wounded’. Moreover, the

general impression I gained from officers and men was that the whole scheme of the advance was an impossible one and should never have been attempted, and the feeling of hostility which is pronounced in this State against General McCay has its origin in the blame attributed to him, as I believe quite unjustifiably, by reason of his association with two tragic blunders of someone [else] in authority at Krithia and [Fromelles].

‘I … shall await with great interest your account of that battle’, Pompey told Bean.

It was shortly afterwards that Elliott read Volume I of the AIF history, which had just been published to wide acclaim. He found that Bean had given him a special introduction into the narrative, as befitted one of the most celebrated characters in the whole force:

Elliott was a heavily-built man of bull-headed pugnacity, but with some of the simplicity and buoyancy of a child. He placed in the old principles of drill and field tactics a simple faith which was very largely justified. He cherished a boy-like admiration for the great soldiers of history and a simple ambition to imitate them. Outspoken, impulsive, excitable, “straight” as a ruled line, intensely headstrong, he worked his men perhaps harder than any commander in the force … but they loved him from the first.

There followed a version of the notorious hat story, a tribute to the 7th Battalion’s prowess which ‘cannot be fully appreciated without an understanding of the leader … affectionately nicknamed “Pompey” Elliott’ and, later on, a compelling account of his exertions at the Gallipoli landing before he was wounded.

Elliott joined the queue of enthusiasts writing to compliment Bean on his first volume, but supplemented his congratulations with a query about the attribution of the adjective ‘headstrong’ to himself:

I would be glad to know on some occasion when you are not too busy of any incidents in my life upon which you base this judgment. I am not at present saying you are wrong or right, but I certainly am not aware of any incident at which you were personally present and directly observed such characteristics. I am therefore somewhat curious to know who was your informant and the nature of your information and whether you verified it with your usual care.

That Pompey’s concern about Bean’s closeness to Brudenell White was behind this request became clear when he went on to tell the historian what General Walker had said to him about the Lone Pine awards. Pompey informed Bean that Walker had been so amazed to find Elliott’s name omitted from the published list after he had placed the 7th Battalion commander at the very top of his recommendations that he had left his hospital bed to make a special visit to the Gallipoli Commander-in-Chief in an attempt to rectify this injustice. Walker had even sought out Pompey himself later to apologise for what he called the most outrageous ill-treatment he knew of in 30 years of soldiering. From a conversation between Layh and a highly placed friend at Birdwood’s headquarters, Major Tom Griffiths, Pompey had since learned, he told Bean, that his name had indeed been deleted from Walker’s list: ‘Your C.O. is not popular here’, Griffiths had remarked to Layh. With Lone Pine to be covered in the Official History volume that Bean was then working on, Elliott sought to connect his omission from Walker’s list to his later supersession:

Do you know the reason why I was continually superseded in the field? … Yet was there ever an occasion [when] my men failed to achieve everything asked of them and even more? White now says there is nothing against my courage or capacity, yet I lack some indefinite quality unfitting me for command … was it the absence of this indefinite quality which caused the removal of my name from General Walker’s list?

In reply Bean thanked Elliott for his congratulations, and handled his awkward query with an admirable blend of tact and frankness. That superb label ‘straight as a ruled line’ fitted Bean as aptly as Pompey. Bean told Elliott he was reluctant to engage in

any such long drawn-out post-mortem as I fear would be involved if I were to fulfil your request, and I therefore do not propose to answer it unless you absolutely force me to do so. Of course if you care to ask me sometime when I see you, and are really anxious to press the matter, I will tell you frankly, in a friendly talk, the basis of my judgement.

In regard to your being passed over in promotion, I know nothing of the facts except what has been recently published in the press. Concerning the matter of honours which you mention, surely Elliott, you are too big a man to be one of those who complain that decorations are not bestowed upon them. Personally, I would rather pick up cigarettes in the street than myself raise a finger to reach for any decoration or honour of my own initiative. Surely it is enough that your name is honoured by the people and that you will go down to posterity, undoubtedly, as one of the big Australian figures of the war; I would strongly urge you to leave it at that.

Pompey was stung by Bean’s forthright advice. Concerning the assessment of him as ‘headstrong’, he accepted Bean’s suggested deferral. But he was keen to elaborate on the awards issue:

[in] regard to the further questions that you raise as to desiring to complain that decorations are not bestowed upon me I would say that so far as they themselves are concerned no one desires them less than myself, but where one has evidence of bias and deliberate injustice in one direction the fact of their non bestowal is valuable corroborative evidence in the same direction. As I thought that in the main you had derived your knowledge of my character whatever it may be from the same source, I merely asked whether you had taken the same precautions in regard to checking your information as I know you did in other matters.

Elliott’s enquiry about Bean’s biographical portrait of him may have been untoward, but his concern about White’s influence on the historian was understandable. The publication of the first volume of the Official History was a revelation. Bean had a marvellous story to tell, of course, but he was chronicling it superbly. With his innovative emphasis on what individual front-line soldiers actually did underpinned by his painstaking research and exceptional command of detail, the quality of this initial volume indicated that Bean was likely to produce a history of the conflict at least as good as any equivalent being compiled anywhere. His paramount motivation was simply to ensure that his history did justice to the men of the AIF and their deeds: it was ‘the only memorial which could be worthy of them’, he declared in a preface. He remained unflaggingly dedicated to this self-imposed ‘duty’. For Elliott, who was longing to see the story of Australia’s war — and, of course, his own part in it — told well, Bean’s emergence as a first-rate historian was very gratifying. But his satisfaction was qualified by nagging misgivings about Bean’s closeness to White. With the Australian Official History proving to be a work of such quality, it was all the more galling to suspect that its assessments of controversies involving him might be unduly influenced by Bean’s friendship with the senior staff officer he had crossed swords with in many of those episodes.

Pompey was right to be concerned. Bean had a fervent, starry-eyed admiration for White, precisely the kind of boyish hero-worship that the historian had ascribed to Pompey when describing his regard for legendary commanders of the past. It was the combination of White’s charm, capacity, and quiet commitment that appealed to Bean. As official war correspondent, Bean had been so impressed by White’s magisterial supervision of the AIF in all its significant facets, by his unswerving dedication to the cause, and — at least as important — by the self-effacing, undemonstrative way he went about it that Bean spearheaded an unsuccessful agitation to have White rather than Monash elevated to the command of the Australian Corps. For Bean, White came to epitomise the notion of selfless devoted service to an ideal; it was because White refused to assert himself with ambitious self-promotion in 1918 that Bean resolved (even against White’s explicit wishes) to lobby for him.

The contrast with Elliott’s agitation in the Senate over his supersession could not have been more stark. Egocentric fulminating day after day in the national parliament about perceived injustice to oneself was, to both Bean and White, unthinkable and abhorrent; Bean’s repugnance was unconcealed in his letter to Pompey on the subject. Like White, Bean was temperamentally poles apart from Elliott, but the historian warmly esteemed Pompey both as one of the AIF’s outstanding leaders and as a marvellous character in the monumental story that was to occupy him for another two decades. When Elliott clashed with White, however, Bean tended to side with his hero.

Moreover, while Bean generally guarded his independence as AIF historian zealously, he routinely sent draft chapters to White for review before publication. White, understandably annoyed by Pompey’s tirades against him in parliament and the press (and not being as nobly selfless as Bean imagined), sometimes used this opportunity to recommend alterations less favourable to Elliott. His manipulation of Bean’s analysis in the Official History of Pompey’s suppressed Polygon Wood report was not the only blatant example of this tendency. When vetting some other draft chapters, White made the gratuitous observation that ‘Elliott had not greatly proved himself’ at Gallipoli, an assertion so wide of the mark as to be implausibly artless. White’s enduring resentment of Elliott’s public diatribes was also evident when Bean consulted him, as the historian frequently did, seeking assistance with research queries.

During the second half of 1921 the dominant issue in the Senate was the tariff. The government wanted to change — in nearly all instances, raise — the rates imposed on particular goods, and also to establish new procedures to administer tariff policy in the future. Several bills were involved. Elliott had recently converted to protectionism after being an ardent free trader. The logic of free trade was unassailable in theory, he declared in the Senate, but in practice so many countries adopted a self-interested protectionist policy that it would be imprudent for Australia not to do likewise. With the zeal of the convert he consistently aligned himself during interminable tariff debates with manufacturers and Victoria’s traditional adherence to the protectionist cause. Whether it was beer or malted milk, corsets or chamois leather, explosives or porcelain insulators, Pompey wanted the local product protected.

In November 1921 Elliott returned to Ballarat to deliver a lecture about the war. He was replicating for his old school what he did at Camberwell — giving a talk on modern battle, principally based on the events of 8 August 1918, as a fund-raiser to assist the construction of a memorial hall. As at Camberwell, Pompey illustrated his address with photographs and film footage borrowed from Treloar’s museum. The lecture was well attended and financially successful, and was reviewed appreciatively by both Ballarat newspapers. ‘I wish I could have heard it’, Treloar assured him afterwards.

Ballarat College representatives praised Elliott’s wholehearted and generous support of the school. Their gratitude was appropriate. Besides donating his services as a lecturer, Pompey had assigned his accumulated war gratuity and other funds, over £500 in all, to establish a scholarship and prize in memory of his brother. The scholarship, worth £20 annually, was to be awarded to sons of soldier fathers who were unable to provide for their children’s education after becoming casualties during the war. Rhodes-like principles were to determine the recipient of the Captain G.S. Elliott Prize: personality, character, and leadership were to be important attributes, and sporting proficiency was to be taken into account as well as scholastic distinction. There was also provision for a possible studentship to assist a Ballarat Collegian proceeding to the University of Melbourne.

The scholarship proved to be a life-changing boon for a number of recipients. The unpromising horizons of Percy Beames, the raw son of an unemployed ex-37th Battalion battler, were transformed when he was offered an Elliott scholarship. After his brilliant feats for cricket and football teams of Ballarat College had brought him to the attention of Melbourne talent scouts, he went on to represent Victoria at both sports, and to write about them for decades in the Age.

Elliott also continued to be actively involved in the affairs of Ormond College. He was on the committee handling fund-raising for the substantial building extensions which had for some time been the most important item on the college council’s agenda. The new development was officially opened by the Governor of Victoria at an impressive ceremony on 23 May 1922. With the Old Ormond Students’ Association chairman, Elliott’s old friend J.G. Latham, unable to attend, Elliott agreed to speak in his stead. He emphasised how splendid it was to have the esteemed initial master, Sir John MacFarland, present at the inauguration of the new library named after him.

Pompey also officiated at a more solemn ceremony later that year when he unveiled a brass plaque commemorating those from Ormond who had fallen. George Elliott was named on it, of course, along with such renowned and lamented identities as Murdoch Mackay and Mervyn Higgins, and also officers killed while serving in the 15th Brigade — John Sterling at Fromelles, and Wilfred Beaver at Polygon Wood. George was among the ex-Ormond residents also honoured with an individual plaque mounted in the room they used to occupy.

Elliott continued to be sought after as an unveiler. An invitation to unveil an honour board at his birthplace was a particularly welcome request. On 12 November 1921 he assured the overflow crowd at Charlton that it was good for Australians to remind themselves through the erection of honour boards and other memorials that their own men had performed feats of outstanding valour and chivalry, as inspiring as the finest deeds recorded in centuries of military history. Pompey then proceeded to authenticate this claim in characteristic style with a series of vividly described examples — Private McArthur, in the leading 7th Battalion boat at the Gallipoli landing, continuing to row despite being fatally wounded; Corporals Harry Webb and Fred Wright, killed while catching Turkish bombs to hurl them back; the 7th Battalion’s quartet of VC winners at Lone Pine; Lieutenant Stewart Smith, in agony with a shattered leg at Fromelles and barely able to crawl, yet refusing to call for stretcher-bearers because others needed them more; and Sergeant Colclough’s intrepid intervention at Polygon Wood.

‘No matter where you search for noble deeds in the annals of no matter what nation’s armies, you will find them paralleled by the deeds of our own boys’, Elliott reiterated. He had ‘told these stories in the hope that the traditions of self-sacrifice would be perpetuated by this school board’. Regrettably, they were living in ‘a materialistic age’ when ‘the measure of success’ was ‘the amount of money that a man could pile up in his lifetime’. In contrast, the men of the AIF had been prepared to risk their lives in order to achieve collective success. Emulating that spirit in peacetime was the key to Australia consolidating as a ‘free and mighty nation’ and ‘sailing safely’ through whatever ‘great troubles’ lay ahead. Pompey’s stirring speech was the highlight of a ceremony that ‘will live long in the memory’, the local paper reported.

He spoke in similar vein at numerous unveilings. A week later, when he travelled to Ballarat to deliver his fund-raising lecture in aid of the memorial hall to be constructed at his old school, he officiated at no fewer than three memorial ceremonies that weekend. On Friday 18 November he formally opened the Avoca Memorial Rotunda, and 24 hours later he was in action again at the unveiling of the Clunes memorial; a large crowd attended each ceremony. From Clunes he proceeded to Ballarat for the lecture that evening, and the following afternoon he did the honours when the Neil Street church commemorated its diamond jubilee by unveiling a memorial to 32 congregation members who had not survived their war service (including Les Blick, a 7th Battalion officer killed at the landing). The previous month Elliott had journeyed to Mornington to speak at the opening of an unusual memorial: a sizeable residence had been purchased, renovated, and transformed into accommodation for homeless and destitute children by relatives of Andrew Kerr, a 57th Battalion sergeant killed at Fromelles, as a lasting tribute to him. Not long before, Elliott had ventured out to Lilydale to enlighten another large crowd about McArthur, Smith, Colclough, and the 7th Battalion’s exploits at Lone Pine while unveiling an impressive honour board erected in tribute to the 492 men who had enlisted from that shire.

Pompey was also busy around Anzac Day 1922, which he spent at the northern Victoria town of Kyabram. From the time he arrived on Saturday 22 April he was well looked after by local returned soldiers. On Sunday he accompanied them to nearby Stanhope and Girgarre to meet soldier settlers from these districts; the wisdom of settling returned soldiers with limited agricultural experience on farms of varying viability was not universally accepted, and Elliott was keen to learn how these men were going. There was an Anzac commemorative service in Kyabram on Sunday night. The following evening, Anzac eve, Elliott gave a talk on Villers-Bretonneux; the local paper observed that his ‘famous’ war lectures had been ‘delivered … with much success in various parts of the Commonwealth’. Then, on Anzac Day itself, after addressing a service attended by 250 people at nearby Tongala, Pompey returned to Kyabram, where a bigger crowd assembled to watch him present medals to a dozen returned soldiers (including one of his 7th Battalion originals), and unveil the Kyabram memorial. Afterwards, at a social gathering in his honour arranged by the returned soldiers, he gave them an entertaining account of amusing wartime incidents.

Four days later he was back in Melbourne to officiate at the Oakleigh Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Memorial Institute, laying a memorial stone before 1,500 onlookers and declaring the institute formally open. The next day he was in action once more, unveiling a memorial column at Victory Park in Ascot Vale. Soon afterwards he was off again, this time to tell the citizens of Morwell about McArthur, Smith, and Colclough while doing the honours at the soldiers’ memorial there.

When he was not travelling his home base was still Prospect Hill Road, Camberwell, but he and the family had moved to a different house in that street. They were now residing further west in an area of unequivocally middle-class ambience not far from Burke Road. The brick residence built for the Elliotts at 56 Prospect Hill Road — which remained Pompey’s home for the rest of his life — was spacious and functional without the slightest hint of grandeur or pretentiousness. The overwhelming impression from the front of the house was reddish robustness, with terracotta tiles on the steeply sloping roof complementing its wide, symmetrical red-brick frontage. Anyone noticing the giant letter box on the way in would have correctly concluded that someone living there received a great deal of mail. Visitors entered via an arched recess in the brickwork, with stained glass above and beside the front door, into an entrance hall separating the feature front spaces of lounge and dining room. Further in, the main bedroom was to the left, and had east windows to catch the morning sun. Generally, however, light was not a feature, an impression reinforced by the extensive use of dark timber for doors, architraves, skirtings, shelves, and mantlepieces; this was particularly prominent in Pompey’s den, with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves dominating one wall. A distinctly nippy house in winter, even at the height of summer it remained pleasantly cool.

Making the most of the outdoors was a big priority for the whole family, Harold very much included. The naturalist instincts that had so pleased his mother when he was young were again to the fore as magnificent gardens took shape at 56 Prospect Hill Road and the vacant block the family owned and enjoyed alongside. The array of trees nurtured by the numerous returned soldiers Pompey employed as gardeners during the 1920s included silver birches, rhododendrons, magnolias, flowering gums, and fruit-bearing varieties that supplied the Elliotts with oranges, plums, cherries, and guavas. There was also a flawlessly maintained croquet-standard lawn, a rose garden, an asparagus bed, rockeries, and a bird bath. It was a superb haven, relished by all the Elliotts. On a fine spring day, with the garden in bloom and teeming with birds, it was idyllic. One acquaintance was given a guided tour and never forgot it:

General Elliott loved the simple things of life. To walk with him round his garden was an education, not only in the habits of Australian plants, but in the simple joy of being alive. In the bush of his beloved homeland he was really at home. The trees and the flowers were his friends.

It was a residence for an extended family, home not just for Harold Elliott’s wife and children but his sister-in-law and mother-in-law as well. Belle continued to be the main domestic organiser of the household; capable and practical, she still answered to ‘Dear’ and generally kept the children on a tight leash. Kate, more deferential and less assertive than her sister, remained Harold’s ‘sunshine lady’, ever loyal and supportive; with Harold often away, she appreciated Belle’s contribution. Visitors like Violet’s schoolfriends felt that Belle was strict and admirably efficient, while Kate was a delicate, sweet-natured, less worldly soul. One family friend remembered Kate as ‘charming’ and ‘like a little Dresden doll’.

Belle’s assistance also came in handy when Kate was expected to partner her husband at various functions. Some were particularly memorable. On 8 August 1921 she accompanied him to a dinner organised by Monash to commemorate the third anniversary of the decisive Western Front offensive. Two years later Senator and Mrs Elliott jointly (and generously) hosted the main social function of the Old Ormond Students’ Association (Elliott was its president in 1923), an ‘At Home’ at Menzies Hotel that was attended by over a hundred guests.

Mary Campbell lived at 56 Prospect Hill Road with her daughters. Never the same after her 1917 stroke, she was sometimes reduced to a semi-invalid’s existence, but enjoyed pottering about in the garden when she felt up to it. The house was in fact in her name. One of the repatriation initiatives of the Hughes government was the provision of housing via the War Service Homes scheme. As the mother of an AIF soldier killed in action, Mary was as entitled to benefit from the scheme as her son-in-law; as a back-bench member of the government that had introduced the scheme, Pompey presumably concluded that it would be more appropriate for her to be the War Service Homes beneficiary. However, he provided the bulk of the capital; the finance obtained under the War Service Homes scheme was only a small part of the overall cost. Mary died early in 1923, aged 82.

Violet’s school was Fintona, a private Presbyterian girls’ grammar situated in nearby Burke Road. Founded in 1896 by Annie Hughston, a gifted teacher who was still actively involved while Violet was there, Fintona flourished under her progressive guidance. The school environment suited Violet, and she soon made her mark; within a year of joining Fintona she was captain of her class. Striving purposefully to make the most of an intellectual endowment that was serviceable rather than outstanding, she delighted her father by sometimes managing to come top of her class. She mixed well with her peers, her popularity unhampered by a lack of sporting prowess (though she was an enthusiastic swimmer). It was her distinctive manner, a quiet maturity beyond her years, that most impressed her teachers.

The boundless love and support Elliott gave his children, so obvious in his wartime letters, was very evident to Violet’s friends during the 1920s. He followed her progress at Fintona appreciatively, occasionally involving himself prominently. A notable example was his stirring address at a Fintona Anzac Day service held at Camberwell’s Trinity Presbyterian Church. A strong bond between ten-year-old Violet and her father was already apparent; when he addressed the whole school she felt proud yet self-conscious. His customary rendition of a series of stories about the deeds of individual Australians went down well. It ‘was most inspiring’, reported the Fintonian. ‘He gave us example after example of the patriotism, courage and self-sacrifice of our Anzacs’. Also speaking at that service, as he did on many notable Fintona occasions, was the Trinity church minister Patrick Murdoch, father of Keith, the renowned newspaperman who knew Pompey well. Patrick’s enduring commitment to Fintona had been consolidated by the marriage of his younger brother Walter to Annie Hughston’s sister.

The Murdochs also had connections with the school that the Elliotts sent Neil to in 1920, Camberwell Grammar (also handily located in Burke Road). Walter Murdoch, a brilliant student who was to become a well-known writer, and his nephew Keith were both, a dozen years apart, dux of Camberwell Grammar. Neil Elliott began well at his new school — like Violet, he was noticeably self-contained and self-reliant from an early age — and he was dux of his class in both 1921 and 1924. But Camberwell Grammar was not thriving like Fintona, and tended to lose students to more prestigious alternatives, Scotch College in particular.

On school holidays Violet and Neil were often to be found at the beach. The family now had a car, an asset Belle had fantasised about acquiring during the war. Harold still commuted to work by public transport, frequently presenting his office staff with produce from his splendid garden (and sometimes absentmindedly leaving belongings on the train). The car was used primarily for social outings and longer trips to the country or the beach. Pompey liked socialising with wartime comrades. One he often caught up with was Bert Layh, who lived not far away from the Elliotts with his family. Pompey enjoyed these outings, and it was important to him that others did, too. ‘Is everyone happy?’ he would ask before they all set off. Brother Rod was still farming productively at Tocumwal, where Violet and Neil had stayed during at least one Christmas break since the war, but the usual holiday destination for the family was Frankston, where Elliott had an interest in land at Oliver’s Hill.

He liked seeing children enjoying themselves at the beach. Noticing a youngster one summer’s day struggling to improvise a boat out of a bit of wood with a scrap of paper for a sail, he was moved to unearth a model yacht he had played with himself at a similar age, and to present it to this delighted stranger. When Kate’s cousin Ina Prictor and her toddler Colin accompanied the Elliotts to Frankston shortly after the war, Harold took Colin to the beach while the cousins had a chat. ‘Does it matter if he gets a bit damp?’ Harold asked Ina. ‘Oh, no’, Ina replied, presuming all Colin would be having was a gentle splash in the shallows. Sixty years later she chuckled as she recalled the sequel: ‘A bit damp — he was saturated up to the shoulders!’

This domestic serenity was suddenly threatened by an international crisis. On 17 September 1922, a Sunday, Australians learned that Britain had given an ultimatum to the resurgent Turkish forces who were, under their legendary Gallipoli commander, Mustafa Kemal, overturning the crushing treaty inflicted on their nation following its surrender in 1918; having just trounced the Greeks at Smyrna, they were now confronted by a weak British post at Chanak. The message from the British government to the rampaging Turks was clear: so far, and no further. To reinforce this blunt ultimatum, Prime Minister Lloyd George and Colonial Secretary Churchill sought to involve the Dominions, inviting them to send contingents. Australia was pointedly reminded that the security of Anzac graves at Gallipoli was at stake. Many Australians wondered with grim foreboding whether they were in for a chilling replay of August 1914. As in 1914, the crisis had arrived out of the blue. As in 1914, the dispute in question seemed of obscure geographic and strategic relevance to Australia. And, as in 1914, the British government appeared to take Australia’s support and willingness to participate for granted. Prime Minister Hughes, who first learned about this sudden Chanak crisis and the expectation of Australian military involvement from the Sunday newspapers, was furious, and vented his spleen in a blistering cable to Lloyd George.

Publicly, however, the Hughes government supported Britain’s stand. This response was not surprising, since such potent triggers of Australian sentiment as the British connection and the Anzac ethos were both involved. In contrast, the ALP, under its new leader Matthew Charlton (Tudor and Ryan had both recently died), upheld publicly the views that Hughes expressed privately in his scathing cable to Lloyd George. In stark contrast to the jubilant euphoria of August 1914, the mood was sombre: ‘the position is undoubtedly grave’, observed Senator Millen.

Elliott supported the government unequivocally. It was, he declared in the Senate,

[no] mere local quarrel between the Turks and the Greeks in which we have been asked to assist. If that were all, we could allow them to fight it out. When a bush fire starts in the back country the settlers in the adjoining territory do not wait until it reaches their holdings before they attempt to render assistance, but immediately start for the scene and help in subduing it. In this instance we have … been asked … to associate ourselves with Great Britain in an endeavour to avoid a conflict. The recent Great War sprang from an insignificant cause — the murder of a prince in Serbia. But what did it lead to? … It is the possible result which has to be considered.

To refute the charge that government supporters were obnoxious warmongers, Elliott provided a gruesome glimpse of what he had experienced at Lone Pine, and recalled the deaths of his brother and brother-in-law in quick succession on the battlefields of Ypres.

Do we support the Government because we love those things? No. We abhor them with every fibre of our being, and yet we must face a renewal of those things with what nerve we can muster. In my own case … I would regard it as an absolute calamity if I were to be taken away from my business affairs again, because, after an absence of five years, I have been laboriously endeavouring to put things into some sort of order. And yet if the Government call upon us for our assistance once more, what can any of us who served in any sort of official position in the recent war do but place our services for what they are worth at the disposal of the Government? Would we do this with any feelings of joy? … I speak tonight with very mixed feelings indeed, but in the great hope that no call will be necessary … Nevertheless I must support the Government, and I ask the people of Australia to join with me in supporting the Prime Minister.

Fortunately the call did not come. War was averted, primarily because of the resourcefulness of the British commander at Chanak, General Harington. His adroitness came as no surprise to Elliott, who had encountered no abler British staff officer during the Great War. The Turks were apparently deterred in part by the prospect of having to take on the Anzacs again. Elliott, like other Nationalists, had cited this deterrence factor when explaining his support of the Hughes government’s response. Although the crisis did not escalate into war, the British government’s imprudent handling of the situation was instrumental in its downfall a few weeks later. Churchill and several other ministers lost office, and Lloyd George was never prime minister again.

With a federal election imminent in Australia, it was possible that Britain might not be the only nation with a new prime minister in the wake of the Chanak crisis. Elliott’s campaigning in 1922 was minimal — the parliamentary term of senators elected in 1919 did not expire until the election due in 1925. Polling day was on 16 December. The results shocked the Nationalists. No fewer than five of Hughes’s ministers lost their seats, including Walter Massy Greene; he was unexpectedly defeated by a 27-year-old Country Party candidate, Roland Green, who cleverly turned his loss of a leg during the war to advantage by campaigning on the slogan ‘Vote for the Green Without an E’. Green’s triumph exemplified his party’s success. The Country Party had captured the balance of power, with 14 members in the House of Representatives compared to 26 Nationalists and Labor’s 29 MHRs. There was also a separate contingent of non-Labor anti-Hughes MPs, five in all, including the new member for Kooyong, Elliott’s old friend Latham. And Elliott would be operating in a different Senate environment, too. Gardiner had represented Labor on his own for much of the previous three years, but during the next parliament eleven ALP senators would join him.

For nearly two months after the 1922 election there was a vacuum in Australia’s national government due to a political stalemate. The Country Party, led by Dr Earle Page, was determined to use its numbers in parliament to remove Hughes and form a coalition with the Nationalists. Protracted negotiations ensued. Nationalist MPs discussed the situation in lively and lengthy party meetings. Hughes had his critics in his own party, but the senators elected in 1919 tended not to be among them; some observers concluded that because of their minimal participation in the recent campaign they did not fully appreciate the strong anti-Hughes mood in the electorate. During this period, Elliott maintained afterwards, his ‘strong feelings of loyalty to Mr Hughes, who was in effect declared “black” by the Country Party’, induced him to react without initial enthusiasm to the formation of the Bruce–Page coalition government after Hughes ultimately accepted the inevitable and resigned.

Prime Minister Bruce was a complete contrast to Hughes in background and style. He preferred to be referred to as S.M. rather than Stanley Melbourne (Stan was sacrilegiously unthinkable). A successful businessman before entering parliament, Bruce was born to the purple. He cloaked his political ambitiousness by cultivating a languidly refined air of lofty imperturbability, which contrasted starkly with his predecessor’s capriciousness, raucousness, combativeness, and chaotic administrative ways. Bruce had a different policy emphasis, too, although this was not immediately apparent. On his first appearance in the House of Representatives as prime minister, Bruce admitted that his new ministry had not decided how to proceed on almost any issue of substance. He kept parliamentary sittings unusually brief in 1923 and headed to London for that year’s Imperial Conference, where he summarised his government’s priorities as ‘men, money and markets’. Essentially Bruce was intent on enhancing Australia’s economic development with an integrated approach involving increased immigration, foreign capital inflow, and trade opportunities.

Something Bruce did make clear right from the outset was that Australia’s national security would be his government’s highest single priority. That this objective, along with men, money and markets, had to be pursued in a British imperial context was axiomatic to the new Prime Minister, and spawned his emphatic resolve to attend the Imperial Conference. The agreed principles of imperial defence ratified at the conference included an acknowledgment of Australia’s ‘deep interest’ in the construction of a naval base at Singapore; it became widely accepted that such a base would constitute the mainstay of Australian post-war security.

Elliott continued to expound assertively on defence policy. He repeatedly affirmed that encouraging Britain to fortify Singapore was fundamental to Australia’s national security. Furthermore,

I say deliberately that the time has arrived for Australia to stipulate that, as a condition for its co-operation in Empire wars, its men shall be commanded by their own officers exclusively, and that British officers shall exercise no jurisdiction whatever over them.

To underline the necessity for this contentious requirement, he went on to deliver another pungent denunciation of what happened at Fromelles. Before the Imperial Conference Elliott also publicly recommended that Bruce should ask Monash to accompany him to London as an adviser on defence matters, and to assist him afterwards in implementing whatever scheme of defence the conference decided to adopt. In post-war Australia Monash had been conspicuously neglected in policy-making circles and on ceremonial occasions. Elliott publicly deplored this neglect, and attended the stirring tribute dinner in Monash’s honour organised by the RSSILA on Anzac Day 1924.

When it came to analysing Labor’s defence policy, however, Elliott aligned himself unambiguously with the vehement criticism forthcoming from Pearce and other Nationalist hardliners. The pre-1914 compulsory military training scheme, a Labor initiative, had proved ‘of incalculable advantage’ when the AIF was created, Elliott acknowledged in July 1923. If the ALP had retained its pre-war attitude to defence and remained united during the war, the party ‘would have been so firmly established in power’ that its ‘position would have been unassailable … for a very long time’. Instead, he asserted, Labor was abdicating its defence responsibilities by advocating a ‘hollow’ policy that was ‘a delusion and a sham’. Moreover, the lamentable continuing hostility to compulsory military training from Labor activists was making its administration much harder for the authorities. It was standard Nationalist rhetoric to claim that pre-war Labor was retrospectively acceptable but post-war Labor was not. As ALP luminaries retorted, Labor’s opponents had condemned pre-war Labor measures when they were introduced just as vehemently as their Nationalist equivalents were now criticising Labor policies in the 1920s.

But Elliott continued to react to government announcements and legislation with forthright independence. As he admitted in the Senate, ‘I have on some occasions been a severe critic of the Government’. He opposed the decision to do without a separate ministry for repatriation. When a substantial rift developed between the RSSILA and Prime Minister Bruce over controversial government appointments that contravened the principle of preference to returned soldiers, Pompey sided with the League and publicly criticised the appointments. And he often initiated amendments to government bills in the Senate. His skilful draftsmanship was increasingly recognised; when he came up with an adroit solution to a seemingly intractable problem late in 1922, Pearce, the government’s influential leader in the Senate, thanked him warmly for his ‘brilliant suggestion’. Now that Pompey had stopped castigating Pearce publicly as one of the culprits in connection with his supersession grievance, they were getting on much better. In 1924 Elliott became aide-de-camp to the Governor-General, Lord Forster.

In April 1923 Elliott responded to a congenial request for help. Charles Bean, beavering away on Lone Pine for his second volume of the Australian Official History, had found that his material concerning the 7th Battalion’s role in that battle was meagre: would Pompey be able to supplement it? He would indeed. His prompt, detailed reply — just like the response he had provided in 1921 when Bean had made an equivalent approach about Krithia — contained useful information about both the battle itself and those 7th Battalion survivors who would be most likely to be worth contacting for their own perspectives (and how to get in touch with them). For more than a month Bean and Elliott exchanged frequent letters (and sketch-maps) about Lone Pine — the historian grappling with the exceptionally complex task of reconstructing what happened in that labyrinth, the commander ever-ready to inundate him with lengthy reminiscences and suggestions (sometimes elaborating for page after page just to help Bean fathom the precise location of a particular trench). ‘[My] Lone Pine file is becoming one of enormous dimensions’, Bean observed.

The fruits of his toil (and Pompey’s enthusiastic assistance) were there for all to see when Volume II was published. Authoritative, accessible, and extraordinarily detailed, it covered the Gallipoli campaign from Krithia to the evacuation in compelling style. Some of the most dramatic episodes in that crowded story featured Elliott and the 7th Battalion. Notable examples included Pompey’s celebrated duel in the tunnel near German Officers’ Trench, the ensuing raid led by Lieutenant Greig (Bean’s narrative of this desperate diversion was enriched by the account he obtained from the Turkish officer in charge of the defence at German Officers’), and all the drama of Lone Pine itself, including such vivid vignettes as Pompey’s parting words to Symons: ‘I don’t expect to see you again, but we must not lose that post’. Elliott was not the only participant to be impressed: ‘I … find an improvement even on the excellence of the first volume’, he complimented Bean.

Pompey continued to be a magnet for disgruntled ex-soldiers with a grievance, and Warrant Officer J.R. Allen was one of many who contacted him. An experienced instructor in the Light Horse, Allen had been dismissed in 1922 at the behest of his divisional commander, General Tivey. Allen felt that his discharge was unjustified, and had unfairly deprived him of a pension into the bargain. He convinced Elliott that he had been unjustly treated; Tivey’s involvement presumably influenced Pompey to take the matter further. On 12 July 1923 he rose in the Senate and moved that a select committee be appointed to inquire into the issue. Pearce, on behalf of the government, claimed that any such inquiry would be inadvisable because it would open the floodgates (just as he had when Pompey was up in arms about his own supersession). All the Nationalist generals in the Senate besides Elliott — Cox, Drake-Brockman, Glasgow, and W.G. Thompson (a Queensland brigadier elected in 1922) — agreed with Pearce. However, Labor senators supported Elliott’s motion, and enough Nationalists sided with him to produce a Senate majority in favour of establishing a select committee.

The committee began its inquiry on 7 August. It was conducted by the seven senators Elliott had nominated (five Nationalists, including Glasgow, Thompson and himself, together with Labor’s Jim Ogden and Allan McDougall); Pompey was chairman. A dozen witnesses appeared before the inquiry. Elliott’s penetrating questions produced frosty exchanges with Tivey; Pompey probed the appropriateness of Tivey’s harsh treatment of Allen, and Tivey stiffly insisted that he knew (and, without saying so explicitly, knew better than this cross-examiner who coveted his job) where his responsibilities as a divisional commander began and ended. With examination of the available witnesses completed, Elliott compiled a draft report which concluded that Allen had been unfairly treated. However, to his chagrin, the rest of the committee except McDougall agreed with Glasgow’s assessment that Tivey’s action had been justified. After submitting a minority report on behalf of himself and McDougall, Pompey publicly attacked the majority finding as a ‘calamity’, prompting predictable retorts about sour grapes since he had chosen and chaired the committee himself. Pompey, sticking to his guns, divulged that he had deliberately included on the committee senators ‘who were strongly opposed to my views’ (Glasgow was clearly one) in order to constitute a balanced jury and to ‘strengthen’ its finding accordingly. But what was the point of a well-credentialled jury if you did not accept its verdict, challenged a Nationalist senator. Juries sometimes make mistakes, Elliott replied.

Elliott also found himself in a minority when he became involved in a more important investigation, a royal commission formed to inquire into allegations that the regulation of Australian coastal shipping under the Navigation Act was having a detrimental effect on trade and national development. The commission was chaired by J.H. Prowse, a Country Party backbencher from Western Australia and a persistent critic of the Navigation Act, which had been introduced by a pre-war Labor government to protect the working conditions of Australian seamen. Its other members besides Elliott were Tasmanian MHR A.C. Seabrook and Senator W. L. Duncan, both Nationalists, and a Labor trio comprising Frank Anstey, Senator C.S. McHugh, and ‘Gunner’ Yates. The commission toiled and travelled industriously: there were hearings in each state, 95 sittings altogether, and 139 witnesses testified.

After all this work the commissioners disagreed. Prowse and Seabrook, both from less-populated outlying states where complaints about the Navigation Act had been particularly aggrieved, advocated complete repeal of its coastal trade provisions in order to allow foreign vessels open slather. The Labor threesome, however, maintained that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the legislation; many of its alleged shortcomings had not been substantiated by the commission, and those that had could be fixed by proper administration. Positioned between these two extremes were Elliott and Duncan: they agreed with Prowse and Seabrook that the coastal trade provisions should be repealed but, instead of agreeing to hands-off deregulation, proposed as their remedy a significant tariff adjustment.

The secretary of this royal commission was parliamentary official Frank Green, a Tasmanian-born returned soldier who had befriended Elliott and sometimes accompanied him to Frankston. During the commission’s visit to Hobart Green took him to the Military Club, where Pompey asked for cider. Someone spiked it. Amid the uproarious sequel Pompey told his favourite wartime anecdote, the one about the amorous Egyptian donkey whose ear had to be twisted, which Green considered ‘the funniest AIF story I ever heard’ — no mean accolade from someone renowned as a Rabelaisian raconteur himself. Next morning Pompey was seedy with an unaccustomed hangover, and Green shepherded him to the exclusive Tasmanian Club to recuperate. The only member present as they entered happened to be Green’s friend Gellibrand, who greeted Green, conspicuously ignored Elliott, and walked out. ‘Pompey offered no comment’, Green observed, but the animosity fuelled by his supersession crusade was obvious.

Friction with another AIF general may well have been instrumental in Elliott’s withdrawal from the Navigation Act inquiry. He resigned as the commission was about to embark upon the second part of its deliberations, an evaluation of the legislation’s impact on Papua and New Guinea. This assignment would involve close liaison with the Administrator of New Guinea, Brigadier-General Wisdom. The decidedly dim view Pompey had formed of Wisdom during the war had been reinforced by what he had heard of New Guinea administration since Wisdom’s appointment to that post in preference to the friend he had recommended, McNicoll.

In November 1923 the traditional Melbourne Cup festivities were scarred by serious civil unrest. With chronic problems plaguing Victoria’s underfunded police force, the accumulated grievances of its members had intensified; but the Chief Commissioner of Police, Alexander Nicholson, was out of his depth, and the conservative state government did nothing (Nicholson’s immediate predecessor, General Gellibrand, had resigned when it refused to endorse measures to alleviate these problems). When a relatively small group of discontented Melbourne constables refused to parade for duty, Nicholson and the government reacted with such inept tactlessness that half the metropolitan police joined the strike. Eventually 635 constables, together with a solitary senior constable, became involved — more than a third of the whole state-wide force. On 2 November, the Friday before Cup Day, disorder ensued on Melbourne streets. Policemen who remained on duty, refusing to align themselves with the strikers, were jeered and harassed; some were assaulted. Order was eventually restored after police reinforcements were hastily transferred from the country.

The authorities’ response to these disturbing developments included the formation of a committee of prominent citizens. Elliott was invited to join it. This committee met on Saturday morning, 3 November, at the office of the Chief Secretary (and future premier), Dr S.S. Argyle. Among those in attendance with Elliott were Monash, Nicholson, Premier Lawson, and Attorney-General Sir Arthur Robinson. Monash’s prodigious prestige guaranteed him a leadership role. Elliott was assigned the important task of organising the supplementary force of special constables being enrolled at Melbourne Town Hall.

Within hours this function became critical as opportunist looting and violence escalated into unprecedented lawlessness. Riotous mobs rampaged through the city. Bottles doubled as weapons and missiles. Plate-glass windows fronting most of the biggest stores were successively and exultantly smashed, and pilferers poured in to filch or grapple for the spoils. Trams were halted, a scared horse bolted, shots were fired; there were brawls and deaths, and hundreds were hospitalised. This blot on Melbourne’s civic pride was deplored in the Age as a ‘cyclone of anarchy’, and in the Argus as a ‘Bolshevik Orgy’. To Attorney-General Robinson it was a repugnant reminder of ‘what a thin crust there is between ordered society and revolution’.

Amid this mayhem and tumult the Town Hall became a hive of activity. An urgent government message was screened at picture theatres calling on returned soldiers to enrol as special constables under General Pompey Elliott in order to inhibit further looting. Hundreds of ex-soldiers flocked to the Town Hall.

‘Here we are again, General’, said a volunteer who led a party of 15 men. He saluted General Elliott and added ‘We are ready and willing for another stunt under you’.

‘Where’s Pompey? Is this his GHQ?’ asked another ex-soldier arrival. ‘Anywhere with Pompey’, he continued to a neighbour. Meanwhile Senator Elliott, with a felt hat resting at a digger-like angle on his head, directed, organised and distributed his ‘specials’.

His wartime officers were prominent in the special force; Layh, Denehy, Watson, and Conder all had senior positions. Some of the police strikers had also served under Pompey, including several 7th Battalion originals. None were ever re-employed in the force.

Elliott was at the forefront of strenuous endeavours to prevent any recurrence of the sweeping havoc of that notorious Saturday. As Monash acknowledged, ‘undoubtedly his presence and personal influence during those hectic hours did much to restore a semblance of security’. At the Town Hall on Sunday (when his wartime superior, Sir James McCay, became involved in the emergency arrangements) Pompey was characteristically purposeful and resolute. ‘The people can rely upon the sternest possible measures against a repetition of last night’s disgraceful scenes’, he assured a journalist. Although sporadic incidents continued to cause concern and the atmosphere remained tense (anxious vigilance was maintained for days), the sense of crisis gradually eased. On Monday, with the situation under overall control, the citizens’ committee met again in the morning. After the meeting Elliott said he would like to be released so he could participate in Queensland hearings of the Navigation Act Royal Commission. Monash thanked him for his valuable contribution, and Elliott headed north.

The train journey gave him time to brood, and he decided to divulge the real reason for his unostentatious withdrawal. The result was a startling communication to Attorney-General Robinson. In this letter, written from a Sydney hotel, Elliott complained about McCay’s intervention. It was particularly inappropriate, Elliott contended, when the government’s public appeal (evidently authorised by Robinson) had specifically used his name and no-one else’s in urging returned soldiers to enrol as special constables. It was an implicit reflection on the way he was superintending these specials when on ‘Monday morning, to my astonishment, without even the courtesy of a direction from yourself to me, General McCay took over the direction of affairs out of my hands’. This unwarranted development was dangerous as well as discourteous, since ‘a great many of the men who were willing to serve with the utmost zeal under my direction were by no means happy to do so under Sir James, and I had to use my personal influence to ensure their continuance, for a time at least, in the duties they had undertaken’. Moreover, ‘since I have been so superseded … this absolutely precludes me from offering my services to the State in future in any capacity, as I cannot afford to be under the slightest accusation of inefficiency’. Robinson, understandably perturbed, sent this letter to his old friend Monash, and asked for advice about how to respond to it.

‘If anyone is to blame in this matter, it is myself and no one else’, Monash assured Robinson, ‘certainly not you, and not McCay’. Monash explained developments from his perspective. He had initially arranged for Elliott to organise the specials then being enrolled into squads, which would operate as reinforcements to the regular police force as and when requested by Nicholson. When Nicholson, evidently overwhelmed, ‘did nothing whatever’ even after the most serious looting, Monash decided late on Saturday night to establish a separate structure in view of the police chief’s ‘paralysis’:

I therefore got hold of Elliott and instructed him to commence the organization of a Headquarters and a fighting and feeding staff, on military lines … Overnight I thought things over, and came to the conclusion that the trouble might develop on such serious lines as to be beyond Elliott’s capacity and experience. He is a splendid leader, but has no idea of organization. Very early on Sunday, Nov. 4th, McCay asked by telephone if he could help. I told him to meet me at the Town Hall, which he did. He said he didn’t want to ‘butt in’, but was available. Knowing that I would be engaged all day at Cabinet, and feeling that I could rely entirely on McCay but not on Elliott, I sought the latter, and in McCay’s presence asked Elliott if he was prepared to take orders from McCay, and he at once and cheerfully said that he was … Elliott’s place in [the reshaped] organization was to be that of ‘outside’ commander, acting under McCay’s staff arrangements, and this job he did excellently well during the rest of that Sunday.

On Monday morning, Monash continued, Elliott said he wanted to travel north to resume his work on the royal commission. He seemed to leave

with no disturbed feeling. The grievances now expressed in his unfortunate letter appear to me to rest upon an entirely false basis. All AIF leaders were trained to defer habitually, in any situation, to the senior man on the spot. The fact that Elliott happened to be the AIF senior within my reach on Saturday evening gave him no moral right to claim that the instructions which I then gave him debarred me from placing him subsequently under the orders of any other senior officers … who might become available later.

The best way to respond to Elliott’s letter, Monash advised Robinson, would be to ‘disclaim … any knowledge of the circumstances’ and ‘leave it to me to try and bring Elliott to see the matter in the right light’. Robinson complied. ‘I know nothing of the circumstances under which, as you state, the direction of affairs was taken out of your hands’, Robinson lied in the brazen letter he sent Elliott immediately after receiving Monash’s version of events.

‘Some of Elliott’s statements are not accurate, others are not justified’, Monash had pronounced in his letter to Robinson. But that assessment applied more to Monash’s letter than to Pompey’s. The assertion that Elliott had ‘no idea of organization’ was preposterous. The 15th Brigade could hardly have become such an outstandingly formidable formation if its commander had been an inadequate organiser. Monash, a peerless administrator himself, would not have been the first to be misled by Pompey’s outward appearance. His tendency to personify an archetypally volatile man of action understandably prompted some observers to categorise him as an impulsive fire-eater of limited sophistication, someone who was the very antithesis of a painstaking administrator methodically ticking off agenda items in precise order, Monash-style. Bean’s first impressions of Elliott were along those lines, until he realised that administration in the 15th Brigade was first-rate and at times inspired — he was astonished to discover that Pompey had arranged for his front-line men to receive three hot meals a day during the terrible winter of 1916-17. Monash also claimed that during the police strike Elliott had breached a golden rule in the AIF that leaders should ‘defer habitually, in any situation, to the senior man on the spot’. Yet that is precisely what Pompey did on that Sunday morning, as Monash’s own letter confirms.

Later Elliott realised he had been usurped by McCay, and resented it. Withdrawing from the organisation of the specials may well have been an overreaction; but after being overlooked in both 1918 and 1921, and railing bitterly against his supersession in each instance, he was ultra-sensitive to such slights. Significantly, his protest letter to Robinson claimed that he had been ‘superseded’ on this occasion as well. Monash, surprised and embarrassed by the letter his friend Robinson had received about a contretemps he had created (as he admitted himself), extravagantly exaggerated the extent of his misgivings about Elliott’s administrative capacity in order to justify supplanting him with McCay. But the fact that he had misgivings at all was significant. Pompey’s conviction that he would have fared differently if Monash had controlled the 1918 and 1921 appointments may not have been well-founded.

The returned soldiers who flocked to the Town Hall to serve again under Pompey relished the revived camaraderie that was one of the few positives of their war experience. Their transition to peacetime conditions had not been straightforward. Most were relieved (if not amazed) to have survived, thrilled to get back home, and keen to forget the ghastliness of front-line combat. But many did not adjust satisfactorily to civilian life, finding it humdrum and anti-climactic; its acquisitive individualism alienated those who missed the comradeship that had sustained them amid the horror and squalor of the battlefield. That brotherhood of mutual regard and interdependence, flourishing most intensely in those terrifying times when they were well and truly on the edge was, for numerous ex-diggers, a sublime sentiment and the main redeeming feature of their terrible torture in the trenches. But to comprehend it, to appreciate it, you had to be there. Understanding was impossible otherwise. There would forever be, they were realising, an unbridgeable chasm between those who had been there and those who had not.

What happened to Ellis ‘Teena’ Stones epitomised the difficulties of post-war adjustment. A 7th Battalion original, Stones was a trained sniper who never fired a shot in action. One of the Essendon boys who suffered terribly at the landing, he was incapacitated with a crippling leg wound; his best mate Bill Elliott was killed, along with many others, in the ill-fated first boat. Eventually Stones was rescued and conveyed (like Colonel Elliott) to hospital at Heliopolis, where his leg was about to be amputated until a last-minute intervention by a doctor from Ascot Vale who knew him. Greatly inconvenienced and in permanent pain, he endured a series of operations as well as headaches, nerves, and nightmares about the events of 25 April 1915. Although pleased to be home, he sadly missed the Essendon mates he had gone away with. He married Bill Elliott’s sweetheart, and tried to resume his pre-war occupation, limping about as a carpenter–builder; but his sore leg was not up to it, and he eventually collapsed. He suffered a complete breakdown, compounded by the death from meningitis of his young son. While he was to recover and ultimately become one of Australia’s finest landscape designers, at the end of 1923 Ellis Stones was in a bad way, a shadow of his former decisive, gregarious self.

For some who returned from the war with conspicuous scars, physical and/or emotional, readjustment was well nigh impossible. Stewart Smith, the officer who featured in the stories Pompey told at unveiling ceremonies for his remarkable selflessness in refusing stretcher-bearer assistance because he thought others were in greater need, died as a result of his wounds a few years after returning to Australia. Besides men like Smith who did not survive long after their return, other tragic cases among the thousands who served under Elliott included a proportion who returned with emotional scars that were severe as well as permanent. Some of these unfortunates were institutionalised due to psychological trauma. Pompey was greatly saddened by their plight.

Even soldiers who appeared relatively unscathed on their return found civilian life challenging. Captain Moon VC, unsettled and battling a delayed nervous reaction to his wartime experiences, left Australia after his stint as Elliott’s 1919 campaign secretary, and spent the next few years working at a Malayan rubber plantation. Many others were similarly affected; unsettled behaviour was rife. A particularly distressing example, aired by Elliott in the Senate, concerned a 7th Battalion original who had enlisted as an 18-year-old and ‘by almost miraculous good luck served from the beginning to the end of the war without getting a scratch’; he survived the Gallipoli landing, the Krithia charge, Lone Pine, and all the rest. The ‘strain which the war imposed on the nerves of a young fellow like that’, Pompey continued, was dramatically revealed after the war when he found his wife’s childbirth agony unbearable. He became ‘worked up to such a pitch of worry and excitement that he went out of the house, walked into a dam and drowned himself’.

Readjustment to civilian life was especially difficult for thousands of returned men who endured terrible hardships on unpropitious soldier settlement blocks. Enthusiastic advocates of the idea of turning soldiers into farmers had overridden pessimists familiar with similar settlement schemes; even applicants who would clearly be handicapped as farmers owing to their severe war wounds were accepted. While some soldiers managed to succeed, most struggled against the combined difficulties of escalating debt, infertile blocks and grinding toil. By the mid-1920s in Victoria (where there were more soldier settlers than in any other state) dozens each week were giving up, simply abandoning their blocks.

Many of Elliott’s men gave the scheme a go. Among them was Bert Heighway, one of the 7th Battalion lieutenants who had been hit as the ill-fated boatloads of Essendon boys rowed themselves towards Fishermen’s Hut. Heighway’s enduring admiration for his colonel prompted him to call a thoroughfare adjoining his property ‘Pompey Lane’, which eventually became its official name. Elliott himself endorsed soldier settlement wholeheartedly. He provided references in support of applicants, and maintained a keen interest in how the settlers were faring. While sympathetic to individuals who were not prospering, he was consistently optimistic about the scheme overall. ‘It is a wonderful record’, he enthused in mid-1923; some settlers ‘have made extraordinary progress’ and ‘are delighted at having had the opportunity of their lives’.

When returned soldiers did manage to attain distinction after the war, their achievements were especially appreciated by admiring wartime comrades who were painfully realising that their best years were behind them. They knew how much of their own drive and zest had been irretrievably lost at the war, and sensed what other Anzacs had overcome to accomplish significant post-war achievements. Among the men under Elliott’s command who returned after sturdy AIF service to play League football was Ivor Warne-Smith, a brilliant champion who won the Brownlow Medal twice in the 1920s. Jim Phillips entertained audiences in an altogether different way; an amusing mimic, with bird calls a specialty, he performed professionally at the Tivoli as ‘Pompey’s canary’. Especially inspirational to their former comrades were Albert Coates and Vern Mullin. Coates was displaying the determination and resourcefulness that were to underpin his illustrious career, achieving brilliant results in his medical studies despite spending evenings on night shift at the Melbourne GPO. Mullin, one of the ill-fated 7th Battalion reinforcements who arrived at Gallipoli just before Lone Pine, returned home blind. Undeterred, he became not only an accomplished switchboard operator at the Repatriation department, but a fine gardener and — of all things — a prize-winning stamp-collector as well.

Former 7ths were also remarkably conspicuous in the collective organisation of returned servicemen. Gil Dyett was in the early years of a stint as national RSSILA president that was to last until 1946. George ‘Gunner’ Holland, a 7th Battalion original (like his brother, who had been killed alongside him at Krithia) was also prominent in the organisation, becoming Victorian president during the 1920s and retaining this position for 21 years. Elliott himself was a notable contributor to the League. President of its Camberwell branch in 1919, he redrafted the national RSSILA constitution, and assisted the organisation in numerous other ways. Pompey became such an influential advocate for returned soldiers in the national parliament and the public domain generally that a Tasmanian senator described him as their ‘finest and most authoritative advocate of all’.

RSSILA membership declined in the early 1920s. With many ex-soldiers increasingly preoccupied with civilian priorities, only 7 per cent of the returned men in Elliott’s home state were members in 1924. There was also a widespread perception that RSSILA leaders were too inclined to align themselves with the conservative end of the political spectrum. Thousands of working-class diggers were alienated by the League’s firm advocacy of preference to returned soldiers rather than unionists.

It was not only those men who returned broken in body, soul or both who found post-war life dispiriting. Thousands of bereaved families could not get over their crushing loss. Geoff McCrae’s parents kept his bedroom as a personal shrine, his officers’ cap on the pillow; even in 1922 his father was still asking Elliott to clarify esoteric details about Geoff’s AIF career, which had ended at Fromelles over six years earlier. For too many Australians, the 1920s resembled an unending funeral. Elliott’s own relatives were affected. His sister-in-law, George’s widow Lyn, could not come to terms with her bereavement. She openly resented the return of other soldiers. Her bitterness often surfaced if she noticed an AIF father out with his offspring when she was strolling with little Jacquelyn: ‘See, their father didn’t get killed at the war like yours did’, she would say. Kate and Belle found Lyn’s erratic tendencies alienating, but Elliott urged them to be tolerant. ‘Even if we don’t like Lyn’, he cautioned, ‘we must see that Geordie’s wee bairnie does not suffer, because he died for us’. To enable Jacquelyn to be ‘properly educated’, Elliott and his brother Rod agreed to supplement the widow’s pension Lyn received. Their combined contributions more than doubled it.

Pompey Elliott did whatever he could to help men who had served under him and their families. Some he employed himself on various tasks at Frankston or on gardening work at Prospect Hill Road. (At one stage even sweet-natured Kate felt moved to utter a mild protest: ‘Does the garden really have to be dug up every day?’) Long after Elliott’s death veterans were expressing gratitude for jobs he had organised in difficult times that gave them secure employment for decades. Moreover, as a member of the board of management of the Melbourne Hospital, he was on the selection committee that gave Albert Coates his first job as a doctor.

But it was not just employment that he provided or organised — he was indefatigably helpful in all sorts of ways. It was remarkable, a Pompey admirer testified,

how much of his time — time that he could very ill spare — was bestowed in acting as the (unpaid) guide, philosopher and friend of innumerable returned soldiers who found their way to his office, always ready to listen to grievances and wrongs, always ready to give not only advice, but personal help and intervention according to the demands of individual cases.

By personal intervention he managed to alleviate the tragic circumstances of the childbirth-related suicide case, explaining directly to the minister in charge of repatriation, Sir Neville Howse, precisely ‘what that boy had been through’, particularly at Lone Pine where he had been in charge of a desperately defended post, and how those experiences had produced ‘such an effect on his nerves that he could not face his wife’s agony as a sane man would’. The result was gratifying: Howse responded to Elliott’s compelling submission by granting a pension to cover both the widow and her baby.

One day in Collins Street Elliott chanced upon Clarrie Wignell, who had been the 16-year-old ‘baby’ of Fred Tubb’s Euroa contingent of 7th Battalion originals. After introductory greetings the conversation went something like this:

‘I doubt you’d remember me.’

‘Come off it, I remember everyone in that first thousand. But you’ve got me tossed, there were two of you Wignell brothers and I’m not sure which one you are.’

‘I’m Clarrie, number 20 on the battalion roll. My brother was number 19.’

‘I see. Where are you going now?’

‘Solicitor. Legal problem.’

‘Well if you want to come to me it wouldn’t cost you anything.’

It was indeed Pompey’s custom to provide free legal aid to men he had commanded, and his recall of them was as good as he claimed. One evening during a country trip his car became so badly bogged that local assistance was sought. The rescue party happened to include an original 7th, who wondered if he could perhaps discern a familiar figure in the dark. ‘Aren’t you General Elliott?’ he asked hesitantly. ‘Yes, and you’re Jim Milroy’ came the immediate rejoinder, as Pompey correctly identified the inquirer despite the murk.

Another Pompey contribution to the returned soldier cause was his significant role in the emergence of Anzac Day as a prominent annual commemoration. Relentless RSSILA lobbying to have 25 April proclaimed a public holiday had been resisted by business representatives concerned about the loss of a day’s trading, but Anzac Day activists had a breakthrough when the 1923 premiers’ conference carried a resolution that 25 April should be commemorated as Australia’s national day. This was gratifying, but only a stepping stone towards the objective of enacted legislation; to maintain the pressure, the RSSILA decided to organise a special remembrance on 25 April 1925. On Anzac Day 1921, the same month the AIF officially ceased to exist, Pompey had participated in a sizeable and successful commemoration in Melbourne (a march through the city and a memorial service at the MCG); but for the next three years the activities the League organised to mark the day did not include a march. As long as business and government remained opposed to a holiday, whenever 25 April was a weekday most employed ex-soldiers would be unable or unwilling to participate.

Anzac Day enthusiasts also had to contend with a mixture of sentiments related to the war’s aftermath. Some Australians had been so scarred by either the turmoil and torment of the trenches or the tumultuous home front that they found remembrance of the war years unbearable. Others felt that it was time the returned men concentrated on civilian endeavours and put the war behind them. Disagreements about the most suitable observance of Anzac Day did not help either. Nevertheless, in 1925, shortly before the tenth anniversary of the Gallipoli landing, the League decided to take advantage of Anzac Day falling on a Saturday that year by initiating another national commemoration in Melbourne. In charge of its organisation was Pompey Elliott.

There was very little time to put it all together, but the arrangements were admirable and the publicity effective. The march was to start at 10.00am and proceed along Swanston, Bourke, and Spring Streets to the Exhibition Building, where Prime Minister Bruce and Governor-General Forster were to speak at a commemoration service. Traffic through some city streets was closed during the procession; so were the pubs. There were exhortations beforehand from Anzac luminaries, including Pompey. ‘Let us be united on this day of remembrance’, he urged:

Let us forget all differences of creed and all party strife, and remember that on us lies the fate of Australia just as surely in these days of peace as in those great days of the war — the day of Anzac, the day of Amiens, the night of Villers-Bretonneux.

Elliott also utilised a publicity opportunity provided by Keith Murdoch’s Melbourne Herald to write a stirring panegyric to the AIF. This was just like one of his speeches at memorial unveilings, a detailed description of exceptional individual deeds by men who had served under him. He highlighted Norman Greig at German Officers’ Trench, the renowned VC trio at Lone Pine (Tubb, Burton, and Dunstan) and their assistants, Corporals Webb and Wright (who died, Pompey wrote, while catching Turkish bombs ‘like fieldsmen at cricket and hurling them back’). At the Western Front he singled out Lieutenants Turnour at Polygon Wood, Moon at Bullecourt, and Dalgleish in the 15th Brigade’s last battle. Such examples of what Australians actually did, Pompey enthused, should ‘rouse in us a white-hot pride in the almost impossible feats’ they accomplished.

The day itself went off very well. At least 5,000 marched (the RSSILA estimate was over 6,000, with 2,000 more returned soldiers lining the route). A large crowd watched reverently as the marchers filed past with Monash in the lead; Elliott was delighted to be able to ensure on this occasion the kind of prominence Monash should have had at other equivalent events. The service at the Exhibition Building was ‘very inspiring’, wrote C.J. Dennis, who listened to it on the wireless and was ‘much affected’; the Governor-General, in particular, delivered a fine speech. A distinctive sentence predictably gratified Elliott:

On the third anniversary of Anzac Day, at Villers-Bretonneux, Australian soldiers saved the day — maybe saved the war — by a feat of arms so brilliant, so valuable, as to be unsurpassed in the long story of the war. (Loud applause.)

It was a busy weekend for Pompey. As well as representing the Governor-General at a service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral that morning, Elliott formally opened a substantial new memorial hall at South Melbourne in the afternoon at a ceremony attended by almost 2,000 onlookers. Then on Sunday he addressed a morning service at St Mark’s Camberwell (where there were dignitaries galore), and also spoke at a memorial service in the afternoon at Coburg Town Hall. The success of the main commemoration on 25 April 1925 was instrumental, just as the League had hoped, in securing a public holiday. The Victorian government legislated to this effect a few months later, and this crucial goal in the entrenchment of Anzac Day’s special place in the calendar had been achieved.

While these Anzac Day commitments were keeping Elliott busy and prominent, he had to put up with notoriety of a much less welcome kind concerning an incident at Frankston. This episode originated in a dispute about ownership of the land at Oliver’s Hill that the Elliotts used when staying at Frankston. Elliott had acquired his interest in this property from an officer he had served with in the Victorian Bushmen’s contingent during the Boer War, Major Michael O’Farrell. As Elliott knew, O’Farrell had originally fenced it at a time when ownership of the land was obscure. Under the law of adverse possession, the continued absence of any apparent owner for fifteen years would enable Elliott to claim that it belonged to him. If an owner or owners materialised in the meantime, Elliott had in mind negotiating to buy them out. During the 1920s ostensible owners did materialise, the Wilson family of Footscray (consisting of Charles, a blacksmith in his sixties, his wife Jane and their son Bert), who tenaciously claimed a valid entitlement — intriguingly, also on the basis of adverse possession. Not only did they resist Elliott’s offers to buy them out; they erected their own fences to substantiate their claim. In 1924 Elliott sued the Wilsons for trespass. The Wilsons’ defence was undermined by trouble with their solicitors. The lawyer they eventually hired after discarding alternatives, well-known Labor identity Maurice Blackburn, advised them to settle rather than pursue a costly court case with an uncertain outcome. A compromise was agreed, with the land in question being divided between the Wilsons and the Elliotts.

Far from settling the dispute, this resolution only exacerbated it, as the Wilsons maintained that Blackburn had negotiated the compromise without their authorisation. The friction escalated. There were confrontations between rival caretakers, and claims and counterclaims of fence destruction and other infringements. The culmination was a skirmish involving the leading protagonists on Easter Saturday 1925. Elliott had arranged for an additional residence to be erected on the land that had been confirmed as his under the 1924 agreement with the Wilsons. On 11 April Charles and Bert Wilson, the aggrieved father and son toting crowbar and axe, menacingly intent on destroying this partly constructed dwelling, approached the men Elliott had engaged as builders and told them to clear out. Bert Wilson reinforced this edict by biffing one of them. Someone sounded a bell (which Elliott had evidently instructed them to ring if any trouble developed). The burly brigadier burst onto the scene, and immediately flattened Bert. When the elder Wilson attempted to aid his son he found himself accommodated, too. The police were called, and another court case ensued. The Wilsons hardly had a leg to stand on legally, and this time they accepted Blackburn’s advice. They tendered a formal apology to Elliott, and accepted £400 from him to compensate them for relinquishing their claim to the land in dispute and the ‘improvements’ they had made to it (less £14 reimbursement for the damage they had inflicted on his property).

This trifling personal kerfuffle became of more than minimal significance when Truth newspaper trumpeted it in characteristically vivid style. Adopting amusing alliterative allusions as almost always, Truth gave the story the full multiple-headline treatment — ‘GENERAL “POMPEY” ELLIOTT IN FIERCE FRANKSTON FISTICUFFS: AUSTRALIAN WAR HERO “OVER THE TOP” AGAIN: ROUGH AND TUMBLE IN THE FRANKSTON HILLS: CITY COUNCIL’S SOLICITOR SITS ON OPPONENT’, and so on. At Oliver’s Hill on this balmy sunny Saturday, according to the dispatch filed ‘by Truth’s war correspondent’, ‘the spectacular sweep of the sparkling bay could be seen in its exquisite entirety, scintillating and solacing’; ‘perfect peace’ prevailed as the ‘hills wore their most handsome habiliments, and a halo of haze hung over habitations’. However, the ‘hour of Zero was at hand’, and the ‘hefty and heavy’ military celebrity known as Pompey was ‘prepared to go over the top once more’. When the Wilsons initiated the fracas

a cow-bell rang long and loudly. That was the signal for the Brigadier-General to climb the parapet. Down pounded ‘Pompey’. Young Wilson was standing with axe in hand at the embryo mansion. Elliott allegedly rushed at him and grappled. The next instant ‘Pompey’ executed something of a ‘flying mare’ in the undergrowth … and pinned his opponent to the ground. Wilson was [unable] to rid himself of the 16 stone or so of military rank.

After the constabulary arrived, Truth surmised that ‘Pompey … must have felt his spine sparkle’ when directed to accompany the Wilsons to the police station, even though he was convinced that he was completely in the right.

The Wilsons gave Truth a full account of their side of the story, but Elliott declined to go on the record for the notorious scandal sheet other than to cite the consensual 1924 settlement that rendered their conduct indefensible. Because the Wilsons were more informative, their version of the dispute dominated Truth’s analysis of the background to the Easter Saturday incident. An explanatory letter setting the record straight from Pompey’s perspective was sent to the paper, but was evidently ignored.

Political combat was lively in 1925, too — it was an election year. Industrial unrest was the dominant issue. The Bruce–Page government was increasingly irritated by the recalcitrance of the Seamen’s Union, which was thumbing its nose at the arbitration process under the militant leadership of Tom Walsh (who had associated himself prominently with the Communist Party) and Jacob Johnson. In 1925 the coalition decided that enough was enough. It rushed punitive measures through parliament, sabotaging the union’s influence by allowing the coastal trade provisions of the Navigation Act to be suspended, and dealing with Walsh and Johnson personally by an Immigration Act amendment authorising the deportation of foreign-born individuals involved in major industrial disputes. (Walsh was Irish-born, but had been an Australian resident for over 30 years; Johnson’s birthplace was Sweden, but he too had lived much of his life in Australia.) Implementation of this deportation initiative was resisted by the Labor Premier of New South Wales, J.T. Lang, who refused to allow the police in his state to co-operate. The Bruce–Page government responded with legislation to establish its own uniformed force.

During the lively parliamentary debates on these measures Senator Elliott made it clear that he firmly supported this vigorous action. The changes to the Navigation Act were consistent, he asserted, with the royal commission report that he and Senator Duncan had submitted in 1924. Amid escalating acrimony Labor’s Charlton challenged the Prime Minister to go to the people. Bruce shrewdly acquiesced (an election was due soon anyway), and the stage was set for one of those law-and-order, ‘kicking the Communist can’ campaigns that were to become very familiar in Australian politics.

An effective Senate campaign was an acknowledged priority for the government. The senators whose terms were expiring (including Elliott) were nearly all Nationalists; with 22 vacancies to be decided, Labor only had to win seven to secure a majority in the next Senate. To maximise campaign cohesion, the coalition had negotiated an electoral pact: the four Senate vacancies in Victoria would be contested by three endorsed Nationalists and a candidate from the Country Party (a prominent Bendigo identity, David Andrew). Elliott had decided to stand again. He felt that he was discharging his parliamentary responsibilities competently and making a difference for returned soldiers. His Nationalist colleagues were to be Senator Guthrie (as in 1919) and party president William Plain. They were each given a portion of rural Victoria to concentrate on during the campaign. Elliott’s allotted region was the north-west of the state; he spent only four days electioneering in Melbourne during more than five weeks on the campaign trail.

Once Elliott had signalled his willingness to stand again, his popularity and repute ensured his endorsement by Nationalist powerbrokers despite the independent streak that had intermittently perturbed them. This widespread esteem was a feature of a perceptive Punch profile of him in August 1925. ‘Brigadier-General (“Pompey”) Elliott was perhaps the best-known and best-liked member of the AIF’, it began; ‘he is certainly one of the best-remembered’. Once-famous VC winners were now ‘dimming memories’, Birdwood was ‘recalled with little real enthusiasm when … recalled at all’, and ‘thousands of ex-diggers … would not recognise … Brudenell White if they met him in the street’. Yet ‘everyone who has had anything to do with soldiering knows all about “Pompey” Elliott, and speaks of him with affection’. During the war he was ‘extravagantly brave’. A ‘terrific worker’, he ‘toiled incessantly’ whenever his men were on front-line duty, and spent much of his leave visiting the wounded in hospital. He established himself as ‘the most distinguished Brigadier in the AIF’. But he should have risen higher:

It was not that he lacked the ability to command a division, or even a larger formation. He had been a student of the art of war since boyhood; he was young as senior officers go, and his mental equipment was of the best. His handicap was that he was always ready to stand up for his men against Army H.Q. when he came to the conclusion that the latter was in the wrong … He was written down as fractious, irresponsible and even insubordinate; a good fighting soldier but lacking in suavity; a useful man in the line but a difficult one to get on with out of it. His officers and men loved him for the very qualities which made him objectionable to the higher command, but that was no particular good to his career. With a more deferential manner, and five or six thousand superfluous deaths on his soul, he might have celebrated the Armistice as a Major-General and a K.B.E.

His time in politics had been ‘rather like his army career’. Once again his attributes might have been expected to equip him for high honours. Not only did he have first-rate ‘intellectual qualifications’ and abundant experience as a lawyer to commend him:

He speaks well. Standing over six feet in his socks and weighing some seventeen stone, he has a most impressive presence. His character is impeccable. He was a great athlete in his day … and he still retains that genuine interest in all classes of sport which so endears an M.P. to the electors … But nothing is surer than that he will do no better for himself in Parliament than he did in the army. With all his shining mental and moral gifts, he lacks one that is almost essential to success in politics — the capacity to be humble and pliant in the presence of his Party bosses.

Elliott concentrated on two main themes in the campaign. Having presented himself as a returned soldiers’ candidate in 1919, he felt impelled to stress what the government had done for them. The war gratuity promised in 1919 had been delivered; so had ‘liberal’ war pensions, preference in employment and war service homes. He qualified his customary enthusiasm about soldier settlement by emphasising that while the federal government had provided funding for the scheme that had enabled 34,995 ex-soldiers (including 10,565 Victorians) to participate, any administrative ‘defects and blunders’ were a state responsibility. They were certainly not attributable to the federal government, which had spent over £150 million altogether in meeting its obligations to Australia’s returned men. It was an ‘incomparable’ record, Pompey claimed, exceeded by no other nation. Elliott covered other topics (the government’s record on postal, telephone, and road improvements in country areas, for example), consistently endorsed his fellow candidates on the coalition’s Senate ticket in Victoria, and also countered various issues raised by the opposition. But his other main electioneering theme was the issue at the heart of the campaign. ‘Do you prefer constitutional government or mob rule?’ he asked audiences in successive speeches at St Arnaud, Birchip, Charlton, Donald, and Hopetoun. Unions were ‘permeated by the Communist virus’. Walsh and Johnson were ‘as deadly to the society’ as ‘cancer is to the human frame’.

On Thursday 15 October Elliott’s travels around northern Victoria with Kate (and an ex-AIF officer acting as his secretary-publicist) brought them to Mildura. During their four-day stay at the Grand Hotel he had a series of engagements. Once again he gave the contrast between constitutional government and mob rule a recurrent airing. There was ‘no side-stepping that plain question’, least of all from him as he delivered his standard campaign address at Mildura, Merbein, and Red Cliffs.

At the completion of the third of these speeches, at Red Cliffs on Saturday morning, he found that a surprise had been planned for him. The meeting chairman, G.C. Green (who had eloped with the sister of up-and-coming barrister Robert Menzies) announced that he had a ‘very pleasing duty to perform on behalf of ex-members of the 7th Battalion’ who were represented among local soldier settlers. Green went on to recount how Pompey had castigated one of his men for appearing on parade in Egypt without a hat, scorned the unfortunate’s explanation that it had been stolen, and soon afterwards found he had been deprived of his own. After ten years it was time the hat was returned, said Green, pulling an old crumpled one out of his pocket and presenting it to Elliott. The recipient joined in the universal laughter, and said he was ‘touched’ by the gesture. He was reluctant to ‘spoil a good story’, he added amiably, before gently correcting Green’s version. (So renowned was the hat story that its ‘return’ was reported in Melbourne and Sydney newspapers, prompting Treloar, who sensed its potential as a notable exhibit at the Australian War Memorial, to ask Elliott if he would be prepared to donate it. ‘I would be delighted’, replied Elliott, but ‘beware of the leg-pull’ — that ‘pitiful wreck’ was, ‘I strongly suspect’, not ‘the real thing’.)

Later that Saturday Elliott returned to Mildura, where he was guest of honour at a memorable RSSILA social. The struggling soldier settlers packed up their troubles in their old kitbags, and enjoyed a jovial evening of spirited singing and reminiscing. They saluted Pompey with three cheers, ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’, and genuine gratitude for his keen interest in their cause.

On election day, 14 November 1925, the government had a comfortable victory. Labor went backwards. In the House of Representatives the ALP lost seven seats, and the coalition emerged with a sizeable majority; in the Senate Labor did not win a single seat in any state. It was a sweeping vindication of the coalition’s cohesive campaign. Once again Elliott was the first senator elected in Victoria, and the returned soldiers’ ‘finest and most authoritative advocate of all’ was back in federal parliament for another six-year term.