As Harold Brentall, George Fish and the other city dwellers rushed to join the march to Broadmeadows and be in the first contingent of the AIF, war fever had already spread across the countryside, on across the flatlands to the west of Melbourne, to the fabled Western District, home of the squattocracy farming some of the richest grazing country in Australia. This would be one of the major collection areas for the men who joined the 8th Light Horse Regiment and the town of Hamilton was its capital.
Hamilton, Wool Capital of the World. The boast stood in bold letters under a statue of a group of curly-horned merino rams, there on the main street, to emphasise to the passer-by that this indeed was the centre of a new, immensely rich corner of the British Empire, where a new landed gentry had taken root and prospered.
High up on a hill above the town is the Anglican Christ Church. Every Sunday in 1914 the carriages and phaetons and the new noisy motorcars clattered and rattled their way up Gray Street, on their way to the morning services here. Past the Hamilton Club, a solid and cream-coloured building, its doors closed to all but the most worthy. Past the primary school, established in 1852, with its Latin motto in wrought iron on the front gates: Semper sursum (‘Ever upwards’).
Up the hill the street continues, along the avenue of poplars, past the old two-storeyed rectory with the bishop’s room looking out from the front landing, and on to Christ Church itself. Back in 1914, the bluestone church was as solid as its Church of England traditions and stood opposite another steepled church on the hillside dominating the town, St Andrew’s Presbyterian. This united Protestant enclave overlooks a town that was designed to remind the townsfolk of the old country, with its botanical gardens full of English trees and splashing fountains.
Hamilton was synonymous with patriotism. Hundreds of countrymen came forward from the Western District, all eager to enlist for this, the Great Adventure, rushing in, just in case it ended before they had a chance to be in it.
But the war wasn’t over quickly. Set against Australia’s current population compared with that of 1914-18, it has been suggested that the impact of the First World War casualties would now be the horrifying equivalent of losing nearly 300,000 men in just four years – almost five times the number that actually died, in other words. But there’s been no such population growth in Hamilton in the last 90 years. It is around 10,000 today, as it was back then, and the deaths of Hamilton’s young men had as devastating an impact then as it would have now.
One of this town’s own, Edward (Ted) Ellis Henty grew up and worked in Hamilton. He was baptised and married in the church on the hill. Ted Henty came from a famous pioneering family. In November 1834, the original Edward Henty (Ted’s great-uncle) landed in Portland Bay – today about a 40-minute drive from Hamilton – on board the schooner Thistle. He was credited as being Victoria’s first permanent settler, the man whose horse-drawn plough turned the first sod of arable land. Edward and his brother Stephen pushed inland, opening up enormous stations, where merino flocks started producing the fabulous golden fleeces, and helping found centres like Casterton and Coleraine. These small towns, like so many others in the west of Victoria, would become a major enlistment source for the 8th Light Horse.
Ted’s mother, Annie Campbell, had been working as a governess on a property a few kilometres from Hamilton when she married his father, Walter, a town merchant. They settled at ‘The Caves’, about 8 kilometres from Hamilton, on the banks of the spring-fed, ever-running stream that the Scottish settlers called the Grange Burn.
Walter and Annie had three children: Wilf, Archie and Ted (born in 1888). They grew up happily on the small farm. The cottage is still there today, now enlarged with later additions. A huge monkey-puzzle tree still stands outside the front, ideal for climbing by small boys. The house sits on a sloping hill overlooking a series of waterholes for swimming, with a limestone arch and a cave that invites exploring. There were apple trees and rich plums in the orchard to eat. The small gorge with its steep banks is famous for its fossils, exposed in a wide band at the creek’s high-water mark. A perfect location for the trio of growing Hentys then, and the boys certainly got up to mischief. Wilf lost the sight in his left eye when he was hit with a rock fired from a slingshot by his brother, Archie. This had far-reaching repercussions after war broke out.
In May 1915, Wilf got a letter from a Lieutenant Colonel Geo Cuscaden at 3rd Military District Headquarters in Melbourne. ‘Dear Sir,’ it read, ‘I beg to inform you that as it is necessary to read a certain Test with both eyes, it is impossible for you to be taken.’ So Wilf was spared going to war. And Archie, who had joined the militia and was also keen to fight, could not go. Father Walter was now sick with a terminal illness and Archie was needed to run the farm.
That left Ted, who was already a good shot. There was no doubt that from the time he could fire a rifle and bring a hare home for dinner, Ted Henty wanted to become a soldier and go to war. And so he did.
Like other Australians of his generation, he grew up in an intensely patriotic, British world. Geoffrey Blainey described it best in A Shorter History of Australia:
On the eve of World War I, Britain was close to the peak of its power. Australians bathed in the warmth of the British sun. In many ways the two nations were one. Between them the flow of migrants, commodities and ideas was usually smooth. In 1914 most of the high posts in Australia were still occupied by people born and educated in the British Isles. Australia’s Governor-General and six State governors came from the British Isles. The Prime Minister, Joseph Cook, an Englishman, was succeeded at the start of the war by Andrew Fisher, a Scot.
The accents of the British Isles could be heard in pulpits and newspaper offices … in private grammar schools the British link was strong. British scholars held at least half the university chairs in Australia and sent their brightest students who wished to do further study on to Oxford and Cambridge. Most of the popular songs and gramophone cylinders sold in the music shops came by ship from England. News from the British Isles studded the daily newspapers …
In schools the geography of Britain as well as Australia was learned. Clever schoolgirls knew by heart the names of all the rivers and mountains of Britain. On Sunday they sang hymns that had converted the dry Australian-like landscape of the Holy Land into the green and fast streams of England. In the bookshops – and Australians were probably more avid readers of books than the British – most best sellers came from London.
Young Ted Henty would undoubtedly have read a local bestseller entitled Deeds that Won the Empire, by the Reverend W.H. Fitchett, published in 1897 from stories that had first appeared in the Melbourne Argus. By the end of 1898 the book had gone into its ninth edition, and by October 1914, in the first rush of recruiting, it was in its twenty-ninth impression.
Written by the headmaster of Melbourne’s Methodist Ladies College, the preface stated that the tales were not meant to glorify war but to ‘nourish patriotism’. They represented, said Fitchett, ‘an effort to renew in popular memory the great traditions of the Imperial race’, and the examples were not only of heroic daring but of even finer qualities: ‘heroic fortitude, of loyalty to duty stronger than life, of the temper which dreads dishonour more than it fears death, and of the patriotism which makes love of the Fatherland a passion’.
The foundations for such patriotic fervour had been helped by Australia’s participation in the South African (Boer) War. Between 1899 and 1902, some 16,175 mounted men and 16,314 horses had served in colonial and Commonwealth contingents, and 606 had died in the cause of the British Empire. Monuments were soon erected in Australian country towns and the heroes were remembered in schools like the Hamilton and Western District Boys College – motto: Humanitas facit hominem (‘Humanity makes the man’) – which had been founded in 1870.
This is where Ted Henty was both educated and inculcated with a firm belief in the need to be able to bear arms. Among the school’s amenities was a rifle range. ‘Cricket, football and golf are all very well in their way, but they will not go far in assisting us to repel a foreign foe, if one should ever attack us,’ insisted the school magazine, The Hamiltonian. Or, more directly: ‘brilliant cricketers, great footballers and fine golfers have not been as conspicuous on battlefields as men who could shoot straight and ride well.’
At the turn of the century there was a great fear in Australia of aggression from abroad. One of the first federal laws passed in 1901 restricted Asian immigration and would soon be called, unofficially, the White Australia Policy. The European settlers had already been alarmed by the energy and success of the Chinese who had poured into Australia during the gold rushes of the 1850s. Those from China who were already in Australia were allowed to remain, but from now on, this was definitely to be a country for the white man.
In 1914 there was an additional worry emanating from the Land of the Rising Sun. There was the belief that Japanese militarism might be directed south; while, in the Pacific, the German Navy was flexing its muscles.
Australian politicians were united in a belief that Australia should learn to defend itself, as well as rely on the might of the British Empire – while, of course, still being in a position to help out the empire overseas if the call came. ‘The nation peered at the rest of the world like a frightened unarmed man looking through very thin bushes at marauding tigers,’ L.L. Robson observed in his 1982 study of recruitment for the First AIF.
In The Anzacs, Patsy Adam Smith wrote that the movement to set up an army cadet corps in Victoria had begun in 1884, and by the next year, 38 state schools alone had established corps. A high standard was expected of these schoolboy cadets: ‘The members of the corps will have opportunities before leaving school of becoming versed in the use of the rifle and infantry field exercises and such of them as may hereafter join the militia or volunteer forces will have comparatively little to learn in order to attain efficiency.’
The Hamilton College cadet corps had been formed in 1890 and built up until in 1902 it totalled 60 in all ranks. In 1903 the official roll listed one Cadet Henty. The corps drilled regularly, with special drills on Saturday mornings for new recruits. By 1903 it was strutting out to its own fife and drum band. There was regular shooting practice at the school rifle range, using heavy Martini-Henry rifles. Cadet Henty scored well – in September 1903 he was firing off a handicap of 3 and scoring 31 out of a possible 35. By 1907 the cadets were assumed to be part of the Australian Military Forces, and by the Defence Act of 1903-11, all Australian boys were required to serve. All medically fit boys between the ages of twelve and fourteen were junior cadets; the senior cadets were older boys still at school or those who had left between fourteen and eighteen.
This compulsory part-time military training was extended after the 1909 visit by Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, when the British Commander-in-Chief in India was invited to visit Australia and report on its defences. (Ironically, of course, it would be the same Lord Kitchener who initiated an attack on Turkey in the Dardanelles in 1915, and a few months later, was forced to order the evacuation after the Gallipoli disaster.)
In his report the following year, Kitchener recommended a trained Australian military force of not less than 80,000 men. The school cadets would pass into a citizen military force until the age of 25, with an additional year in the reserves. Training would be done at annual camps. The whole of Australia was to be divided into military districts, with officers appointed to supervise the camps in each area. In addition, a military college was to be established to train career officers, resulting in the opening of the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in 1911.
After he left school Ted Henty threw himself into soldiering with the citizen military force and got a job as a clerk in a Hamilton bank. Aside from his passion for things military, in 1914 the countryside was in recession and the extra money gained from his part-time soldiering was much needed by the family living at ‘The Caves’.
‘He evinced a disposition for the Light Horse in which he was one of the enthusiastic spirits and which might be described as his only hobby,’ The Hamilton Spectator said of Ted in its tribute on 23 August 1915. In May 1914, well before war was declared, he managed to get ten days’ leave from the bank to go to Melbourne and attend a training camp at Flemington, where he graduated with a ‘certificate of instruction’. And when war broke out, it was Ted who organised the guard of honour that saw off the first volunteer soldiers from the town.
Ted would have to cool his heels for a while in Hamilton, however. It was not until 21 September that he was appointed a lieutenant with the 8th Light Horse, which would not really form up as a regiment until October, although some of its members turned up at Broadmeadows much earlier. So the dashing young officer, slim and straight-backed as befits a natural horseman, dark-haired and dark-browed, turned his attention instead to marriage. His bride-to-be was Florence Grace Pearson, the beautiful young governess teaching English literature and poetry to two little girls on a property called ‘Koornong’, a short ride away from ‘The Caves’. They settled on a date for the wedding: 18 November.
Meanwhile, other old boys from Hamilton College were coming forward to join the 8th Light Horse. One was Sergeant John Leslie (Les) Connor. Born in Coleraine, he had been captain of school before going up to Melbourne to stay at Ormond College and study mechanical engineering at Melbourne University. After graduation, Les went off to pursue a career first in the tin mines of Mt Lyell in Tasmania, then searching for gold at Mt Morgan in Queensland. In November 1910 he went to Western Australia as a surveyor in the Golden Horse Shoe mine at Boulder City. ‘When resident in Boulder he joined the Citizen Forces, and as whatever he did he tried to do well, he studied the science of warfare, passed examinations and received a commission in the Goldfields Battalion,’ his school magazine reported.
But Les Connor’s fate was sealed in August 1914, shortly after war was declared. Back in Victoria on holiday, he arrived in Melbourne and tried to have his Goldfields commission transferred to the first expeditionary force, but there were no vacancies. Rather than wait to be offered a position as an officer, he joined the 8th Light Horse at Broadmeadows Camp as a trooper (private) instead. Aside from an eagerness to fight for his country, whatever the rank, there was an important reason for this decision. Les knew people like Ted Henty in the 8th Light Horse from their schooldays together; he knew others because they came from his hometown of Coleraine. The 8th would turn out to be a network of old school chums and university students, fellow townsfolk, old friends and close relatives, who all joined up to share in the Great Adventure.
They were mates – or, to use the preferred word of the time, they were cobbers. Like so many recruits from around Australia, each man would come to regard his regiment as something very special; a crack outfit, but also a special, close family.
Dudley Murton was another twenty-year-old Old Hamiltonian who joined the 8th, and would become a member of Ted Henty’s ‘B’ Squadron. He was one of the few men in that squadron to survive the war, receiving a shattered elbow in what was then known to the school, late in 1915, as ‘the famous Walker’s Ridge charge’. Murton would spend two years in hospital before returning to Australia in 1917.
Another old boy, Keith Learmonth, a nineteen-year-old station hand, also enlisted at Hamilton and became a corporal in the 8th, but was evacuated ill from Gallipoli just a day before the Charge at The Nek. He survived the war and was invalided home after he had been transferred to the Postal Corps. Altogether, Hamilton and Western District Boys College, just one of a number of small country schools in Victoria, would send 124 of its old boys to the Great War and nineteen would be killed.
Ted Henty’s wedding to Florence at Christ Church was Hamilton’s society wedding of the year. The Hamilton Spectator brought details to its readers under the headline ‘Soldier’s Bride Honoured’:
A marked token of the high esteem in which Lieutenant Edward E. Henty is held by his fellow officers and men at Broadmeadows encampment was shown by the valuable and handsome gifts received by Miss Pearson on the occasion of her recent marriage with their popular young troop leader.
From the C.O. and officers of the 8th Regiment, Miss Pearson was the recipient of a handsome oak case of cutlery, while from the non-commissioned officers and men comprising Lieutenant Henty’s troop, a silver entree dish and salver were received.
The latter was suitably inscribed as follows: Presented to Miss F. Pearson by the NCOs and men of A Troop B Squadron 8th Light Horse on the occasion of her marriage to their troop leader, Lieutenant E.E. Henty, 18th November, 1914.
The silver salver stands today on a sideboard in the home of Lieutenant Henty’s great-grandchildren for, in October 1915, two months after her husband was killed on Gallipoli, Florence gave birth to a son. She called him Edward Ellis Henty, after his father, and two generations on they still remember him.
All 36 names of those in Ted Henty’s light horse troop are engraved on the salver; only two would still be alive a year after the wedding. A random look at these names gives some idea of the diversity of the men who came forward to join the 8th Light Horse towards the end of 1914, as well as providing a roll call of the tragedy to come at The Nek.
The first name on the salver is that of Sergeant Henry James ‘Bunny’ Nugent who was one of the two survivors and a particularly interesting character. He was a Boer War veteran (so keen to fight that he had paid his own way to South Africa to enlist in the Midland Mounted Rifles), after which he returned home and became a VFL umpire. Then, just five weeks after being taken on at Broadmeadows as a trooper in September 1914, Bunny’s fitness and experience saw him promoted to sergeant. His heroism during the war earned him a Military Medal and, later, a unique honour in football history: on opening day 1918, Richmond and Essendon lined up before the match and applauded the umpire – Bunny Nugent – onto the ground. He survived wounds, sickness and service in three wars to eventually die in 1955, aged 75.
Others in the troop were not so fortunate. Corporal Victor Nassau Raymond, for instance, was a 19-year-old warehouseman from Prahran, 5 feet 10¼ inches high, weighing in at 11 stone 7 pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes. Killed in action at The Nek. No known grave.
Lance Corporal George Thomas Hughes was 38 and a Presbyterian minister from Balranald in New South Wales; 5 feet 11 inches tall, with blue eyes and grey hair. His sister wrote after his death on Gallipoli: ‘He was the Presbyterian Minister for two years before he resigned his charge to enlist. He sold some valuable horses, buggy, furniture and a motor previous to going away.’ Killed in action at The Nek. No known grave.
Trooper Joseph Patrick McKay was a 24-year-old labourer from Yarrawonga, Victoria. He was 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighed 12 stone. By a twist of fate, he was saved from certain death when he was taken from the firing line suffering from piles, two days before the charge at The Nek. He would die at the very end of the war, by drowning.
Trooper William Arthur Hind was a 21-year-old apprentice printer from Hamilton, eldest of a family of eight whose father was the foreman at The Hamilton Spectator. The newspaper said in its tribute: ‘He was of a quiet but obliging disposition and was well liked by his confreres. He also possessed the soldier’s inclination and was not content until he threw in his lot with the colours as soon after the outbreak of war as possible.’ One eyewitness later said he ‘fell whilst waving his country’s flag above the parapet of the Turkish trench’. Killed in action at The Nek. No known grave.
Lance Corporal John Boswell was a 21-year-old farm labourer from the tiny Western District town of Woorndoo, and also signed up at Hamilton. Killed in action at The Nek. No known grave.
Trooper Samuel James was aged 22, with blue eyes and light brown hair, and hailed from another minor Victorian town, Wychitella, in the wheat fields of the dusty mallee country. Killed in action at The Nek. No known grave.
Trooper Robert Kerr was a 31-year-old draper from the northern Melbourne suburb of Essendon. After he died, his personal effects were sent home – a pack of cards and his watch. Killed in action at The Nek. No known grave.
Trooper James Alexander Bell was a ruddy-faced 34-year-old labourer from Sale in the dairy country of eastern Victoria. Killed in action at The Nek. No known grave.
Trooper Donald Mathieson McGregor Johnson was a tall 18-year-old, a brass finisher from the city of Warrnambool, in the state’s west. He had a marksman’s badge from the school cadets. Killed in action at The Nek. No known grave.
Trooper Laurence Gerald Finn was a 23-year-old grazier who had attended the private Catholic school Xavier College, where he was known as ‘Finny’. His proud parents said that he was the first man to volunteer from the Port Fairy district. Killed in action at The Nek. No known grave.
Just one year after Bunny Nugent had organised the engraving of this silver salver, he found himself in a hospital bed in Heliopolis, Egypt, where he lay wounded after being evacuated from Gallipoli. The respect and affection he felt for his late troop leader are obvious from the following letter he wrote to Ted’s mother Annie:
Dear Mrs Henty
I received your kind letter and was very pleased to hear from you. I would have written to you only I did not like to intrude in your bereavement. I was going to wait till I got back if I was spared to tell you how your son died.
He was made second in command of the Squadron the night before the Charge, but he got permission to come out with his old Troop.
He said to me: I have been with you ever since I joined the Force and I am going out with you now.
He was killed in the first rush – a machine gun got him and he died without a sign. I got to him just as he fell but he never spoke nor moved. I think he died happy because he had the old smile on his face.
I was going to bring him in only I got hit just after him.
I would like to let you know the honour and respect we all had for him. We would have followed him anywhere and all the other Troops envied our Troop Leader.
They all used to say little Ted was the best man in the regiment. That expression shewed the feelings of every man in the Regiment. He always had a cheery word for his men. He was always doing something for their comfort in the trenches. He would help us build up the sandbag parapets for our protection with never a thought of danger for himself. He died like a Hero leading his men when he need not have gone into danger.
There are only another man and myself left out of the old A Troop that was in the Charge.
I always had a soft spot in my heart for him, we got on so well together. He was an Ideal Officer and I will always remember him if I am spared to get through all right. You can rest your mind easy that he died without any pain.
The report of his death that you sent me and any effort of mine can never tell what a fine soldier and gentleman he was, and I am in a position to know being closely connected to him both in Australia and on Service at the Front. I think his photo is fine – it is just him.
You ask about the black horses. I have got his black mare and will not let anyone ride her. I will send you a photo of her.
I would like you to tender my sympathy to his poor Wife. I hope that both the Baby and herself are keeping well. And if I get through I will call and see you myself when I hope to be able to give you better details than I can write.
I hope the Baby has been named after his Father because I would like to think there is still one with the same name and a Son of the Whitest Man I ever knew.
I also wish to express my sympathy with you in your sad loss of a son but I am sure it is the way he would have liked to go out.
Thanking you for your kind thoughts on my welfare.
I will now close.
Yours sincerely,
J.J. Nugent
Sergeant A Troop
B Squadron
8th L.H.
Many Gallipoli survivors honoured their fallen comrades in this way by writing to their loved ones and visiting them when they eventually returned to Australia. But Bunny Nugent’s letter also shows how close the officers and men of the regiment were to each other. They were, indeed, a band of brothers.