While the men of the 8th Australian Light Horse Regiment were assembling at Broadmeadows, the other two regiments that would make up the 3rd Light Horse Brigade were forming up in Perth and Adelaide.
In Perth, the 10th Light Horse Regiment was almost entirely the creation of one man – its commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Noel Murray Brazier. Christened ‘the father of the regiment’, Brazier was the driving force and chief recruiter for the 10th. The regiment was a very personal thing to him; it was his preoccupation, his other family.
Noel Brazier was a peppery, stout man with strong views and a convivial character, who enjoyed the companionship of fellow members of his Perth club, where they could all relax over a whisky and a good cigar. He was known as ‘Colonel’ even to his grandchildren until the day he died, aged 80, in 1947.
Born in Victoria, the fifth child of eight in the family of the Reverend Amos Brazier and his wife, Jessie, he moved to Perth in the 1890s and got a job as a surveyor with the Public Works Department. In 1893 he married well after becoming engaged to Edith Maude Hardwick, daughter of the Swan Brewery’s general manager, an influential figure in tiny, colonial Perth.
Brazier travelled widely, getting to know the state well, and was attracted to the fertile south-west. Here he bought a property in the Upper Capel area, just west of the present town of Kirrup. He called it ‘Capeldene’ and set out to make it a showplace farm and a place to raise thoroughbred horses.
Together with this tough personality and the passion he had for the new regiment, Noel Brazier also came equipped with an extremely short fuse. And being one to brood long and hard over insults and slights, real or imagined, his personal relationships with the commanding officers in the 3rd Light Horse Brigade would be a major factor in the drama that lay ahead at Gallipoli.
Western Australia in 1914 was vastly underpopulated. Despite the gold rushes of the 1890s there were only about 300,000 people living in a state that occupied a third of Australia. Most men were on the land, working on the great sheep and cattle stations in the north, the flat wheat belt that spread beyond the Darling Range near Perth, or in the fertile pocket of arable land in the south-west. Here was the natural habitat of the light horseman. Others worked in shallow shafts or deep underground in the goldfields of the flat red desert country that extended out from Southern Cross, Coolgardie, Kalgoorlie and Boulder. These mining skills would soon be used to help construct the maze of burrows, tunnels and saps that would house the light horse on Gallipoli.
When war broke out in August 1914, Western Australia had one mounted regiment, known as the 25th Light Horse. It had troops scattered throughout the state and had trained for a couple of years under Brazier, who had been promoted to lieutenant colonel after sitting for an examination in 1913. Sometimes the local light horsemen paraded on his property, ‘Capeldene’.
The state already had a long tradition of mounted units; the Pinjarra Mounted Volunteer Rifles had been raised in 1862, followed by the Guildford Mounted Rifles and the Bunbury Rifles as well as several troops in Perth. During the Boer War, Western Australia had sent nine mounted units. There was enormous disappointment, then, when at the first call for enlistment for service overseas in 1914, it became known that no mounted troops were being asked for from the West.
The ranks of the 25th rapidly became depleted as troopers left, deciding to sign up for the infantry. The rest persevered in the belief that sooner or later mounted troops would be needed from Western Australia. At last, almost grudgingly, the authorities announced that a squadron of light horse would be accepted from Western Australia – as long as each member supplied his horse for free.
On 22 September 1914, Brazier noted in his diary: ‘Went to Perth and reported for duty.’ Four days later he saw a parade of the first contingent of Western Australians to leave the state. ‘Fine looking men,’ he wrote. ‘March discipline only fair. Lump in my throat all the same.’
By the first week in October a squadron of light horse was in training at the old remount depot once used by the Guildford Mounted Rifles. The original plan was that they would become part of the 7th Light Horse, joining up with other squadrons being raised in Queensland and New South Wales.
Brazier was hard at work lobbying. Continual applications were being made from men eager to serve in the light horse, but were shelved or turned down because only a squadron was authorised for the state. Soon enough, the breakthrough came.
‘Repeated efforts were at last crowned with success, authority to form a Regiment was granted, and the 10th Light Horse Regiment was accordingly formed. In this respect great credit is due to the personal effort put forth by Lieut-Col. N.M. Brazier, who may rightly be called the “Father of The Regiment”,’ wrote Lieutenant Colonel A.C.N. Olden, the regimental historian. The original squadron raised became ‘A’ Squadron of the 10th, and now two further squadrons could be raised to make up the full regiment of over 300 men, which would become part of the 3rd Australian Light Horse Brigade.
Brazier was already busy recruiting men and selecting donated horses (or buying them) for this, his regiment. He was riding out to the countryside and contacting old friends, recruiting their sons and the men he had met as a surveyor on their farmlands.
‘Left for Beverley at 7 am,’ he wrote in his diary on 30 September as he set out for the wheat belt. ‘Crops look rotten and feed scarce. Outlook very gloomy. Very hot. One horse only at Beverley. Got 16 men at Narrogin. Seven horses given.’ At another wheat town, Wagin, the next day, he signed up fourteen men, four with horses; at Katanning the day after, ‘15 men with horses, another 16 without’.
The new regiment’s headquarters were set up at Claremont Showgrounds, where a party of officers under Captain Tom Todd was putting prospective light horsemen through their riding tests aboard a tall chestnut called Doctor Mac.
One such test was recorded. Todd asked one youngster, after he had fallen off Doctor Mac three times, ‘My boy, what made you think you could ride?’
‘I don’t, sir.’
‘Have you ever been on a horse in your life?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Well, what the hell did you come here for?’
‘I didn’t say I could ride, but I don’t mind having a try, and I want to join the regiment.’
‘That’s the way to talk. Well, go away for a week and practise riding and I’ll give you another chance.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
The next week the boy came back. This time he stayed aboard Doctor Mac and was accepted.
The determination to join the 10th was extraordinary. One man rode nearly 300 miles overland from Kimberley to Wyndham, and then caught a ship down the coast to Fremantle to join up. Another was medically rejected because he had a malformed big toe. A week later he reappeared again at the showgrounds with a grin, asking, ‘Will you take me now?’ He had been to hospital and had the offending toe amputated.
Training in the West proceeded at a furious rate. By November 1914, Brazier would note: ‘Men jumping over hurdles and tent pegging. Two men seriously hurt. Pace too hot, must be slowed.’ But it continued just the same.
As Perth hotted up for a long, dry summer, the regiment moved down the Swan River aboard the ferry Zephyr, out through the harbour mouth at Fremantle and south to a dusty, dirty camping ground at the coastal settlement of Rockingham. Here the men would train until February, with the merciless heat and the persistent bushflies. Only a daily swim in the ocean and visits by friends laden with picnic hampers made life bearable.
A Mrs P. Law-Smith presented a regimental standard here. It was emblazoned with a black swan on a yellow background and the motto Percute et percute velociter – ‘strike and strike swiftly’. His Grace Archbishop Riley, chaplain-general of the forces, blessed the standard as the men of the 10th stood with the sea breeze ruffling the emu feathers in their slouch hats, and the flag was solemnly handed over to the regimental sergeant major by Mrs Law-Smith herself.
In Adelaide, the nucleus of the 9th Australian Light Horse Regiment had also come together. Two squadrons of light horsemen would be recruited from South Australia, another vast state, which then had a population of only about 420,000. They would come to Melbourne after initial training and join up with a Victorian squadron to form another full regiment, the third arm of the 3rd Brigade.
The South Australian command went to Lieutenant Colonel Albert Miell, commanding officer of the 24th Light Horse Regiment, Citizen Forces, described in the regimental history as ‘an energetic and capable officer of long standing’. Miell was 44 years old and a veteran of the Boer War, while Major Carew Reynell, his second-in-command, was described as having ‘untiring energy … day or night he was forever at his post and ready for any task, however arduous’.
As in Western Australia, troopers rushed to enlist. Early days at the camp in Morphettville were also described in the regimental history:
Strict training was carried out by officers and men, who soon began to show signs of perfect physical fitness for the hard tasks they would be called upon to face at an early date.
The horses supplied to the regiment were a splendid lot and reflected the greatest credit to the officers on whom the responsibility for their selection and purchase rested. As soon as the horses had been allotted to the various troops, each member was put through a thorough riding test, much amusement being caused by some, who, though anxious to serve with a mounted unit, had evidently never ridden a horse in their lives. As a result of this test a number of men had to be transferred to dismounted units, much to their disappointment. The remaining members immediately commenced troop and squadron training.
A Mrs Richard Bennett then presented the 9th with its own standard – ‘a magnificent piece of work bearing the regimental crest, a lion rampant on a white Australia, the whole being on a scarlet field with a diagonal gold cross’. On this scarlet field, in white, sat the motto of the 9th Light Horse: Pro gloria et honore (‘For glory and honour’).
The two squadrons paraded through Adelaide’s streets before leaving from Mile End station at the end of November on the train journey to Melbourne. They arrived at Broadmeadows with their horses at 11 pm, but ‘rain was falling heavily and as the night had to be spent in the open, the impression formed that night of Victoria was far from complimentary to the sister State’.
The next day, the Victorian squadron, under Major T.J. Daly, rode up to join the two squadrons from South Australia. The 9th was now complete.
Within days the 9th would join with the 8th for training. The brigade commander himself – that ‘elderly citizen officer belonging to leading social circles in Victoria’ – would bring his personal supervision and special attention to ‘musketry and bayonet fighting’. Colonels Miell and White could now have a closer look at the 3rd Light Horse Brigade’s commanding officer, Frederick Godfrey Hughes.
The brigadier had been born in Windsor, Melbourne, on 26 January 1858, one of three boys born to Charles and Ellen Hughes, who had met in England but married in Victoria after migrating separately. Charles’ early death led Ellen to take in sixteen young lads attending Melbourne Grammar School and offer lodgings with ‘good food and a Christian environment’. Young Frederick would also go to Melbourne Grammar, where he was a keen sportsman. He left school to work as a clerk for a land valuer, and set up his own business around 1884.
Hughes began his military career at the age of 17, when he joined the St Kilda Artillery Battery as a horse driver. He became a sergeant in 1883 and was commissioned as an officer a year after that. The battery was one of the many pre-Federation military units notable for their dashing young men in self-designed uniforms. This one was under the command of Major Frederick Sargood, a wealthy businessman who would later be knighted and become an influential minister for defence in the Victorian Government. The uniforms had ‘S.K.’ (for St Kilda) on the shoulders, but the locals claimed the initials stood for ‘Sargood’s Kids’.
Frederick Hughes had a long connection with the seaside suburb of St Kilda. He would serve on the St Kilda City Council for 24 years, during which time he served two terms as mayor (in 1900-01 and 1911-12). He loved uniforms and being the centre of attention, and the garb of mayorship was another excuse to don fur-trimmed robes and gold chains.
His move into Victoria’s high society was confirmed when he married Agnes Eva Snodgrass. She was a formidable lady, founder of a patriotic and conservative organisation called the Australian Women’s Nation League, which at the outbreak of war boasted 50,000 members. Judging by a piece from Bulletin magazine’s ‘Melbourne Chatter Page’, this entitled Hughes to some sympathy: ‘Larry Rantoul was not trying to be either funny or insulting, but he convulsed an Empire Day gathering at the Town Hall when eulogising Brigadier General Hughes by declaring: “Nobody was surprised when General Hughes went to the war, for is he not the husband of Mrs Eva Hughes?”’
Eva’s father, Peter Snodgrass, was a member of the Victorian Legislative Council, long regarded as the bastion of squatters’ rights, and both families could boast that they were original settlers in the Port Phillip District of New South Wales.
Eva’s sister Janet had also married well. She was now Lady Clarke, wife of Sir William Clarke, one of the richest landholders in Victoria. Janet had been governess to the four children born to Sir William’s first wife, Mary, who had been killed in a carriage accident. Janet went on to bear him another seven children.
Sir William was the squire of ‘Rupertswood’, the mansion he had built 40 kilometres from Melbourne at Sunbury, and named after his son and heir. He also had a keen interest in military matters and used his money to help raise an outfit called the Victorian Nordenfeldt Battery. The Nordenfeldt was a primitive ten-barrel machine-gun mounted on a light carriage, and while the colonial government supplied the guns, Sir William provided the horses to draw them. He also supplied the new commanding officer – Frederick Hughes, who became its captain through the Snodgrass family connections.
The social cachet of being the commander of the battery was enhanced even further when another squire, Andrew Chirnside of ‘Werribee Park’, offered to support a unit of horse artillery. Chirnside inhabited a 60-room mansion outside Melbourne, said to be the largest private residence ever erected in Victoria. His property spread over 93,000 acres. Here were two squatters trying to outdo one another with their private armies.
The government decided to harness the military contributions of the two squatters by amalgamation. The Victorian Horse Artillery Regiment was born, with Hughes again as commanding officer, now promoted to major.
The Horse Artillery was a very flash unit indeed. The white helmets, highly polished riding boots, the blue uniforms with the gold braid and lace were all copied from the Royal Horse Artillery in the UK. And it was there, in 1893, that Hughes took a team of the Victorian Horse Artillery, to take part in an annual military tournament at Islington and shooting competitions at Bisley. Sir William Clarke (Baronet) footed the bill. But four years later, government support for the unit faded, a recession followed a land boom and bust in Victoria, and after Sir William’s death, the regiment was formally disbanded.
Hughes was transferred and became a staff officer at headquarters in Melbourne, where in 1900 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel. After Federation, the old colonial mounted units became regiments of light horse, and in 1903 he was given command of the 11th Light Horse Regiment. Four years later Hughes was promoted to colonel.
Historian Peter Burness describes Hughes as ‘an active and gregarious fellow’ and goes on to comment: ‘He was a man’s man who mixed easily and enjoyed a range of masculine interests. In middle age he remained physically impressive. Although not considered intellectual he was “an alert, articulate, observant and sometimes irascible man (who) mixed urbanity and geniality with toughness and shrewdness”.’
In 1907 Hughes could put on more gold braid when he became aide-de-camp to the Governor-General. And nepotism still ruled. It was time to return some favours as he became more senior in the army.
Sir William Clarke’s youngest son, Reginald, was appointed adjutant of a regiment over the heads of other officers and then made brigade major when he followed Hughes, who was appointed to command a peacetime brigade. Later, Hughes made some suitable arrangements for his bright young nephew Wilfred Kent Hughes, known to everyone as ‘Billy’.
Billy Kent Hughes (later in life to be knighted and become a prominent federal politician) had also gone to Melbourne Grammar, and enlisted in the army on 17 August 1914, as a private in the infantry. He got his sergeant’s stripes ten days later because he had been in the school cadets, and sailed for Egypt with the 7th Battalion in the first contingent of the AIF. Soon after his arrival he received a cable from Melbourne telling him he had been awarded a Rhodes scholarship.
Sergeant Kent Hughes would call on his uncle soon after the brigadier arrived in command of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade and tentatively enquire about transferring from the infantry to one of the light horse regiments. The result was far more than he could ever have hoped for. He wrote excitedly to his father:
I am now Uncle Fred’s orderly officer (or practically A.D.C.). I made a suggestion to Uncle Fred about transferring, and he went to an awful lot of trouble to get things fixed up, although when I first asked him I had no idea of any promotion.
The step from platoon sergeant in the foot-sloggers to A.D.C. to the brigadier of a mounted force seems a tremendous change from one point of view, though on the other hand I had been doing an officer’s work for the past four or five weeks as my platoon commander has had charge of the reinforcements.
Now Lieutenant Billy had a batman, three horses and a groom. He was thrilled with his new job because in action ‘it will probably mean dispatch-riding and that will be ripping’. On Gallipoli it would mean following Uncle Fred on the wearying climbs up and down Walker’s Ridge and conveying his confused orders. Later on, the brigadier’s own son, Arthur, would be commissioned and transferred across to Gallipoli.
After taking command of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade in October, the old brigadier seems to have let his brigade major, Lieutenant Colonel Jack Antill, have his head in the training of the men.
John Macquarie Antill – widely known as ‘Bull’ Antill, or simply ‘the Bullant’ – was a tough professional soldier, vastly experienced, but also both a martinet and a bully. Aged 48, he had been appointed second-in-command of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade on 17 October 1914. A photograph taken of him later on Gallipoli shows him standing, legs apart, arms akimbo, glaring square-jawed at the camera. His tie is done tightly up, shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows; long shorts cover his knees almost touching the tightly furled regimental puttees and he is grasping a fly whisk in his right hand, as though he is ready to swat any nuisance that gets in his way. The picture was taken in September 1915. By then Jack Antill would have taken command of the brigade from Hughes (who was invalided home from illness).
Antill was born on the family property at Picton, the historic little town south of Sydney, on 26 January 1866. As Peter Burness sums him up: ‘Jack Antill was descended from a distinguished line of British Army officers from whom he inherited an interest in history and a sense of his own destiny.’
His grandfather, Major Henry Golden Antill, had served in America and India before coming to New South Wales, where he served as aide-de-camp to Governor Lachlan Macquarie. Granted land at Picton, he called the property ‘Jarvisfield’ in honour of the governor’s own estate in Scotland.
Young Jack grew up and learnt to ride at ‘Jarvisfield’ before going off to school at Sydney Grammar, where he boxed and fenced, and got his first taste of military life in the school cadet unit. Like Noel Brazier, he first became a surveyor after leaving school, and also joined the local militia when he was 21. Two years later, he raised a squadron of mounted infantry at Picton that would become part the New South Wales Mounted Infantry Regiment (later the New South Wales Mounted Rifles) under the command of a Captain Henry Beauchamp Lasseter. The latter, from a prominent Sydney retail merchant family, married Antill’s sister, and this may have helped Jack come to the attention of Major General Edward Hutton, the commander of the New South Wales military forces.
Hutton arranged for Antill to be sent to India in 1893 to get experience with the British Army. He served with the Devonshire Regiment and the 2nd Dragoon Guards. When he returned in 1894 he was commissioned into the new Commonwealth Army. Five years later, with the outbreak of the Boer War, Jack Antill was promoted to major and given command of ‘A’ Squadron of the New South Wales Mounted Rifles.
Bull Antill made his mark in South Africa. His squadron took part in a number of major actions, including the capture of a major Boer force led by General Piet Cronje. Antill was among the first into the Boers’ camp after they surrendered, and he sent the white surrender flag home to Sydney, where it became a major attraction in the window of Lasseter’s store.
His commanding officer reported: ‘On two occasions he led his Regiment at the gallop against positions held by the enemy. Proving him to be a fearless and valuable leader in the field. He has shown great capacity in command of his regiment.’
Antill returned to Australia on 8 January 1901, but was back in South Africa in March, as second-in-command of the 2nd New South Wales Mounted Rifles (commanded by his brother-in-law). In action again, he took part in a series of night marches that resulted in the capture of over 1,000 prisoners.
He came home to be married, something of a minor war hero, with seven clasps on his service medals, having twice been Mentioned in Despatches. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the Bath (CB) and promoted to the rank of brevet lieutenant colonel. After being appointed chief instructor for the Australian Light Horse in New South Wales, Jack emulated his grandfather by becoming aide-de-camp to the Governor-General, Lord Northcote, from 1904 to 1906.
After turning 40, Antill retired from the army for a short while, but in 1911 he got the call to join up again as commandant of the Instructional Staff Schools. His blunt, uncompromising manner landed him in hot water, however, when he was appointed to the army’s inspection staff and required to attend militia training camps and submit reports to the inspector-general.
‘The assessment he made of a one-week camp held by the 5th Brigade at Liverpool in November-December 1913 plunged him into trouble and became the lowest point in his peacetime career,’ wrote Burness. ‘In his report he condemned the lack of discipline, the control and proficiency of the officers, the supervision, filthy lines, poor rifle exercises, bad marching, dirty band instruments and the appearance of the men.’
He even criticised one of his brother officers whom he had served with in South Africa – cruel comments that were described as ‘grossly unfair’ by a court of inquiry called to look into the report. The court heard claims that Antill was harsh and tactless, and found that parts of his report were ‘unjust, unfair, misleading and not supported by evidence’.
Although no action was taken against the Bullant, there was a suggestion that he should be transferred to another state and the controversy hung over his career, which had now stalled somewhat. He had held the same rank for over a decade and had seen officers he knew well, and some junior, promoted over him. ‘The truth was that, while he was an intelligent man,’ Burness continued, ‘he was rigid in his thinking and did not possess the quickness of mind or the fertile brain of those whose promotions he coveted’.
When war was declared, Jack Antill couldn’t wait to get away. After a period as enrolment officer for the AIF in Sydney, responsible for selecting the men for the first contingent, a selection board decided on his appointment interstate as brigade major for the 3rd Light Horse Brigade.
It must have been something of a shock to be number two and not in command. Even more so when Antill discovered that his new CO was ‘an elderly citizen officer belonging to leading social circles in Victoria’ and that the commanders of the 8th, and 10th regiments were militia men who had never heard a shot fired in anger.
Antill threw himself into the task of making his presence felt. The Bullant began doing the thing he was best at – throwing his weight around. First he went to Adelaide to have a look at the South Australians before they moved east to Broadmeadows to join the 3rd Light Horse Brigade.
‘Major J.M. Antill, C.B. who had been appointed Brigade Major to the Brigade, arrived from Melbourne about the middle of November to inspect the Regiment on behalf of the Brigadier,’ wrote Major T.H. Daley, stiffly, in his regimental history With the Ninth Light Horse in the Great War. ‘After spending two days, during which he subjected the Regiment to a thorough overhaul, he returned to Headquarters.’
In reality, Antill had simply dressed them down. A local newspaper reported that his remarks were ‘resented by every man in camp and the officers had the greatest difficulty in keeping the men in hand’. The tongue-lashing had been so bad that the NCOs asked to be discharged, and the officers made their protests directly to their colonel. Somehow, things were defused, so that before returning to Melbourne, Antill would describe the troops as ‘a fine type of men’.
Brigadier Hughes, meanwhile, went off separately to visit Colonel Brazier and his men in Western Australia, telling The Argus on his return that he had found the 10th Light Horse Regiment to be ‘very hardy and tough’. Antill would wait until January before going to Perth and he would sail with the men of the 10th early in February for Egypt.
But this visit, and the long voyage that followed, would produce a deep and bitter enmity between Brazier and Antill.