Beatrice Brown cleared a space at her kitchen table and set down a piece of paper. Her pen scratched across the page, and the flashing nib left a stream of ink blots behind it. She glanced up anxiously towards the window. Her husband might appear any moment; then again, he might not.

Her pen scratched quickly across the page: Beatrice Brown’s desperate letter to the authorities. Here she pleads for protection from a disturbed and violent husband. The ongoing trauma of war cast a shadow across domestic life in postwar Australia. NAA: C138/4, C29645 courtesy National Archives of Australia.

‘He has been in a queer mental state of late,’ she wrote, ‘is always away and I never know his whereabouts.’ And so she hurried to finish her letter. The first of many she would write to the authorities. Beatrice was alone, having left her only family back in South Africa. She needed help and she needed reassurance.

‘Sir,’ she continued, hoping that some office clerk would sense the urgency in her tone:

my husband, WCA Brown, a returned man on a pension came home for a few hours . . . He told me he was going to China . . . He took my pension card saying it was necessary . . . I dare not refuse him as he had been violent in temper and menacing in attitude, stuttering as when he first returned from war.

People had often told Beatrice she was one of the lucky ones. Her man had come home and they could build a new life for themselves in Australia. But now she wasn’t so sure of that. This was not the same man she’d married.

Beatrice’s heart was racing. She plunged the nib into the ink bottle again:

He looked quite mad and talked about thrashing me and ‘kicking my brains out’ . . .  Four years ago he was a very gentle man but he has reverted to the ‘brutal’. He has gone to pieces physically, mentally and morally and looks unshaven – unclean – awful.

Beatrice put her pen to one side and drew a deep breath. Fear was one thing to confess to a stranger, shame and dependency quite another:

I am in debt for rent and other necessaries. My husband has given me no support since his return and will not live in the home that I have provided . . . He prefers to pass himself off as a single man . . . Two days after his visit here a love letter arrived from a young lady who apparently he has got into trouble.

Beatrice was at her wit’s end now, her life and her marriage were collapsing around her. ‘Right or wrong he is my husband,’ she wrote, ‘but duty, truth, kindness he has lost all sense of.’ Could the doctors be sent to help him, she asked. Her husband seemed ‘mentally wrong’. The war had taken him from her.1

William Charles Angus Brown had enlisted at the age of 43. A veteran of the Boer War, the Army thought he showed potential and selected him for officer training. Sergeant Brown was demoted to Private by the time he was sent to France. Sent into the line, he suffered what they called ‘shell concussion’. Brown was trapped in the trenches for days on end, forced to drink water contaminated with the bodies of men.

‘Has a slight stammer,’ the medical files noted, ‘tremors of hands’, and his wounded knees could barely support him. Brown was discharged as medically unfit on 16 January 1918. By then there was not much ‘organically wrong’. It was the wounds you couldn’t see that were the problem.

Beatrice Brown petitioned for divorce in December 1920. Her husband had deserted her and his mind was ‘so disturbed’ that she could no longer live with him anyway. For Beatrice, there were no fresh beginnings; all she could hope for was to return to her people in South Africa. William Brown, by contrast, married again – Miss Frances Suttor, a young woman from Bathurst who was more than twenty years his junior.

We will never know why Frances married this shell-shocked soldier. Sympathy, perhaps, desperation probably – war had claimed the best young men of the district. Perhaps Frances had lost someone herself, and taking William on might have been a kind of compensation. More than likely she was that young lady he had got into trouble.

Whatever the reason, Frances believed William loved her. ‘He married the girl of his heart,’ people said, and they would build a future together. But the war had not treated William kindly – nor would the peace.

William and his new bride settled in the far west of New South Wales, in dry scrubby country bordering the desert. He’d taken up a Crown lease of about four thousand acres, and despite his ‘trouble with nerves’ believed they could make a go of it farming sheep. But there was no water on the block, and the government refused to sink a bore. Every day, the new bride carted buckets of water two miles from the nearest dam, just to meet the basic needs of her household.

The government also failed to provide an access road to the property. When William went to see the doctors in town, Frances was left ‘alone in the wilderness’, marooned and isolated on that block in the bush, ‘hawkers and stray rabbiters . . . the only human beings seen for weeks’.2

Without reliable water, the holding was bound to fail; and William Brown’s health was failing also. Like Beatrice before her, Frances took to writing to the authorities. ‘[H]is nerves . . .  make him really ill,’ she wrote to the pension department in 1923, ‘[h]e still suffers from sleeplessness and nervousness and horror.’ Sometimes her husband went away to the city, for a spell in what he called the ‘nerve home’. In 1923 he was laid up for three months in Mudgee Hospital, ‘so nervous and broken down from lack of food and worry that [he] could not stand longer than half an hour at a time’. 3

In 1925, William Brown made one last trip to Sydney. That March he went missing. Police found his body on a park bench in the Bennelong Point Reserve. He had swallowed a bottle of poison.

The death of yet another war-wrecked man wasn’t likely to make the headlines in interwar Australia. Nor, as we’ve seen, were the victims of domestic violence, the casualties of men deranged or brutalised by their experiences overseas. But the pathetic plight of a widow, left alone to care for the babes of a ‘nervy’ soldier – that was another matter entirely. At last, the authorities took up the cause of Mrs Brown: ‘It is one of the most shocking cases ever I heard of,’ J.W. Percival MLA wrote to the Undersecretary. ‘[Brown] was a shell shocked wreck, mentally deficient and in a fit of madness committed suicide.’ He left a ‘bereaved widow . . . and two War babies’, a debt she could barely cope with, and a pathetic pension of less than three pounds per week.4

Frances Brown was described as a frail woman, unable to take work ‘because the two tiny tots need her attention’. This was deemed a ‘deserving case’, and one quick to merit the assistance of the state. Frances was given permission to sell her husband’s desert property, and much of his debt on the same was written off. But no such concessions could be offered to the first Mrs Brown – or hundreds of others like her, whose men returned damaged by war.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story draws on William Brown’s service dossier NAA: B2455, BROWN WCA; his repatriation file NAA: C138/4, C29645, BROWN WCA; his soldier settlement file State Records NSW: 12/7274/07902. For further reading on the soldier settlement scheme see Bruce Scates and Melanie Oppenheimer, The Last Battle of the Great War: Soldier Settlement in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

1 Beatrice Brown to the Chief Officer of Pensions, 4 February 1920, NAA: C138/4, C29645.

2 Frances Brown to Pensions Department, 1 October 1922, ibid.

3 Frances Brown to Pension Office, 1923, ibid.

4 ibid.