In the autumn of 1921, Mr W.A. Windeyer of Hunter’s Hill made ready for his journey. We can imagine him assembling all the things a man of his age and status was likely to need for many months abroad – a sturdy suitcase, a hat box, an umbrella, camera and notebook. We can imagine him looking sceptically at the dark woollen overcoat, sagging beneath the weight of itself. It was much too warm for Sydney, even in the darkest days of winter. This was a garment fashioned for another place and another climate, made to cheat the icy winds of the Somme and the drenching rain of Flanders.

William Archibald Windeyer was a man born to privilege; only the elite of Sydney society could afford that first class passage to England. The son of a Supreme Court judge, his family included politicians and pastoralists, university men and senior civil servants. Windeyer himself had invested wisely in the buoyant property market in Sydney. In the years before the war, this canny young solicitor had bought and sold over a dozen residential properties. But privilege, Windeyer believed, carried with it the burden of responsibility. Civic minded to the core, he worked as an alderman of Hunter’s Hill municipal council for twenty-three years and served as the mayor for nine. He was also deputy chairman, then chairman of the Boy Scout Association; secretary and treasurer of the Suburban and Country Golf Association; and an avid supporter of any number of charities.

When hostilities broke out, Windeyer took up patriotic work. He was a driving force behind the Belgian Relief Fund, the War Chest Fund and one public appeal after another to help repatriate wounded soldiers. An ardent imperialist, Windeyer believed the war was just, and he campaigned for conscription of the nation’s young men to fight it.

Patriotic work: Notice of the Grand Patriotic Concert in Hunter’s Hill, in aid of the Belgian Relief Fund. The handsome invitation wove together local, national and imperial loyalties, the flags of Great Britain and its allies draped around floral emblems of Australia. The Rising Sun of Japan unfurls beneath the Australian flag – in the First World War Japan was Britain’s ally. Patriotic events like these were largely a preserve of the well-to-do. The same significant citizens (Windeyer included) hosted pro-conscription rallies, hoping to force young men to fight the war in Europe. Courtesy the Windeyer/Bragg families.

In February 1921, Windeyer prepared for yet another patriotic gesture. He and his wife would sail on RMS Narkunda for Britain. His destinations included the war cemeteries of Belgium and France. That warm Sunday afternoon there was just one task remaining

Windeyer took a sheet of paper from his desk and dipped his pen into an inkwell. Cursive writing curled across the page. Soon forty-four names were assembled in a column, much like the lists of names lined up on honour boards across the country.

These were the boys from Hunter’s Hill who didn’t come home: a fireman from Paul Street, a mechanic from Woolwich Road, a bricklayer from Madeline Street. Lads who once kicked footballs in the grounds of Boronia Park, buried now in the cold mud of Flanders.

Windeyer’s journey was a pilgrimage by proxy. He went not just for himself but for mothers who had lost an only boy, fathers bottled up with grief, wives who barely knew their husbands. One woman who wrote to him had lost three sons in a single day. And twelve of the suburb’s forty-four dead were still officially listed as ‘missing’. Windeyer promised to seek out every grave he could. And he would bring an image of that grave home to Australia, photographing a cross and a name, offering some kind of closure.

A pilgrimage by proxy: The grave of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey. Mrs Ruby Millicent Windeyer laid a wreath here on Armistice Day in 1921. It was on behalf of the mothers of Hunter’s Hill who had lost sons during the war. Lost quite literally. Twelve of Hunter’s Hill’s war dead were never recovered from the battlefield. The grave of the Unknown Warrior acted as their surrogate tomb. Courtesy © Dean and Chapter of Westminster.

And that wasn’t all. In his time abroad, the Mayor of Hunter’s Hill (himself an avid gardener) ‘systematically collected seeds of different flowers which [he found] growing freely in most of the cemeteries’: golden coreopsis and blood-coloured poppies, asters, nasturtiums and antirrhinums. On returning to Australia, photographs and seeds were dispatched to dead men’s relatives, proof that life sprang anew even in a battered wasteland.1

Windeyer hoped his journey would heal. He saw himself as an agent of hope and consolation. But the horrors of the killing fields soon came to haunt him.

In October 1921, this well-connected, Empire-minded man carried his protest to Australia House in London at the head of a deputation of concerned Australians. He claimed thousands of bodies were still left ‘uncovered’ on the battlefields. That ‘unsystematic’ searches by indifferent authorities had failed to find them. That ‘Belgian peasants’ eager to reclaim their farmlands ploughed bodies into the earth: no reward was offered for the recovery of Australian or British dead so there was simply no incentive to bury them. There were rumours the French practice of demanding a body to authorise pension payments had led to a ‘gruesome’ trade in the dead and reports of corpses being dissected to claim double rewards. ‘I know from personal knowledge of a British body from which the tunic and pocket buttons were removed in order to destroy its identity,’ Windeyer told the Australian High Commissioner. The deputation demanded that each and every battlefield be searched again ‘by Britishers’ and made to yield up its harvest of dead for formal burial. And they suggested that ‘rewards should be paid to the Belgians and the French for the discovery of Australian bodies, as other nationalities paid for such information’. Cost should be no obstacle to the decent burial of ‘our dead’. The High Commissioner promised to put the concerns to the Government and within a fortnight Prime Minister Billy Hughes, still ‘the Little Digger’, announced that the Commonwealth would authorise ‘whatever expenditure may be necessary’ to resume the search for Australia’s missing.2

The search for Australia’s missing: A newspaper report in Adelaide details Windeyer’s ‘unwelcome allegations’ in London. News that the bodies of the dead were left exposed on the battleground caused great distress amongst relatives, as did even more sensational claims (relayed in newspaper columns across the country) about the dissection and trade in bodies. The report highlights the diplomatic sensitivities in recovering the war dead; note the High Commissioner’s claim that Australia could not act independently in the matter. Adelaide Register, 15 October 1921 courtesy National Library of Australia.

Windeyer returned to Australia in December 1921, carrying with him a folio of photographs and packets of seeds. He supported efforts to build a local memorial. A proud stone obelisk pointing to the sky, it helped heal the memory of battered bodies scattered across killing fields. Its simple inscription: ‘For the Brave 1914–1918.’

In 1936, the NSW Congress of the RSL presented W.A. Windeyer with a certificate of appreciation on behalf of returned men and their families. Four years later, Windeyer’s own boy Frank went to war. Frank would die of wounds received at the siege of Tobruk. Windeyer – who died in 1943 – would never see the grave of his son.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story draws on the biography by Windeyer’s grandson, J.B. Windeyer, W.A. Windeyer: Not Idle but Useless? Not he! (Canberra: J.B. Windeyer, 2011); J. M. Bennett, ‘Windeyer, William Archibald (1871–1943)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, adb.anu.edu.au/biography/windeyer-william-archibald-1063/text16157, published first in hardcopy 1990, accessed online 15 March 2015. This story also draws on contemporary newspaper accounts including a detailed survey of the British Australasian. For further information see the entry for Windeyer in Who’s Who in Australia, 1922 & 1938. The authors thank J.B. Windeyer for his detailed comments on this piece. The opinions expressed in this account are the authors’ alone.

1 Sydney Morning Herald, 2 August 1922; The Farmer and Settler, 4 August 1922.

2 Brisbane Courier, 15 October 1921; British Australasian, 20 January, 29 September 1921; Adelaide Register, 15 October 1921; Sydney Morning Herald, 7 February 1920, 10, 26 October 1921.