Tom Elliott’s name is one of more than a thousand chiselled into the memorial wall at VC Corner Cemetery in Fromelles. Etched in cold, white stone the names upon layered names cry out a nation’s loss. Amongst those names were Australia’s brightest and bravest – Tom Elliott included.

Etched in cold, white stone: Tom Elliott’s name is on the Memorial to the Missing at Fromelles. There are over four hundred men buried in this graveyard – all ‘Unknowns’. The authorities opted for two mass graves rather than row after row of tombstones reading only ‘An Australian Soldier Known Unto God’. Courtesy Bruce Scates.

Tom was one of eleven children. Thomas and Mary Elliott raised seven sons and four daughters and Tom was the eldest boy. His mother was bright, capable and had the courage of her convictions. Although she had trained as a midwife, was well informed and politically aware, she had never had the opportunity of any formal education. Mary was determined her children would not suffer the same limitations she had. Least of all the most promising of her children, Tom.

Tom enrolled as a cadet at the Royal Military College, Duntroon in 1912. The college was a very different establishment then to what it is today. Then, in just its second year, Duntroon was a remote institution, marooned in a vast bush landscape waiting on a city.

Duntroon offered Tom the kind of quality education he could not have otherwise had. Whatever its failings, the Australian Army was a young institution, unencumbered by ancient regimental traditions and determined to be something of a meritocracy. Tom may not have been born to power and privilege, but he placed first amongst more than one hundred entrants’ application tests. He secured a place at the college, and moved to Canberra from Sydney to attend.

Tom’s potential impressed his superiors. He was ‘methodical, brainy, plucky and resolute’, the kind of young man destined to succeed.1 After two years of academic and sporting achievement, Tom graduated third in his class. But term ended early: war had broken out in Europe and the freshly minted graduates of Duntroon were needed overseas.

Tom sailed off to war with the second contingent in December 1914. He fought at Gallipoli with the 7th Light Horse and was evacuated to Malta in September with severe enteritis. By June 1916, at just 22 years of age, Tom had achieved the rank of Major. He was sent to the Western Front to join Pompey Elliott’s 15th Brigade.

On July 16, 1916, just before six o’clock in the evening, Tom Elliott led his men out of the trenches at Fromelles. It was a fine summer night and, although the artillery barrage had scarred the landscape, enough of a wheat crop remained to glow gold in the sunset. That night the wheat was cut down by concentrated fire from the German trenches. Men fell in what was called ‘grazing fire’, Tom Elliott amongst them.

As with hundreds of men lost that night, Tom’s body was never recovered. A comrade had seen him falling in the mud with a ‘big gash in his back’ and bleeding profusely.2 But no one had seen him killed, and so technically Tom was missing. In the carnage at Fromelles, there was very little hope of survival. His commander, Brigadier General Pompey Elliott wrote a long and intimate letter to Tom’s family:

[His] personality and force of character impressed itself very forcibly on all he came in contact with . . . He was looked upon just before his death as a man likely to become a second Kitchener or Lord Roberts.3

A man likely to become a second Kitchener or Lord Roberts: Tom’s enrolment at Duntroon bound him to twelve years’ service in the military forces. Tragically his commitment went far beyond that. Courtesy Ross McMullin.

He hoped they could accept their loss and offered what comfort he could in their grief.

But Mary refused to accept that her darling boy was dead. Accounts of the battle were confused and contradictory, and what did that awful word ‘missing’ really mean?

It is an awful thing to leave a mother in dought [sic] . . . I have heard things here and there that made me dought [sic] he was killed, if you [k]now anything about what happened to him in mercy let me know the suspense is awful . . . I can’t make anything of the war but that it is wrong, wrong, wrong, from beginning to end.4

It wasn’t long before the sadness turned to anger:

I was a fool [to send] all my bread winners of the family [to the war] . . . when it is all over King George of England and the Kaiser will be kissin’ one another and wondering what it was all about.5

Bitter and disillusioned, Mary Elliott found no comfort in patriotic platitudes. Instead, she turned to drink. Beer was her ‘crutch’, she confessed. ‘I have no love for it, but it saved me from going mad when I was terribly depressed and worried.’6 Alcohol offered Mary a few hours of oblivion, for a time at least it pushed the demons away.

But not for long. Struggling with her grief and her addiction, Mary became known as a public nuisance. She was brought before the courts to enter charges of violent behaviour and threatening language. In August 1918, she was committed to Callan Park Mental Hospital. Discharged after inadequate treatment, her delusions, mania and drinking only worsened. By November she had been admitted to Parramatta Mental Hospital. She died there in June 1919 of Spanish influenza.

The war took everything from Mary Elliott: the boy she loved, her sanity, her purpose for living. In her time in hospital she was troubled by visions of Tom returning.

In a sense his loss was the first of many. Three more of her boys had served in the First AIF. Though all returned, they were, she insisted, ‘maimed by this wretched slaughter’. All Mary’s sons suffered multiple wounds, and Norman, Tom’s younger brother, died of tuberculosis at 21 years of age.

Not content with killing my good noble son in your rotten commercial war and cheating me and his helpless brothers and sisters, my other three sons have been maimed for life in the wretched slaughter7: The Great War tore the Elliott family apart beyond the sad deaths of Tom (far right) and Mary. Norm Elliott (second from the left) died of tuberculosis not long after his repatriation home. Ernie Elliott (far left) suffered from nerves after the war and would often beat his brothers. Evening News, 21 July 1916 courtesy National Library of Australia.

The Memorial to the Missing at Fromelles honours the name of Major Tom Elliott. Every year, Australian pilgrims visit the site, patriotic speeches are made, flags raised in the air and the white stone piled high with flowers. But few remember Mary Elliott, or the price that ‘rotten commercial war’ exacted on her generation.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story draws on the service dossier of Major Thomas Patrick Elliott NAA B2455, ELLIOTT TP; his Red Cross Missing and Wounded file AWM 1DRL/0428; and contemporary newspaper reports. The story of Tom Elliott also features in Ross McMullin, Farewell Dear People: Biographies of Australia’s Lost Generation (Brunswick: Scribe Publishing, 2012); and Jennifer Roberts, ‘Bereft: War, Grief and Experiences of the Asylum, 1915–1935’ (PhD thesis, University of Wollongong, 2013).

1 RossMcMullin, Farewell Dear People (Brunswick: Scribe Publishing, 2012), p. 113.

2 Red Cross Wounded and Missing file AWM 1DRL/0428 Major Thomas Patrick Elliott.

3 Letter from Pompey Elliott, cited in Farewell Dear People, p. 157.

4 Mary Elliott, Letter to Major Lean, 14 May 1918, NAA: B2455, ELLIOT TP.

5 Mary Elliott, cited in Farewell Dear People, p. 165.

6 Letter from Mary Elliott, cited in Farewell Dear People, p. 160.

7 Mary Elliott to Defence Minister, cited in Farewell Dear People, p. 167.