Mr Walter Beauchamp Bagenal was not a man to do anything by halves. His was a life dedicated to the interests of two very different parties.

As a young man Walter was apprenticed in Bordeaux, the wine capital of the world. There, the Irishman from County Carlow was schooled in the techniques of viticulture. In 1894, Walter ventured to the other side of the world to the newly planted vineyards of the Emu Wine Company in Victoria. A decade later, he married Marion, the daughter of a pastoralist family in Adelaide. Another decade passed, then the outbreak of war drew Walter back to Europe.

At the beginning of the war the AIF accepted men aged between 18 and 35. But enlistment levels fell as the casualty lists grew longer, and by 1915 the upper age limit had increased to 45. Walter Bagenal enlisted in 1916, the same month the first conscription referendum was held. At nearly 44 years of age, he was one of the older Anzacs.

Sapper Bagenal and the 10th Field Company Engineers were stationed on the Somme in 1918. On 24 April, more than two thousand shells blasted their position. Mustard gas and high explosives rained down from above. Several men were killed and Walter was severely wounded.

Walter was sent to the 3rd Southern General Hospital in England. A hasty operation saved his life but not his leg. A mangled toe on his right foot was cut away and his left leg was amputated just below the knee. Walter’s days as a soldier were well and truly over.

Walter Bagenal returned to Australia and became a founding member of the Victorian Limbless Soldiers’ Association. Rather than being subsumed by the RSL, the Association prized their independence and battled for their own brand of broken men. Walter was the Association’s first president and held that post for much of the 1920s. Many saw him as the limbless soldiers’ strongest advocate – a formidable committee man and zealous campaigner.

Their unique needs: A Limbless Soldiers’ Association of South Australia badge from their 1925 appeal. Fundraising was a major part of these associations’ work. Courtesy Laura James.

Their own brand of broken men: Walter Bagenal (far left) with delegates from the state branches of Limbless Soldiers’ Associations at a national meeting. The Chronicle noted there were only ‘five real legs between them’. The Chronicle, 16 September 1922 courtesy National Library of Australia.

Walter and his executive threw themselves into fundraising. They assisted over 750 crippled men, finding them work, distributing relief, even establishing school scholarships.

Alongside that voluntary service, Walter worked tirelessly to promote the burgeoning wine industry in Victoria. The Emu Wine Company went from strength to strength under his management and by the 1920s, Walter was earning a wage many Australians would have envied. That suited Walter perfectly: he had the time and the money to improve the lot of limbless men.

When governments needed badgering into action, it was Mr Bagenal who badgered them: Walter was a prominent figure in the Australian wine industry. He was a leader in the fight against phylloxera, a pest that devastates vineyards. Walter loyally worked for the Emu Wine Company for close to six decades; the company was one of the largest and most internationally recognisable brands of Australian wine. Here, Walter is judging the wines at the Wayville Showgrounds in 1929. According to the newspaper report, Walter ‘liked the bouquet on this one.’ The Register-News Pictorial, 29 October 1929 courtesy National Library of Australia.

Walter was never a man to settle for second best. The artificial legs issued by the Repatriation Department were heavy, crude and clumsy. In his own time and at his own expense, Walter experimented – fashioning a prosthetic limb from duralumin, an alloy of aluminum, copper, manganese and magnesium. The piece he produced was two pounds lighter than any apparatus issued by the Department, sparing much fatigue for the wearer.

A leg of his own invention: Former soldiers at work in the Artificial Limb Factory, South Melbourne. Workers can be seen carving an artificial foot and attaching a thumb to a prosthetic hand. Duralumin was introduced to the factory thanks to Walter’s research and development. The Argus, 24 January 1923 courtesy National Library of Australia.

At first the Department was skeptical – how could a wine-drinking Irishman know better than the experts? But success was a hard thing to ignore, and the Repatriation Department eventually entered into partnership with Walter. They began using his innovations at the Artificial Limb Factory in South Melbourne.

For much of his later life, Walter Bagenal lived in his wife’s home state of South Australia. No sooner had he arrived in Adelaide, he became a force in that state’s Limbless Soldiers’ Association. He also travelled the world over, refusing to accept the confinement and immobility that afflicted so many of the disabled.

In South Australia, as in Victoria, Walter divided his time between the men and the vines. He fought for the retention of pensions and benefits through the dark years of the Depression, and helped strengthen quarantine laws to protect a struggling industry. Walter was described as a ‘veritable apostle’ in the fight against phylloxera – a tiny, yellow pest that then threatened to destroy Australia’s youthful vineyards.

None of this was easy. Like all limbless men, Walter struggled every day against his injury. In 1927, he had a terrible fall, as his ‘bad leg’ gave way navigating down a flight of stairs. And then there were the pains: his stump swelled up each morning, circulation was a problem, there was a ‘progressive shortening’ of his good leg, and his skin was broken and tender where his ‘peg’ was attached. Walter’s weeping ulcers also refused to heal. But he never gave into them.

When Walter Bagenal died in 1952, the Department accepted his death was due to war service. Although he was nearly eighty, sympathetic doctors acknowledged the ‘mental stress [caused by] the difficulties and frustrations associated with the amputated leg’. He had lived too long in a ‘good deal of pains’ and the ‘sepsis associated with the stump’ had reached a dangerous level. In a sense, the war had killed Walter thirty-four years after his leg had been severed from his body.1

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story draws on Walter Bagenal’s repatriation file NAA: D63, H029717; his service dossier NAA: B2455, BAGENAL BW; 10th Field Company, Australian Engineers diary, AWM 14/29/15; 3rd Australian Pioneer Battalion diary AWM 14/15/18; and contemporary newspaper reports. For further reading on the Limbless Soldiers’ Association see Charles Henry Stevens, Limbless Soldiers’ Association of Victoria: Official History, 1921–1971 (Melbourne: Limbless Soldiers’ Association, 1971) and Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavment in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

1 NAA: D63, H029717-01.