Cecil Tarrant immigrated to Australia in 1910. His hometown was Treharris, in the Taff Bargoed Valley, South Wales. As with many young men, emigration promised something better. But five years after his arrival in Australia, Cecil was sailing back to Europe, a young recruit in the 15th Battalion.

Cecil’s war was brief and it was bloody. At first he was sent to the nursery sector at Armentières, to be schooled in what the generals called the ‘Art of Trench Warfare’. But there was very little art in what followed. Cecil Tarrant and his battalion were thrown into the carnage of Pozières. The 4th Division relieved the 2nd in the defence of the ruined township, and, like them, faced days of incessant bombardment. Then came the disastrous assault on Mouquet Farm, yet another costly attempt to take the high ground at Thiepval. July to November 1916 is known in the history books by the august title of the ‘Battle of the Somme’. Soldiers like Cecil had a far better name for it – they called it the ‘Great Fuck Up’.

It was at Mouquet Farm that Cecil received a gunshot wound to the face. His jaw, mouth and nose were shattered. Cecil spent a year and a half hospitalised in France, suffering an endless series of operations. Then he was moved to Sidcup Hospital in England for further treatment. From 1916 to 1919, Cecil Tarrant underwent forty-two separate surgeries, his jaw was rebuilt, dentures fitted and an ‘appliance’ placed in his left nostril. The wounds never seemed to heal and Cecil often bled profusely from the mouth. From the day he was wounded on the Somme, every breath he took, and every meal he ate, would be an effort for Cecil Tarrant.

Private Tarrant belonged to a generation determined to defy disability. Intent on earning a living for himself, he took on forty-five acres of farmland in the Tweed Valley, near Murwillumbah, just south of the Queensland border. But his injuries proved one of many handicaps. Cecil knew next to nothing about the local land, the seasons were bad and the markets indifferent. In his first year at Eungella, the farm yielded barely three cases of bananas per week, and returns from the dairy were minimal. Soon Cecil Tarrant’s debts were mounting.

On 25 April 1921, crowds gathered by war memorials all around Australia. They listened to speeches that honoured the bravery of soldiers and the debt the Empire owed the fallen. Honouring the debt to the living was quite another matter. At the very moment that these commemorations took place, the local bailiff charged into Tarrant’s home, repossessed the family’s furniture, confiscated a herd of dairy cows, and took whatever he fancied in farming equipment.

The Murwillumbah community was outraged. It was bad enough such a thing should happen at all, let alone on Anzac Day. A town meeting was called to discuss the treatment of Private Tarrant. Horrific photographs were shown to the audience, a graphic illustration of the way this faceless man had been pieced back together. The assembly gasped at the raw wounds, ‘a mute tribute to colossal suffering’.1

A mute tribute to colossal suffering3: Cecil Tarrant suffered terrible facial injuries in battle. These images show his initial wounds and the progress made by 1918. Se71-171 Cecil Tarrant Photographs courtesy Royal Australasian College of Surgeons.

The mayor declared that Tarrant’s farm was ‘hardly fit to grow an [onion]’ and that ‘it was impossible for him to make a living on it’.2 Rural communities are often close-knit, and Murwillumbah came to the aid of Cecil Tarrant, raising over £400 to help him.

Cecil Tarrant returned to the UK. Little is known of his life there. What we do know is that many men failed on the land in Australia, so many it taxed the funds and the patience of even the most caring rural township. And it seems very probable that this was not the last time Cecil Tarrant’s wounds became a perverse kind of ‘asset’. It was only the most disfigured men, the men who wore the wounds of war on their bodies, who could move communities to charity in the calamity of the Great Depression.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story draws on Cecil Tarrant’s service dossier NAA: B2455, TARRANT CECIL WILLIAM; his repatriation file NAA: C137, R90115; and contemporary newspaper reports. For studies of soldier settlement in this part of Australia, see Murray Johnson, ‘Promises and Pineapples: Post-First World War Soldier Settlement at Beerburrum, Queensland, 1916–29’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 51, no. 4, 2005, pp. 496–512; also Bruce Scates and Melanie Oppenheimer, The Last Battle of the Great War: Soldier Settlement in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

1 Richmond River Herald and Northern Districts Advertiser, 3 May 1921.

2 ibid.

3 ibid.