The following is the text of a speech given by JAMES PARKER to the 11am service at Nubeena on Anzac Day, 2022. Lest we forget.
May I say that I am honoured to be asked to talk to you today, and, in this time of a return to war in Europe, I want to point out the shocking consequences of war at a local and personal level. I may touch on some parallels on the Ukraine war but I am not qualified to comment on that conflict in any depth.
So, rather than comment on the war in the Ukraine, I am going to return to the First World War, and try to show the effect it had on Australian society, by telling the story of the foundation members of the Premaydena Cricket Club. I have here the pocket-book in which minutes of meetings were recorded and accounts were kept.
And the thing is, you can tell the story of the War – or the Australian experience of it – through the story of those young men from a small orcharding community who founded a cricket club in late 1912. This was to be ready for competition in the summer of 1912 to 1913. Yes, 1913 – you shiver don’t you, because you know what was going to happen. But in 1913, no-one saw the war coming. There are even notes from 1914 getting ready for the upcoming season.
The years 1913-14 just weren’t like the 1930s when everyone saw the gathering storm clouds before the Second World War. Until the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, no one saw a huge war coming. In Britain, the so-called Golden Summers of the Edwardian era, leading up to the war, were a time of prosperity for the expanding middle class and of rising wages for the workers. And it was a golden era for cricket as well; there in Britain and here in Australia. Victor Trumper was the star of the Sydney Cricket Ground – where my father saw him bat when dad was a boy. Everyone, including the ruling classes, was blissfully unaware of the approaching storm. No-one saw the war coming.
And in a way this does have a parallel with the present war in Ukraine in that there had been a low-level, but an actual shooting war, in the Balkans for some years before 1914, but the Great Powers weren’t paying attention – until the Archduke and his wife Sophie were killed. Likewise, there has been a low level but shooting war going on in the east of Ukraine since 2014, and the European Union and the United States have been ignoring it. But no-one saw Putin’s amazing expansion of hostilities coming until January 2022, just as the Great Powers didn’t start negotiating until July 1914, when it was too late.
In 1914, Australian society was considered the Worker’s Paradise.
So there are parallels, and one parallel is the effect on non-combatants both in the war zone and in safe countries. There were actions against civilians by German troops in Belgium which were used as recruiting propaganda, and here in Australia with lurid cartoons by Norman Lindsay. We don’t need cartoons to see the atrocities in Ukraine – they are there on television.
In 1914, Australian society was considered the Worker’s Paradise. Because of the actions of the unions, the courts and the Labor Party, and with the consent of the ruling classes, the rapid recovery from the economic depression of the 1890s meant that Australia was not only a very prosperous society, but possibly the most egalitarian in the “western” world. Women had the vote, and a living wage had been established in the International Harvester case of 1907. That judgement proclaimed that a minimum (basic) wage must be paid to a worker sufficient to allow a family of four to live in “modest comfort”. The case had been decided in the new Court of Arbitration and Conciliation – all the Federal institutions were brand new, including the defence forces. The Australian Navy – basically composed of old British ships – sailed into Sydney Harbour in 1913, another event witnessed by my father as a boy.
Here on the Tasman Peninsula, refrigerated shipping to England had allowed the orcharding industry to become very profitable in just a few decades of free settlement after the convict days. So life was good – good enough for the young men of Premaydena to set up a cricket club; annual subscription to be 5/-, a not inconsiderable sum. The names in this book will resonate with many of you: names such as Greatbatch, Locke, Ridler, Spaulding, Noye and Kingston. These are names still connected to the Tasman Peninsula.
By 1917, 12 of the men who names are recorded in this book were away at the war, most of them on the Western Front and in extreme danger. By the end of the war three of them were dead.
Let us now go on to the war with them.
The Australian forces included the (mainly) Tasmanian 12th battalion, one member of which was Signalman Sidney Granville Locke.
After distinguished but ultimately unsuccessful service on Gallipoli, the Australians went to France. After the first rapid advance of the Germans in August 1914, the war on the Western Front had descended into an enormously bloody stalemate, often referred to as a mincing machine.
The Battle of Menin Road was a typical action of this period. It was designed to advance the British Lines in Flanders about 1,000 metres up to a ruined forest called the Polygon Wood on the Passchendaele Ridge. This was to be achieved in a huge assault by massed artillery followed up by infantry occupying the ground and was to take place over just one day, September 20, 1917. The attacking force consisted of seven divisions of British troops and two divisions of Australians, with seven British divisions in reserve. In other words, more than 100,000 troops.
The Australian forces included the (mainly) Tasmanian 12th battalion, one member of which was Signalman Sidney Granville Locke. Before the war, Sid had been his father Tommy Locke’s greatest helper in his blacksmithing business, which included manufacture of a wire strainer which Tom had patented. The athletic Sid was Tom’s striker – the man who wielded the hammer – but he also undertook sales and promotion work. On one promotional trip to Victoria, Sid ran in the Stawell Gift, Australia’s richest foot race.
His physique would have suited him well for the work of a signaller, which was physically demanding.
The 12th moved up to the line around 2am (“rather late”, one observer said), but they were in position by 4am in a place on the ridge called Glencorse Wood when they were shelled. Their jumping-off tape was just 135m from the forward German posts, but they managed to avoid this barrage by moving further forward and a bit left – closer to the German posts and, presumably, beyond their jumping-off line.
During this manoeuver, Signalman Locke would have been laying telephone wires designed to keep the command post in touch with the front-line. Radio communication had existed for some years by 1917, but it was largely restricted to naval use. It is not hard to understand how easily these land-laid telephone lines could be disrupted by an artillery barrage, necessitating repair by the signallers under the shellfire of the same barrage, a very dangerous job.
As the German shelling went on until the start of the Allied attack at 5.40am, we can confidently say that Signalman Locke had a night of hard, dangerous work and no sleep. While the 12th advanced to “the Blue Line” – one of their intermediate objectives – Sid was hit by a shell and lost one of his legs below the knee. Despite applying a tourniquet, the wound became infected and Sidney Locke died two days later. His body was lost in the continued fighting, and his memorial is just an inscription on the Menin Gate.
In the outrageous context of the war on the Western Front, the Battle of Menin Road was considered completely successful. Objectives were gained on time because the massive artillery bombardment had destroyed defences and completely demoralised the defenders. And, thanks to the work of signallers like Sidney Locke, commanders had managed to co-ordinate artillery and infantry. But at what a cost. The Australians alone had casualties of 5,000. And, as we have seen, one of them was Sidney Locke.
His father Tom Locke never recovered. Tom was quite a man. The wire strainer he had invented is the one we still use – the one which all Australian farmers are familiar with. But the loss of Sid seems to have knocked the stuffing out of Tom and he let his patent lapse and stopped working the blacksmithing business. He did go on farming but his interest in cricket seems to have diminished, despite several of his sons playing for Premaydena. Before the war, Tom had been patron of the club; after the war his name does not appear in this book. The death of his son destroyed his life. And he wasn’t alone.
I suspect Norman was a really good cricketer, because I’ve seen the later generations play, including New Zealand’s Mark Greatbatch (same family) who scored 149 not out and held out the Australians all day to hang on for a draw in Perth in 1989.
Imagine the effect of a letter from the authorities in 1925 to James and Lottie Greatbatch saying that that the body of their son, Norman, had been exhumed body in France and re-buried it in an Imperial War Graves Cemetery with all due ceremony – this after they had been fighting the government for years to get acknowledgement and recompense for their son’s death.
Not, I would have thought, an easy letter to digest.
I suspect Norman was a really good cricketer, because I’ve seen the later generations play, including New Zealand’s Mark Greatbatch (same family) who scored 149 not out and held out the Australians all day to hang on for a draw in Perth in 1989.
Like his fellow Premaydena cricketer, Sid Locke, Norman was in the 12th Battalion, and like Sid, Norman died from wounds to one of his legs. Norman nearly made it to the end of the war. He had just returned to his unit, following time in hospital, when he was killed in an assault on the Hindenburg Line in September 1918. This was a time in the war when the Australians were having great success, being used as “shock troops” in what had become a war of movement after the years of stalemate. But that success was coming at fearful cost. Casualties were so high, and reinforcements so low, that Australian battalions were operating at less than 30 per cent of their nominal strength.
One other Premaydena cricketer didn’t come home. James Lacy of Koonya had joined the Light Horse. He also died in September 1918, but not in action – he died in Egypt from septicaemia complicated by malaria. So in all, 12 Premaydena cricketers went off to the war – a very high joining-up rate – and a quarter of them didn’t come home, which was about the national average. As I have often said, war touched everyone.
And so, a great number of damaged soldiers came home to a society that didn’t really understand what they had been through.
And what happened when those who had survived the war and the following influenza pandemic? What happened when they came home. Were they whole? Or were they suffering from what we now call PTSD? This was known, and dismissed, at the time, with various names. A chap might be “windy” or he might be thought a “shirker” or he could even be considered to have “shellshock”. Some officers were taken away and treated for this; not many in the lower ranks were.
And so, a great number of damaged soldiers came home to a society that didn’t really understand what they had been through – and they resented it. Going back to my dad, as an 18-year-old boy at Sydney University in 1919, he found the “returned men” rather intimidating.
At the Premaydena Cricket Club, the recreation ground was cleared and cricket came back, with three of the returned men signing up to play again. So life went on but it was, of course, much altered: as I say, that war touched everyone in Australia.
. . .
In the end, the connection between all conflicts is the grief. I can’t imagine the grief of Tom Locke or Lottie Greatbatch over the loss of their sons more than 100 years ago, but I saw it on TV on the face of a very young mother in Ukraine just a week ago. She had just seen her three-year-old son killed. She wasn’t in floods of tears; she seemed to be numb, perhaps in shock, at the complete horror of what had happened. That to me was the face of war and its shocking consequences.
They have to be fought, of course, in the face of terrible aggression such as the Second War and the present conflict in Ukraine, but the consequences are always more than is predicted. And while we remember and honour the combatants, we must remember the non-combatants, the people who have no choice, but are killed or maimed or thrown into grief anyway. We must remember them as well.
James Parker is a Tasmanian historian (but with deep connections to Sydney), who writes and talks on mainly colonial subjects – especially convicts, women and the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.