World War I

Revealing Lives—Hiram and Me

/ Tessa Wooldridge / 4 Comments

My grandfather returned from the First World War in 1919. He worked ferociously for 18 years to build a family, a career, a community, a nation. And then he died.

I never knew him.

Getting to know you

I’m reaching an age where family history beckons me. I have time to ask questions now. Who were the people who came before me, what shaped their lives, how have their lives shaped mine? Today, it’s easy to answer basic questions about living people. Our lives are documented and captured ad nauseum, often unwittingly and unknowingly. My brother-in-law, for example, doesn’t own any electronic devices and he’s never used a computer. He might be surprised at the extent of his online presence—news articles, photographs, community records—none of it intentionally generated by him. Even without Twitter or Instagram or Facebook accounts, he’s easy to ‘find’.

Compare that with my grandfather’s life a century ago. No internet, no mobile phones, even cameras are a novelty. How do I come to know this man? His name is Hiram.

The curated life

I have an assortment of physical items that once belonged to my grandfather. Among them, a certificate verifying his membership of the Juvenile Order of Rechabites and a card outlining the rules for his local Harriers club. There’s the receipt from the hotel where he and my grandmother spent their first night as a married couple, and a business card for the real estate agency he set up with his brother-in-law. There are pictures of the town carnival he helped establish and his handwritten notes for speeches delivered at political rallies. Most numerous of all is the memorabilia from his war service: colour patches, medallions, poems, photographs, postcards, international currency, leave passes.

What strikes me is how intentional this collection is. It has already been carefully curated (and censored?) to provide a version of his life; each item deliberately retained by my grandfather, then by his wife and, later, by their daughter—my mother. It’s private and personal.

The subject in the frame—changing perspectives

Through the objects in the curated collection, I can discover what my grandfather considered important. I can see how he chose to be seen—a teetotaller, an amateur athlete, a husband, a businessman, a community leader, a political activist, a serviceman. But there are other sources of information, too. Does the material they hold align with the image he preserved?

There is the public record—family notices in newspapers, published obituaries, cemetery listings and the like, and there are official sources—certificates from Births, Deaths and Marriages; military service records; repatriation files.

In both the public and official sources, Hiram loses agency. Another person or organisation takes charge of his life narrative, and their intentions differ from his. It’s like changing the lens in a camera—the subject in the frame remains the same, but the perspective shifts.

Let me give you an example. There is a whispered story in my family, gleaned from relatives long dead. The story goes that my grandfather died from the effects of mustard gas poisoning, sustained during the war. My understanding is that the longer-term health effects of mustard gas inhalation are respiratory disease and, potentially, lung cancer. Hiram’s death certificate—an official source—records his cause of death as kidney cirrhosis, hyperpiesia (persistent high blood pressure) and heart failure. His lungs were fine. So what is the story behind the bare facts? Is the family’s mustard gas tale a furphy and, if it is, why was it told?

 Change the lens again and yet another perspective is revealed.

Hiram’s Repatriation Commission files detail his medical condition over a period of 20 years. His reported symptoms include headaches, insomnia, ‘nerve trouble’ and a ‘feeling of depression’. The symptoms are attributed to the ‘strain of active service’. (His treatment comprised tonics, sedatives and liniments.) Am I now looking at a man diminished by shell shock, or what, today, I would call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? No hint of this possibility exists in the brief obituary published in the Melbourne Age. Lauded in this source for his community engagement, Hiram is quintessentially a ‘well known member of the 59th Battalion’.

The privately collated collection, the whispered family folklore, the public record, and the official sources offer variant versions of one life.

The revelations of time travel

Cover image courtesy of Black Inc.

In his book The Art of Time Travel: Historians and Their Craft, Tom Griffiths writes: ‘History … is a powerful disciplinary tool in the search for truth. But its greatest virtue is uncompromising complexity. As we study the past it changes before our eyes, affected by our gaze and eluding definitive capture … The art of time travel is to maintain a critical poise and grace in this dizzy space. There is a further hazard: we never return to exactly the same present from which we left, for time cycles on remorselessly even when we seek to defy it. And in the course of our quest we find that we, too, have changed’ (p. 321).

The question I posed initially about my grandfather was: ‘How do I come to know this man?’ One answer is, ‘I can’t’. I can know about him, using the historian’s tools. I can glean something of what he thought significant in his own life, and I can see how he is rendered by others. The essential Hiram may be undiscoverable.

But perhaps there is another question worth asking.

As I seek to rediscover an ancestral life, how might that quest change me?

There may be hazards, as Griffiths warns, in time travel. There could also be gifts.

Links and sources

Useful starting points for information on the lives of 19th and 20th century Australians include:

  • Trove: a gathering of content from ‘libraries, museums, archives, repositories and other research and collecting organisations big and small’
  • ‘Family History’, National Library of Australia: a research guide that includes links to directories; almanacs; electoral rolls; Births, Deaths and Marriages registers; and answers to ‘Frequently Asked Questions’
  • Ryerson Index: an ‘index to death notices appearing in Australian newspapers’ from 1803 onwards
  • National Archives of Australia
  • Australian Dictionary of Biography
  • And, for information on returned services personnel, the Australian War Memorial

‘Mustard Gas’, World Health Organisation, 2011

Tom Griffiths. The Art of Time Travel: Historians and Their Craft. Carlton, Vic.: Black Inc., 2016

G. A. Henty and Australia—Part II

/ Tessa Wooldridge / 2 Comments

A selection of G. A. Henty titles from the National Library of Australia’s collection.

It’s the opening decade of the 20th century. Right across the British Empire, boys are filling their heads with imaginings of adventure and fighting and war. They are supping at English author G. A. Henty’s fictional table and they are replete.

(You can read more about Henty and his copious output here.)

Reading Henty ‘Down Under’

Among this squadron of imperial boy readers is a troop from the Australian colonies.

Let’s picture one of these colonial lads; we’ll call him Tom. It’s December 1908 and Tom is 11 years old. He receives, as his end-of-year school book prize, a copy of Henty’s By Conduct and Courage: A Story of the Days of Nelson.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 12 December 1908: 18.

Perhaps Tom, or his brothers, had received other Henty titles over the years and this new book will be added to the family collection. (Imagine there are copies of Under Wellington’s Command: A Tale of the Peninsular War and With Kitchener in the Soudan already on the shelves at home.) Suppose, too, that Tom’s father, who had read serialisations of Henty tales in the newspaper when he was a boy, has borrowed a Henty title from the local Mechanics’ Institute. The lad’s father recalls devouring The Young Colonists: A Tale of the Zulu and First Boer Wars when he was Tom’s age. Now he plans to share it with his son.

 Be Ready to ‘Play a Young Man’s Part’

Frontispiece. By Conduct and Courage: A Story of the Days of Nelson.

Tom reads Henty fictions as if they are historical fact; he is convinced by the author’s declarations of careful research. He imbibes the Henty philosophy—boys should grow up to be ‘bold, straightforward, and ready to play a young man’s part, not to be milksops’. He also absorbs Henty’s ‘horror of a lad who displayed any weak emotion and shrank from shedding blood, or winced at any encounter’ (Fenn, p. 334).

What effect do these narratives have on Tom’s emerging sense of self? Maybe he pictures himself, in a bygone time, standing beside Nelson on the Victory, or with Wellington in Spain or Kitchener at the Battle of Omdurman. Tom’s understanding of the world, and his potential role in it, is being forged by Henty.

Now jump forward seven years to 1915.

Tom has just turned 18 and war is talking hold on the Balkan Peninsula. Advertisements appear in newspapers across Australia imploring men to ‘enlist now!’ Do Tom’s memories of Henty’s historical tales blend readily with these fresh calls to fight for the ‘Great British Empire’?

The Brisbane Telegraph. 22 September 1915: 4.

Henty himself certainly believed his stories had a tangible effect on his youthful readers. The author’s entry in the Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature states: ‘Some of the jingoism and enthusiasm to serve in the army that marked the beginning of the First World War is sometimes laid at [Henty’s] door, and indeed he wrote with pleasure in the Boy’s Own Paper (1902) that “officers of the Army and Volunteers have assured me that my books have been effectual in bringing young fellows into the Army”’ (p. 243).

And So to War

Writing from a southern hemisphere perspective in 2006, Angela Woollacott, in her book Gender and Empire, argues that Henty’s stories ‘imparted to the rising generation of soldiers, colonial administrators, and citizens of both colonies and metropole a visceral sense of the excitement and importance of the empire … Generations of British and white-settler boys’, says Woollacott, learnt ‘that the empire proffered an amazing array of exciting places where they could test their mettle and prove their worthiness to family, God and country’ (p. 60).

And so, in 1915, Tom and the ‘rising generation’ enlisted in the AIF—a fighting force that meshed both ‘Australian’ and ‘Imperial’ identities.

Field Artillery Brigade, Chateaux Wood, 29 October 1917. Frank Hurley, photographer.

In 1919, some of them came home. Were they still thinking of Henty’s valorisation of the British at war? And, if they were, might they have agreed with Henty’s biographer, George Manville Fenn, that Henty’s images of fighting were ‘here and there a little too bright in hue’ (p. 321).

 A Postscript

As I was writing this Henty instalment, I happened to read the transcript of an address delivered at a higher education conference in March 2017 by Jeffrey Bleich, US Ambassador to Australia, 2009-2013. In the course of his talk, Bleich reminded his audience of the changes wrought by the second Industrial Revolution during the period 1875 to 1915. ‘It fundamentally transformed how people live’, he said.

Like the ‘disruptive technologies’ of the current Digital Revolution, these rapid and extensive changes left much of that earlier population with feelings of uncertainty, disorientation and anxiety. Bleich’s observations made me wonder whether those Australians who went to fight for Empire in 1915 ultimately discovered that they were fighting for a world that had already past—just like the worlds in G. A. Henty’s novels.

The Third Henty Instalment

The third (and final) part of this reflection on G. A. Henty will take a closer look at Henty’s only Australian novel—A Final Reckoning: A Tale of Bush Life in Australia.

First instalment of serialisation. Weekly Times (Melbourne), 11 April 1891: 5.

Links and Sources: