Bill had a truncated education—just a handful of years at a state school. Since leaving school at fourteen, he had variously laboured on a farm, learnt carpentry skills, and ridden as a rough-and-ready jockey breaking-in horses.
Early in the First World War, the Brand family was living in Melbourne. Bill’s father, a self-taught carpenter, had signed up for service with the Australian Light Horse in 1915, but had already been invalided out. A desperate call went out for young men to volunteer for the armed forces; the nineteen-year-old Bill Brand was one who answered. Not, perhaps, an ideal candidate but at least he would replace his father.
Bill’s father was a victim of paralysing malaria on the Gallipoli Peninsula, and suffered concussion. He also had that ubiquitous First World War sickness—shell shock—which seemed to embrace a dozen different diagnoses. He was discarded from the Australian Army, unfit, one month before his son stepped into the Melbourne Town Hall on 7 July 1916 to enlist.
It was a dismal day that dawned on Melbourne, and, in an obscure light, so typical of that southern city in winter, William Henry Brand entered the Town Hall, along with a handful of other men. There was not only a depressed weather pattern upon Melbourne that greasy and miserable July day, but there was a dark mood constricting the city. War news filled the newspapers.
Examined by the army doctor, Bill, fully stretched, stood at a jockey’s altitude, five feet five and three-quarter inches, and weighed a smidgeon below a bantamweight at eight stone. A yellowing army file tells us that his swarthy skin was discoloured by a mole, a burn scar and vaccination marks. Later, the Sherlock Holmes in John Cade would have seized on each blemish as a story to unfold from this would-be soldier’s past—and it was a more varied and pockmarked past than Bill’s scant testimony suggested. He had spent many rough hours as a labourer in a tannery and, kicked by a horse years before, his right knee was rickety. But nothing and no one betrayed its weakness that day.
Bill’s body was pored over by his medical reviewer for syphilis, defective intelligence, haemorrhoids and traces of corporal punishment. None were found and he was passed medically fit. At no stage, apparently, was he asked about a history of mental illness.
The official archives suggest that Bill may have attempted to join the Australian Light Horse, like his father, but for reasons unknown was accepted into the infantry.
Atop each page of his army file sits his regimental number, unit and battalion, embedded digits that in later years no mental illness could ablate and, even in moments of madness, came to him with ease:
Private William Brand
Regimental No. 6618
21st Unit of the 7th Battalion
To the army he was always known as William Henry Brand, but everyone called him Bill.
In a few scratchy but revealing lines poking above the parapet, the army dossier records Bill as a ‘Driver’ (presumably of motor cars) and unmarried, living in the city of Melbourne. He had been neither dismissed ‘with disgrace’ from the military nor did he admit to any police record, nor was he deemed ‘incorrigible or worthless’ in the penetrating eyes of Australian law. There was little to distinguish him from the thousands of other working-class men who flocked to the call of mother Britain—except on one point. Bill had already been rejected once as ‘unfit for His Majesty’s Service’ because of his ‘weak constitution’. What that meant is never explained and, it would seem, in this hour of dire national need, such doubts were swept aside.
William Henry Brand signed his name on his attestation papers: a gawky ‘W’ and ‘H’ suggest a schoolboy’s best hand. His writing is clumsy—ungainly curlicues—constructed rather than written, like a student composing his first signature to please a teacher. Bill took his Oath of Enlistment and committed until the end of the war ‘unless sooner lawfully discharged, dismissed, or removed’—a prescient phrase.
Bill embarked from Melbourne, along with scores of other troops, on 2 October 1916, aboard the Nestor, arriving six weeks later in Plymouth, England.
On board he fell sick, and upon arrival in England he was carted to an isolation hospital in Salisbury. His diagnosis was uncertain. He had two lumbar punctures—thin metal probes inserted into his lower back to siphon off the fluid from around his spinal cord and brain—to confirm a possible diagnosis of meningitis. Diagnosed with the suggestive but ultimately vague label of ‘cerebrospinal fever (mild case)’, it was reported that Bill ‘has periods of permanent excitement . . . lacks comprehension . . . does not remember much at all’. His diagnosis was an enigma to his doctors.
Bill’s military dossier continues as a string of brief, punctuated statements; the air of turbulence that pervades his life is unmistakeable.
Three months later he was marched from the hospital to his military base. His right knee—the one kicked by a horse years earlier—swelled with fluid during each forced march until Bill could step no more.
Within days he was readmitted to another military hospital, from which he absconded on a three-day escapade. On return, he—in the perverse language of the army—was ‘awarded 72 hours detention’ and was forced to cough up five days’ pay. Five weeks later he was marched to his depot. Medical probing found him less than ‘A’ class and—while what distinguished ‘A’ from ‘B’ category of human health was never revealed—he was scrutinised closely. By July 1917 Bill, now a serial nuisance within army ranks, created ‘a disturbance at about midnight . . . damaging government property four panes of glass valued at 5 shillings’. He was forced to make reparations, and pay back the damage bill. Further hospitalisation and detentions followed.
There is an air of the scruffy, of disrepute, if not quite of the unlawful when one read’s Bill’s military file. And while his may have been an aberrant, disruptive personality on the loose, it rather has the thrum of an awakening mental illness.
Bill’s eight months in England were a mishmash of detentions in various hospitals and army depots; and of disorganised and petty criminal behaviour that saw him packed up and on board a ship heading home to Melbourne by the middle of 1917. As Bill prepared to voyage back to Australia, his medical attendant, in a statement not reassuring to the crew, warned: ‘This man is suffering from dementia and should be under control.’ Whatever medical diagnosis afflicted him, Bill’s mind was unleashed and beyond understanding.
Not a great deal is recorded of Bill’s wayward return voyage but clearly it was not without its problems. The swelling about his knee subsided and he roamed the tilting decks without a limp; although obedient for the most part, Bill’s excitability was more expansive than the normal range of human experience and, at times, spilled into fits of violence. Occasionally he sat in a trance, prompting the obscure and almost menacing aside that this man ‘acts strangely’.
Feeble and brain-addled, Bill arrived back home to Melbourne, a casualty of war before he’d made the Western Front. Back on land, he seemed befuddled. At times he confounded his medical examiners. Had he been to France, they interrogated repeatedly. He couldn’t answer. What work might he like to do? He didn’t know that either.
Bill’s eyes looked down upon his hands; one was scarred. He couldn’t recall when or how it was damaged. At every turn Bill was a baffling conundrum. His doctors swayed between a kind of sympathetic understanding of his plight and the harder-edged conclusion that there was a whiff of malingering. Regardless of such professional pontificating, Bill was a changed man: sometimes listless, sometimes roaring at his inquisitors. At times, after a momentary flourish, he’d slump back and sit quietly, wasted, refusing to take in food.
Frustrating his doctors, Bill was cross-examined: if he showed no eagerness to return to his previous work then what might he like to do with the rest of his life? Of that, Bill was certain, and wrote: ‘uncertain’.
Bill was dosed up with a concoction of ‘triple bromides’—a standard sedative mix of the day—and admitted to hospital.
His doctors tried to slot him into a box: the diagnoses flew about, tryi
ng to hit their mark. He was reported as having concussion but no evidence was forwarded. At other times he was reported as being clear of fits; whether these were fits of violence or epilepsy is never clear, but more likely the former. Was it shell shock, the doctors asked. But there was no evidence that he reached France or was near any exploding shells of any kind. Meningitis, perhaps? The evidence was illusory. The medical fraternity scratched about, like chooks in a henhouse, seeking a diagnosis; none was forthcoming.
Sometimes Bill spoke in a distant, dreamy manner, as if his body had returned from overseas but his mind still wandered abroad. He told his doctors that he recollected leaving Melbourne but was ‘unable to remember anything on the other side’, as if ‘the other side’ was some ethereal place for lost souls.
Flummoxed, the doctors discharged him home to his parents. But it did not last, and his despondent father, unable to cope with Bill’s oddities, trudged back to the hospital with his son in his wake. On arrival at the hospital, an unconcerned Bill blithely gave away all his personal belongings.
In December 1917, three months after he had landed back in Melbourne, Bill was formally discharged from the Australian Army as medically unfit and sent home again.
The Repatriation Department classified Bill as 100 per cent fully disabled, a conclusion one would have thought was not too difficult to arrive at.
Six months later, Bill forlornly wrote: ‘I have been unemployed since discharge. My present state of health is as follows: Cerebrospinal meningitis. I suffer from pains in back and severe headaches. Shell Shock.’
Two weeks after writing this, Bill vanished from his father’s care; hot-headed, he grabbed a car and drove several hours from Melbourne to Bendigo, reckless and oblivious to cost. Bill, despite his disjointed mind, had the wits to steal money from a friend in Bendigo. In his turbulent wake came the police. They reported him as ‘mentally affected’ and ‘missing for two weeks . . .’
Bill was arrested as a public nuisance, returned to Melbourne, and taken to Royal Park Receiving House, the major psychiatric reception centre in the state of Victoria. In an obliterating gesture Bill was labelled as ‘mental’, explaining nothing, yet apparently everything.
Bill bubbled into Royal Park, all affability, and casually confessed to his doctors that he had attacked his brother violently over a trifle, and then took a motor car from Melbourne to Bendigo. He was ‘voluble and talkative; inordinately self-satisfied [and] appears to have no sense of the seriousness of his position. His own account of himself exhibits evidence of most erratic conduct and loss of self-control . . . And with regard to the civil charge hanging over him he seems to regard himself as the injured person. Ward reports show him to be “simple” and in consequence I have no doubt that he is irresponsible.’
The Inspector-General of the Insane, a title more in keeping with Edwardian militarism than the care of those in such private pain, wrote on behalf of Bill:
Lunacy Department,
Melbourne,
9th August 1918.
‘In re ex-Pte, William Henry Brand, 6618, 7th Battalion,
This lad . . . returning to this country as a mental case . . . has committed a felony in Bendigo.
He is allowed out on bail and has to appear at the Supreme Court in Bendigo . . .
There is no doubt that the boy is mentally unstable, and in my opinion he should not be held responsible for his crime. In the first place it is necessary to rescue him from the consequences of his act, and subsequently to put him in some position in which he can be prevented from misbehaving in a similar manner.
I am,
Yours faithfully,
W Ernest Jones
Inspector-General of the Insane
The letter was a slender moment of understanding, and less than one week later, ex-Private W.H. Brand was released from all charges ‘as insane’.
Bill was transferred to the nearby Royal Park Hospital for the Insane and confined there for five months. A diagnosis of ‘adolescent mania’ was made with a nod, probably, to evidence that his illness had roots before adulthood. When he departed the asylum, the Repatriation Department concluded that Bill’s incapacity for earning a livelihood was now only three quarters. What this actually meant and how they arrived at this conclusion is never made clear, but apparently with the viable one quarter he had left, Bill was supposed to make a living.
It did not take long for Bill’s health to further decay. He wrote—pulling together his splintered mind—and argued for a fairer pension. He complained that in cold weather his gammy leg ached and that he suffered from ‘defective vision in the left eye; shooting pain in the region of the heart; giddiness at times’.
Out of hospital he tried the arduous work of horse-breaking as a form of casual employment, giving new meaning to the term ‘casual’. But his failing health made breaking horses nigh on impossible.
Living a pinched existence—with no appetite, pain racking his head—at only 25 years of age he presented to the Repatriation Board like an old man: his hands were discoloured blue; his legs leaked pus and his scarred knee was an ever-present reminder of life before the First World War. Sometimes he was giddy and swayed, his memory always fuzzy. England during the war years was more a dream than reality.
To the machinery of government, Bill Brand was an irritant to be extruded. The response was pitiless; his pension was cut.
In appeals for more money, he stated: ‘My ground of appeal is that I am suffering from effects of Gas and spine troubles’ (although there is no evidence of any ‘Gas’ exposure during the war). The scar on his right hand, of which previously he could not recall the cause, was now recorded as a gunshot wound. The truth was that Bill was mentally ill. Gusts of mania knocked him about and imagined voices pestered him.
Bill was up against it whenever he applied for reconsideration of his pension—military custom, misplaced medical certitude, and the inertia of indifference conspired against him. Whenever he asked for a raise, it was with the wavering conviction of a man accustomed to rebuke. Each rejection rankled. In many ways his pension battle was the real war that Bill waged, not the one he never fought in Europe. It was with the aggrieved air of the misunderstood—the eternal lot of the mentally ill—that Bill put pen to paper.
In 1923, Bill’s life changed unexpectedly when, against all the odds, he met and married a girl with the enchanting name of Pearl Patten. Bill was smitten by Pearl, whose delightfully alliterated name charmed all before her. Pearl was a working-class girl who laboured at the local Pelaco shirt factory and Bill was lucky to find her. Family history has it that Pearl’s brother, Gordon—a carpenter like Bill—brought Bill home from work to meet Pearl. It was a match made not so much in heaven as in rough-hewn Richmond, an inner-city suburb of Melbourne. To the Patten family he was always ‘Bill’.
Pearl was a nurturing woman—by instinct and necessity; she became the sole carer for her younger brothers after their father abandoned the family, and her mother died young. We can only imagine that Bill was, at best, an unsteady suitor. But in a Richmond terrace, on a summer’s day in early 1923, Bill and Pearl married.
When Bill came into Pearl’s life, the family oral history is that Pearl latched on to him for security; in that assessment she would be terribly wrong. One year after marriage Bill was driving cars for a living but sometimes worked as a wood machinist or gardener or labourer for extra money, but often there was nothing. He fronted up for another medical assessment and was depressed, thin, coughing and blue; repeatedly tested for tuberculosis and syphilis, nothing was found.
Over the next few years, despite marriage, Bill was a mess.
His right leg, so long an aggravation to him, scarred and swelling, had now atrophied and was smaller in circumference than the left. Chilblains appeared on his ears—minor but painful—telling of his poor lot in life. From within the foul innards of his lungs he coughed up phlegm at will. The tips of his left middle and left index fingers were sliced off in a factory accide
nt.
In 1929, when the world was highly irrational and about to trip into depression, Bill was noted at his annual check to be ‘rational and though mildly euphoric has no mental disorder’. On the edge of an apocalyptic world, Bill was considered saner than most. But his wife saw otherwise as their home life fell apart. She implored his doctors to help and wrote to them trying, in vain, to understand her husband’s affliction. Her voice, as we read her words, betrays a rising tide of fear; of not knowing what to make of a man so twisted and unreasonable.
By 1931 the doctors recorded that Bill had several false teeth, and was nervy and tremulous; the two puncture marks at the base of his spine from his time in an English hospital were still visible. His left ankle was bloated with infection and he woke from dreams at night awash in sweat.
Bill suspected his wife might leave him. His doctor chimed in: ‘[Bill] has some emphatic views regarding his wife, probably delusions regarding her fidelity, but he denies this.’ Bill was squeezed by the pincer of cold bureaucracy and the threat of a departing wife.
With military understatement, it was recorded that Bill’s ‘dress and manner is rather unusual’ when Bill swanked about in two pairs of women’s silk stockings. Bill was not seen as psychiatrically unwell and, almost unbelievably, scornfully, his doctor wrote: ‘I cannot state there is any definite disorder in this man. He is a constitutional psychopath, very cunning and plausible.’ Bill was a loafer, to his accusatory eyes.
In calling Bill a psychopath, his doctor was really calling Bill a malingerer—suggesting that his apparent mental illness was fake. And with that supernatural gift of the army doctor, Bill’s disability was assessed as a mere twelve per cent from his wartime duty. Although feelings of insurrection may have swelled in Bill’s breast, he had little choice but to accept.
On a Monday night, while in the Army general hospital, as if to put his twelve per cent assessment to shame, Bill absconded from his ward and waltzed into ‘a picture show’. The movie, in 1931, would have begun with the obligatory singing of the imperial anthem ‘God Save the King’. In the midst of this throng of seated, orderly movie watchers was William, Bill, Billy, or whatever he called himself that night, disorderly and ready to combust. The national anthem, it seems, was not enough singing for Bill in his manic state, and, clad only in his pyjamas, he stood unabashed and raucously sang to the cinema audience. The syllables spilled from his lungs as he entertained those about him. At moments like these, Bill saw himself as impregnable.
Finding Sanity Page 13