by Mark Baker
The Savage became a regular haunt of Schuler and Bridges and they immersed themselves in the theatrical hijinks. In 1913 Schuler wrote and produced a sketch entitled Fame which starred Alberto Zelman, the violinist and conductor who had founded the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra seven years earlier. Zelman played an ageing musician living in poverty in an attic while ‘The Spirit of the Violin’ was played (off stage) by William Tainsh, poet, later radio broadcaster and club secretary. The club history would commend this work by ‘that most loveable of all Savages’ as promising great development in dramatic writing.13 In the winter of 1913 a mock trial was performed that would be eulogised as the best burlesque ever staged by amateur club actors. Schuler played a witness for the plaintiff, ‘Eric Plantaganet Cholmondelay, mostly eyeglass’. A number of leading barristers were invited to witness ‘the Club’s travesty on court procedures’.
The high life soon came to an abrupt end. On New Year’s Day 1914 the Sydney Morning Herald had editorialised with restrained foreboding about the gathering tensions in Europe, recognising Australia could not stand apart: ‘Today no matter how tightly Australia holds her skirts, it is not in her power to keep clear of the world.’14 On Sunday 2 August 1914 Schuler was at a tennis party in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs when an army friend was hastily recalled to the headquarters in St Kilda Road, on the southern edge of the city:
When I went to see him at the Victoria Barracks that same night, I found the whole place a glare of lights from end to end of the grim, grey stone building. It was the same the next and the next night, and for weeks, and so into the months. But even when the Governor-General, Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson, sent to the Prime Minister (Mr Joseph Cook) at noon on 3rd August the telegram bearing the announcement that we all knew could not long be withheld, the strain seemed unlifted. ‘England has declared war on Germany’ was the brief but terrible message quickly transferred to the broadsheets that the newspapers printed at lightning speed and circulated, while the crowds in the streets cheered and cheered again as the message was posted on the display boards.15
Among the patriotic crowd that thronged outside the offices of The Age in Collins Street was a Frenchman who got up on the steps and sung ‘La Marseillaise’: ‘The crowd grew frantic with enthusiasm. He was lifted bodily in the air shouting “Vive l’ Angleterre! Vive La France!” A Scottish piper turned up but the pipes were almost drowned out by the cheers.’16 Schuler began immediately to report on the reaction as war was declared in Europe and therefore Australia too was at war. The streets were filled with jubilant crowds night after night for weeks. There was a series of riots, quickly subdued by police, after raids were made on a number of German premises. Security was tightened at military buildings as official cars swept through the streets and into Victoria Barracks. Port defences were manned. Australian ships, having coaled and prepared, were moved to their war stations. And soon the great mobilisation and recruitment campaign began to form the first Australian Imperial Force. It would be, at least for the moment, a cause for celebration more than foreboding, as Schuler wrote:
Never did a young Dominion cling more closely or show its deep-seated sense of gratitude and affection and responsibility to the parent nation. Having helped to secure herself, Australia immediately offered troops for active service overseas. A tremendous wave of enthusiasm swept over the land and the acceptance by the Home Government of the offer was the occasion of great outbursts of cheering by the crowds.17
The initial target of 20,000 recruits was filled within three weeks and another 30,000 young Victorians would enlist before the year’s end. A training camp was hastily established on 200 acres of the Mornington Park estate at Broadmeadows. The property was owned by militia officer and member of parliament Major Robert Garrick, who had donated the use of his land to the war effort. Schuler watched the first 4000 volunteers assemble at Victoria Barracks on the morning of 19 August before marching through the heart of the city and on to the Broadmeadows camp, 10 miles away. Led by a band of Highland pipes and bugles, they were hailed by huge crowds that lined their way along Swanston Street:
Their pride swelled in their veins as they waved brown felt hats, straw-deckers, bowlers to their mates watching from the office windows and roofs. It was the first sight of the reality of war that had come to really grip the hearts of the people, and they cheered these pioneers and the recklessness of their spirits. There were men in good boots and bad boots, in brown and tan boots, in hardly any boots at all; in sack suits and old clothes, and smart-cut suits just from the well-lined drawers of a fashionable home; there were workers and loafers, students and idlers, men of professions and men just workers, who formed that force. But they were all fighters, stickers, men with some grit (they got more as they went on), and men with a love of adventure.18
The war came as no surprise to Schuler. He’d had a taste of military life during his several years of service in the militia. In early 1914 he had been assigned to report for The Age on the tour of Australia by General Sir Ian Hamilton. It began an abiding friendship with the fabled general who was to command the Allied forces at Gallipoli. Hamilton was then head of the British Army’s Mediterranean Command and also carried the grandiloquent title of Inspector General of the Overseas Forces of the Empire. With the latter cap on, Hamilton had visited all colonial military forces around the world, assessing their capabilities for what even then was considered to be an inevitable confrontation with Germany.
During his almost three-month tour of Australia—from 3 February to 24 April 1914—Hamilton was feted like royalty. Arriving in Melbourne on 12 February he was met at Spencer Street Station with a lavish guard of honour. Dressed in full ceremonial uniform and wearing a pith helmet and the dazzling insignia of his knighthood and campaign honours, the general charmed the crowds. There were parades, civic receptions and grand dinners at Government House. Hamilton travelled to Ballarat and Bendigo, visited Dame Nellie Melba’s farm at Coldstream in the Yarra Valley, and witnessed a mock battle at Lilydale. It was there that a militia colonel named John Monash impressed the general as a smart field officer—an impression that would be vindicated in triumph on the battlefields of the Western Front in 1918.
As he toured cities and towns across the continent, Hamilton was unfailingly elegant and eloquent, witty and self-effacing. The press gushed. Punch described him as ‘one of the most dashing fighting men in the world today’. The Bacchus Marsh Express would declare: ‘The visit of Sir Ian Hamilton to Australia has been a stupendous success. Every speech, every gesture, every tone of voice, has been an inspiration to all who came within range of his charming personality.’ Unsurprisingly, Hamilton’s choice just a year later to lead Australians in the biggest military challenge in the nation’s brief history would be met with universal enthusiasm.
With the outbreak of war, the Australian government moved in tandem with Britain and the other dominions to appoint official war correspondents. It would be the first step in a century of intensive media meddling as governments sought to rein in the free-wheeling days of press correspondence and control the flow of battle information through the regulation of correspondents and elaborate censorship regimes. Australia would appoint a meticulous, fastidious English-born journalist on the staff of the Sydney Morning Herald to be its official correspondent. Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean would go on to chronicle the war to its end, write much of the Australian official history and drive the establishment of the Australian War Memorial. But the correspondent’s job, or at least half of it, was supposed to have gone to Phillip Schuler.
After it was confirmed that Australia would send a military contingent to fight alongside the mother country, Bean had promptly written to Defence Minister Edward Millen seeking permission to accompany the troops as an ‘eyewitness’ reporter. Millen, who had been a reporter and editor in western New South Wales before entering politics, wrote back to Bean on 13 August saying his application would be considered if an opportunity were to arise to send a correspondent. Th
e same day an official cable arrived from London saying each of the dominions would be permitted to send one correspondent with its expeditionary force. Apparently ignoring the cable, Millen wrote to the two biggest newspaper alliances in the country—the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Argus, as well as Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and The Age—inviting each to nominate a reporter. The Herald and the Argus chose veteran Boer War and China correspondent and celebrated bush balladeer Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson. And the Telegraph and the Age nominated Phillip Schuler.19
The federal election called on 5 September put an abrupt end to that plan. The Commonwealth Liberal government of Joseph Cook was swept from power and Edward Millen, who had sent the naval and military contingent that captured German New Guinea and had launched the recruitment drive for the first Australian Imperial Force, was back on the opposition benches. The new Labor government of Andrew Fisher referred the decision on choosing a single official Australian war correspondent to the newly founded Australian Journalists Association. Fisher’s new defence minister, George Pearce, would later tell an AJA dinner that he had passed to buck on choosing the official correspondent because he had some good friends among the journalists ‘and I did not like being put in a position of making a selection’.20
The AJA’s central committee met in Sydney on Thursday 24 September and the federal government’s request was at the top of its agenda. The names of the first applicants from New South Wales were read out before ‘a lengthy discussion ensued’. The committee then resolved to request the Victorian branch to send further nominations by the end of the week. The next day, Friday, a telegram arrived from the Defence Department that drove a new sense of urgency to the process. After outlining details of the appointment, including the proposed salary, expenses and the duties of the role, the department demanded a decision by the next day, Saturday. In the subsequent scramble to meet the government’s deadline, it appears that a number of Melbourne-based journalists were locked out of the process—possibly including Phillip Schuler.
The committee adjourned until that evening after setting a 5 p.m. deadline for final nominations. When it reconvened at 9 p.m. the executive’s patience had run out. ‘Having waited for four and a half hours for the promised further nominations from Victoria, [the committee] now proceeded with the ballot,’ general secretary Frank Bignold minuted in his flowing copperplate script in a large bound logbook. It was noted that a move to adjourn the matter to 11 a.m. the next morning was defeated. A total of twenty names were then submitted for ballot—just three of them from Victoria.
In the first round of voting, three strong contenders emerged. Charles Bean secured nine votes, Keith Murdoch eight and Oliver Hogue, another Sydney Morning Herald journalist, six. A further preferential ballot saw Bean beat Murdoch seven votes to three to secure the nomination. To underscore the government’s intention to exert proprietorship over the work of the official war correspondent, Bean was awarded an annual salary of 600 pounds, the honorary rank of captain and—as Defence Minister Pearce advised the Senate—‘the usual allowances’. These included a horse, a batman, a 10 shilling daily field allowance and 15 pounds to buy a uniform. The union magazine The Australasian Journalist noted another perk: ‘Free passage from and to Australia in troopship.’21
Keith Murdoch, who was by then working for the Sydney Sun as their political correspondent in Melbourne, was bitterly disappointed at losing to Bean. He would begin hatching plans of his own to make his mark in the war. Oliver Hogue chose to assuage his disappointment by taking his own free passage on a troopship. He immediately enlisted as a trooper with the 6th Light Horse Regiment and sailed for Egypt in December. Hogue would win fame as a writer and as a soldier on the front lines at Gallipoli and in Palestine. As ‘Trooper Bluegum’ he submitted many memorable articles to the Herald chronicling the daily lives of the Australian soldiers. As a major with the Imperial Camel Corps, he fought gallantly throughout the desert campaigns and won the Military Cross, only to die of influenza in London soon after the war ended. ‘I might be rather angry with Captain Bean, first because he beat me to the post for the big job, and second because he seems to have ignored our Brigade all along,’ Hogue once wrote. ‘But I find him so absolutely straight and sincere and honest that I like him immensely and always have.’22
The AJA seemed well satisfied with the choice of Bean. Its journal would praise what it regarded as his unsung talents: ‘Mr Bean is not only a newsgetter. He possesses a bright, fresh literary style which in his general work for the press has unfortunately been largely wasted . . . Mr Bean has shown what he can do in an appeal to an audience which knows good work well done when it sees it.’23
The management of The Age was not so sure. Not for the first or last time, the paper was unwilling to settle for the work of a Sydney journalist, however accomplished, as its sole source of coverage of a big story, not least a world war. The paper had sent a staff reporter with the New South Wales contingent dispatched to avenge the death of General Charles Gordon in Khartoum in 1885—the emerging nation’s first engagement in a foreign war. It was among the first Australian papers to report first-hand on the Boer War. In both instances, the correspondent was William Lambie, who had the unhappy distinction of being the first Australian to be wounded in action, in the Sudan, and the first to be killed in action—when he was caught in a Boer ambush in Natal Province in February 1900. The Age was adamant that it must have its own coverage of World War I, whatever official impediments were being constructed, and it sought and won permission to have its own man travel with the first convoy to the war in Europe. A change of government might have robbed Phillip Schuler of the chance to be Australia’s official correspondent, but he would now have the opportunity to make his own luck.
Banjo Paterson’s disappointment would not be so easily salved. Unable to persuade any Australian papers to hire him, Paterson also left Australia with the first AIF convoy in October 1914, filed a few despatches from Egypt for The Argus then travelled on to London where he was again frustrated in his efforts to find a regular commission as a war correspondent. After driving ambulances for the Australian Voluntary Hospital in France for a few months, Paterson returned home to Australia. Commissioned in the AIF and sent to the Middle East, his experience as a horseman saw him promoted to the rank of major and given command of the Australian Remount Squadron.
The journalists’ union organised a dinner to farewell Bean at Melbourne’s ‘Cafe Francaise’ on Saturday 3 October 1914, shortly before he embarked with the first troops. Acknowledging how little say the Australian government would have over the work of its official correspondent, Senator Pearce said he hoped Bean would be given permission to go the front with the Australian troops but conceded ‘he may not be allowed to’. The minister was in no doubt, however, about the magnitude of the task that Bean had been assigned and how much Australians expected of him:
He will have to write part of the history of Australia. That history will be written on French or German soil. It will be written in blood but it will be as much our history as if it were written in the Australian back-blocks or on the mining fields or in the cities of Australia.24
Frederick Schuler, parent and editor, would quietly present his son with a parting gift he no doubt prayed would guide him safely through those fields of blood. It was an Oxford pocket Bible bound in khaki cloth. On the flyleaf he wrote with the buttoned-up affection of the times, ‘To Phillip F.E. Schuler, from Father, 1914.’ The little Bible would return to Australia with its cover scuffed and stained, but its pristine pages suggested the owner found little time for religious contemplation. While it may not have been a religious transformation, the flamboyant young journalist would come back a man profoundly affected by all that he had seen and lived.
4
To Egypt
Phillip Schuler’s war began on 21 October 1914 when His Majesty’s Australian transport ship Orvieto embarked from Port Melbourne on the long voyage to Europe. The 12,13
0-ton Orvieto, a former Orient liner requisitioned for war service by the Australian government, was flagship of the armada that would soon assemble in Western Australia before crossing the Indian Ocean. She carried the headquarters staff of the AIF, led by Major General William Throsby Bridges, another 1450 servicemen including the 5th Battalion and the 2nd Field Company, and four nurses. The departure was a stirring, emotional event—at least for a young nation determined to prove its fidelity and worth to the British motherland. Even thirteen years after achieving independent nationhood, Australia still wholly identified with the empire. Schuler, like many others, was moved by the moment as a crowd of about five thousand people thronged Prince’s Pier:
The crowd broke the barriers and rushed the pier, overwhelming the scanty military guards and forcing back Ministers of the Crown and men of State who had gone aboard to wish Major-General Bridges success with the Division. It was unmilitary, but it was magnificent, this sudden swelling up of the spirit of the people and the burst of enthusiasm that knew no barriers. Ribbons were cast aboard and made the last links with the shore. Never shall I for one (and there were hundreds on board in whose throat a lump rose) forget the sudden quiet on ship and shore as the band played the National Anthem when the liner slowly moved from the pier out into the channel; and then the majestic notes of other anthems weaved into one brave throbbing melody that sent the blood pulsing through the brain. ‘Britons never, never will be slaves,’ blared the bugles, and the drums rattled and thumped the bars with odd emphasis till the ribbon snapped and the watchers on the pier became a blurred impressionist picture, and even the yachts and steamboats could no longer keep pace with the steamer as she swung her nose to the harbour heads.1