Phillip Schuler

by Mark Baker

  Ian Hamilton would also grant permission for one more Australian correspondent to join the press pack in early September. In doing so, the general unwittingly opened a dangerous new front in his private war with Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett.

  10

  The Postman

  The last Australian correspondent to land at Anzac Cove arrived on 3 September 1915. His visit to the Gallipoli Peninsula lasted just four days and three nights. The few dispatches he sent back to his papers in Australia added nothing to what had already been reported. But the words he wrote weeks later—not for his newspaper’s readers but for an exclusive private audience—would have far greater impact than any of the tens of thousands written by Charles Bean, Phillip Schuler and Charles Smith in their coverage of the campaign.

  After four years in the federal parliamentary press gallery in Melbourne, Keith Murdoch had at last found his journalistic bearings; his keen sense of destiny had discovered a route map to success. In sharp contrast to his stumbling efforts to break into Fleet Street half a decade earlier, the intensely ambitious young journalist had become an adept networker, ingratiating himself with the most powerful men in the Commonwealth. After Frederick Schuler welcomed him back to The Age in 1910, this time on staff rather than as a contributor paid by the line, Murdoch was assigned to report on the federal parliament in Melbourne. In 1912 he left The Age to become the parliamentary correspondent for the Sydney Sun, a more senior and better-paid job.

  By the time Andrew Fisher had returned to the prime ministership in September 1914, Murdoch counted himself a close friend. Fisher had, for many years, been part of the congregation at Camberwell’s Trinity Presbyterian Church, where the Reverend Patrick Murdoch presided. The younger Murdoch made his father’s friend his own, introducing Fisher to golf at the nearby Riverside club where Keith was captain for a time. Murdoch also cultivated a friendship with William ‘Billy’ Hughes, Labor’s then legal spokesman and Fisher’s eventual successor as prime minister. Both Fisher and Hughes joined in weekend retreats with Murdoch at Sassafras in the Dandenong Ranges, east of Melbourne, where the journalist’s aunt ran a guest house.

  In mid 1915, Murdoch was offered the job of managing and editing the London-based United Cable Service, a news service run in partnership between the Melbourne Herald and the Sydney Sun and located within the office of The Times. It was a plum post and a chance for Murdoch to prove himself in the city whose rebuff the last time he visited still smarted. Before accepting the position, Murdoch wrote to Fisher seeking his advice and saying he had the feeling he ‘should be going to the Front’. His decision not to enlist in the army, as his brothers Ivon and Alan and 135 other young men from his father’s church had done—and when his occupation certainly did not require his services on the home front—was already becoming an issue, at least in his own mind. His approach to Fisher elicited the evidently pleasing counsel that he was far too skilled for the trenches. The prime minister thought Murdoch would make ‘an indifferent soldier’ whereas journalism was his ‘own special job’. The flattery was reciprocated in Murdoch’s letter to Fisher in late June: ‘All the cabling in the world is not going to win this war. I turn to you as a friend for guidance in this matter and I want you to know that I have always felt that I could joyfully perform any task you set me in the service of my country.’1

  Fisher declared London to be the place where Murdoch’s best work could be done. And Murdoch immediately set about wangling himself an official task that would enable him to visit the front lines without getting too much mud, or blood, on his boots. The casualties would be political. While much was later made of his commission to make enquires in the Mediterranean on behalf of the government—not least by Murdoch himself—the appointment was only made because the journalist had asked for it. In response to that request, Defence Minister George Pearce authorised him to visit Egypt on his way to London and report back to the government on the organisation of mail services for the Australian troops and on ‘the disposition of wounded to hospitals’—an issue already causing great controversy thanks to Phillip Schuler’s reporting.2 Letters, newspapers and parcels sent from Australia to the troops and their letters home were being delayed and going missing, and there were allegations of graft involving money telegraphed home by soldiers through the Anglo-Egyptian Bank and Thomas Cook & Sons in Cairo. The terms of reference given to Murdoch by the defence department—along with a 25 pound cheque for his services—were explicitly confined to those matters. It was a brief far more modest than the one Keith Murdoch would soon rewrite for himself.

  Armed with letters of introduction from Fisher and Pearce, Murdoch embarked from Melbourne on 15 July. As soon as he reached Cairo, he wrote to Sir Ian Hamilton at Imbros, recalling their meeting during Hamilton’s tour of Australia and begging permission to visit Gallipoli—as both a journalist and an emissary of the Australian government. The dual responsibilities of independent eyewitness and paid agent would for many journalists raise substantial issues of conflicted interest, but not for Keith Murdoch. He saw mutual advantage for his own advancement. From the outset, the agent wearing his journalist’s hat volunteered to Hamilton that he would submit fully to the rules of censorship:

  I should like to go across in only a semi-official capacity, so that I might record censored impressions in the London and Australian newspapers I represent, but any conditions you impose I should, of course, faithfully observe . . . May I add that I had the honour of meeting you at the Melbourne Town Hall, and wrote fully of your visit in the Sydney Sun and Melbourne Punch; also may I say that my anxiety as an Australian to visit the sacred shores of Gallipoli while our army is there is intense.3

  Hamilton was unimpressed. He did not share Murdoch’s warm recollections of his coverage of the Australian tour and would later describe the letter as ‘wheedling’. But he immediately sent back consent from his General Headquarters: ‘This cable is your authority to come to GHQ at once whence you will be sent to Anzac.’ Murdoch reached Imbros a week later. He went straight to see Hamilton who scrawled a hand-written instruction to Anzac commander Lieutenant General William Birdwood across the top of Murdoch’s letter of introduction from Defence Minister Pearce: ‘This gentleman is duly authorised—help him in any way you can.’ The brief meeting rated a perfunctory mention in Hamilton’s diary that day: ‘Mr Murdoch, an Australian journalist, paid me a visit to thank me for having stretched a point in his favour by letting him see the Peninsula. Seemed a sensible man.’4

  Hamilton would soon regret having stretched that point and would come to recant wholly his initial character assessment. Later he would elaborate on his first impressions of ‘the sensible, well-spoken man with dark eyes’ noting that the Australian had said ‘his mind was a blank about soldiers and soldiering, and made me uncomfortable by an elaborate explanation of why his duty to Australia could be better done with a pen than with a rifle’.5 Before he left GHQ, Murdoch signed the official declaration required of every Allied war correspondent in Europe at that time. His ‘solemn’ vow was ‘to follow in every particular the rules issued by the Commander-in-Chief through the Chief Field Censor, relative to correspondence concerning the forces in the field, and bind myself not to attempt to correspond by any other route or by any other means than that officially sanctioned’. Those rules applied to all correspondence, whether public or private, cable or letter, and regardless of who that correspondence was addressed to.

  Arriving at Anzac Cove the next morning, Murdoch was extended the same hospitality by Charles Bean that Schuler had received when he first arrived, six weeks earlier. The visitor was photographed outside Bean’s dugout clutching a pith helmet and wearing a crumpled and dusty pair of workman’s trousers held up by braces. Bean, who was unwell and still recuperating from his wounding a few weeks earlier, struggled up the hill above the dugout to show Murdoch the view out across the Turkish positions before returning to his camp bed to rest. He also gave his guest a detailed briefing and it was likely to have be
en more pessimistic that the official correspondent’s general outlook, according historian Michael McKernan:

  Bean was at a low ebb, his diary shows, and in real despair about the prospects at Gallipoli. He wrote bitterly about British muddle, confusion and arrogance. Bean was also a sick man. His mood must have affected Murdoch.6

  While Bean might have passed on his pessimism at that point to the visitor, he would be deeply unhappy with what Murdoch was to do with that information. As the official correspondent was not well enough to accompany him, Murdoch spent most of the next few days wandering alone around Anzac. He visited Suvla Bay briefly but did not go to the main British positions at Cape Helles. At Anzac, after being introduced by Bean, he spent considerable time talking to Major General Harold ‘Hooky’ Walker, the British officer who had taken command of the First Anzac Division after Australia’s most senior officer, Major General William Bridges, was killed by a sniper in early May. A tough and courageous commander, Walker had opposed the landings at the outset and argued in vain with Birdwood to have the Battle of Lone Pine cancelled, rightly predicting that he would lose too many of his men. What exactly he said to the visiting journalist is not known, but it would hardly have been an upbeat assessment of the campaign and its prospects as winter approached.

  On his return to Imbros, Murdoch spent several days at the correspondents’ camp where one journalist would freely give an appraisal that was unequivocally negative. Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, still smarting over his dressing down by Hamilton’s staff for misconduct on his trip to London in June, was suddenly presented with an opportunity to settle the score. The accounts of the two journalists about what happened next are at odds. Ashmead-Bartlett says Murdoch, alarmed by what he had seen and heard at Anzac, ‘begged’ him to write a letter that he could ‘carry through uncensored’ to the government in London: ‘He declares, and I think quite rightly, that unless someone lets the truth be known at home we are likely to suffer a great disaster.’7 Murdoch would later claim it was Ashmead-Bartlett who had asked him to carry a letter to British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith—and that he did not know its details: ‘It was a sealed letter and marked “Personal”. I asked him what it contained. He said it contained information for the Prime Minister.’8 Whoever did the asking, there was no doubt that by the time he left the Dardanelles for London on 8 September, carrying Ashmead-Bartlett’s letter, Murdoch was an enthusiastic participant in the conspiracy to flout the censorship rules and join a lobbying campaign in London to have Sir Ian Hamilton sacked and the Gallipoli campaign abandoned.

  It was a sudden and quite dramatic change of heart by the Australian. In one of the few disapatches Murdoch filed to the Sydney Sun before leaving the Dardanelles, he had acknowledged both Hamilton’s hospitality and his own lack of qualification to pass judgement on the state of the military campaign:

  I must again say that my stay at Anzac is short, despite generous provision offered me by General Sir Ian Hamilton for a long visit. I can give no adequate picture of the fighting and toil of these heroic sons and brothers . . . I am only a visitor of a few days standing and can tell of nothing better than impressions.9

  It was an assessment shared by Ashmead-Bartlett who, privately, was less than flattering about the abilities of his new-found accomplice: ‘When Murdoch sailed I felt relieved for the first time. Although he is no great authority on military matters, he has seen enough to understand the position, and he has been well coached with notes and memoranda.’10

  Ashmead-Bartlett’s letter was a political grenade, primed with the conviction that he knew better than any of the generals what must be done at Gallipoli and fired with his trademark hyperbole and conceit: ‘Our last great effort to achieve some definite success against the Turks was the most ghastly and costly fiasco in our history since the Battle of Bannockburn. Personally, I never thought the schemes decided on by Headquarters ever had the slightest chance of succeeding.’ And there was more: ‘The army is in fact in a deplorable condition. Its morale as a fighting force has suffered greatly, and the officers and men are thoroughly dispirited. The muddle and mismanagement beat anything that has ever occurred in our military history. The fundamental evil at the present moment is the absolute lack of confidence amongst all ranks in the headquarters staff.’

  The letter did not mention Hamilton by name but was infused with animus towards the commander-in-chief. The ‘lack of a real chief’ at the head of the army, Ashmead-Bartlett asserted, ‘destroys its discipline and efficiency all through’. The confidence of the troops could only be restored, he claimed, ‘by an immediate change in the supreme command’. And implicit in all that he wrote was the insinuation that Hamilton and his staff not only were incompetent but also were lying to London. Ashmead-Bartlett conceded, however, he could not know whether that was so: ‘I have taken the liberty of writing very fully because I have no means of knowing how far the real truth of the situation is known in England, and how much the military authorities disclose.’

  Ashmead-Barlett had learned much by observing small-scale wars at first-hand, but he was not qualified to make the grand pronouncements he so freely made about the conduct of the Dardanelles campaign to his newspaper readers, let alone to the British government. His sole formal military experience was to have served for a few months—and well away from any serious danger—as a junior officer with the Bedford Regiment in the Boer War. While the journalist liked to parade the orange and red ribbon of the Queen’s South Africa Medal above the breast pocket of his correspondents’ tunic, it was a pale shadow of the decks of campaign ribbons and decorations that adorned Ian Hamilton’s uniform. Those were a virtual history of British conflict spanning 40 years and traversing the Asian and African continents, most of it viewed with bravery and tenacious leadership that earned Hamilton the admiration of most who served below him.

  What Hamilton lacked—and it would be a fatal flaw at Gallipoli—was the streak of brutal bastardry that characterised the most successful military commanders throughout history. He also observed an old-school respect for the most senior men under his command and believed as a principle—as well as an article of British military organisation at that time—in allowing them latitude to lead in the field. Military historian Basil Liddell Hart would later write: ‘His reluctance to intervene may be explained by his natural kindness. Intervention demanded a ruthlessness from which, despite his high personal courage, he instinctively shrank.’11 Hamilton would discover, too late, that some of his generals were woefully ill-equipped for the tasks assigned them in the August offensive. Their failures became his.

  Murdoch would later argue—with a vehemence that grew stronger over the years—that he was not wittingly in breach of the censorship rules by corresponding with government leaders. But Ashmead-Bartlett was in no doubt that he had done so. ‘I am, of course, breaking the censorship regulations by sending this letter through to you,’ he wrote to Prime Minister Asquith. ‘But I have not the slightest hesitation in doing so, as I feel it is absolutely essential for you to know the truth.’

  The first Hamilton knew of the conspiracy came via a tip-off from another of the correspondents—later revealed to be Henry Nevinson—as the general would note in his diary on 17 September:

  A correspondent writes in and tells us that for the honour of his profession he feels bound to let us know that Mr Ashmead-Bartlett has secretly sent home an uncensored despatch per, of all people, Mr Murdoch! I had begun to wonder what had come over Mr Murdoch and now it seems he has come all over me!12

  Nevinson would write years later in his memoirs that Ashmead-Bartlett had openly boasted about the letter and its contents to officers visiting the press camp and other correspondents.13 As soon as he was alerted, Hamilton took steps to have Murdoch intercepted by British military intelligence when his ship reached Marseilles on its way to London. The letter, confiscated from Murdoch with other papers, would not reach its intended destination. It was forwarded to London by military intelligence but the War O
ffice would later claim it was lost in Whitehall before it could be delivered to 10 Downing Street.

  Four days after receiving Nevinson’s tip-off, Hamilton cabled the War Office asking whether his information was correct that Murdoch was carrying a dispatch for Daily Telegraph proprietor Sir Harry Lawson from Ashmead-Bartlett. At that point Hamilton still believed ‘the letter’ was a news report. And the reply from the War Office left him still ignorant of the fact that the illicit dispatch was in fact a letter to Prime Minister Asquith: ‘A dispatch answering the description has been taken from Murdoch at Marseilles. You should delay action, however, until we have seen it and you hear from us further.’14

  Henry Nevinson was not alone in his disquiet at the actions of Ashmead-Bartlett and Murdoch. Charles Bean, who had been critical of Ashmead-Barlett’s earlier actions in lobbying politicians in London about the conduct of the campaign, criticised his decision not to resign and carry the letter home himself. After apparently being shown a copy by Ashmead-Bartlett, Bean conceded that despite the inevitable exaggerations it contained some powerful arguments about the parlous state of the campaign. He had no idea at that point of the dramatic course of events Ashmead-Bartlett’s actions would unleash:

  It was a brilliantly written letter—rather overstating the case as Bartlett always does, but a great deal of it is absolutely unanswerable and badly needs understanding . . . Bartlett’s letter was worth the consideration of any man, and I’ve no doubt it will be considered in time. Several members of the Cabinet asked him to write to them privately—which was not a very loyal thing of them to do, but then politicians are not loyal.15