Phillip Schuler

by Mark Baker

  In Marseilles Murdoch was furious to have lost not merely Ashmead-Bartlett’s letter—a document that would have been his passport into the heart of the British establishment. The party that raided his cabin also seized Ashmead-Bartlett’s briefing papers on the conduct of the war and letters of introduction from Ashmead-Bartlett to leading officials known to share his view that the campaign should be abandoned. Also confiscated were copies of Murdoch’s news dispatches and reports to Australian Defence Minister Pearce—not to mention his precious letters of introduction from Pearce and Prime Minister Fisher. As he headed on to London, relieved of his treasures, Murdoch resolved to draft his own letter about the state of affairs at Gallipoli. The postman was now about to recast himself as the postmaster-general. It was a big call.

  11

  The Letter

  In London in late September 1915 it was already getting hard to find friends of the Dardanelles Expedition. Most of the men who mattered—or who had a say in the matter—were either firming the case to quit Gallipoli or struggling to defend the decision to stay on. The failure of the August offensive was compounding a mood of pessimism and sharpening the knives of those politicians, and the generals in France, who had long wanted the men and the matériel deployed in the eastern Mediterranean brought back to bolster the fight on the Western Front. Keith Murdoch thought he was bringing big news from Gallipoli. In reality, he was carrying more grist for a mill that was already gathering an unstoppable momentum.

  As soon as he arrived on 21 September, Murdoch went straight to the London Times office to work on the final draft of the 7500-word letter he would address to Andrew Fisher. Harry Campbell-Jones, the journalist he was relieving as head of the United Cable Service, introduced him to Times editor Geoffrey Dawson. The following day, over lunch with the two men at the fabled Simpson’s restaurant on The Strand, Murdoch rehearsed his florid reconstruction of Ashmead-Bartlett’s epistle. ‘Dawson was at once moved by the sincerity and vividness of his word pictures,’ Campbell-Jones would recall.1

  Geoffrey Dawson who, in step with his boss Lord Northcliffe, was a strident critic of the Dardanelles campaign, urged Murdoch to pass on his information to the British cabinet. He lined up a meeting for the Australian over breakfast the next morning with Sir Edward Carson, chairman of the cabinet’s Dardanelles Committee. Over the subsequent days, Murdoch was drawn into a merry-go-round of meetings with other members of the cabinet, members of the House of Lords and heads of government departments. Suddenly the pushy young journalist with a stammer still not fully tamed—and who struck some he met as ‘rather inarticulate’—had become a minor celebrity among Britain’s elite.

  In Keith Murdoch’s mind, he was, in the best tradition of his calling, a courageous journalist blowing the whistle on a military disaster in which the lives of thousands of young Australians were being squandered. But in London he was welcomed more as a pawn than a prophet. The warmest reception came from ambitious men with axes to grind. They, like Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, saw Murdoch as a compliant agent to help advance their political and personal objectives. Among those Murdoch met during his first days in London was David Lloyd George, the then minister for munitions. The following year the wily former Welsh solicitor would replace Kitchener as secretary of state for war, before proceeding to replace Asquith as prime minister. For Lloyd George, already a Gallipoli sceptic and at odds with the vacillating Asquith over the conduct of the war, Murdoch and his alarming account were political manna.

  Lord Northcliffe, who owned both The Times and the Daily Mail and would later become a powerful friend and benefactor of Murdoch, was especially excited by the opportunity the Australian presented. Before Murdoch’s arrival, a senior member of Northcliffe’s staff was at a gathering in the historic Walter Room in the Times office in Printing House Square during which the viscount, having ‘paced up and down the floor like a caged lion’, threw himself into a big chair and declared that urgent action must be taken to rescue the Australian troops at Gallipoli: ‘We must get those Aussies away. We must. But how? How? . . . To leave the men there is to have them marooned and destroyed. It’s horrible—horrible . . . We must awaken the people to the appalling danger of the situation. The War Office is working in blinkers here in England, and Australia must galvanize it into activity.’2 Northcliffe’s anonymous colleague then offered a plan of action:

  I recalled that Mr Keith Murdoch was on his way to London . . . Coming straight from the battlefields he could have first hand information. ‘Good’, commented Viscount Northcliffe. ‘He may prove the lever we want.’ And I was placed under obligation to let him know the moment Mr Murdoch arrived. Meantime, he explored other avenues to bring him to his objective—the saving of the Anzacs.

  One of Sir Ian Hamilton’s own staff had a head start on the Australian journalist in seeking to undermine the Gallipoli operations. The day that Murdoch had arrived at Imbros, Major Guy Dawnay left for a brief visit to London. The Eton-educated intelligence officer was smart and very ambitious. He would end the war as a major general. Dawney was also well connected, friends with the Asquiths and the royal family. Cabinet secretary Maurice Hankey dismissed him as ‘disagreeable and too big for his boots’ but Hamilton liked and trusted the young officer. Naively, the general thought he was just the man to explain things first-hand to Kitchener and ensure the old warlord’s continued support:

  Next to my going home myself, or to K. himself coming out here, this is the best I can do. Dawnay is one of the soundest young officers we have, but he is run down physically (like most of us) and jaded. He should benefit by the trip and so should the rumour-mongers at home.3

  Once in London, Dawnay revealed himself to be a foe not a friend of Hamilton’s cause. In private meetings with Kitchener and Major General Charles Callwell, the director of operations and intelligence at the War Office, he pressed the case for evacuation. Soon he was presenting the same argument to the king, Asquith, Lloyd George and many other senior figures. There was no such candour when Dawnay returned to Imbros. Hamilton would record his duplicitous emissary blaming others for signs of a shift in Kitchener’s position:

  Dawnay says K. was most interested in him and most charming to him all through his stay until his last interview just before he started his return journey. K.’s manner then, he said, had changed—so much so as to give him the impression that the great man was turning or was being turned against all of us out here.4

  Between his meetings with many of the same senior political figures, Murdoch continued to work on his letter to Fisher. He drew on notes he had made during the voyage from Marseilles as he scrambled to try to reconstruct what Ashmead-Bartlett had written in his letter to Asquith and in the coaching materials the British correspondent had supplied to his colonial understudy. While Ashmead-Bartlett’s letter had been written with a pen poisoned by his antipathy towards Hamilton, much of it was well argued and based on extensive if not necessarily authoritative first-hand experience. In stark contrast, Murdoch’s rewrite was neither measured nor informed by more than cursory experience. Indeed, it was riddled with gross inaccuracies, character assassination, sweeping generalisations and—as would later be confirmed—at least one calculated and malicious lie.

  Murdoch declared that the August offensive at Gallipoli had cost ‘our Imperial armies . . . 35 per cent of their strength, fully 33,000 men’. In fact, the total Allied casualties were 21,500 against vastly greater Turkish losses. He claimed that in the first days after the landings at Suvla Bay an order had to be issued to officers ‘to shoot without mercy’ any soldiers who lagged behind or loitered. No such order was issued. He claimed 90,000 troops landed at Suvla and that there were many deaths from thirst. In fact, 30,000 troops were landed at Suvla and, while many of the troops suffered from serious shortages of water, there is no record of any man dying of thirst. He described an Australian general being ‘staggered’ to see the IXth and Xth Corps retreating from the Anafarta Hills. Staggering indeed: there was no Xth Cor
ps at Suvla.

  The sloppy and wildly inaccurate reporting of facts and figures might be understood, if not forgiven, from a journalist who had never been to war before. What is much harder to excuse in the Murdoch letter is the wholesale slandering of officers and soldiers by a journalist who spent just four days ashore at Gallipoli and saw no action, let alone any of the fighting on which he stood in harsh and confident judgement. He smeared many of the British troops at Suvla as ‘toy soldiers’, deriding them as ‘merely a lot of childlike youths without strength to endure or brains to improve their conditions’. By contrast, the Australians were almost gods in Murdoch’s jingoistic vision. ‘It is stirring to see them, magnificent manhood, swinging their fine limbs as they walk about Anzac,’ he enthused to Fisher. ‘They have the noble faces of men who have endured. Oh, if you could picture Anzac as I have seen it, you would find that to be an Australian is the greatest privilege the world has to offer.’

  Murdoch denounced a clutch of individual British generals by name and made sweeping charges of incompetence and cowardice against virtually the entire general staff at Hamilton’s headquarters, sneering at the red flashes on the tunic collars of staff officers:

  The conceit and self-complacency of the red feather men are equalled only by their incapacity. Along the line of communications, and especially at Mudros, are countless high officers and conceited young cubs who are plainly only playing at war. What can you expect of men who have never worked seriously, who have lived for their social distinction and self-satisfaction, and who are now called on to conduct a giant war? Kitchener has a terrible task of getting work out of these men, whose motives can never be pure, for they are unchangeably selfish . . . Australians now loathe and detest any Englishman wearing red. Without such a purification of motive as will bring youth and ability to the top, we cannot win.

  This attack, infused with racism and bigotry, would further reveal Murdoch’s ignorance. As journalism historian John Avieson has noted, Murdoch showed he did not understand that the headquarters staff were mainly officers temporarily posted to administrative roles: ‘Obviously, he had taken no steps to discover that they included at least three officers who had been awarded Victoria Crosses—and who had all died when they left their staff posts to take over from fallen comrades in the heat of battle on Gallipoli.’5

  Australian officers were generally but not entirely spared Murdoch’s withering critique. A separate letter sent from Egypt to Australian Defence Minister George Pearce includes the first evidence of Murdoch’s dislike for the then Brigadier General John Monash—a view that would harden later on the Western Front when Murdoch joined with Charles Bean in a failed effort to stop the promotion of the man who would become the greatest Australian general to emerge from World War I, if not the greatest Allied general. He includes Monash in a broad charge against brigade commanders of ‘murder through incapacity’ by needlessly sending troops to their deaths:

  Without doubt some of our brigadiers have cost us many lives through their ignorance and through their in-adaptability to these extraordinary conditions. Monash and [Brigadier General William] Hughes dashed their men against a high post here—Baby Seven Hundred—and they should have known after the first line went out that the job was hopeless. It was pitiful—fine Australian heart and soul and muscle wiped out in an impossible task. Oh, there is a lot of murder through incapacity.6

  But the harshest—and wildest—criticisms in the letter to Fisher were reserved for Hamilton. Murdoch insisted he must be recalled immediately:

  I cannot see any solution which does not begin with the recall of Hamilton . . . it is plain that when an army has completely lost faith in its general, and he has on numerous occasions proved his weaknesses, only one thing can be done. He has very seldom been at Anzax [sic]. He lives at Imbros. The French call him the general who lives on an island. The story may not be true, but the army believes that Hamilton left Suvla on August 21 remarking, ‘Everything hangs in the balance, the Yeomanry are about to charge.’ Of course the army laughs at a general who leaves the battlefield when everything hangs in balance.

  In this instance it was Murdoch’s misrepresentation of Hamilton’s actions and character that were laughable. Hamilton had left Suvla Bay only after rushing to the front to relieve the disastrously incompetent Lieutenant General Frederick Stopford, whom he later dismissed, and ordering the troops to advance in line with his original orders. The insinuation that Hamilton was somehow cowardly and negligent by remaining aloof on Imbros was also nonsense. In fact, the general visited his field commanders at Anzac Cove and Cape Helles at least three times a week, and was a familiar and popular face in the trenches. And the suggestion that the French sneered at Hamilton’s supposed remoteness from the fighting was a complete distortion. After Hamilton had once watched French troops in action, French commander General Henri Gourand had remarked: ‘Coming here from your island, you remind me of Achilles quitting his tent. Your arrival is a presage of victory.’7 In the hands of Keith Murdoch, a Gallic compliment became an Antipodean slur.

  When Murdoch dispatched his letter to Fisher from London on 23 September, Hamilton was still ignorant of how rapidly political events were unfolding and how serious the threat to his position was becoming—not from the words of Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett but from Murdoch himself. After he sought further information from the War Office, Hamilton received a reply that finally revealed Murdoch was ‘carrying a despatch for the Prime Minister criticising military operations in Gallipoli’. The general was surprised but brushed off the incident. He remained convinced, as he ought reasonably to have been, that he had the loyal support of the government that had sent him to the Dardanelles and, as far as his orders were concerned, remained committed to a campaign he was still convinced could be won, despite the severe setback of the August offensive:

  I could not help laughing heartily at the blue looks of Tyrrell, the head of our intelligence. After all, this is Asquith’s own affair. I do not for one moment believe Mr Asquith would employ such agencies and for sure he will turn Murdoch and his wares into the wastepaper basket. I have reassured Tyrrell tittle-tattle will effect no lodgement in the Asquithian brain.8

  Hamilton should have shared the apprehension of Lieutenant Colonel Gerald Tyrrell, the former British military attache in Constantinople and fluent Turkish speaker who knew a thing or two about political betrayal. Tittle-tattle had become a contagion sweeping through the corridors of power in London to the mortal peril of Hamilton’s career.

  As Hamilton anticipated, Asquith was singularly unimpressed with Murdoch’s florid analysis—and with the man himself. Lloyd George had forwarded a copy of Murdoch’s letter to him on September 25, but the prime minister resisted pressure to meet the Australian. A week after receiving the letter, Asquith wrote to Major Dawnay, expressing his reluctance to even bother forwarding the letter to Imbros:

  On reflection, I think it better not to trouble Sir Ian Hamilton with the text of the Australian letter, of which I spoke to you. It is largely composed of gossip and second-hand statements, and the antecedents of the writer are not such to command much confidence. It may, however, do mischief in Australia, and there are certain specific points upon which we shall no doubt ask Sir I. Hamilton for explanation & comment.9

  As Lloyd George and his allies turned up the heat and Northcliffe fanned the flames, supporters of a continuation of the Dardanelles campaign struggled to hold ground. The critics’ campaign was boosted when Ashmead-Bartlett—expelled by Hamilton for breaching the censorship rules—arrived back in London and joined the fray. Winston Churchill, a principal architect of the Gallipoli operations and Hamilton’s great friend and patron, could do little. Churchill had been dumped as First Lord of the Admiralty in May and sidelined to the marginal post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Still convinced that a breakthrough could be achieved, he would describe Murdoch’s letter as ‘lurid’. The secretary of the War Cabinet, Lieutenant Colonel Maurice Hankey, would offer an
even harsher review. After being invited to meet Murdoch over lunch by Arthur Balfour, Churchill’s successor at the admiralty, he branded the journalist ‘a horrible scab’ in his diary. Hankey would report to the Dardanelles Committee that under detailed questioning about many of the allegations in the letter, Murdoch had been unable to stand up his claims.

  Maurice Pascal Alers Hankey would prove to be one of the few players among the British leadership not driven by opportunism or political weakness during this critical period. Born to an Australian mother and an English father who had been a grazier in South Australia before the family returned to England, Hankey began his career as a junior officer with the Royal Marine Artillery and would end it as a baronet and one of the most respected and highly decorated bureaucrats in modern British history. Shrewd, tactful and a brilliant intelligence analyst, he had what Compton Mackenzie admiringly described as a ‘bald bulging benevolent head’. Hankey had been an early supporter of the proposal to open a new theatre in the war to try to break the stalemate on the Western Front. He shared Churchill’s enthusiasm for the Gallipoli campaign, while recognising from the outset that it was a gamble. As the cabinet considered the fate of the campaign in late September 1915, it had before it a fresh, detailed and authoritative first-hand account of the situation on the ground written by Maurice Hankey. In mid-July, Asquith had decided to send Churchill to Gallipoli along with Hankey. After opposition from a number of cabinet members, Churchill was withdrawn from the mission at the last minute and Hankey was sent alone. He was on the ground for a month and returned to London convinced—despite the failure of the August offensives, which he had witnessed at close quarters—that victory was still possible and that there were compelling arguments against withdrawal.