Phillip Schuler

by Mark Baker

  Everything about him is wrong. He has adopted an almost mincing attitude, his shoulders half-turned in embarrassment towards the camera, one hand resting on a stanchion in a curiously feminine way and the other grasping what appears to be a scarf or a piece of material at his side. The fingers are long, shapely and intensely sensitive, the face quite firm and patrician but somehow nervous and ill-at-ease.2

  Moorehead places the moment ‘somewhere about’ April 1915—on the cusp of the Gallipoli landings. In fact, the picture was taken on 16 October 1915, the day Hamilton learned he had been sacked. He is aboard the Triad for a last supper with three of his most senior and trusted officer colleagues before departing for London the next day. He might be forgiven for feeling and looking a bit out of sorts. The effeminate left hand Moorehead was drawn to is so because it was shattered by a Boer bullet during the Battle of Mujuba Hill in South Africa in 1881. The hand—and thereby Hamilton’s career—was only narrowly spared amputation.

  So much about Ian Hamilton was, and remains, misunderstood. Or misrepresented.

  In late July 2011 Rupert Murdoch was called before a select committee of the House of Commons in London to answer some tough questions about the conduct of his British newspapers. This was the city where the young Keith Murdoch had been spurned and humiliated—before he grasped the chemistry of political intrigue and used the formula to launch his career as an Australian media baron. Now the son who transformed that empire into a global colossus was facing some humiliation of his own.

  Murdoch the Younger was under considerable pressure over a scandal that had forced him to shut down his lucrative News of the World tabloid, quit his bid to take control of the BSkyB satellite broadcaster, farewell a clutch of senior executives and begin paying tens of millions of dollars in compensation. It had been revealed that over several years reporters at News of the World and other News Corp papers had hacked the phones of hundreds of politicians, celebrities, members of the royal family and ordinary Britons in an insatiable quest for sensational news. The targets had also including a murdered British schoolgirl, the families of dead British soldiers and victims of the July 2007 London bombings. The committee would go on to conclude that Murdoch had ‘exhibited wilful blindness’ to what his papers were doing and found that he was ‘not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company’.

  Towards the end of what he proclaimed to be ‘the most humble day of my life’, Rupert Murdoch delivered something of a plea for clemency from the committee members. He invoked the patriotism of his father and his Gallipoli letter—while attempting to hide the silver spoon of his birth behind a veil of familial rectitude:

  I was brought up by a father who wasn’t rich but who was a great journalist and, just before he died, bought a small paper, specifically saying he was giving me a chance to do good. I remember what he did and was most proud of, and what he was hated for in this country for many years: it was the expose of the scandal of Gallipoli, which I remain very proud of. And I would hope to see my sons and daughter . . . following if they are interested.3

  Rupert Murdoch has spent much of his long life cultivating a version of the Gallipoli mythology that portrays his father as one of the heroes, perhaps even the greatest, of the ill-fated campaign. The first Anzacs might have fought with exemplary tenacity and courage, but it took a fearless young journalist fresh from Melbourne to storm the parapets of censorship, expose ‘the truth’ of monumental British bungling and rescue his countrymen from disaster. The corollary of much of the eulogising of Keith Murdoch by his son and his son’s media outlets has been the further demonising of Sir Ian Hamilton. The work begun by correspondents Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and Keith Murdoch would be given fresh currency in Australian popular perceptions with the arrival of two films more than 30 years after Hamilton’s death in 1947.

  Peter Weir’s classic 1981 film Gallipoli is a stirring evocation of the tragedy of the campaign and particularly the folly of the murderous charges by the Light Horse regiments in the Battle of the Nek. It remains a standard reference for many Australians on what happened during the campaign. The film’s final credits carry the qualifier: ‘Although based on events which took place on the Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915, the characters portrayed in this film are entirely fictitious.’ Those characters do not include Sir Ian Hamilton, but they may as well do. The explicit message is that the young Australians were driven to certain death in the face of the Turkish machine guns by callous and incompetent British commanders. While the heroes in Gallipoli all have robust Australian accents—despite the fact that a large proportion of the 1st AIF were English-born migrants—the villainous officer who insists the men must charge, despite the pleas of an avuncular Australian major, speaks with a mincing caricature of an English upper-class accent.

  In truth, at the height of the Battle of the Nek, it was an Australian officer who ordered the men to keep charging despite the evident slaughter: Lieutenant Colonel Jack ‘Bull’ Antill, brigade major of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade, the brusque and authoritarian former militia officer born in Picton, New South Wales. The real villain of the Battle of the Nek would get his comeuppance on the Western Front in late 1916. Antill, by then a brigadier general and, by accounts, more swaggering and opinionated than ever, was planning an attack in the Somme sector that his senior officers feared would end in another disaster. According to the memoirs of one of them, Lieutenant Colonel John Charles Barrie, he and several other officers conspired with an army doctor to have Antill, who was ‘coughing and spluttering’ with a common cold, declared to be seriously ill. The ruse worked, and Antill was summarily evacuated, never to be seen on the front lines again.4

  Peter Weir’s Gallipoli was bankrolled by Robert Stigwood and Rupert Murdoch after the South Australian Film Corporation pulled out of the project. Rupert would concede in a 1989 interview with Gerard Henderson that much of what was said in Keith Murdoch’s Gallipoli letter was wrong or exaggerated. But that did not inhibit his approach to Weir’s screenplay. The movie is now part of the catalogue of Twentieth Century Fox which Rupert’s News Corp took control of in 1985. On the 25th anniversary of the movie’s launch, Fox released a special edition of the boxed DVD. A companion disc in the set has special features that reinforce the assertion that it was Keith who was instrumental in rescuing thousands of young Australians from the same tragic fate as the film’s hero, Archie Hamilton, the West Australian farmer’s son who lied about his age and his name to enlist. The Gallipoli letter is reproduced in full and, in an extensive interview, the venerable Dame Elisabeth, Keith’s then octogenarian widow, recites a glowing paean to the role of her late husband. After the film was released in the US to critical acclaim and commercial success, Rupert Murdoch would tell interviewers that he had been attracted to the project because of his father’s connection with the Dardanelles campaign. As biographer Jerome Tuccille would observe: ‘To a great extent, he was paying homage to his father’s shining moment as a journalist.’5

  The other film that rivals the popularity and influence of Weir’s Gallipoli in the cinematic canon of Australian military history is Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant. It appeared a year earlier—and took similar liberties with the truth in telling the story of the Australian troopers of the Bushveldt Carbineers who were executed during the Boer War for killing prisoners. The film’s biggest villain (beyond the off-screen Lord Kitchener, who personally signed the warrants for the execution of Lieutenants Morant and Handcock) was a senior officer on Kitchener’s staff. The supercilious Colonel Hamilton depicted as perjuring himself at the court martial is repeatedly referred to as ‘Johnny’—Sir Ian Hamilton’s nickname. The internet is now awash with commentary perpetuating the allegation that Sir Ian was a recidivist killer of innocent Diggers: he was the martinet who lied to secure the firing squad for Morant and Handcock and then, thirteen years later, he callously sent thousands more to their deaths at Gallipoli. Among the propagators of this version of history is eminent film cr
itic Paul Byrnes. In his synopsis of Breaker Morant on the website of the Australian National Film and Sound Archive, Byrnes declares: ‘The Colonel Hamilton mentioned here is Sir Ian Hamilton, who would later command the allied forces at the start of the Gallipoli campaign—his last command. He was relieved after an Australian journalist, Keith Murdoch, delivered a scathing secret attack to the British cabinet about the Gallipoli campaign.’

  While there is a strong case to conclude that Harry Morant got what he deserved from the straight-shooting ‘bastards’ at the prison in Pretoria in February 1902, there is no doubt Bruce Beresford shot the wrong Hamilton in Breaker Morant. The senior staff officer who gave evidence at the Morant court martial was not Ian Hamilton but the then colonel and later major general Hubert Ion Wetherall Hamilton, who was Kitchener’s military secretary and aide-de-camp from November 1900 until the end of the Boer War. His nickname was Hammy, not Johnny. And he had been dead for six months when the first Australian troops landed at Gallipoli in April 1915, shot through the head while commanding the British 3rd Division on the Western Front.

  The truth of Phillip Schuler’s part in the Gallipoli story has also fallen victim to the modern media massagers. Recent telemovie and documentary makers have woefully misrepresented his role, and even Schuler’s own newspaper has struggled to get it right.

  On the 90th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings, Fairfax Media—the latter-day owner of The Age—published a lavish coffee-table book entitled Gallipoli: Untold stories from war correspondent Charles Bean and front-line Anzacs. The book was engineered around the work of two old ‘Fairfax’ hands—Charles Bean, ‘Gallipoli Correspondent, The Sydney Morning Herald’ and Phillip Schuler, ‘Gallipoli Photojournalist, The Age’. The potted biography of Schuler described him as ‘Australia’s official photographer on Gallipoli’ and declared that he had volunteered to photograph the AIF at Gallipoli:

  From the moment he sailed for Egypt as The Age correspondent with Charles Bean in October 1914, the two correspondents worked together, with Schuler photographing the voyage and the entire campaign. He was at the landing and then over the next eight months took thousands of photographs.6

  In fact, Schuler was not a ‘photojournalist’ but a journalist who carried a camera, the same as Bean. Schuler was not Australia’s official photographer on Gallipoli; there was no such position. He did not volunteer to photograph the AIF on Gallipoli; he was assigned to report the war by The Age and when he and Bean embarked in October 1914 they and the rest of those aboard the convoy thought they were bound for England. No one knew they would be diverted to Egypt and the Dardanelles until halfway through the voyage. Schuler was not at the landings; he wasn’t allowed ashore until late July 1915, three months later. He did not spend eight months at Gallipoli; he was there for a total of six weeks due to official restrictions on his access.

  The Fairfax book rightly celebrates the great photographic legacy of Schuler’s time in Egypt and Gallipoli, but to describe him as someone who ‘wrote stories to complement his photographs’ is untrue and sells short his outstanding work as a war correspondent. The book’s crowning cock-up is its front cover. It shows a scene at Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915, the day of the landing. An Australian soldier lies wounded in the foreground, as hundreds of other soldiers move among the dead and wounded on the beach. Soldiers wearing Red Cross armbands are helping the wounded. Boxes of equipment are stacked among the men and the beach is scattered with discarded soldiers’ kit. It is a great photo but it was not, as the book’s photo credit claims, the work of Phillip Schuler, who that day was stuck on a boat well off the coast. The picture was taken by Captain Charles Atkins, a Tasmanian doctor with the Australian Army Medical Corps. The same picture appeared on the front page of The Age on Anzac Day 2014—once more attributed to Phillip Schuler.

  In the age of Twitter, Rupert Murdoch is an irrepressible octogenarian. On Anzac Day 2015 he was particularly busy in the world of 140-character missives. ‘Today century of Gallipoli disaster,’ he tweets, channelling his father. ‘Testament to British arrogance, incompetence. Many thousands of brave Anzac youths slaughtered.’ Later he gives a plug with his 660,000 Twitter followers to his Foxtel network’s new dramatisation of the Dardanelles campaign: ‘Congrats Foxtel, especially Brian Walsh and brilliant collaborators on great Deadline Gallipoli series.’ The two-part drama screened on the eve of Anzac Day is a lavish production that focuses on the part played by the four most significant correspondents to write about the campaign for Australia—Charles Bean, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, Phillip Schuler and Keith Murdoch. It takes the hagiography of Keith Murdoch to a new level, while taking considerable liberties with the truth of the character and conduct of the other three journalists.

  The executive producer of the mini-series was actor Sam Worthington, who also played Phillip Schuler. At a media conference in Adelaide in early 2014, Worthington appeared ignorant of the fact that while Murdoch and Ashmead-Bartlett had conspired to have Sir Ian Hamilton sacked and the Gallipoli campaign aborted, neither Bean nor Schuler were involved or supported their actions. ‘The more we uncovered about these journalists, the more we realised we had All the President’s Men in a war zone . . . The thrilling part of the drama is the story of these four journalists fighting the upper echelons of the military to get the truth out and stop the carnage,’ Worthington said.7 In truth, Bean had accepted and never publicly fought against military censorship and, when he discovered what Ashmead-Bartlett and Murdoch had done, he disapproved of their defiance of the censorship rules. Schuler emphatically disagreed with their actions. He greatly admired Hamilton and shared the general’s conviction that the campaign would have succeeded if the British government had stayed the course. He was particularly furious with Keith Murdoch and their relationship never recovered.

  Having constructed Deadline Gallipoli on a false premise, the producers proceeded to compound their corruption of the historical record with farcical depictions of some the principal characters. As ever, Sir Ian Hamilton is caricatured as a colour-less, humourless recluse, sipping cognac while brave men die and braver journalists struggle against him. With a breathtaking disregard for the ample evidence of his tenacity and courage under fire, Schuler is presented as a coward. He is shown cowering in the landing boat that took him to Anzac Cove and later blubbering to a nurse: ‘I couldn’t get off.’ Bean is shown standing with Colonel White of the 8th Light Horse Regiment before White charged with his men at the Battle of the Nek. In fact, the wounded Bean was resting in his dugout that day while it was Schuler who was with the troops in the front-line trenches and who would later brief Bean on the action. At another point in the dramatisation, Bean tells the newly arrived Keith Murdoch: ‘The British couldn’t organise a fucking children’s fete.’ While the straight-laced clergyman’s son might once have muttered the word ‘damn’—well out of earshot of the ladies and the young—there is nothing in the vast archive of his life and times to suggest Bean was ever tempted to utter such a vulgarity.

  Even the love interest in Deadline Gallipoli is a brazen departure from the facts. A Murdoch is once more in bed with Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, but this time it is Keith’s great-niece and Rupert’s niece, the actress Anna Torv. She plays Lady Gwendoline Churchill, who succumbs vigorously to the British correspondent’s affections during his visit back to London in June 1915. This is an exceptional piece of poetic licence. Indeed, it took the imagination of the Foxtel scriptwriters to achieve the coupling that the correspondent himself had failed so dismally to consummate in reality. Ashmead-Bartlett was indeed infatuated with the aloof and beautiful Lady Gwendoline, daughter of the Earl and Countess of Abingdon. In 1906 he wanted to propose marriage to her but, facing bankruptcy from crippling gambling debts, he could not go ahead. ‘Nevertheless I feel that I shall surmount all obstacles and win her in the end, at least if I only set my mind to it,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Everything comes to him who waits.’8 Not for the first time, Ashmead-Bartlett was deluding himself. G
wendoline married Jack Churchill, Winston’s brother, in 1908, to the great distress of the lovelorn journalist. ‘It was unbearable,’ he wrote after learning of their engagement. ‘I would have gone to a certain death with a light heart at that time and would have welcomed the end.’ After returning from an assignment in Morocco and seeing pictures of the wedding in the London papers, Ashmead-Bartlett’s sorrow turned to anger. He resolved to banish Gwendoline from his mind ‘and never trust any woman again’. It was a sentiment that perhaps fuelled Ashmead-Bartlett’s antipathy towards the Gallipoli campaign. Major Jack Churchill was a senior and trusted member of Sir Ian Hamilton’s headquarters staff. His presence—and the memories of lost love that would inevitably evoke—could not be avoided during the long months on Imbros in 1915.

  Not surprisingly, Deadline Gallipoli casts Keith Murdoch’s actions at Gallipoli in familiar heroic light. But it breaks new ground in historical revisionism with its account of Murdoch’s appearance before the Dardanelles Commission. There is no trace of the humiliation Murdoch actually endured when he was cross-examined in February 1917; no mention of his admissions that much of what he wrote in his letter was wrong or hearsay or, indeed, a calculated lie. Instead we see Murdoch in a way that he surely would have liked to recast that day for himself. He is tough, defiant and unwavering in defence of his actions. And when challenged by one of the British commissioners about his actions, Murdoch pushes right back: ‘Let me remind you, Lord Kitchener, that I am under the jurisdiction of the Australian government.’ Never mind that Lord Kitchener never sat on the Dardanelles Commission or that on the day Keith Murdoch was called to give evidence the venerable field marshal had been dead for eight months.