Horrie the War Dog

by Roland Perry

  A Mr A. C. Bendrodt, from a prominent Sydney family, went public. His photo was carried in reports in which he said that Wardle was ‘guilty of unnecessary brutality’ over the extermination.

  Another person, calling himself ‘Y. S., an old soldier’ of Chatswood, Sydney, ended his letter with: ‘I hope and pray that when your day comes I will have the pleasure to put you to sleep in the same way as that little mate [Horrie] died.’

  More worrying was a further unsigned message, which said: ‘I was trained to kill in the Great War and I am still a very accurate shot. Your [Wardle’s] killing of this creature of God deserves a similar fate and I know how to do it.’

  Another, signing him or herself ‘Dog Lovers of the World’, wrote:

  Dog Murderer,

  Please do us a big favour & on your way home today buy yourself a dose of arsenic or something that makes a slow deaf [sic].

  The many threats did not fall on deaf ears. Wardle was more than concerned. He wanted to sue the letter writers and journalists commenting on the case for libel. He wrote to the federal government’s Crown Solicitor asking if legal action could be taken. The Crown replied that ‘it could not be established that any real injury was done to the reputation’ of Wardle, and that any ‘verdict obtained [for Wardle]’ would only gain ‘nominal damages.’ In other words, it was not worth going to court over.

  Wardle was not alone in feeling the heat. The unfortunate New South Wales Minister for Health, C. A. Kelly, came under scrutiny and was labelled ‘one of the most unpopular men in Sydney’ for his alleged putting to death of Horrie. Kelly denied that he had anything to do with the case, which was a federal, not a state matter, and he feared he would lose his seat at the next election. He was vilified, he claimed, by strangers and even a small boy, who ‘complained to a member of my staff about the cruelty I am supposed to have done.’

  The Truth newspaper, which loved scandal, dwelt on the story with features such as ‘Legal Murder of War Dog Executed by Red Tape.’ Articles were often accompanied by Moody’s photographs from the war and afterwards, which verified and authenticated the heroic tale with its shock ending. Moody again took a gamble by releasing the photograph of him, Brooker and the dog on the morning of 9 March when he took the fake Horrie to the Quarantine Station. But the medium front-on shot of the dog, dwarfed in the photo, would need expert scrutiny to distinguish it from the real Horrie, especially if the latter had his ears pinned back and was not on alert.

  Moody had a phone call from Barry Bain, the butcher, who was now working in Sydney. He was angry and upset about Horrie. He ranted on the phone, attacking even Moody for not doing enough to save Horrie. Moody was forced to interrupt: ‘Barry, Barry, Barry,’ he said, ‘listen! What did I tell you when we were based near Tel Aviv, and you thought we were going to leave him with the Ascalon Police?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What did I tell you?’

  ‘That I shouldn’t worry, you had a plan for him.’

  ‘Well, I am saying it again.’

  There was silence on the line before Barry understood what he was being told.

  ‘Oh . . . you mean . . . ?’

  ‘Yes . . . but please, mate, keep it under your hat. All right?’

  The Rebels had a meeting at a pub in Sydney’s Woollahra on 20 March and Moody asked the others if they should find a partner for Horrie.

  ‘He’ll need a companion like Imshi,’ he said. After several rounds of beer, they passed around the hat and collected £3, which would be used to purchase a suitable female for Horrie, who would be sent to Cudgewa.

  ‘Where are you going to find it?’ Featherstone asked.

  ‘I’ve already met her,’ Moody said with a wry smile, ‘and I’m going to show her to the world.’

  The next day Moody returned to the pound he had visited a few weeks earlier when looking for the Horrie substitute and bought the cute little white Scottish terrier for seven shillings. He then alerted the press and fuelled his grand deception by telling reporters he had bought a dog to replace Horrie. Subsequent articles had photos of Moody with the ‘new’ dog.

  A reporter from the Mirror asked him if she had a name.

  ‘Imshi II,’ he said poker-faced.

  ‘Imshi? What’s that mean?’

  Moody gave a brief description of the original Imshi, ‘Horrie’s companion in Palestine and Syria.’

  The press lapped it up. The caption for the photo in the Truth of 25 March read: ‘Jim Moody, saddened by the loss of Horrie, now has a new canine pal, a Scotty, one Imshi II. But Jim will never stop mourning the loss of his Wog cobber, Horrie.’

  Whenever the story settled down, Moody planned to take Imshi II to Cudgewa to mate her with Horrie.

  *

  The ongoing ‘tragic’ story of Horrie’s ‘death’ created a huge public response right across the nation. Papers were flooded with letters and commentary into April. Moody became an overnight martyr-hero, himself receiving hundreds of letters of sympathy and support, with scores of people offering help, some with funds, to take his protest further. Ninety-nine per cent of the letters to the press condemned the authorities for their callous disregard and lack of flexibility and humanity. Many were so touched that they burst into verse with poignant poems. Typical was one written by Laura Eveline Dixon that began:

  A hero passed, when stilled the splendid heart

  Of that brave dog who played in War his Part.

  A waif from out the desert, he attained

  By right a page in history, and surely gained

  The love of everyone who knows the worth

  Of canine comradeship upon this earth.

  It was heartfelt. Doggerel predominated. A person signing himself ‘Charlie’ wrote:

  Now Horrie’s gone far far away,

  He’ll no more see the light of day,

  His life is done, they blew him up,

  And never more we’ll see our pup.

  The passionate response reached a crescendo a week before Anzac Day 1945 when a public protest meeting was held in the basement of the Sydney Town Hall. Moody and Idriess spoke at the meeting. Wardle was singled out for suggested ‘punishment;’ a demand was made for the Commonwealth government to amend regulations; and the Prime Minister was petitioned to prevent anything ‘similar happening to gallant pets of servicemen returning to this country.’

  On Anzac Day itself, wreaths were solemnly laid for Horrie (and would be for another 20 years) at the Cenotaph in Martin Place, Sydney. Prominent among them was one from the 6th Division, inscribed: ‘In Memory of our pal, Horrie, the Wog Dog.’

  The tabloids showed a picture of Private J. M. Creer, ‘WX40960,’ saluting the wreaths placed for Horrie on the Cenotaph.

  The papers also reported that ‘a small boy’ called at Sydney’s Red Cross House and asked what he could do with a wreath he had made. It was adorned with a Union Jack he had drawn himself, and a message: ‘In memory of Horrie, the Digger’s Friend of the Middle East—From Mickie Wilson.’

  Moody kept it running by letting the press know he had written to the boy, enclosing a photo of Horrie. By taking up every press opportunity, Moody was maintaining his public rage for the benefit of the government and the bureaucracy. After the story died down, he would have to tread carefully, he reasoned, for the rest of his life, to maintain the fiction about Horrie’s demise. This was especially with so many influential people and institutions duped. Moody also felt the responsibility to the Rebels, who were all implicated in the supreme cover-up and hoax, the most successful in Australian history.

  Barry the Butcher, the only character outside the Rebels who had an idea of the ‘fraud,’ found the group in a private room at the Woollahra pub late in the afternoon on Anzac Day. They had been drinking since the march in Sydney’s streets finished at noon. He wanted to know the full story, but they refused to tell him. Yet Moody reassured him that his ‘little mate’ was safe and well.

  ‘One day,’ Moody assured him, �
��I’ll let you see for yourself.’

  That was enough for Barry, who was allowed to join them for the rest of a most convivial evening.

  *

  The Horrie story had become a national issue that had a life of its own. An official memorial was proposed by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Readers of its magazine, Animals, were asked to provide funds, but Moody never endorsed this development, believing it would be a monument to his own grand deception, no matter how it was justified to him by Brooker and the Rebels as ‘for the greater good.’ The monument was never built. (In 1955, a decade later, the RSPCA was accused of doing nothing with the £81 raised for the Horrie memorial.) But Moody was happy to be linked to a Sydney Daily Telegraph appeal for funds to invoke the memory of Horrie in order to keep open the King Edward’s Dogs Home in Moore Park, Sydney. That appeased Moody’s soul a fraction, with the substitute dog forever on his conscience. By helping to keep the home operating, he was doing his bit to ensure that hundreds of other dogs survived.

  The continued public clamour over ‘Horrie’ had a direct impact on a further illegal animal import case. In April, another dog, called ‘Dinah,’ who belonged to a former officer of the 2nd AIF, was condemned to death for similar allegations to those thrown at Horrie. But this time Wardle relented and spared Dinah. This again helped Moody justify to himself the merit of his actions over Horrie and the substitute dog. Reacting to Wardle’s backdown this time, Moody said: ‘It’s a case of once bitten, twice shy.’

  The dignified office of the Prime Minister deemed it appropriate to keep replying to ‘sensible and rational’ letters concerning the Horrie story but they were not from John Curtin. He died on 5 July 1945 and was replaced by Ben Chifley, who had the unenviable task of sifting through the massive correspondence that had piled up in the office during Curtin’s debilitating last months. The letters from Chifley’s private secretary, E. W. Tonkin, concerning Horrie began to flow in September. One example was a reply to a 21 September letter to the Prime Minister written by a Mrs Mateer, of Lithgow, New South Wales, who had wanted him to act on the ‘barbarous act perpetrated on Horrie.’ The response, dictated by Chifley to his secretary, said:

  I have been requested by the Prime Minister to acknowledge the receipt of your letter relative to “Horrie the Wog Dog”. Mr Chifley wishes me to say that he is unable to help you in the direction desired.

  This reply demonstrated that the sting had gone out of the Horrie incident after half a year of intense coverage and scrutiny. While the story had attracted a big following it was not quite one of the issues then galvanising the nation in August and September, such as the end of the Pacific War and Japan’s unconditional surrender after the two atomic weapons had been dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August, and Nagasaki on 9 August 1945.

  Moody was pleased and most relieved with the subsidence of the Horrie ‘issue.’ His brazen scheme had worked far beyond his wildest expectations. Now it was apparently over, he hoped that he and Horrie could carry on their lives under far less strain or scrutiny. But the scam had touched Moody more than anyone else. He felt an ongoing sense of guilt for deceiving so many people from the Prime Minister down, and including his father, the Machine Gun battalion, the entire 6th Division, the media and the public. Moody would love to have told the world that Horrie was alive and safe, but instead he had to maintain the subterfuge over a tale that would never leave him. Every day of his life he was reminded by somebody or an incident, of the story.

  The only people he shared the ruse with were the Rebels and Barry the Butcher, with a very few exceptions over the decades. One was a young journalist, Norma James, whom he met in the seaside town of Wollongong, 82 kilometres south of Sydney. Moody, still a celebrity, was on a photographic assignment in February 1946, 11 months after the execution of the substitute dog. They talked about Horrie. James told journalist Anthony Hill that Moody said to her: ‘I’ll tell you something one day.’ Moody took her notebook and pencil and wrote: ‘Horrie is not dead. He never died. But if you tell anyone I’ll deny it.’

  Soon afterwards, he revealed the tale in more detail to James.

  ‘You don’t think an Australian soldier would leave a mate like that, do you?’ he said to her.

  Years later Betty Featherstone, the wife of Brian, recalled a ‘half-drunk’ Moody talking and laughing about the hoax. At every Anzac Day reunion he would drink heavily with those wartime mates and relive the story in every amusing and dramatic detail. Moody found those days cathartic. For a few precious hours annually he did not have to live a lie. He and the Rebels could wallow in private over their coup.

  ‘‘I was supposed to be the joker in our pack,’ Bert Fitzsimmons said to Moody more than once at these special reunions, ‘but you have pulled off the prank of the century!’

  28

  POSTSCRIPT

  Horrie lived in idyllic surroundings on a dairy farm at Cudgewa owned by Eddie Albert Bennetts, a friend of Moody’s from the 6th Division who had fought with the Tank-Attack (formerly Anti-Tank) Battalion. Horrie sired two litters of seven pups with his partner, Ishmi II. Over the years, most of the Rebels managed to visit Horrie at least once and Barry the Butcher was known to have made the trip from Sydney six times.

  Moody kept in contact with Horrie and on average made monthly visits to him, keeping Imshi II and the pups with his (Moody’s) family. He decided with Bennetts to give Horrie the new name of ‘Benji’—an amalgam of Bennetts and Jim. Calling him Horrie would have been dangerous. Word would have leaked out that a dog fitting the famous animal’s description was alive and well. Moody was based in several places within a few hours drive of Cudgewa.

  It gave him great joy to see his beloved mate happy and contented into his maturity. Horrie always greeted him (and Imshi II) with unbridled enthusiasm, as if thanking him for his wonderful life that his master’s many risky actions had given him. Horrie was closer to Eddie Bennetts’ wife Gladys because Eddie was not comfortable with dogs around cattle.

  On one occasion at a Melbourne reunion on Anzac Day in the late 1940s, Moody, Bennetts and several of the Rebels got themselves merry. As usual Moody was ready for some spirited behaviour. He took Bennetts, Featherstone and Gill for a hair-raising ride in the old Rolls Royce he had converted into a moveable workshop for his wool-classing operations. Imshi II was in the car. Moody, in a reckless mood, careered through Melbourne’s beautiful Treasury Gardens, where vehicles never travelled. The thrill-ride ended up with them all partying at a nearby pub. Eddie Bennetts noticed Moody left the celebrations several times in the night. The next morning his intermittent departures were explained. He had been with Imshi in the Rolls, helping to deliver four pups sired by Horrie.

  At age ten years, Horrie was overweight and slowed up by severe bouts of rheumatism in his back. This less-than-nimble condition led to him being accidentally run over and killed at Log Bridge near Cudgewa. Moody was devastated by the news. But all the Rebels consoled him by reminding him that had he not taken Horrie out of the Libyan Desert he would have died there as a pup. Hundreds of men of the 2/1 Machine Gun Battalion and many more in units of 6th Division then would have been killed and injured by German Stukas in Greece, Crete and Palestine, on the high seas and on land.

  ‘Every dog has his day,’ Moody said, ‘and except for a week or so in Syria, Horrie was on top of life, every day.’

  Horrie’s sad demise drew Moody closer to Imshi and the pups, and he often commented to his family about ‘all the little Horries running around.’

  Imshi died in 1959, aged 14. Moody gained great personal satisfaction from knowing that Horrie’s fine genes lived on through many offspring, and that he and the Rebels had beaten the system. But the long-running sting did not end there. In 1966, 21 years after the ruse by Moody and the Rebels, he felt comfortable enough to donate Horrie’s ‘uniform’ and his mode of travel, the pack, to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Included were an Africa Star, ribbon, colour patch, and chevron
s: his insignias indicating rank and length of service. These were displayed by the Memorial and the event created another round of publicity on the story. But Moody kept the EX1 tag and RSL medallion as keepsakes for his own vivid memories. They were his equivalent to the sock given to Horrie to always remember Moody by. Being a professional photographer he also kept stylish snaps of Horrie, Imshi II and their pups.

  *

  Jim Moody gained fame from his association with Horrie but his life was never the same after his traumatic war and the dramatic events of 1945. The government noted his record of being AWL, and also his attacks on its Health Department, and decided he was not eligible for any soldier settlement block. He ran his Manly photography shop for a while and also worked for another photographic business, Peter Fox Studios in Melbourne. He and Don Gill enjoyed a couple of years after the war as daredevil motorbike racers at Sydney and Melbourne speedways. He and Gill were always able to provide spectacular acts, which had been practised and honed in Libya’s Western Desert in 1941.

  Moody kept in contact with all the Rebels and they would have a reunion every Anzac Day for two decades after the war. Most of the group would make it to Melbourne and take a private room at the Bowling Club in Union Street in the suburb of Windsor. As the decades rolled on, the dispersed group members were down to phone calls, cards and letters. Moody had divorced during the war after his wife became involved with another man in Melbourne. In 1948, he met Joan Booth, an army nursing lieutenant, and they married in 1951 (the same year Brian Featherstone married his wife Betty). When asked what attracted her to Moody, Joan replied after some thought: ‘His sense of humour.’

  Betty Featherstone agreed with that Moody characteristic and added that he was ‘a larrikin with a good heart.’