by Peter Rees
Part One
The Early Years
A child’s outlook on life is ‘caught’ rather than ‘taught’—learnt from the example and dogma of parents or other leaders who are the child’s heroes, and not from any reasoned explanation of how right doing leads in the end to happiness, and wrong doing to misery.
Charles Bean, The ABC Weekly, Sydney, 3 April 1948
1
Here, My Son
From the first day of his life, Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean knew the dust and heat of the Australian bush. Born at Bathurst, on the western edge of the Great Dividing Range in New South Wales, on 18 November 1879, he was a son of rural Australia. But he did not suffer the hardship that generally accompanied life for people in the bush. While the Bean family did not live in luxury, it did nonetheless enjoy comparative comfort.
Charles Bean’s father, Edwin, was a product of the nineteenth-century education revolution that had spread throughout Britain to cater to the emerging middle classes. He would never lose sight of the importance of education.
Edwin was twenty-six when he and his wife, Lucy, arrived at Bathurst, the oldest inland town in Australia, on a hot January day in 1878. Edwin had been appointed headmaster of All Saints’ College, which had opened five years earlier. When the Beans arrived, Bathurst had a population of just 4000. The Main Western rail line from Sydney, which carried the Beans to Bathurst, had reached the town two years earlier. Establishing All Saints’ College was part of Bathurst’s progress.
When Edwin took over, there were just fifteen students and the neo-Gothic college was struggling. The Beans arrived in the middle of a drought and, after Sydney, they found life in Bathurst tough and uncivilised. Lucy thought it primitive. Despite the travails, ‘we pulled through, and the school grew in numbers and reputation,’ she wrote later.
Edwin Bean had been born in Bombay, India, in 1851. His father, Dr John Bean, was a surgeon-major in the East India Company’s service. When Edwin reached school age, he was sent to Clifton College in Bristol, England. The family’s aim was for Edwin to enter the Indian Civil Service. The seven years he spent at Clifton influenced him—and subsequently Charles—for life. It was Charles, however, who would take the lessons beyond the schoolroom into Australian life and history.
Amid the revolution in secondary-school education taking place in England, Clifton’s first headmaster, John Percival, was intent on developing an educational philosophy that had been set by an earlier reformer, Thomas Arnold, when headmaster of Rugby School. Percival was Arnold’s protégé. Arnold focused on religious principles, gentlemanly behaviour and academic attainment, and emphasised the importance of character training: virtues such as loyalty, chivalry, sportsmanship and leadership. He believed education should prepare pupils for citizenship for the overall well-being of society. ‘Big noting’ was anathema to these values.
John Percival had learned the Arnold philosophy as a teacher at Rugby before being appointed as headmaster at Clifton, a post he held from 1862 until 1879. Under him, Clifton became one of Britain’s leading public schools. Years later, Charles Bean would describe Percival’s aim as ‘to give boys a course of education which would not run in the set hard and fast lines of the old Classical education’ but ‘should afford a wider scope of learning’. With a great work and study ethic, Edwin quickly became a favourite of John Percival. In 1869, Edwin went to Trinity College, Oxford, with a classical scholarship. In a letter to his grandfather in April 1871, his earnestness was clear: ‘I see more and more clearly that we do not live in the world for our own sakes only, but for our friends and countrymen.’
Edwin emerged from Oxford with third-class honours, thus missing out on entry to the Indian Civil Service. Offered a job as tutor to a wealthy Hobart family, he arrived in Tasmania in February 1874. But the family was unhappy with his inexperience and sacked him. A lifeline appeared when he was offered a teaching post at Geelong Grammar. This job he enjoyed, but he returned to Hobart during school holidays to see Lucy Butler, a member of a family of lawyers regarded as foundational to the establishment of Tasmania’s legal community. The courtship flourished.
In July 1876, Edwin wrote to his mother in England to announce his engagement to Lucy. He had met ‘numbers of good looking and clever girls in the colonies, but . . . I never was suffered to think of anyone else.’ He told his mother: ‘It was her large broad view of life and its duties that first attracted me to her.’ Edwin and Lucy married in June 1877, and six months later, having moved to Sydney to teach classics at Sydney Grammar, he accepted the post as headmaster at All Saints’. Edwin noted that Lucy had ‘an admiration for Arnold of Rugby, and I feel sure would welcome any efforts of mine to make towards his work.’
Taking on the headmastership gave Edwin the opportunity to foster the ‘muscular Christianity’ of Arnold and Percival. He spent time travelling the surrounding country explaining the benefits of a private-school education. By the end of his first year there were more than sixty students at the college. By the mid 1880s he had established All Saints’ as one of the great public schools of New South Wales. He did not necessarily have a high opinion of all of his students, writing of one, in a cutting observation of colonial society: ‘Of course he is not a gentleman, and of course he is rich, and a squatter—for the ignorant and rich boys are all budding squatters, though the converse does not always hold.’
Lucy had been pregnant with their first child when they arrived at Bathurst, and their daughter, Madeline, was born on 4 May 1878. Their happiness was short-lived, however. Madeline contracted meningitis and died on 8 January 1879. Charles was born just ten months later. In a letter to his father in England, Edwin described his new son as ‘a regular “King Sturdy”’.
A brother, John ‘Jack’ Willoughby Bean, was born in January 1881. Both parents were avid readers, and the boys flourished in a household where literature was highly prized. Lucy spoke of the enjoyment she and Edwin shared while reading aloud Charles Dickens’ satirical novel Little Dorrit. From an early age Lucy noticed that Charles was unusually observant: ‘Everyone notices how quick the child is and what a memory he has for names, people or words—indeed everything.’
Lucy read to four-year-old Charles the parable of the Prodigal Son, the verses of which he felt ‘were very poor’ and decided should be rewritten to something ‘far finer’. Jack remembered that Charlie titled the poem The Naughty Boy Who Ran Away.
He lay abed and worked out the poem in his wee mind to the tune and rhythm of the old nursery song ‘Jim Crack-Corn, I don’t care!’ Then, having its few short lines or verse or two finished and fixed in his memory, he got into his parents’ bed next morning full of keenness to share it with them! Both [father and mother] were quite deeply impressed and proud of the remarkable literary promise . . . and felt a future for that toddler poet!
The family encouraged conversation and learning. Edwin and Lucy were both storytellers, and on occasion Edwin would give the children geography lessons using the lamp for the sun and Jack’s head for the earth. By the age of four, Charles was writing letters on a glass drawing slate, and by five had written what was probably his first letter, to his grandfather in Hobart, complete with drawings of two ships and signed with his full Christian names.
By the time Charles and Jack entered preparatory school in 1886, they had a younger brother, Montague, who was born in 1884. Charles was described as ‘fairly quick’ at his lessons. He progressed solidly, but as he would later comment, ‘not in any way a marvel of learning or industry . . . I loved best to read the school magazine, the Bathurstian—poems, articles, stories and all the cricket and football news, and to play cricket in a small way.’
Away from school, the Bathurst Plains were at his door. With the area’s colourful gold-mining and bush-ranging past, there was plenty to capture the imagination of a young boy. While exploring abandoned diggings Charles began to sketch—a practice that he would develop and continue throughout his life, illustrating letters and st
ories.
On Christmas night 1887, with her boys in bed, Lucy wrote in her diary an assessment of Charles’ development. ‘I must tell you that I have been pleased to notice that you have been much more unselfish lately; I am very glad to see this.’
Worn out by the task of building up the school over the previous ten years, Edwin suddenly resigned, just as Charles, aged nine, prepared to enter the upper school. As Edwin explained in a letter to his father, ‘I . . . don’t think I could manage many more years of the incessant worry and effort of school keeping without breaking down.’
All Saints’ College was thriving when Edwin sold his interest in the school for £5750 to a Church of England clergyman. With the deal scheduled to take ten years to complete, the Bean family sailed to England in March 1889.
2
Waterloo
As the coast of England came into view from their steamship, a sense of anticipation gripped the Beans. ‘We all knew that the white cliffs would be there—I think we must have been aware of that before we were weaned,’ Charles wrote later. They arrived in London in early spring 1889, and young Charles was immediately captivated by the big, bustling city.
Edwin’s plan was to educate his three sons by his own tuition and by travelling. They would spend summers at Oxford and winters in France and Belgium. He taught them the classics, and to look upon Latin prose as a problem of logic rather than of language. ‘If you cannot translate that sentence as it stands, translate the meaning of the sentence into simpler English which you can translate into Latin,’ he would tell them. Edwin was not a mathematician but had an interest in the Greek mathematician Euclid and his system of geometry. Charles was fascinated. ‘I grew so fond of it that I used to love to do the little Euclid problems better than anything else—for years I would rather tackle a Euclid problem than the simplest sum of algebra.’
Holidays on the Continent were memorable. In Brussels, they were under the care of Belgian governesses, and Charles took drawing lessons from an artist. ‘It was taking a plunge for several weeks into another life—new scenes, new language, new customs, new sounds, new food, new smells.’ During this time the seeds of an interest in military history were planted. From this young age Charles learned the importance of forensically examining battlefields:
Our greatest delight was our visits with the Pater to the battlefield of Waterloo, of which he, and we too, came to know every inch. The museum at the Hôtel de Musée on the battlefield, with its chipped skulls, and broken swords and bayonets, and old shakos [tall, cylindrical military caps] with holes through them where the bullets had passed, had an intense fascination for us . . . I tried to find on the battlefield bullets and fragments of swords or harness.
The boy’s fascination grew with legendary battles that the British had fought. He would later write that ‘Australians, almost as much as the English, had been brought up on tales of Crécy and Agincourt, Trafalgar, Waterloo, the Indian Mutiny and the Crimean, Afghan, Zulu and other British wars.’ Charles’ imagination enhanced this. For years he chronicled in a scrapbook the adventures of one ‘John Mo’, who began as a humble black American before changing into an aristocratic black Englishman and ending up as ‘Field Marshal Lord Mow’. One of Charles’ drawings depicted Mo earning the Victoria Cross—running an Indian hill tribesman through with his officer’s sabre and fending off attackers.
During this time the headmastership of Brentwood Grammar School in Essex became vacant. Edwin’s father had been a pupil there, and his grandfather one of the wardens. The school had fallen on hard times, with enrolments declining to forty or so students in 1891. Charles would later write that his father took over the headmastership during an ‘acute crisis’ for the school. The analogy that sprang to mind for Edwin, as he tried to ‘nurse’ a run-down school, was ‘trying to light a fire in the bush in rainy weather, when you have to blow every spark into flame and shield it with your coat, and may find after all your efforts that the exasperating thing goes out!’ The bush had left its mark on him. To Charles, his father’s chief anxiety was the school’s standards and morale. ‘He was adamant in his belief that upper and middle class homes fostered qualities and standards vital to the school and to the nation, and he was determined to keep that element among Brentwood boys.’
Therefore, Edwin wanted to ensure that day boys from local state primary schools were fully accepted as members of the school. Opponents believed that the social ‘tone’ of the school would be hopelessly ruined, but Edwin refused to accept this. ‘Providentially, my experience of the best Australian schools had taught me that “democratisation” is quite compatible with a high tone and with good intellectual standards,’ he wrote. The young Charles was witnessing first-hand an important lesson in egalitarianism.
Brentwood’s history dated back to the less egalitarian era of Mary Tudor, a Catholic queen of England. In 1557 Sir Anthony Browne, the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, acquired the land on which the school was built. Two years earlier an event occurred which remained large in the school’s history. A young Protestant, William Hunter, was martyred when Browne, acting on the wishes of Queen Mary, ordered that he be burnt at the stake as a heretic for refusing to accept the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation, according to which the bread and wine of the communion become the body and blood of Jesus Christ. In 1558, with a grant from the Crown, Browne opened Brentwood School on the site of the execution. Years later, Charles Bean wrote a poem about William Hunter’s fate. Set to music, it later became the school song, and remains so to this day—all nine verses, the first of which speaks of how:
They bound a lad by a green elm tree
And they burn’d him there for folks to see:
And in shame for his brothers and play-mates all
They built them a school with a new red wall.
As he had done at All Saints’ in Bathurst, Edwin drew inspiration from John Percival. As Charles later recalled: ‘At Brentwood the influence of Clifton was very marked. School terminology [was] largely drawn from that source. But what was more important, the school’s standards were largely founded on Percival’s, with an added element of friendliness.’
Edwin did not see the headmaster’s job there as long-term. His plan was to get the school back on its feet and then resume travelling with the family. But in 1893 several commercial banks in Australia collapsed. The effect of this was profound: Edwin decided to stay on at Brentwood. As he later wrote: ‘If it had not been for Brentwood I should have been a ruined man when the great Australian Bank crash occurred, it robbed me of six thousand pounds at one swoop.’ The family resigned themselves to life in Britain.
Charles’ attitude towards Britain began to change. He had been there for four years and it had become home. Forty years later he would recall, with memories no doubt coloured by time, the days when the family would arrive back from the Continent:
Much as we enjoyed [the travel], we now found that the supreme moment of each trip—the single hour of compressed, distilled, undiluted enjoyment—was that of the last morning, when, after the nasty North Sea crossing, the returning boat had landed us at Harwich, and after crossing the wharf with its international smells of tar and rope and grated wood, and climbed into one of the clean, glossy carriages of the clean, glossy English train standing there all ready; and then in a train compartment with just sufficient sniff of upholstery to make us feel luxurious, we set off to race for an hour or so between the gentle English hills, covered with the plaid pattern of neat, pocket-handkerchief fields, with the cosy farms nestling into lovely trees and snug hedges; and, where we roared above the roads, the carters (or, where we roared past the platforms, the railway porters) were going about their business without shouting or gesticulation—just doing their job in the matter-of-fact, quiet English way. I speak only for myself, but as a boy I think I would have given the whole three weeks of that European tour for the quintessence of delight in that sweet hour at the end of it. It was not the mere scenery that was twining its
elf so deeply around one’s heart-strings; it was more a certain deep spirit of content and agreement that expressed itself in that orderly quietness.
The country and its school system, together with his parents’ attitudes, were shaping fourteen-year-old Charles Bean. He was benefiting from a unique travel-filled education, one that included opportunities he could only have dreamed about if the family had stayed in Australia. The principles and ideals instilled by both his parents and Brentwood were just the beginning. He was ready for the next step.
3
Tempering steel
The winter of 1894 saw fifteen-year-old Charles Bean at Clifton College near Bristol, some 250 kilometres from his family and Brentwood School, and a world away from all that was familiar. Edwin, an old boy himself, knew the school’s ethos and wanted this for his eldest son. The headmaster, Michael Glazebrook, was a forbidding and unpopular personality who was soon nicknamed ‘The Bogey’. Despite this, he maintained the excellent academic standards and high moral tone that John Percival had set.
Charles entered the classics stream of Form Three and had to tolerate jibes at his Australian accent. At cricket, his classmates invited him to ‘boawl them aout’. Because of this, he was known as ‘The Rum’Un’. He took it in good heart, later joining in the spirit in a letter to his father where he referred to the Australian cricket team, in England for the 1896 Ashes Tests, as ‘the Horse-trail-ians’. He lost his Aussie drawl within a couple of years to an English accent he had previously described as ‘putting on jam’.
Edwin wrote letters exhorting him to form good habits that would lay the foundation for future success. ‘Of course you are now launched on the stream of school-life which leads into the great river of world-life; so you must steer your own course. Don’t go to sleep at the helm, and let your boat follow the current, even if you see others around doing so. It is by perseverance more than anything else that men succeed.’ Edwin’s unusual use of metaphor was a trait his son was to inherit.