by Peter Rees
In this quiet bush backwater Bean, still often wearing his Army uniform, now set about his task of writing the history of the AIF not only as a closely researched narrative but as a study and celebration of what he saw as the Australian character. The drowsy sheep paddocks of Tuggeranong could not have been more different from the focus of his narrative—Gallipoli and the Western Front. But, as Bean would soon find, even quiet backwaters can hold surprises.
40
The Nipper
A ‘mastoid problem’—that’s how it all started. Otherwise Charles Bean would never have become captivated by Sister Effie Young. He was admitted to Queanbeyan Hospital with complications of the virus. ‘The matron was away and I was the patient of Sister Ethel Clara Young, then acting matron,’ Bean wrote in the private diary that had lain idle during the war years and which he picked up again in the winter of 1920.
Someone snapped a photo of Bean in his Army uniform seated in the sun on the hospital porch steps with a bandage around his head, with Sister Young in her nurse’s uniform sitting beside him. He wrote to his parents after the infection, which gave him an abscess on his neck, had healed. He said he had been so comfortable in hospital during his two-week stay that he hardly wanted to leave. He singled out Effie’s care of him. ‘They have looked after me most splendidly at this hospital—especially the little sister who is acting-matron during the matron’s absence. Perhaps I was a bit of a favourite of hers and she has been a favourite of mine—one of the sweetest and most natural girls I have ever met. I shall miss all this attention.’ Effie was subsequently invited to Tuggeranong for a tennis party. Romance blossomed.
At the rambling homestead, Bean was enveloped in his own thoughts as he sought to make sense of the questions he had posed himself. He had boxes and boxes of records, his own diaries and vast personal experience. Out of this complex mix he sought to write the first volume, on the Gallipoli landing.
But he knew the issues went much beyond this. How did the Australian people—and the Australian character, if there was one—come through what he believed was the universally recognised test of this, their first great war? Second, what did the Australian people and their forces achieve in the total effort of their side of the struggle? Third, what was the true nature of that struggle and test so far as Australians took part in it? Bean also wanted to know what guidance Australians or others could obtain from this experience for future emergencies. These would all be issues that the history would have to confront.
Arthur Bazley, after five years of close association with Bean, was well placed to analyse his approach. As he saw it, Bean tackled these questions as much from the viewpoint of the front-line soldier as from that of the Commander-in-Chief. Bean believed that, so far as possible, responsibility for the events he was to describe should be attributed to the men actually responsible—at least sufficiently to prove that responsibility for important decisions, which the official reports tended to ascribe to on commanders, also lay with their subordinates. As Bazley commented:
This decision—and the conviction that many instances of self-sacrifice, of devoted endurance and bravery would never be heard of unless they were recorded in these volumes—meant the furnishing of more detail than had been put into a war history, at least in modern times. A further reason which rendered necessary much detail was to ensure that the Australian history should be accepted as authoritative overseas as well as in Australia.
The sources on which Bean relied were many and varied. At one time he drew up a list of the main ones. They included the war diaries of the Australian military units and formations; orders and instructions; reports of operations; despatches; thousands upon thousands of signal messages; statements made by prisoners of war on their release; copies of or extracts from British, New Zealand, Canadian, American and French operational records in which their troops and Australians were engaged; soldiers’ diaries and letters; his own diaries and notes; printed books and journals; maps and air photographs; and large collections of official and private photographs.
Such was Bean’s focus from the moment he moved to Tuggeranong and settled into the sparsely populated community of the newly designated national capital, whose ‘temporary’ Parliament House would soon be built a mere 20 kilometres away. Bean installed a pianola and a billiard table which provided the staff with entertainment; regular tennis matches took place on the ant-bed tennis court which the men had restored, and a concrete cricket pitch was laid down in an adjoining paddock. Bean, along with his staff, local graziers, farmhands, schoolteachers and schoolboys, formed the Tuggeranong Twisters Cricket Club under John Balfour’s captaincy to play in a competition that stretched from the Tuggeranong Valley to surrounding towns and villages. For a diversion in summer, they killed snakes that came too close to the homestead on their way to the creek.
And then he met Effie. They soon became inseparable, enjoying picnics and drives in his Ford Model T tourer, playing social tennis and even attending local balls, one of which was at the Queanbeyan Hospital. Bean wrote to his mother about it, telling her he did not get to bed until 3.30 a.m. and that his ‘favourite nurse’ could not get there until halfway through:
You will have guessed, Mum dear, that little nurse Young, who was acting matron when I was in hospital, has more than a light attraction for me as she has for all those who come into her influence. My doctor and his wife treat her as if she were their daughter, and the Roman Catholic Padre here as well as many others (a very fine chap) is more fond of her than any of his own flock. I don’t know if she will ever marry me, but I am pretty sure that I should never marry anyone else—if it were anyone, now, it would be she.
As he approached his forty-first birthday, Bean was in love. Effie was his ‘little nurse’, and he suddenly found himself in a social whirl. In early October 1920 he wrote to his mother that ‘The last word of the last chapter of Vol. I was written this week. I am now on the preface and tomorrow shall be revising other chapters. It is splendid to think that all the records up to a certain date can now be put away, and will not be needed again. It has been a very heavy job and I shall be glad of the holiday.’
Bean was swept along by romance with ‘my dear Nipper,’ as he called Effie. She had been born in 1894 at Narrandera, in southern New South Wales, the daughter of a police sergeant later posted to Tumbarumba, in the high country on the western edge of the Snowy Mountains, 200 kilometres away. When Effie’s father died in 1909, her mother ran a boarding house to support the family of four boys and four girls. Effie spent four years at the Goulburn Hospital from 1915 training to be a nurse, and on graduation moved to Queanbeyan Hospital in February 1920. Her references show that she quickly won respect as a capable, reliable and keen nurse who was well liked by doctors and patients. Her formative years had clearly been a struggle and could not have been more different from Bean’s. But if Effie lacked Bean’s sophisticated knowledge of history and world affairs, she had a sunny disposition that he, like many others, found captivating. She had not the education of the women in Bean’s pre-war Sydney circle; however, she came from the bush and represented those country values that he so valued among the men who, to him, constituted the archetypal Digger. It is not hard to see how, with the shadow of war still fresh in his mind, he would be drawn to Effie—an attractive woman, who through her nursing knew something about human suffering, and who had returned servicemen among her patients.
The courtship ignited a long-suppressed side of Bean’s personality. During the war he had imposed a strict discipline upon himself. The focus of his life had been the business of war, with no room for frivolity. He had been abstemious in every sense of the word, but now he was revelling in the warmth of a woman’s affection. Less the sharp-eyed war correspondent, he was more the starry-eyed romantic. ‘You are constantly in my head, Nipper,’ he wrote to Effie, ‘and I long for the time when we can just sit down quietly together or with our friends and have a quiet chat whenever we want, and a good big hug. When I’m tired e
specially, Nip, I want you more than ever.’ He could not bear the thought of being without her. But she had doubts. Bean’s cousin, Joan, by now a young woman, stayed with her mother at Tuggeranong during this time. She later recalled that Effie ‘turned him down—two or three times, and Charlie was pretty floored by it. He had to get away for a while.’
While Bean would not hear of Effie not agreeing to marry him, she had her own reservations about her suitability. She admitted to him that she felt she was ‘a very lucky girl to be getting such a dear old boy . . . I really thought it was so silly of Dr and Mrs [Christie] to think you would fall in love with me as I thought you would like a more learned and well to-do squatter’s daughter, but I hope to make you as happy as my dear Mother and Dad were.’ Arthur Bazley soon noticed what was happening. He noted in his diary in early August 1920 that Bean had taken ‘a special liking to one of the sisters’ at Queanbeyan Hospital. He was now spending his spare time in the nearby town, and ‘things seem to be going in the usual direction.’
In October 1920 they became engaged, which meant that Effie had to resign. She didn’t like the idea of leaving the hospital, but Bean sought to reassure her. ‘You’re going to marry me in the end, so you won’t have to say good bye to Queanbeyan even when you do leave the Hospital.’ Perhaps echoing directions she had given him in hospital, Bean continued: ‘My advice is . . . make your mind to marry me after not too long a wait; shut your eyes and swallow very hard and it won’t seem too bad a medicine, Nipper, it won’t really.’
Bean wrote to his parents, excited about his proposal to Effie. ‘I don’t think either of us will ever face the prospect of parting again so long as we live. There is nothing announced, but I go up to her mother’s place for a week in December; and if all is right then we shall be soon married and come down and see you. I am very happy and so I think she is.’ He also wrote excitedly to Effie’s mother, Agnes, telling her ‘how happy and lucky’ he felt to be taking her daughter as his future wife. He believed that Effie was ‘a sweeter, better and more unselfish girl’ than he deserved, but he vowed to make her a good husband and believed that they would be very happy.
We are very unlike one another in some ways: but we have many common interests. Effie has all the qualities I most admire—the qualities which my own mother has; and as I have always admired my mother above every other woman, I fell in love with Effie very nearly at first sight; I shall be just as much in love with her when I die . . . I hope and feel sure that you will find that this daughter has fallen upon happiness. And I do hope that besides making her a good husband I shall be able to make you a good son.
In December 1920 Bean visited Mrs Young at Tumbarumba and found her ‘a simple kindly, sweet natured woman,’ who had struggled hard to keep her family going in tough, cold country. In a letter to his parents about the visit, he said she lived in ‘a simple old home, but I love that sort of thing as you know: indeed I do not know a happier holiday outside of one with one’s own family than that breezy jolly healthy country life up there.’ Perhaps Bean saw in his future mother-in-law’s straitened circumstances something of the ability to cope with adversity that had fascinated him since his early visits to the outback.
During the tumult of falling in love, Bean was still contending with the Official History. He wanted to be married to Effie when it appeared:
The issue of Vol. I will be one of the big events of my life, and, I think, of yours, Effie dear; and we ought to be together for it. It may not meet altogether with praise—there may be, very likely will be, some criticism amongst it, because it is a true book; but whether there’s praise or criticism we ought to share it; and it would be a great delight and pleasure to have you beside me then.
The fact that Effie was fifteen years younger than Bean could explain the use of the term ‘nipper’, which is clearly a term of endearment in their correspondence—Effie adopted it in signing off letters to him. Perhaps for Effie, Bean, with his store of knowledge and university education, was something of a mentor. Bean certainly seems to have felt this. As they tried to settle on a date for the wedding, he wrote to Effie about the invitations and sought to allay any concerns she might have. ‘The letters after my name are M.A., B.C.L. (Oxford). Though I never use them (Master of Arts, and Bachelor of Civil Law). I don’t bother about them—they make no difference to what you are and that’s the only thing that matters.’ Perhaps as further reassurance, he wrote: ‘Oh Nipper darling, I do so often get tired and I do want you to talk to and stroll round the place with you, or to have quiet evenings on the verandah, or in our sitting room, there. When we’re married I don’t think one will get so fagged.’
When Bean’s parents met Effie later they warmly embraced her into the family—but Edwin Bean clearly felt that her education was lacking: he gave her lessons on the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, and the history of Canada and India. Bean left no doubt that social and educational differences did not matter to him. Their being together was the only thing that did.
He intimated that writing the history had already taken its toll on him, telling her that it was ‘a rather strained old husband that you’ll be getting, Nipper darling, like a bat with a sprung handle at present.’ But with give and take they would be very happy. He also tried to imagine what would happen if they didn’t marry. He felt that each of them, to varying degrees, would experience emptiness. Effie would go from one hospital to another and ultimately ‘some nice young chap would have snapped you up.’ For him, though, there would be only misery:
I would have gone on working every day and every night getting more and more musty, with no interests outside one’s work—and it would have taken a long time to have got over this crash, if one had ever done so. Do you know, as I walked home tonight, after getting your letter dear Nipper, the thought kept on cropping up in my mind—and I couldn’t have realised it could arise—‘well, the history’s all right anyway, now.’ I must have been thinking in the back of my brain, without realising it, that the history was uncertain so long as I had not your help in life.
With a new Sister appointed to replace her, Effie began to focus on the forthcoming change in her life. ‘I am a very lucky girl to be getting such a dear old boy. Of course it will be strange to be out of hospital but my time will be better filled and I’m not going to let you pour [sic] over the History for hrs at a time. You will have to come and talk to me very often, I’m afraid, but it will be better for you, my dear.’
When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle visited Sydney and caught up with his wartime acquaintance over dinner, he told Bean: ‘That’s a sweet little girl you’ve annexed, Bean.’ Bean’s brother, Jack, agreed, writing: ‘To me in many ways those simple uncramped country girls are far more attractive than your city girl who often, however nice, yet has a shell of artificiality.‘
Bean kept pressing Effie for a firm date for the wedding, and it was finally set for 10 a.m. on 24 January 1921, at St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney. About twenty people attended the ceremony, which was conducted by Albert Talbot, the Dean whom Bean had known as an Army chaplain during the war. Jack Bean, his best man, cabled their parents in Hobart, who had been unable to attend, that the ceremony was a complete success. Jack said he had been ‘the nervous and excited one’ while Charles had been ‘as cool as a cucumber’ even though Effie was half an hour late. Jack continued: ‘You can’t fluster these old soldiers, Chas is quite a typical Anzac, they have had so many crises to face that their nerves become like steel. I realised the exceptional strength, purity and thoughtfulness of Chas’ character in a way I had never done before.’ Charles Bean undoubtedly had shown ‘nerves of steel’ during the war, but he would never have seen himself as a ‘typical Anzac’. Still, his brother’s view underlined their close relationship, and his insights into his character.
A wedding breakfast followed at a city restaurant before the newlyweds drove off to the Blue Mountains and Jenolan Caves. Bean’s younger brother, Monty, commented in a letter to
their parents: ‘Dear old Chas needs someone to look after his comfort and I feel sure that Effie will do so splendidly and she will also prevent people imposing upon him as they do at present.’ Later that day, after they arrived at their hotel at Mt Victoria, Bean also wrote to his parents that ‘It was a really charming little wedding. Everything went right. When the small choirboy sang “Love one another with a pure heart fervently” I nearly cried for all the old memories it brought back.’
They honeymooned for three weeks before returning to Tuggeranong and the newly built independent married quarters that Bean had requested. New furniture arrived from Sydney and transformed the house. They engaged a young maid, and Bean went back to work proofreading chapters and working on the last of the volumes, XII, the photographic volume. Later that year Volume I was finally released, and Effie was there to share the moment.
What Bean did not see coming was the reaction of Erskine Crawford, his secretary. Crawford was unstable; he drank heavily and, according to Bazley, his behaviour caused tension in the household well before the marriage. Bazley thought Bean showed great tolerance towards him. As Bean’s romance with Effie had deepened, Bazley noted in his diary: ‘Crawford his bachelor friend, is rather anxious about it and I think he foresees himself a bit cut out before very long . . .’
Bean believed that Crawford had ‘great literary abilities’ and acknowledged later that he had suggested many improvements in the style and content of every chapter of Volume 1 of the Official History. Further, he had completed the onerous job of indexing the work.
According to Bean’s cousin Joan Butler, Bean had helped Crawford ‘through some stiff alcoholic crisis.’ But Crawford was ‘devoted to Charlie, [and] he never forgave him marrying Effie—it split the association.’ Joan remembered: ‘Poor old Crawf, as Baz used to call him at Tuggeranong, Charlie’s devotion to Effie hit him hard.’ She recalled staying at Tuggeranong with her mother one time when Crawford ‘went on a bender’ and her mother had to ‘take him in hand and get out of him where he had planted his bottles. One was found in the hedge near the front gate, and a couple down near the creek. My mother stuck to him all day.’