by Peter Rees
After Heney became editor of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph in 1924, his work failed to improve. Bean was blunt, telling Heney in mid-1925 that ‘In its present condition I cannot send the book forward.’ The manuscript did ‘not sufficiently interpret the soul and spirit of the Australian people under their great test.’ Bean accepted that while the time frame might have been too short, ‘the book cannot be rendered adequate by more editing.’ Another author was needed to complete the book. ‘I cannot pass Mr Heney’s book in its present condition,’ he told the Defence Department.
He approached Ernest Scott, Professor of History at the University of Melbourne, who initially declined, leaving Bean with little choice but to persevere with Heney. He began working in Melbourne on the government files he had so far ignored. The revised manuscript still fell short of Bean’s standard. When White read the work he told Bean it was ‘neither record nor history.’ It was, he wrote, ‘merely a newspaper article—and not much better founded than the usual newspaper product.’
Then Heney’s health failed, a misfortune he blamed on the work he had had to do in Melbourne. In March 1928 he gracefully resigned, placing all his notes and the entire manuscript at Bean’s disposal. Bean turned again to Scott, who this time accepted. In July 1928 Scott submitted a draft plan of the book that Bean described as ‘very workmanlike’. Unlike Heney, Scott made the official record his starting point, making almost no use of Heney’s material. Scott even insisted on doing all the research anew.
Bean had to accept that the home-front volume would be further delayed. Adding to the problems was that he and Scott differed in their attitudes to Britain: Scott was an imperialist who believed that Britain’s interests were Australia’s interests, whereas Bean was a nationalist whose Holy Grail was the ‘Australian Ideal’ that the war had fashioned. Again Bean misjudged the scale of the task, estimating that Scott should complete a manuscript of 240,000 words in a year. Bean thought that at the end of the book, the reader should ‘understand the Australian attitude and outlook—our independence and habit of thinking for ourselves.’
As with Heney’s work, Bean played a major role in the final shaping and writing of the book. He believed he had no choice if the volume was to be saved, and warned Scott against allowing a justifiable charge of bias that, Bean said, would ‘wreck the history.’ Fuelling Bean’s concern was the lack of an account of the motives of the anti-conscriptionist case. He was able to draw on the views of former Prime Minister Andrew Fisher and others to overcome the problem. Scott had no choice but to agree—but he refused to agree to a photo of the anti-conscriptionist leader Archbishop Daniel Mannix in the book. Bean was no fan of Mannix anyway.
In rewriting Scott’s work to make it politically acceptable, Bean explained that he had exercised all his ingenuity ‘in the endeavour to preserve the points made by you, and at the same time to steer clear of rocks upon which I am certain we should strike.’ One such instance occurred with former Prime Minister Billy Hughes, whom Scott had quoted as saying that the Germans were ‘a nation of liars.’ Hughes was still a minister in Prime Minister Joe Lyons’ Government, which was concerned not to offend Germany amid a fragile world peace. Bean was not sympathetic to the Government’s position, asking ‘what importance do we attach to what Hindenburg or Hitler said of us in 1914–1918?’ Nonetheless the statement was amended and Hughes was quoted as remarking, a little more diplomatically, that ‘the Germans were entirely untrustworthy.’
Volume XI, Australia During the War, was finally published in December 1936, seventeen years after Heney began it. Bean was no doubt relieved by the favourable reviews and good sales that followed. But in his private diary, he noted that the volume ‘gave me a great deal of trouble—it required infinitely more work than we could expect him to put into it for £500 and there were many big gaps and many inaccuracies which Johnny Balfour discovered. Johnny did splendid work there.’ And there was still the matter of the further four volumes he had undertaken.
43
In his own hands
Aside from the rupture with Erskine Crawford, who subsequently left the property, and would die in late 1924, life at Tuggeranong homestead offered a balm after the horrors of war. There was a pattern and a rhythm that came with the country environment. Tuggeranong was on a party line that included the surrounding Woden, Lanyon and Cuppacumbalong stations between Queanbeyan and the village of Tharwa. A horse and sulky ran the mail daily. The Beans, Bazleys, Balfours, and George Lowery, who had by now married the Tuggeranong schoolmaster’s daughter, formed a small community of young married couples enjoying life in the bush. Babies were born, and domestic staff came and went. There were tennis parties and dances to attend, cricket and picnics by the banks of the nearby Murrumbidgee River, interspersed with moments such as fishing the too-curious son of the local butcher out of the septic tank.
Embarrassing as it was, this ranked as a mere inconvenience compared with another experience for Arthur Bazley. Because the house was lit by carbide gas, a new gasometer had to be installed immediately. Within a few months the cylinders began to jam, and two mechanics from Queanbeyan came out to fix the fault. Bazley recalled that they had just dismantled the unit and laid the cylinders on the ground when he walked past. The cigarette he was smoking sparked an explosion that left him with a burnt and blackened face and missing hair and eyebrows. He convalesced for the next three months, a ‘sorry sight’ to behold on the verandah.
Arthur Jose and Fred Cutlack visited on several occasions to discuss their work with Bean, quickly fitting into the household’s ways. Jose was tall and round, with a straggling moustache; the group quickly realised that his occasional tendency to pomposity was only a veneer, and besides, he played the piano well. Cutlack could be irascible at times. He happened to be in the office one morning when Professor Tucker’s edited copy of his manuscript arrived in the mail. Among his writing habits was use of the phrase ‘owing to’ this or that, and Tucker, who had changed the phrase on several occasions, apparently became annoyed at its repetition and finally commented in the margin, ‘Australians are too fond of owing.’ This was too much for Cutlack, who grabbed a pencil and scrawled beneath Tucker’s comment, ‘And so are some professors of cheap sarcasm.’
Bean on the whole was content with his rustic environment. In 1923 a recurrent kidney ailment flared up. He was warned that the harsh climate of Tuggeranong could exacerbate his health and he might have to move to a warmer place. Bean was filled with sadness; he loved this fine old-fashioned homestead. Memories of courtship and newly married life with Effie, and of writing the Official History, gave Tuggeranong special significance. In May 1924, his condition deteriorated and he was told he might need surgery. This was serious news. Bean noted in his private diary: ‘. . . as risk attached to it Effie and I decided that we would go to England in order to obtain a further diagnosis.’ He noted that this would enable him to take Effie on the trip that he had always promised her. Knowledge that the Government had extended his contract for another five years relieved the financial pressure. And the Government had also agreed to pay his passage. Bean was thankful. ‘Most generous,’ he wrote in his diary.
On 9 July 1924 the couple drove to Sydney to board the American liner Ventura. They would sail to the United States on the way to Britain. Effie noted that her husband had ‘signed both our wills in case we go down at sea.’
They arrived in San Francisco twenty days later, Effie having suffered from sea sickness for much of the voyage. The city did not impress Bean: ‘wretched music—all jazzes and fox trots; everyone with a car but not much culture, one would say.’ They took the train to Chicago where Bean was stunned by ‘the most squalid slums that I have ever seen.’ In New York, they went to the Ziegfeld Follies. Bean was unimpressed: ‘it was mainly a display of naked women—sometimes being flung about by Eastern men—the sort of thing that has become excessively boring and very commonplace and vulgar at that.’ He left America thinking it was ‘that most jingoistic of a
ll countries.’
On the voyage to Britain, Bean spoke to a German who wanted to know if Australia would return to Germany its lost colonies in the Pacific. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ Bean told him. ‘They are too important for us, from the point of view of keeping Asiatics out.’ Clearly, six years after the war, he still held to his pre-war attitudes. On arrival in London, Bean met with his surgeon, who advised him to have his right kidney removed. The surgery took place a week later, on 29 August 1924. For his initial convalescence, Bean took Effie to stay at Brentwood, and they eventually left in mid-November for France. He showed Effie the Somme battlefields, before they went to Paris and the Riviera, then sailed back to Australia.
Finally returning to work at Tuggeranong as autumn settled on the valley, Bean realised that the climate, just as he had been warned before his surgery, was indeed now too cold for him. Family members recall that he always felt the cold, wearing winter underwear even in summer, and wool socks that Effie knitted. ‘It was a case of changing our location then or never,’ Bean wrote in his diary. On 1 April 1925 he was given approval to move to Sydney and set up office in ‘a beautiful warm sunny room’ at the Army’s Victoria Barracks. He and Effie moved to a house in the leafy North Shore suburb of Roseville. With Volume II published a few months earlier while he was still in England, Bean began work on Volume III, the first of the four he would write about the AIF in France. In April 1926, he and Effie, who was now studying music at the Conservatorium, moved to Bellevue Hill.
•
At Victoria Barracks, Bean’s work on Volume III involved heavy use of British military records. To help with this, Tas Heyes, who had been attached to the AWRS in London in 1918, was sent to Britain in 1924 to collate and copy files. He became the Australian representative on the military historical section of the Committee of Imperial Defence. Tracking down files was a frustrating job. Heyes often found them marked ‘out’ and impossible to trace further. In some matters, Heyes found it more effective to use the status of Australia House to ask for records rather than doing it himself. He told Bean there had been a conference regarding a despatch from him which the British had interpreted ‘as reopening the whole question of access to records.’ Heyes understood that the decision the meeting had reached meant that ‘copies or lengthy extracts of secret documents could not be allowed to leave the country but that facilities, similar to those granted to their own historians, would be placed at your disposal for you to make notes on the condition that you would agree to submit your manuscript to the British authorities before publication.’
As Volume III, The Australian Imperial Force in France, 1916, covered the disastrous British planning that led to the terrible loss of Australian lives at Fromelles, it was inevitable that Bean would run up against British sensitivities. It was a fight that, as he acknowledged in correspondence with returned Diggers, was ‘a very difficult battle to describe with accuracy, as the accounts are so contradictory.’
Bean’s treatment underlined the differing approaches that he and his British counterpart, Sir James Edmonds, took. The correspondence between them on the draft chapters of their respective histories highlighted this. Edmonds believed most Dominion forces exaggerated their performance, and he in turn was criticised for his ‘grudging’ praise of them. He was critical, too, of Dominion historians, who he thought lacked the necessary knowledge of staff work, and who were too concerned with protecting the reputation of their respective countries to write an informed history. Edmonds put Bean in this category, asserting that he ‘conceives that everything happening to the Australians is unique and unparalleled.’ As official historian, Edmonds’ approach was to write a description of events that largely ignored praise or criticism of British leadership. This has been widely seen as a way of protecting the reputation of senior British commanders and the General Staff.
The underlying tension between the two men emerged when Edmonds read Bean’s draft on Fromelles. Lieutenant General Sir Richard Haking was cast as the main culprit. Bean ridiculed Haking’s contention that the newness of the infantry was the sole reason for the failure. He conclusively showed that, as planned, the operation had no chance of success. Edmonds attempted to defend Haking on his past record and in September 1927 offered to send drafts of Bean’s Fromelles chapters to him. Haking did not reply, and Edmonds finally informed Bean that the general had no wish to comment on the battle, adding, ‘I don’t think he was much use after his wound . . . in 1914.’ And yet Haig had entrusted Haking with a senior command in important operations two years later.
The British censors’ description of Fromelles as merely ‘some important raids’ had enraged Bean at the time; this was starkly untrue. However, Edmonds defended the understatement, saying people did not need to know the truth. It was difficult to know how much a democracy should be told, but ‘from the purely military point of view, the less the better.’ Edmonds’ disregard for the public’s right to know was underlined in a subsequent letter lecturing Bean: ‘Your history should be educative, and the more you inculcate that one gives one’s army the best chance if one refrains from demanding information, the better you will serve your country.’ Edmonds also chastised Bean for including the doubts entertained by British staff officers at Fromelles, asserting that their opinions should not be disclosed because the general was the one man responsible and his staff were ‘servants to him.’ But to Bean, staff officers’ private and personal views were essential to an understanding of the war.
Edmonds’ remoteness from reality was further highlighted by his rejection in Bean’s Pozières drafts of his account of the shelling. According to Edmonds, in his four and a half years in France he had experienced many heavy barrages, but ‘I neither saw nor heard of any of the scenes you describe . . . How many Australians in point of fact became “insane”?’ As he had observed French and Belgian troops endure bombardment as a matter of course, he wondered if Australian soldiers were more nervous than they. This, he asserted preposterously, was what the text seemed to imply. He concluded that, ‘it was all due to lack of self-control, which is fostered by discipline.’ Bean acidly noted that Edmonds had ‘never been in a real battle.’ He dismissed the comments as typical of ‘the General Staff attitude—exactly as it was in the war; it is almost too laughably mistaken to be worth a reply.’
Another figure Bean offended was General Hubert Gough, one of the notable British failures during the war who had been sacked in 1918. Shown the drafts, in which Bean accused him of impetuosity, he was indignant, if not delusional. ‘I was not ‘‘temperamentally’’ addicted to attacks without careful reconnaissance and preparation, as the conduct of all my military operations fully bears out, including this one,’ he complained in remarks that Edmonds forwarded to Bean. But Bean refused to back down, telling Edmonds that Gough’s ‘pressure was always for speed in trench operations, in which speed could only be a danger and of little value.’ This drew a remarkable admission from Edmonds that Bean was correct. ‘For Gough I had no brief after 1916. Up to that time, he was, I think, first-class as a division and corps commander, but his gifts of energy and dash were out of place in command of an army. I and Peyton [Military Secretary] told Haig this, but Haig was perfectly infatuated with him.’
Edmonds did manage some praise, lauding Bean’s summing up of the Somme campaign as one of his finest chapters. He argued, however, that Bean’s analysis of Haig’s strategy dealt inadequately with its effect on the German Army. Edmonds contended that on the Western Front, there was no alternative to battles of attrition. Justifying Haig’s strategy, which had led to needless slaughter and left Australians angry and disillusioned, Edmonds asserted that it was misleading to depict the battle as a struggle for ‘bits of ground’ as Bean had done. He challenged Bean to nominate what the Allies’ strategy should have been. ‘In a long war with sides very evenly matched . . . nothing but the slaughter of its men will bring one side to its knees.’ Such callousness had outraged Bean during the war. Nonetheless, he wou
ld stay on good terms with Edmonds, who provided—perhaps unwittingly at times—insight into the British military machine.
As per his usual arrangement, Bean showed the proofs of the volume to Brudenell White, who thought the Pozières chapters constituted ‘the most remarkable historical record of war it has ever been my fortune to read.’ But White also criticised what he saw as a change in Bean’s perspective. He took issue with Bean’s ‘scathing’ references to higher staff, commenting: ‘I think it excessive to ascribe to an individual actor the making or marring of an action.’ But Bean did not substantially alter his opinions.
With the final proofs for Volume III approved, Bean waited for the book to be published. No doubt relieved to have it completed, he settled back to enjoy Christmas 1928 with Effie—an occasion marked by a happy event. Just before Christmas, Effie’s niece, nine-year-old Joyce, came to live with them. This was a family arrangement, as the Beans were unable to have children of their own. Mumps was thought to have been the reason. A year later, on 13 December 1929 after they had bought Arthur Jose’s house at Lindfield and moved in, Joyce’s adoption was registered by the New South Wales Child Welfare Department. As Bean noted in his private diary, Joyce had become ‘our little girl.’ He was a devoted husband already, and now would be a devoted father. A gap in their lives had been filled.
A tennis court in the backyard became a focus of Sunday social gatherings with family and local friends. Bean tried building a retaining wall for the tennis court, but it was too thin and had to be anchored by iron rods. Family members recall Bean dressed in long white trousers, a Clifton College tie around his waist as a belt, and a white silk shirt with the sleeves half rolled up. In his diary, Bean noted that Effie was a good tennis player—‘probably the best of us really, with an excellent back hand drive.’ Family members also recall that Effie was the ebullient one at these gatherings, her husband happily quiet in the background. Bean encouraged Effie to take painting lessons under the respected artist Thea Proctor, and to continue her study of the piano.