by Peter Rees
As his health and mental acuity were failing him, Bean began a note to Effie, written in spidery, unsteady handwriting:
My darling,
What is the aim which, of all aims we would most wish to see attained in our life time?’
Enigmatic though this was, it had a familiar ring to it: Bean was still in search of the truth. Effie wrote on the note later: ‘My darling’s last four lines he wrote sitting in the sunroom—he was not well enough to finish his letter to me.’
When dementia set in, at the age of eighty-four, Bean was admitted to the Concord Repatriation General Hospital, on the peaceful backwaters of Sydney Harbour, where many old Diggers also lived. Effie visited him regularly. Bean died there on 30 August 1968.
On hearing the news, Arthur Bazley wrote to Effie about his ‘beloved mentor’ and ‘second father’. He had thought back to ‘the old days at Tuggeranong and in Sydney, and well beyond them across the years from my first meeting with him in 1914, and at Anzac and in France—the years when I came to worship him.’ He paid tribute to Effie as ‘a wonderful helpmate and there was no doubt whatever that it was largely due to you that he lived to such a ripe old age.’
There was little fanfare or recognition at the funeral, on 2 September 1968, with just 200 mourners in the vastness of St Andrew’s Cathedral, the church where he and Effie had married in 1921. A section of George Street was closed, and a police motorcycle escort led the cortege when the service finished. The scene was in stark contrast to the funeral for Sir John Monash, which had drawn a crowd of more than 300,000 people thirty-seven years earlier in Melbourne. Perhaps this contrast reflects the two men’s personalities; in its own sombre way, certainly, Bean would have preferred the low-key version.
Nonetheless, there were people who thought there should have been a much grander farewell. A letter tucked away in files at the Australian War Memorial, written by an old soldier, laments the lack of honours and officials at the funeral. ‘Altogether I found the ceremony a most depressing example of the rapidity with which a national figure is allowed to fade from sight,’ the Digger wrote to Arthur Bazley. A national figure he was, and faded from sight Charles Bean had.
Epilogue
People who knew Charles Bean admired and loved him, yet over the decades he has also attracted critics who accuse him of glorifying war and perpetuating a nationalistic myth. Inevitably, there were flaws in his performance as both a war correspondent and a war historian. Nonetheless, he showed qualities that set him apart.
Philip Knightley, in his book The First Casualty, writes that almost all World War I British war correspondents identified with the war effort. Military censorship of despatches became largely unnecessary as journalists fell in with military and government objectives. The war correspondents ‘allowed themselves to be absorbed by the propaganda machine.’ Knightley says Bean was different. ‘Only one correspondent did not remain silent, and his criticism was muted by his intense nationalism. This was Charles Bean.’ Rather than reporting news, it was accurately recording the war that concerned him. ‘Somewhat to the amazement of the British correspondents, he set himself the task of visiting, on the day of the battle or soon afterwards, every important trench or position occupied by Australian troops in Gallipoli and France. He accepted little second-hand information.’ As the British correspondent Philip Gibbs observed, Bean ‘regarded it as his bounden duty to see everything with his own eyes.’
Bean may not have questioned the war itself, but he did challenge whether Britain was making the best use of the AIF to win it. As Geoffrey Serle concluded, the Official History is a work well worthy of the AIF, but it might easily have been otherwise. Bean identified with the ordinary troops, eschewing the safety of headquarters to follow the men into battle for four years. Unlike the British history, his narrative was not written for the generals but for the Diggers.
Bean’s accounts of the Anzacs on Gallipoli and on the Western Front not only challenged the traditions of military history, they set the parameters for how Australian military history would be recorded. In this they exerted a pervasive cultural influence. As the historian Humphrey McQueen has pointed out, Bean’s approach was emulated by the founders of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Unlike their counterparts with the British Dictionary of National Biography, who only wrote about the great and famous, they set out to commemorate a representative sample of society.
The twelve-volume Official History—six books of which Bean personally wrote—ran to four million words, 10,000 pages, 2250 maps and 1500 illustrations, and documented the actions and names of around 8000 men and women. Bean’s goal was to reach a non-military audience; he once confided to Gavin Long that he had never met an academic historian who had read any of his volumes.
Such is the enigma of Charles Bean—a man who was captivated by the mateship and egalitarianism that he saw in outback Australians, and then in Australian soldiers in the Great War. Mateship is necessarily a part of any army, but Bean saw Australian mateship as different. Born in the unique environment of the bush, it was sustained by the moral and social qualities he admired—characteristics that were also part of the British public school code. As he saw it, the Anzac spirit meant going straight at the job, standing by a mate, always taking a worthwhile risk, enduring hardship and refusing to give in. As Bean put it in an Anzac Day talk on ABC Radio in 1953, ‘Where officers were killed men carried on. They always found someone . . . in very many cases a private who would take them forward again.’
If the Official History volumes have never garnered the readership they deserve, that is also true of his diaries. Bean was not blind to the limitations of the diaries and of eyewitness accounts in general. As a condition of the gift of his papers to the Australian War Memorial he stipulated that the Memorial attach to every diary and notebook a caveat which reads:
These writings represent only what at the moment of making them I believed to be true. The diaries were jotted down almost daily with the object of recording what was then in the writer’s mind. Often he wrote them when very tired and half asleep: also, not infrequently, what he believed to be true was not so—but it does not follow that he always discovered this, or remembered to correct the mistakes when discovered. Indeed, he could not always remember that he had written them.
Thus while the records should be used with caution, he emphasised that he did try to ensure accuracy by widely consulting those who had seen or otherwise taken part in the events. On one level, these diaries tell the immediate story of the AIF that Bean recorded; on another they provide an understanding of his commitment to the troops and the impact of the war on him.
At Bean’s funeral service, his friend, the media executive Angus McLachlan, spoke of ‘a whole and integrated man’ in whom ‘were none of the contradictions, the conflicting values, that dwell in so many men. There were no hidden vanities lurking behind the modest exterior.’ Such was the devotion Bean won from his friends—yet he has become an arcane presence somewhere in the nation’s consciousness of the Great War, the recipient of nodding recognition that he did something great but often with little understanding beyond that.
In the wake of the Great War he was fervently determined that the young nation must avoid the pitfalls of the Old World. Bean was idealistic, even utopian, in his aspirations for the nation. In this, he could be seen as one of those rare figures who managed to affect the way Australians regard themselves and their country. Arthur Bazley, who worked closely with him for twenty-five years, could lay claim to knowing him as well as anyone. In a letter in 1939 to Bean’s mother, he praised him not just as ‘the guiding spirit’ of the Australian War Memorial, but also as ‘a practical idealist, possessed of all the noble virtues—courage, humility, honesty, selflessness, public spiritedness.’
Sir Robert Menzies once observed that Bean was a ‘man and scholar of self-effacing modesty.’ Few would disagree. Menzies also described him as ‘the greatest Australian of his generation.’ Whether others would
share this view is moot; what is clear is that Bean would have disagreed. He had no doubt that the greatest Australians were the Diggers with whom he had rubbed shoulders on the battlefields. But without him their story would have been incomplete. This was Charles Bean’s unique contribution to the story of a generation of Australians who went to war. He knew the price they had paid.
As a headmaster and educationist, Charles Bean’s father, Edwin, believed that the prime purpose of education was to form character and train the mind. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)
Lucy Bean and the infant Charles, in a photograph probably taken at Bathurst, New South Wales, in early 1880. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)
Younger brothers Montague, or ‘Tig’ (left), and John, also known as ‘Jack’ or ‘Jock’ (right), flank older brother Charles in a late 1880s photo. Charles would develop a fascination with both the navy and cricket. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)
By the time he was a teenager, Charles Bean had developed his drawing skills. (Photo: C.E.W. Bean Private Collection, Australian War Memorial.)
Charles Bean, aged 15 in 1895. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)
The three brothers, Monty, Charles and Jack, as young men at the turn of the 20th century. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)
Charles Bean was admitted to the Sydney Bar as a barrister in 1905, but a legal career held no interest. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)
Charles Bean at Brentwood School, when he was The Sydney Morning Herald’s London correspondent. During the posting he covered the 1912 Ashes tour. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)
Charles Bean, official correspondent, and Dr Jack Bean, the 3rd Battalion’s medical officer, pictured together on the eve of departure for Gallipoli. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)
From the time of his appointment in 1914 to when they returned to Australia, as pictured here on the Kildonan Castle in 1919, Arthur Bazley (right) was Charles Bean’s loyal batman. (Photo: Peter and Shirley Bazley.)
A group portrait of staff and officers at Mena camp, Egypt. Charles Bean is at the far left of the back row, and Major General William Throsby Bridges, commander of the new Australian Imperial Force (AIF), is sixth from the left in the front. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)
On reaching the beach at Anzac Cove at Gallipoli on the morning of 25 April 1915, Charles Bean snapped this shot of the Australian Divisional Headquarters Staff wading ashore. (Photo: Australian War Memorial.)
On the island of Imbros, Charles Bean (front) leads the British correspondent, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, down a dusty track. (Photo: Australian War Memorial.)
Keith Murdoch (left) and Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, who both played significant roles in reporting the Gallipoli campaign. (Photo: Australian National Library.)
From this rudimentary dugout, Charles Bean worked throughout the Gallipoli campaign, leaving on 19 December 1915, two days after this photo was taken. (Photo: Australian War Memorial.)
Arthur Bazley in a German trench on the Western Front. (Photo: Peter and Shirley Bazley.)
On the back of this photo, Charles Bean wrote: ‘German shell hole fair in the road from Casualty Corner past the Chalk Pit to Pozières. This shell fell near an old German battery position just N of Casualty Corner … I got Brooks to take these photos and put Bazley into the shellhole.’ (Photo: Peter and Shirley Bazley.)
Amid the mud of the Western Front, Charles Bean watches the first Australian advance towards the Hindenburg Line at the end of February 1917. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)
Charles Bean, British author John Masefield, Australian Official Artist Lieutenant Will Dyson, and the Russian exile Alexis Aladin, contemplate the devastated old battlefield at Pozières. (Photo: Australian War Memorial.)
Charles Bean (left), and Brigadier General Henry Goddard, commander of the 9th Infantry Brigade (right), explain Australian troop operations during the battle of Mont St Quentin to Prime Minister Bill Hughes. (Photo: Australian War Memorial.)
Arthur Bazley’s photo of troops from the 24th Battalion AIF in a trench on the desolate battlefield after the battle of Broodseinde, near Ypres, 4 October 1917. On the back is written, ‘The Germans occupy the wood in the background past the sniper post.’ (Photo: Peter and Shirley Bazley.)
Charles Bean, centre, with other members of the Australian Historical Mission on Hill 60, Gallipoli, on 22 February 1919. With him is Major Zeki Bey, second left, a Turkish Regiment commander during the Gallipoli campaign who provided information from the Turkish side. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)
The first volume of the Official History finished, Charles Bean, centre, prepared on 11 December 1920 to send it to Sydney for publication. Among those from his staff with him at Tuggeranong homestead are John Balfour, second left, and Arthur Bazley, far right. (Photo: Australian War Memorial.)
Hospitalised with a ‘mastoid problem’, according to the details on the back of this original family photograph, Charles Bean is shown here on the steps of Queanbeyan Hospital. To his right is Sister Ethel Young, his future wife. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)
A disconsolate Arthur Bazley, with burns suffered in a gas carbide accident at Tuggeranong in 1920. (Photo: Peter and Shirley Bazley.)
On the back of this photo of Effie as a nurse, Charles Bean wrote, ‘Eff’s photo for me, 1920.’ (Photo: Bean Private Collection, Australian War Memorial.)
Charles and Effie Bean on their wedding day, Sydney, 24 January 1921. Jack Bean (right), was his brother’s best man. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)
Charles and Effie Bean at Tuggeranong. Bean sent this photo to Arthur Bazley, writing on the back, ‘To Baz and Mrs Bazley with all the best—this memory of 29 years ago from EC and CEW Bean.’ (Photo: Peter and Shirley Bazley.)
Arthur Bazley (left), and John Balfour (right), sort through Charles Bean’s private diaries compiled during the war. (Photo: Australian War Memorial.)
A seated Charles Bean in discussion with the official medical historian for World War I, Dr A.G. Butler (centre), and Gavin Long (left), the official historian for World War II. (Photo: Australian War Memorial.)
Charles Bean often continued to wear his army jacket as he wrote the Official History at Tuggeranong. (Photo: Australian War Memorial.)
Charles and Effie Bean with their adopted daughter, Joyce. On the right is Miss Violet Gibbins, headmistress of Osborne Ladies College, Blackheath, NSW, which Joyce attended. Miss Gibbins’ brother, Norman, died in the battle of Fromelles. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)
When the Queen Mother visited Canberra in 1958, Charles Bean took her on a tour of important relics at the Australian War Memorial, including ‘G for George’, the Lancaster bomber Australians in Bomber Command flew in WWII. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)
Aware of her husband’s failing health, Effie Bean watches anxiously as Charles Bean speaks at the opening of the Hall of Memory at the Australian War Memorial on 24 May 1959 in what was probably his last public appearance. (Photo: Edward Bean Le Couteur and Anne Marie Carroll.)
Notes
Part One
The Early Years
Prologue
The details of Charles Bean’s study were drawn from the recollections of his granddaughter, Anne Carroll, while the Australian War Memorial holds his library of books.
The ‘blood’ letter was published in The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), 15 January 1953.
Bean’s speech, ‘What England means to me,’ was an address to the Women’s League of Empire, Sydney, March 1934; AWM38 3DRL 6673/571 33/3.
The family diary entry was dated 8 August 1886.
Bean’s draft of his proposed speech to the Australian National University for the presentation of his honorary
degree is held at AWM38 3DRL 6673/480.
The quote is from C.E.W. Bean, On the Wool Track, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1963, revised edn, p. 132.
The letter was from Ross Hohnen, Registrar of the Australian National University, 19 November 1958; AWM38 3DRL 6673/480.
The letter from Monash is held at AWM38 3DRL 7953/4 pt 1.
Bean’s response to the Hohnen letter was dated 13 April 1959; AWM38 3DRL 6673/480.
The story of the mule is found in Bean diary 15 August 1917.
1—Here, My son
Lucy Bean’s quote is drawn from The History of All Saints’ College, Bathurst, p. 33.
For further information on the Arnold tradition, see: Michael McCrum, Thomas Arnold, Headmaster, Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 53. Also see Dr Stephen Ellis, C.E.W. Bean, A Study of his Life and Works, University of New England, Armidale, 1969, p. 176; Justice Geoff Lindsay, ‘Be Substantially Great In Thy Self: Getting to Know C.E.W. Bean, Barrister, Judge’s Associate, Moral Philosopher,’ http://www.forbessociety.org.au/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/bean.pdf