ETU Members at War

When Prime Minister Andrew Fisher declared Australia at war in August 1914, ETU unionists began to enlist. On 23 September, 30 year old Will Hummerston, one of our founding members, signed up in the Wireless section of the 2^nd Field Engineers.

Five years earlier Will had married Lillian Rout; she gave birth to daughter Ellen and then died. We can only imagine what was going through his mind as he dragged on the khakis for the first time, being a widower with a five year old daughter.

In November 1914, as a soldier about to go to war, Will married Nellie, Lillian’s younger sister and on 27 December he climbed aboard the HMAT Berrima bound for the Middle East. As the ship sailed away from Australia, did he think he would be coming back? Had he fallen in love with Nellie, or was he trying to provide for his daughter’s future? Whatever the truth, he was destined the front line in Belgium.

On 22 March 1915, as war strategies turned towards the Dardanelles, twenty-four year old Jim Kirkland put his trade on hold and joined ‘B’ Company of the 24^th Battalion of the AIF. Jim was a newer member of the ETU but had already caught the eye of the National and Victorian union secretary, J. Vern Gust, who described him as one of our more energetic members.

What was on Jim’s mind on 8 May 1915, as he pulled down his slouch hat and boarded the Euripides bound for Gallipoli? Less than two weeks earlier, Australian forces had landed in what was to become known as Anzac Cove. He could not have known the carnage he was headed for nor that one of his union mates, James Daniels, had charged to his death on that first day of 25 April.

Bodies like lumpy shapes lapping in the waves; chaos and bravery hand in hand in a campaign doomed from the start. It was as Pte B. Jackson of the 2nd Battalion, described it: "I came to a spot where the dead were lying two and three deep, and I saw an Australian and a Turk who had run each other through with their bayonets. (they) had fallen dead at the same instant, as their bayonets had not been withdrawn. In their death struggle, their arms must have encircled each other. They had been in that sad embrace for at least a week".

This was the scene as Jim Kirkland splashed his way to the beach at Gallipoli to begin his campaign as a fighting Anzac soldier. But it was to be short lived. He copped one; a bullet wound to the abdomen was the official description, on 18 September, six months from the day he signed up.

On 11 October, Jim’s mum got an official letter from the AIF saying; ‘Your son Private J.G. Kirkland has been reported wounded. It is not stated as being serious, and in the event of further information coming to hand, you will be promptly notified.’ But Jim was already dead. He’d died on the hospital ship Maheno four days after he was wounded and was buried at sea, off the coast of Malta.

Jim was not the first nor would he be the last to die. When the ETU informed its members of Jim’s death in its November 1915 journal, it recognised him as the 18^th Victorian ETU member to have lost his life since hostilities began.

In December of 1915 the Allied forces withdrew from the Dardanelles and increased their offensives in the fields of France and Belgium.

Will Hummerston landed in Marseilles on 30 March 1916 destined for the front lines. And nobody can describe how it was going to be better than those who were already there. Anzac soldier, Wilson Long, wrote to Edith Harris on Phillip Island: The Mud was well over our boot tops and we never had dry feet for the whole of the time we were there. Fritz put a lot of gas and tear shells over us and if you got a whiff of gas it was goodbye. The tear gas makes your eyes smart as if somebody was squirting onion juice into them only it is ten times worse. It makes your face swell out like an air balloon…

The once serene landscape of the Belgium-French border was being bombed into oblivion. Green fields and quaint villages becoming no more than barren muddy expanses of shell holes, dead bodies and soldiers suffering from what had become known as trench feet.

More Australian tradesmen than any other calling went to war; 34% of all who enlisted were tradesmen, and, like Jim Kirkland and Will Hummerston, 56% of those who enlisted were between 21 and 30 years of age. So many of them suffered. Battlefield Nurse May Tilton described how it was; ‘Several of my dressings were the most appalling “trench feet”. The sickening odour from the black, discharging pulp that once were feet filled the ward and our nostrils long after we had left them… often half their feet had to be cut away at a dressing…’

While ‘trench feet’ crippled, the the gas killed excruciatingly. ‘…Most of the poor boys died, but those who still lived, to die later, suffered intensely. This mustard-oil gas burned their bodies. Such frightened expressions met our eyes as we bent over them, working to relieve the pain, bathing their poor smarting eyes…’

This was the war Will Hummerston marched into; fighting on the fields of Flanders in the offensives that were to become known as the Battle of Passchendaele, and the third battle of Ypres.

Early in October as preparations for the third Ypres offensive began, Will passed back and forth through heavy shelling. For three days he worked to get an ‘Engine Charging Station’ up to San Souci on the Ypres-Roulers railway; and amid the constant shelling he erected it. The Battles around him resulted in the Allied forces capturing the village of Passchendaele at the expense of close to half a million casualties. The Germans called it the battle ‘Kindermord bei Ypern’ or the Massacre of the Innocents of Ypres.

Will was awarded the French ‘Medaille Militaire for his bravery and returned to Australia in May 1918. He went back to his trade and when he died in 1966 his daughter Ellen wrote to the army records office asking for information about his war bravery; ‘Officer in charge: Dear Sir…I would be most grateful, now my father has passed on, and as he would never tell us how he won the medal. I would like my children to know and be proud of his deeds.

Jim Kirkland was never to return. Although Jim’s mum was listed in the AIF papers as his only living relative, she struggled to convince the military bureaucracy that she was his next of kin. ‘No, Jim wasn’t married nor did he have any surviving sons or daughters; and Yes, Jim’s father was dead.’ Her efforts finally got her his war medals and the two hair brushes that were his only personal effects.