Lieutenant Martin's Letters
Frederick William Scott Martin M.M. 1895 - 1917
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Fred Martin was Anne McCosker's uncle - her mother's only
brother. He joined the A.I.F. (Australian Imperial Forces) in 1915 after
being part of the ill-fated Kennedy regiment expedition to help seize control of
German New Guinea. He fought at Gallipoli, and the Western Front. He
was killed at Polygon Wood, Passchendaele in 1917.
Anne is editing her uncle's wartime correspondence to his family and placing
individual letters in their historical context. She is writing this book
in Weymouth, Dorset, ENGLAND, a mile from the Westham Anzac camp where her uncle convalesced for
six months in 1916.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Queenslander
These chapters in preparation
2 Off to War
3 Gallipoli
4 Home
5 King's Town
6 Weymouth
7 The Western Front
8 Polygon Wood
9 No Grave
Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
My aunt, Winifred Francis Martin, gave me in 1974 a bundle of WWI letters and
postcards carefully tied with ribbon. They were from her brother
Lieutenant F.W.S Martin, my Uncle Fred. The only son in a family with five
girls, his death in Polygon Wood, Passchendaele, on the Western Front in September
1917 crippled the family. These letters, holding as they did, pain and
sacrifice, honour, duty and responsibility, love of country and Empire –and well
as a sense of humour, of fun - were a family inheritance. To be given
these letters by the eldest daughter of the family was a privilege and burden.
Throughout my childhood my mother had spoken about her brother, five and a half
years older then herself. He, wanting a brother had called her, the tomboy of
the family, ‘Dicky’. My mother died when I was sixteen. I could not
therefore as an adult ask her questions about Fred. I remember though much
of what she said and her sense of loss was absorbed and felt by me and has
remained with me all my life. Then too there was the half life size
portrait of Uncle Fred in my grandmother’s lounge in Brisbane, Queensland.
It hung on a wall opposite my grandmother’s rocking chair and dominated the
room, the whole house.
That day my aunt gave me the letters, we did not open any of them. Over
the years I tried at times to read them. I could not. There was too
much pain. I would shiver, feel overwhelmed, give up. But I kept them very
safe in a small fire proof trunk. They travelled between Australia and
England in my personal luggage, rich jewels to me. For a decade they were
deposited at my solicitor still in their fire proof trunk. I worried that the paper was starting to crumble and the pencil some were
written in was fading. But still I could not read them, study them.
For many years I felt drawn to the ancient harbour port and seaside town of
Weymouth. I grew up in Queensland, and New Guinea, close to the sea and
have never lost my love for it. I thought therefore it was the sea that
primarily attracted me to the district. Yet there was always something
else, some other, indefinable quality about Weymouth. This strange sense
of the place for me was further increased when my sister died while I was
staying in the town, house hunting. In 2006 we finally moved here.
At once I felt some one from my family had lived in the area. I imagined
it was an ancestor, as I had heard occasionally vague talk of ancestors from
both sides of my family living in Dorset.
In July 2008, during Wimbledon Final, I left the TV too on edge to watch further
and sat in a room opposite the tin trunk holding my uncle’s letters. The
trunk was on a move to Weymouth and a new safe deposit vault close to where I
was now living. I suddenly opened the box, shuffled through the various papers
and documents, took out my uncle’s letters and began to read. My spine
tingled, I shivered, felt exhausted but the letters stayed out.
Photographs, letters, postcards were picked up and glanced at. There were
more here than I had realised. Richard looked at one, then a couple. He
was able to do what I had never been able to, read them. He took them to
the computer and began to scan and read them. A few days later he came rushing down
the stairs, in his hand one of Fred’s letters. He showed me the address. WESTHAM, Weymouth.
Westham (camp) was one of several military convalescent camps in the Weymouth
area. Under Australian command they were collectively known as No 2
Australian Base Camp. By the end of WWI between 110 and 120,000 Australian
and New Zealander (the New Zealanders were to establish their own convalescent
camp in early 1916) soldiers had stayed in this area. Some men were here
for only a week or two, before being discharged from the army - or returning to
the Front. Other men like my uncle remained many months in these
convalescent camps suffering frequent relapses of an infectious disease caught
in Gallipoli or hospitals of the Mediterranean
Fred Martin stayed here - in Weymouth - for longer than any where else after he
left his native Queensland. It was along these cliffs, these beaches,
through these lanes and woods, round these villages, in and out of these
churches, my uncle walked. Even though his life was so short Fred was to
know Dorset in the spring, and then old England would be welcoming him as a well
loved son of Empire.
My uncle saw the fields of wildflowers that flowed and danced like rainbows
along the sea edge or stood delicate and peaceful beneath the fresh leaved oak.
Here too that Queenslander would have seen the citadel rock of Portland raise
its primaeval head and follow the sea curve by Chesil Beach as it laced along
the Fleet. And there, in Westham, where a letter box still stands, Fred
probably posted letters home.
Obviously a considerable number of Fred Martin’s letters are missing. How
many will never been known. One can only guess at what happened to them.
Some almost certainly would have been lost before they ever reached family or
friends. Individual letters sent to his sisters would have been cherished
possessions. My mother, sixteen when he was killed, would have taken her
personal ones to New Guinea with her. Perhaps these disappeared during the
family evacuation from her home, Matala Plantation, in 1941 or the subsequent
years of wandering and turmoil during WWII. Other members of my
family might have destroyed them when she died.
Most of Fred’s letters now in my possession are addressed to my grandfather.
I wonder if, when he died his eldest daughter Win sorted and kept them.
And then all those years later gave to me. By the time Fred’s mother died in
1966, she was then in her 90s, it is possible the letters from her son had been
lost, or perhaps they were destroyed after her death by another member of the
family. I know very many letters were destroyed at this time.
However I think there are enough letters left to give an idea of the character
of the boy who left enthusiastically for war, fought at Gallipoli, survived
injury and illnesses, gained a M.M. on the Western Front, became an officer and
then aged 21 disappeared into the mud, gun fire and barbed wire of Polygon Wood,
Passchendaele.
Different letters will no doubt appeal to different readers. Overall, however, what struck me almost immediately as I read these letters is how
Australian Fred Martin was. The Commonwealth of Australia was founded only
in 1901 and yet here is my uncle in 1914 showing so many of the basic
characteristics of the Australian of a later date. I had imagined my
father’s strong Australian character developed not only through the Great War
but in the years after – as a pioneer in colonial New Guinea, a soldier in the
Second World War. Yet here in my uncle’s letters is that same relaxed
stance, the confidence, the mocking attitude to authority, the phrases - often
using the same words my father did , a similar sense of humour and of the
ridiculous.
Fred Martin’s Australian characteristics are even more surprising to me as both
his parents were born in England, his father migrating to Queensland in his mid
20s, his mother at 18. Then too for at least the first ten years of his
life Fred lived in small, rural Queensland towns where the population would have
been made up mainly of immigrants born in the British Isles.
I was not surprised by Fred Martin’s attitude to Home, England, the British
Empire. Before the start of the Great War - in spite of a not
inconsiderable German population in Australia, the free decision of Australia
was never in doubt as C.E.W. Bean was to write in The Official History of
Australia in the War of 1914-1918 Vol.1. The Commonwealth of Australia
would declare war on Germany and its people - "be there" beside the United
Kingdom. My uncle had too that ability to be, as my father was, a
passionate Australian and a fervent Britisher. This dual nature, this
concept was and is not always understood by outsiders but Australians considered
themselves as much part of, and creating, the British Empire as England.
From all over our new nation men went to fight at Gallipoli, the Western Front,
Palestine, and immediately in those foreign lands the Australian identity was
consolidated and internationally recognized. The essence of this identity,
this character though had been developing before the Great War far away from any
battlefield.
Fred Martin has no known grave. There was no where, no special place his
family could go to and there remember, mourn. Perhaps if there is
somewhere a family can grieve for a loved one lost in war, some sort of peace
can come. I think though that all those people, where ever they are, who
themselves have had no close relations or friends killed in conflict – have no
idea of what the aftermath of war IS. War is not over when the war is
ended. The after effects of WAR go on crippling, altering, condemning,
burdening. Perhaps members of a family will not or cannot openly
acknowledge the effects war deaths have had on their family. Sometimes
they are not even recognized for what they are. I believe though the after
shocks of sudden death in violent war situations can go on for generations.
Even for those families whose men survived WAR, as my father did two world wars
and another uncle - his brother - the Japanese POW camps of Singapore and Burma,
the family pays a heavy price.
I was born into the shadow of my Uncle Fred’s death. The Second World War
was raging in Europe at the time of my birth and the subsequent events of my
life after Japan entered into that war - evacuation, destruction of my birth
town, the death and harrying of much of its population, New Guinean, European,
Chinese, have shaped my personal life and formed further shadows around me.
However the death of a brother long before I was born lay in the centre of my
Being. When my mother died, the first words I can remember
saying after being told of her death were “She will be with Fred now”. I
was talking about an uncle I had never known who had died 40 years before.
Now I live in Weymouth. I am writing this in a room from where I can see
the outline of a hill. This is where Westham camp was. My uncle
lived at this camp from January to August 1916. Here he recovered from fever,
trained, grew to manhood in the aftermath of Gallipoli, and from here he went
off to the Western Front and eventual death in a bloody wood.
I doubt if I would be living in England at all if my Uncle Fred had not been
killed in 1917. Here I am in Weymouth. Is this really all
just coincidence? Is the uncle with whom I feel as I read these letters I have
much in common, looking over my shoulder? With a grin on his face - having got
me back to Weymouth - he is re-reading his own letters. "By Jove!"
This book is for him and his mates.
Martin family, Charters Towers, Queensland 1915
