13

Hugo

London, 1915

IN MAY 1915, German zeppelins began attacking London. Katharine saw one from her sixth-floor flat: ‘looking out of the back window, I saw what I thought was a lighted cigar, high in the sky and presently a ball of fire seemed to fall from it … the inhabitants of the flats came rushing up and said, “Come down to the cellar at once”’.¹

As Katharine waited for The Pioneers to be published, she was spending time with Australian soldiers. At an afternoon tea in June, she and Doris Carter—famous for her ‘rippling, birdlike singing’—entertained thirty men evacuated from Gallipoli.² In September, the new London branch of the Australian Natives’ Association established, at vice-president WT Reay’s suggestion, the Anzac Club and Buffet.³ Katharine was a frequent visitor in the six weeks before she left London—she could not ‘extol too highly the value of its existence’. Offering free meals and the company of respectable Australian women, it aimed to give the soldiers ‘a little bit of Australia in London’, but just as much, it hoped to keep them away from prostitutes and alcohol.⁴

At one function, Katharine met Major Tom Todd of Western Australia’s 10th Light Horse Regiment. Todd invited her to an afternoon tea at the opulent Royal Automobile Club, which had become something of an officers’ club during the war. Here, on 14 September 1915, Todd introduced her to one of his men, Lieutenant Hugo Throssell.⁵ A gregarious 30-year-old, Hugo had been wounded at Gallipoli a couple of weeks earlier and only just evacuated to London.

Katharine and Hugo talked for a while and discovered their mutual love of horses. He proposed they go riding along Rotten Row, a track along the south edge of Hyde Park. When she said she didn’t have a riding habit he suggested she sit astride the horse—something still widely considered improper for women—and show Londoners how Australians could ride. It made her think of Harry Newton showing off in a rowboat back in 1908. The proposed ride ‘didn’t happen, thank goodness’.⁶

Katharine wrote that ‘there was an indefinable attraction to each other’. His ‘irresistible manner’ lifted her out of her ‘usual aloofness’. He would later claim that he fell in love with her as he caught sight of her walking along the terrace towards him.⁷ In a typically brief entry, all he recorded in his war diary was, ‘Met Miss KSP’.⁸

HUGO VIVIAN HOPE THROSSELL was from Northam, a wheatbelt town a hundred kilometres inland from Perth. He was always known as ‘Jim’, a name Katharine said he gave himself.⁹ His father, George Throssell, worked his way up from poverty to be a rich merchant, Northam’s member of parliament, and even premier of WA for a few months. Born on 26 October 1884, Hugo was the thirteenth of fourteen children; his younger sister died as a baby and he grew up as the indulged youngest child. He ‘had the best of everything. All the graces and pleasures of a country squire were his. There was always a horse of his own in the stables; his own dog; even … a pet monkey’.¹⁰ Educated as a boarder at Prince Alfred College, a prestigious Methodist school in Adelaide, Hugo’s great trouble in life, according to Katharine, was that he ‘had not been trained for any definite job’.¹¹ After finishing school, he did office work for six years for his much older brother’s business. He mucked around; he boxed; he sprinted; he acted in the local drama club; ‘he was a popular escort, but as incapable of being serious about a young lady as he was about any of life’s less significant pleasures’.¹² In 1910, the year his father died, Hugo worked as a stockman on Ashburton Downs Station, in the north of Western Australia.¹³ When he returned to the wheatbelt, he and his brother Eric tried to grow wheat on a family property in Cowcowing. After several years of failed crops, they owed a large debt and they decided to enlist, probably out of equal parts economic necessity, patriotism and the prospect of adventure. Enlisting together at Guildford in October 1914, they were original members of the newly formed 10th Light Horse Regiment.¹⁴ During training at Rockingham, south of Perth, Hugo was made a 2nd Lieutenant; he left for the front in February 1915.¹⁵

Arriving in Egypt, Hugo was left behind in Cairo to look after the horses when most of the regiment sailed to Gallipoli in May to fight, dismounted, as infantry for the ill-fated campaign to capture the sea route through the Dardanelles and supply the eastern front.¹⁶ In late July, Hugo led eighty-one soldiers sent to Gallipoli as reinforcements.¹⁷ After several difficult weeks in the trenches, Hugo was sent with the remnant of the battalion to Hill 60, on the north-western end of the frontline. On 29 August came the battle that would see him awarded a Victoria Cross, the one costly success of his life. It was the same day as the first newspaper advertisement for Katharine’s novel The Pioneers.¹⁸ At 1 a.m., a group of soldiers led by Hugo ran, exposed, the 50 metres from their trench to a trench held by the Turks and took one end of it, putting up a sandbag barricade. Separated only by the sandbags and a 5-metre section of trench, the two sides exchanged bombs the size of cricket balls through the rest of the night. Turkish reinforcements arrived at 4.30 a.m. and the Australians were outnumbered. It was then, Hugo wrote, ‘I got a bullet through the back of the neck and a piece of bomb through the left shoulder’.¹⁹ Despite the wounds, he fought on and rallied the other soldiers. ‘Men standing near me and next to me were blown to pieces or lost limbs, [or] were killed outright.’²⁰ At daylight, a machine gun arrived at the New Zealand line, and the Turkish soldiers who were not killed retreated. At about eight o’clock, Hugo agreed to have his wounds dressed; he was in such bad shape the doctor ordered that he be evacuated to the hospital ship.²¹

Arriving in London, Hugo was caught between making the most of the adventure of his first trip to Britain and getting better. A specialist blamed his hearing problems not on the noise of the trenches but adenoids. A week after meeting Katharine, Hugo was put under general anaesthetic and his adenoids removed. After the operation, he began developing a fever and was soon delirious and vomiting, fighting for his life for the next week.²² He had bacterial meningitis; the surgeon’s scalpel may have accidentally perforated the lining of his brain during the operation.²³ He was at his worst on 29 September and yet the next morning his temperature fell rapidly ‘with general remission of symptoms’.²⁴

Hugo remembered a doctor telling him as he recovered that ‘he would never be normal again’.²⁵ On 14 October, the medical board at the Wandsworth Hospital ruled that he was unfit for duty for six months.²⁶

The next day, while still in hospital, Hugo was announced as one of eight Anzac recipients of the Victoria Cross, the highest military honour awarded ‘for valour in the face of the enemy’. Hugo wrote ‘there was considerable excitement on my balcony where I was then domiciled that day. Many telegrams, letters and cables of congratulations were received, whilst a great number of visitors called, including seven people from Northam, press reporters after copy & camera fiends’.²⁷

On 17 October, he recorded meeting two women—Miss Rene Sara and Miss Watson. At the time, he seems to have been at least as interested in them as he was in Katharine.

Rene Sara, turning twenty-six that year, was feted in Western Australia at the time of her early death from appendicitis in 1921 as ‘perhaps the most brilliant of any of our singers’. She came to London to study at the Royal College of Music and stayed to work as a concert singer and to entertain troops.²⁸ In early 1916, Hugo took her with him to Ireland to stay at his father’s birthplace, the town of Fermoy. Whatever there might have been between her and Hugo, she married another Western Australian soldier in March 1917.²⁹

The other woman Hugo recorded meeting, Henrietta Watson, was a well-known British actress of forty-two. He had seen her perform in Adelaide when he was still at school and was entranced; after finding a photograph of her in a magazine in 1910 he wrote a fan letter. When Hugo reached London, he wrote again to let her know he was in town, which is how she came to visit him in hospital. They met up often over the following months. Hugo was to tell the story of his romance with Watson many times and at some stage he wrote it down, calling the story ‘Intimate Strangers’. ‘Of course, in a proper story, we should have got married and lived happily ever after, but this is a really truly story in every detail and so we just remained the very best of friends, or, as she aptly puts it—“Intimate Strangers”.’³⁰

It was a phrase which struck Katharine enough that she repurposed it as the title of a novel she wrote in the early 1930s in the years before Hugo’s suicide. Her Intimate Strangers (1937) isn’t the story of a coy romance between a war hero and an actress but a disintegrating marriage between a damaged war veteran and his wife.

READING IN THE newspaper that Hugo had been awarded the Victoria Cross, Katharine ‘sent him a telegram of congratulations and forgot him, because without a word of warning my brother Nigel arrived on one of the hospital ships from the Dardanelles’. Katharine was overjoyed to see Nigel, the first family member she’d seen in five years. She made a bed up for him in her lounge ‘and we spent a few happy days together’.³¹ A blurry photo of the two of them survives, Nigel seated with Katharine perched on the arm of the chair and a tantalising glimpse of the inside of Katharine’s flat, a framed photograph and a long, indistinct artwork on the wall, flowers on the side table. ‘With Nige, during the war’, Katharine wrote on the back, and with a different pen, ‘Mostly feet’.³²

Major Todd came to her flat to tell her Hugo had been suffering meningitis and wanted her to visit. When Katharine finally saw Hugo, ‘we were chattering as if the undercurrent of that inexplicable attraction flowing between us needed no explanation’. Yet he sounds insensitive. He’d been reading The Pioneers and she wanted to know what he thought of it. His only comment was to correct her use of the term ‘waggon’ on the first page: it should have been ‘covered-in dray’.³³ Katharine remembered the rebuke for decades, and made a special note in the preface to the revised edition in 1963 that she had taken the opportunity to finally correct it.³⁴

At the hospital she met Hugo’s brother Eric—known as Ric—for the first and only time. He was about to return to the front. ‘The brothers were David and Jonathan in their devotion to each other. Ric, a splendid looking man, broader and taller than Hugo, had the same Australian-ness I admired in them both, a virility and the air of horsemen accustomed to deal with men and beasts.’³⁵

Katharine was due to leave for Ceylon on the Omrah on 23 October. Hugo came to her flat to say goodbye ‘in the midst of my luggage, packed cases of books and belongings. I couldn’t believe there was more in his feeling for me than a sort of bushfire flare that would pass. So we parted, shaking hands, sadly, without any acknowledgement of an emotional stir between us’.³⁶

She was only meant to be on a short visit to Ceylon and Australia; perhaps she didn’t bother saying goodbye properly to all the friends she’d made, thinking she would be back within a year. There would have been a parting date with Reay—perhaps dinner at a fine restaurant. He was anxious for her to return soon. Yet ‘now things were different’, Katharine’s son writes. ‘Her success had given her more confidence.’³⁷

A MONTH AFTER Katharine left, from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday 20 November 1915, the Australian Natives’ Association held an ‘At Home’ at the Anzac Club and Buffet to honour the Australian Victoria Cross (VC) recipients. ‘The floral decorations were wattle blossoms and grasses. At one end of the table stood a good-sized kangaroo in natural skin and colour.’³⁸ Four of the six VC recipients were there, including Hugo. It’s not recorded whether Reay was present, but he was vice-president and it was the sort of thing he usually attended. If Hugo and Reay ever met, it was most likely this afternoon.

After songs by Hugo’s love interest, Rene Sara, and others, Sir George Reid, the former Australian prime minister and now high commissioner, gave a rousing, patriotic speech. ‘The King of Terrors meant a thousand deaths for each of you, but, in spite of all the thunderbolts which he launched, you stand before us not only alive but also braver, finer, and nobler for the experience.’³⁹ At that moment, at the height of his celebrity and before the death of his brother, Hugo may even have believed Reid. But the ‘King of Terrors’ with his ‘thousand deaths’ was not finished with Hugo yet.

Hugo, ‘his head still in hospital bandages’, was the only one of the VCs to give a substantial speech. He ‘began by declaring that he was a farmer, and could not be expected to make a speech’ but he went on to remember several brave soldiers he had seen die. He concluded by saying, ‘My wounds are nearly well, and when they are I shall be off, too, although I have two maladies to cure—a heart affection and a swelled head. Folks here have made so much of us that we begin to imagine we are some kind of special pumpkin. Gallipoli will soon cure us of that’.⁴⁰