16
Melbourne, 1916–1917
‘Early in September’, wrote a Sydney gossip editor after Katharine passed through the city, ‘she returns to her home in Melbourne for a few weeks and will then proceed to London, where her work necessitates her presence’.1 However, things worked out nothing like Katharine planned.
After Beatrice and baby Thea departed for Ceylon, Katharine ‘was settling down to write Black Opal when the blow fell I had been fearing for some time. Alan told me he wanted to volunteer for active service’.2 He had stayed home with widowed Edith for years while Katharine was overseas and now it was her turn. She still planned to return to London but Alan’s enlistment meant she ‘decided, under the circumstances to remain with her mother a few months longer’.3
ALAN WENT INTO training in the midst of an acrimonious public debate about conscription. On 30 August, while Katharine was travelling to Lightning Ridge, Labor prime minister Billy Hughes announced a referendum on the issue would be held on 26 October. He was pushing for conscription and yet leading a party in which many strongly opposed it. The previous December, the government had required all Australian men under forty-five years old to register whether they were willing to volunteer for military service and to explain any reluctance. Alan would have felt increasing pressure to enlist.
Katharine wrote that she ‘was bewildered as to what was the right way to vote’.4 A couple of days before the referendum, she attended an anti-conscription meeting in the inner-city suburb of Fitzroy, taking detailed notes, recording the speaker’s words and the atmosphere:
He talked in a husky voice with an earnestness that shook his meagre frame …
‘It’s the first time in the history of the world that a people have been asked to vote themselves into conscription. In every other country it has been forced on the workers. But this—the passing of the Referendum—will mean that the democracy will put the shackles on itself. It’s like breaking into Hell & staying there.’
And over all the clear night sky, thick with stars, the warm still night … These same stars gazing down on the battlefields of the Marne & Somme. What battles are waging there—& here?5
Guido, Nettie and Vance were all strongly opposed to conscription.6 Yet Katharine also had influences pushing her in the other direction. Eight years earlier, in peace time, she’d written the opinion piece vehemently supporting compulsory military training. Hugo publicly supported the ‘yes’ campaign.7 She had a brother training for the front; the influence of Reay; and a number of patriotic friends to balance out the ‘antis’—including the journalist Masie Maxwell, her replacement at the Herald who later wrote in the second referendum campaign that every woman must ask:
‘Shall I vote Yes and save my country, or vote No and play into the hands of Germany?’
Maybe it will not be easy for her to arrive at a decision. The pacifists, shirkers, Sinn Feiners, socialists, and all the rest of that brigade will see to that. They will play upon the emotional side of her nature and bring forward fantastical arguments which they feel will appeal to her sentiment, and give her a distorted perspective.8
As much as anyone, Katharine was torn between the two sides. Eventually, she came to a decision. ‘If recruits were needed, I thought, they would help to bring the war to an end, so with considerable misgivings I voted for them to be sent.’9 There were many reasons for her to do so, but it is still a shock to find her voting for conscription less than three years before the Australian intelligence agency opened a file on her as a dangerous radical. In Child of the Hurricane, Katharine complained about government and press censorship of the ‘no’ campaign—yet she voted ‘yes’ with full, firsthand knowledge of the arguments put forward against conscription.
In voting ‘yes’ she was in the minority—the conscription referendum was narrowly defeated.
IN NOVEMBER 1916, the month Windlestraws was published, Hilda and Louis left for New York, where Louis hoped to have his plays produced. The day they departed ‘several inky wayfarers wished the Esson literary couple bon voyage at Spencer-street station … Mr and Mrs Vance Palmer will take shelter in the Essons’ shack at Emerald while the intellectual couple are facing the blizzards in New York’.10
It was a tumultuous time for Katharine. The week after Hilda left, Edith’s sister, Christina, died; she had been one of the influential aunts shaping Katharine’s life.11 Then, on 16 December, her brother Alan embarked for France.12 ‘As the ship pulled out from the wharf I knew that I would never see that loved face again.’13
In the midst of this, there are signs Katharine had turned back to Guido only to learn he was involved with someone else. On 19 December, three days after Alan left, she wrote in her notebook:
Some men are licensed to retail undiluted essences of hell—& they do it to the best of their ability. They are a danger to society, public nuisances. They ought to be locked up.
*
One drink’s one’s own tears—but tears are a poor drink. They increase thirst—and are bad for the digestion.
*
I want to swim in you—as one swims in a lake. Drown in you … It is only in the merging of souls that lovers become immortal—one flesh.14
In the aftermath of the referendum victory, Guido had fallen for a poet named Lesbia Keogh, better known by her later married name, Harford. Katharine may have already known her; Lesbia had been friends with Nettie since 1907.15 Guido and Lesbia grew close in late 1916 working together on an organising committee for a proposed new journal, a review of politics, literature and arts. The journal never came about but ‘what did eventuate from these meetings’, wrote Guido, ‘was our intimate friendship’.16 Lesbia had a heart condition that was expected to kill her by thirty. Now twenty-five, she was living intensely. She completed a law degree in December 1916, but had joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and was working in a clothing factory out of solidarity with the working class. She introduced Guido to Percy Laidler, the Melbourne IWW leader and manager of Andrade’s Bookshop, a meeting place for radicals.17 Guido wrote that it was Lesbia ‘above all who helped me to find my way right into the revolutionary working-class movement’.18
If Katharine’s words on 19 December are in response to learning of Guido’s unfaithfulness, she forgave him. Guido seems to have remained involved with both Katharine and Lesbia all through 1917, with probably neither Katharine nor Lesbia fully aware of the situation. Guido visited Emerald with each of them, writing of Lesbia, ‘I well remember one Saturday in 1917, when this remarkable woman, despite her bad heart, insisted on our climbing a steep hill in the Dandenong Ranges, proceeding at the same time both to stir my mind deeply & to set my imagination on fire’.19
In May 1917, Nettie was dangerously sick with septicaemia after the birth of her second child.20 While Nettie was in hospital, Katharine sublet the Emerald cottage from the Palmers for three weeks. She wrote to Nettie from Emerald while she was there. ‘I am loving every minute of my time here … I love going further into the wilderness with an axe in the morning and wheeling home a barrow-load.’ She added as a ‘by the way—although it is no by the way at all’:
Guido came to see me on Monday. We had all Tuesday together & he caught the train back on Wednesday … The party was indiscrete, dear, but innocent to a degree—and I cannot tell you what it meant to us both. Mother would have hysterics if she heard of it—so this information is just for you dear. We had two perfect blue days wandering about the hills. I am better in mind and body than I have been for a very long time.21
It is Katharine’s only known direct acknowledgement of her romance with Guido. What was the ‘degree’ of ‘innocence’ in their relationship? Guido is said to have suddenly married for the first time seven months later because the woman, Kathleen Tobin, ‘refused to go to bed with me unless I did’; presumably, Katharine and Lesbia ‘had been less resistant to his charm’.22 And yet, for whatever reason, there was a degree of innocence between Guido and Katharine on those days in May 1917.
GUIDO’S BIG PROJECT in 1917 was to help establish the Victorian Labor College. The activist Bill Earsman was the initiator and he recruited Guido to join the organising committee and teach.23 The constitution stated, ‘the point of view of teachers shall be frankly working class, and the aim of the College shall be to enable working men and working women to serve their class’.24
Katharine’s lack of a degree was a wound she still carried. Now, in 1917, it may have helped her to identify with the working classes cut off from tertiary education. In June, inspired by Guido, she wrote to the college committee asking if she could take classes even though she was not a member of a trade union. The committee accepted her application and the next meeting minuted her as the first student to be enrolled in the college.25 Her enrolment was the most radical political step of her life so far. She was renouncing the middle class she had been born into and asking the working class to adopt her as an honorary member. It came only seven months after she had voted for conscription.
The Australian political landscape shifted dramatically after the first conscription referendum. In November 1916, prime minister Billy Hughes and thirty other pro-conscription government members split with the Labor Party over the issue. In May 1917, Hughes and these pro-conscription defectors won the federal election as part of a new centre-right party, the Nationalist Party of Australia. Presumably, Katharine’s vote remained with the decimated Australian Labor Party, which now held a clear anti-conscription position.
There was an atmosphere of class division and turmoil in Melbourne. Cost of living pressures led to food riots. The Great Strike began in New South Wales in August and was affecting 20,000 workers in Melbourne by September, up to a half of them actually on strike while the other half were stood down as industry ground to a halt.26
At one point in 1917, Katharine experienced a political ‘omen’, with many of the markers of a religious experience:
Walking into the city, across Prince’s Bridge one evening, I saw the first posters proclaiming the revolution in Russia. It had happened. The dream of the exiles I had met in Paris, so long ago, had come true. There was a gash of gold in the cloudy sky. Everything was suffused in golden light. In a daze of excitement and rejoicing, it seemed this was an omen for the future … I lost no time buying and studying all the books of these writers [Marx and Engels] available in Melbourne. Discussion with Christian [Jollie Smith], [Bill] Earsman and [Guido] Baracchi confirmed my impression that these theories provided the only logical basis that I had come across for the reorganization of our social system.27
In an earlier account of the experience, Katharine wrote that ‘until then … I had not heard of Karl Marx or Communism’.28 This seems incredible from someone who had been mixing with socialists for years, but before 1917, Marxism was just one theory among many shaping the numerous movements opposed to capitalism.29 Published in 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto had finally found its moment. It spoke of history as a struggle between classes; in capitalism the workers who provided the labour were exploited by the minority class of capitalists who owned the means of production. It was time for the workers to throw off their chains and take power, forming a classless society in which production was decided according to human need rather than profit.
There were two revolutions in Russia in 1917. If the bridge experience is dated to the February Revolution—March 1917 in the modern calendar—it could have been one of the catalysts leading her to enrol at the Victorian Labor College in June. In the February Revolution, a series of strikes begun on International Women’s Day shut down the Russian city of Petrograd and led to the abdication of the Tsar. A reformist Provisional Government came to power. When Katharine heard of these events, it would have brought to mind the Russians she met in 1908 whose dream was the overthrow of the Tsar.
As news reached Australia of the February Revolution, there was excitement in radical circles. The Age reported that on Sunday 25 March a group of Russians met on the banks of the Yarra under a red flag, rejoicing over the revolution.30 Perhaps Katharine saw them there as she crossed Prince’s Bridge, if not at the time of her omen then on another crossing. An Australian workers’ newspaper declared: ‘The Russian revolution, which has created such a wonderful sensation throughout the world, is literally a triumph for the countless number of noble men and women who for very many years have devoted every energy they possessed to the liberation of their glorious country’.31
Another influence on Katharine in this phase of her radicalism was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Often known by the nickname the ‘Wobblies’, the IWW came out of the US labour movement and the first Australian group was formed in Sydney in 1907; a Melbourne group was formed in 1915.32 The movement attracted those on the left disillusioned by the compromises the Australian Labor Party had made to win elections. The IWW opposed parliamentary politics and arbitration courts setting wages, and instead called for direct action, with all the workers uniting to seize control of their industry. Rather than dividing into unions according to different trades, the workers would unite across an entire industry and ultimately form One Big Union.33 Opposed to militarism, the IWW was also protesting the war and twelve IWW leaders were arrested in Sydney in September 1916 and dubiously convicted of various offences, including arson and treason. Then, in December 1916, the federal government passed legislation banning the organisation. The prosecutions of IWW members stepped up in mid-1917, just as Katharine was radicalised.34
As Lesbia pulled Guido into the IWW circle, his theoretical interests seem to have turned to syndicalism, a theory which had shaped the movement.35 ‘Some of my friends’, Katharine wrote, ‘argued that syndicalism offered a more effective approach to the problems of industrial exploitation and poverty than guild socialism. I was myself more attracted to syndicalism’.36 It was probably in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917 that she read the key syndicalist text, Georges Sorel’s book Reflections on Violence (1908). 37 Sorel advocated workers staging a general strike to seize power in violent revolution.
The first term of the Victorian Labor College began at Unity Hall in the city on 9 July 1917. Guido Baracchi taught economics on Tuesday evenings from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m., giving a survey of different theories of how to emancipate the working class from 1750 to the present.38 Later Guido was to remember that he had ‘gone a fair way toward orthodox Marxism’ in 1917, but he—and Katharine—may not have been as far along as they remembered.39 The course did not culminate in Marxist theory, but instead offered several Marxist approaches as part of ‘the dissenters’; this section was followed by more recent theories.40 It is even likely that Guido didn’t give his lecture on Marx and the dissenters at all that year. The last four weeks of the second term were cancelled so that everyone involved with the college could use their energy for the ‘no’ campaign in the second conscription referendum.41 In December, Guido spoke not on Karl Marx but Georges Sorel’s syndicalism at the Victorian Socialist Party’s Sunday evening meeting.42
At the end of her life, remembering the architect of the revolution, Vladimir Lenin, Katharine wrote, ‘Among my friends … there was excited and enthusiastic discussion about Lenin. Who is he? How had he won the soldiers, sailors, peasants and industrial workers to fight for the Russian revolution? Would socialism become practical politics with the establishment of the USSR?’43 Katharine, Guido, and the other Australian radicals who would form the Communist Party of Australia in 1920 were inspired by the success of Russia’s Bolsheviks in the second revolution of November 1917. However, the ideology of the Australian radicals wasn’t settled yet. For several years they were still drawn to syndicalism and the IWW, which was re-created by Guido and others in 1918 as the International Industrial Workers to circumvent the IWW’s illegality.44 The IWW wanted power directly in the hands of the workers while the Bolsheviks believed temporary control by the revolutionaries was necessary ‘to crush capitalist resistance’ and ‘confiscate capitalist property’ before turning power over to the working class.45 When historian Ian Turner interviewed Katharine in 1960, he commented that her 1919 pamphlet The New Order still showed the influence of syndicalism in its emphasis on industrial unionism and the strike. She agreed that she held a more syndicalist approach ‘until the collapse of the Italian syndicates after the war’, at which time she ‘accepted the communist idea of the importance of political action’.46 She seems to be referring to events in 1921, which dates her full conversion to communism later than her own official account.
Katharine’s time at the college was a formal phase of her political education after years of eclectic personal reading. It put her in the midst of radical circles at a time of revolutionary urgency—the horrors of the war in Europe, the hope of a new order in Russia, and, at home, a government pushing for conscription and suppressing dissenters like the IWW.
SOMETIME IN 1917, Katharine and Edith had moved with a maid named Ethel to a ‘dreary’ two-storey house at 900 Malvern Road, still in Armadale. Katharine and her mother lived in shared anxiety for Alan at the front as they clashed over Katharine’s bohemian and radical tendencies.47 ‘She was shocked to find that I had learnt to smoke while I was in England, and used to pull down blinds … for fear neighbours would see … Then, one day, when I had a frantic headache and no cigarettes, she trotted off and returned in triumph with a packet.’48 They argued about sex education, conscription and communism. Though Edith sometimes asked, theatrically, how she came to have such a child, she began to accept that ‘the old ways and ideas’ did not work for Katharine.49
Katharine had spent all the money from the Hodder & Stoughton prize and she was now making a precarious living writing stories while also working on Black Opal. In a letter to Nettie in May she asked if she could delay paying rent for the Emerald cottage until the magazines had paid her the £12 they owed her.50
The effects of the war are felt in some of her stories of the time but rather sentimentally. Although the lightweight six-part serial, ‘Granny Peace’ (1917–1918), is set in the idyllic apple orchards of Sunny Creek, the romances and small intrigues of the Peace family and other locals are affected by anxiety for loved ones fighting at the front and the pressure on men to enlist. In December 1917’s ‘Danny Niel’, the title character is a town drunk mistaken for Father Christmas by a little girl whose father has been killed in the war. Danny turns his life around in order to bring presents for the girl and her brother. It’s a heart-warming story, probably written before October when the first of two deaths struck Katharine.
KATHARINE’S CLOSE FRIEND, Sumner Locke, was the first of the deaths. Sumner had married Corporal Henry Logan Elliott in Sydney at the end of 1916. It was a sudden marriage; the two had known each other when they were younger but had been close for just a few months. Less than two months after they married, Elliott—in Sumner’s words her ‘beautiful ten minutes husband’—left Sydney for the front.51 In that time, Sumner had fallen pregnant. She went ahead with a trip she had already booked to the United States to gather experiences for a future novel and meet with her publisher.52
She came back to Australia in August and was admitted soon after to the Laurels Private Hospital, gravely ill with eclampsia. Her baby was ten days overdue when he was finally born on 17 October 1917. Late that night, Sumner’s sister Lily sent a telegram to their other sisters in Victoria saying that ‘Putty arrived this afternoon, splendid boy, eight pounds. Everything satisfactory’. Sumner was dead by the time the sisters received it the following morning.53
In a tribute to Sumner, Katharine quoted from Sumner’s last letter to her. ‘I’m a whole heap alone. And I don’t like it… Since last week I’ve done a yarn and a war poem in bed, and that helps some … I’ve got big splendid hopes of my desert novel for next year.’ Sumner counselled, ‘Kathy, go slow! Run chickens and books but don’t get downhearted dearest’. At the end of the letter was a note from Lily saying, ‘We have laid her to rest among the gums and wildflowers of Illawarra, which she loved so much’.54
It was the first time a close friend of Katharine’s had died. She wrote, ‘The shock and grief of that announcement make it almost impossible to write. That sun-shiny personality not here any longer? Sumner not laughing and talking somewhere? It is unbelievable’.55
In November, Katharine wrote to newspapers as honorary secretary of the Sumner Locke Memorial, calling for donations from friends and admirers of Sumner’s work to establish a permanent memorial.56 Katharine’s original idea ‘was to plant an Australian tree on the bank of the Yarra, to form, perhaps, the opening of a memorial avenue to Australians who in their lifetime had contributed something of value to the art and literature of their country’.57 However, it proved impossible and the eventual form the memorial took was the publication of a slim collection of Sumner’s poetry in 1921. The proceeds from sales were used for the benefit of her son, Sumner Locke Elliott. He was being raised by his aunt and uncle and Katharine continued to send money from the fund until its closure in 1930.58
Katharine’s ‘ending’ for Sumner in which Sumner introduced Katharine to her masterpiece, a son, had a strange fulfilment. Living much longer than his mother, Sumner Locke Elliott would go on to have the kind of career she dreamed of as the successful author of ten novels, acclaimed in both Australia and his adopted home of the United States. In a number of the characters he created he was to give ‘fictional life to the mother he never knew, an act of creation based on his aunts’ family memories and on a handful of letters, photographs, and memorabilia that survive’.59
ON 7 NOVEMBER 1917, just as the Bolshevik Revolution brought a communist government to power in Russia, prime minister Billy Hughes announced a second conscription referendum. Katharine remembered, ‘I had no doubt by this time where I stood, and offered my services to the campaign directors’.60
Fifty years after the defeat of the conscription referenda, a committee set out to compile an honour roll of Victorian ‘people and organisations active in the anti-conscription campaigns of 1916 and/or 1917’. An initial list was widely circulated in Victorian union and radical circles and additions, confirmations and corrections requested; it grew from 400 names to 700. Guido Baracchi was on it, as were Nettie and Vance Palmer. Louis Esson was raised as a ‘possible’ in one version. Yet Katharine Susannah Prichard was missing. She was not the only member of her circle notable by their absence—Christian Jollie Smith was nowhere to be found either. But given Katharine’s high profile as a communist and a writer in the 1960s and her celebrity right back in 1917, it would be strange if she was heavily involved in the campaign and no-one consulted remembered it.61
Katharine was probably only involved in the last week or two of the campaign, spending the rest of the period in Pyramid Hill, a town in the goldfields, housekeeping for her brother Nigel at his request. Nigel’s wife, Vera, had returned to her hometown of Geelong to give birth while, as one of the few doctors in the district, Nigel continued with his practice.62 It seems an unlikely thing for Katharine to agree to do as a woman with egalitarian convictions, busy with writing and classes. Perhaps she felt a sense of family obligation; perhaps she wanted to escape her mother or Guido for a time.
Vera gave birth to a daughter on 23 November, Katharine’s second niece, and it would have been some time after that before Vera returned to Pyramid Hill.63 So it was probably from the isolation of Pyramid Hill that Katharine wrote a heartbroken unsent letter to Guido on 20 November, a double-sided page of which survives, sitting loosely in one of her notebooks.
I’ve been reading some of your old letters today & I’m full to the brim with the spirit of them. A silly thing to do, but I longed so to read again some wonderful things you have said to me. I wonder do you still mean them … I say to myself—‘he asked you to have faith’ … Am I still to have faith? I mean that you are so indifferent, so careless of me.
You say in some of these old letters—that there are only two things you ask of life—& one is that your life may not be ‘devoid of me’—I wonder do you still mean that …
I ask only those two things of life too. The first I have always been striving to—the second has grown with my love of you. And now I feel as if you were wanting to be ‘devoid of’ me. Why? … Is it just that with all the others to be seduced, I must be put to one side because I consent to be put there? I’m all middle-class female! If I went on a rampage & blacked your eyes for philandering with other women would you have more respect for me? I believe you would.64
Katharine returned to Melbourne and did what she could for the anti-conscription campaign. She wrote an article which a newspaper declined. Then she was asked to speak at an open-air meeting, and ‘there was a dreadful scene with Mother’, who felt like she was refusing to send help to Alan. As it turned out, she didn’t speak that night; the meeting was ‘broken up by a gang of hooligans and drunken soldiers’.65 At a street meeting alongside Bill Earsman on 18 December 1917, she gave a speech titled, ‘People of Australia, think for yourselves!’ Her arguments against conscription were nationalistic and class-based. ‘Members of the Government seem to think it a disgrace for people to declare themselves Australian above all things.’ She called conscription, in this period of the war, ‘anti-Australian’, as the country was threatened by Japan and the goal of the conservative government was ‘cheap labour and a spiritless working class; they are out after the bones of our industrial organizations, although they wear the sheep’s-clothing of patriotism dyed the Imperial Purple’.66
It was only the second speech she had ever given, the first being the talk at the Primrose League in England. It wasn’t reported by the newspapers or even remembered by the anti-conscription jubilee committee. And yet it was Katharine’s most public act of radicalism so far and a harbinger of the role she was to adopt as an outspoken communist.
‘As I was not an impressive speaker’, she wrote, ‘there were no more requests for me to address meetings’.67 The referendum was just two days later, so the short amount of time is probably the real reason she wasn’t asked to speak again. Yet her own sense of her lack of power as a speaker and her fear in the unsent letter that she was too middle class could have been felt in reaction to her rival, Lesbia. Guido wrote of Lesbia ‘speaking against conscription night after night at street corners’ until she was sent to hospital with heart problems, only for her to sneak out of the ward and ‘break her silence the very next night from a soapbox’.68 In activist circles there can be an implicit competitiveness over who is the most radical; Lesbia would have been difficult to beat.
On 13 December, a telegram came advising that Alan had been wounded in his left arm and back. He could still write, apparently, and the Argus reported that ‘hope was entertained of his recovery’.69 During that last week of conscription campaigning, Katharine prepared her speech full of worry for her brother.
The referendum was held on Thursday 20 December and to the surprise of many, conscription was defeated for a second time. That night, Guido held a ‘grand party’. Vance was there, and got so drunk that instead of returning to Emerald, he slept on Guido’s bed with his boots still on.70 It’s unknown whether Katharine was at the party.
The day after the referendum, there was a knock on the door of Edith and Katharine’s house.
As [Mother] lay in bed, she heard me open the door and take the telegram from the small boy who brought it. There was no need to tell her what I read on that scrap of paper. Her broken cry told me she knew. I fell into her arms, pressed against the soft bosom that had been a place of comfort in many distresses. But there was no consolation for either of us now. Mother rolled about in the turbulence of her grief, distraught and moaning: ‘Oh God, how can I bear it? My boy! My boy!’71
Alan had been wounded by a bomb on 2 December and transferred to No. 2 Casualty Clearing Station, Le Veau. Despite the initial hope of recovery, ‘the injury to the spine had caused paralysis, followed by pneumonia’ and he died on 12 December, nine days before Katharine and Edith received the second telegram.72
The breeze died down at sunset that day, the Argus reported on the same page as an article on Alan’s death, and it was a humid, oppressive evening.73 Just a few days before Christmas, Katharine and Edith were grieving in the summer heat, their scattered family hit by a second tragedy a decade after Tom’s death.
‘I liked Alan so much’, wrote Hilda to Nettie when she heard the news. ‘We grew up together, and had many experiences, good and bad, together, that his death was a terrible shock. It seemed one of those unnecessary catastrophes. For Kattie it will be terrible because she loves so intensely, and grieves so fiercely, that it is too much for her to bear.’74
Sometime later, Katharine or Edith wrote to Reay in London, seeking his help to arrange photographs of the grave. It was noted on Alan’s military record, ‘three photographs of grave sent … to Lieut. Col. W. T. Reay (for relatives)’.75 Alan’s effects were eventually put on board the Barunga to be sent back to Edith. However, the ship was torpedoed by a German submarine on 15 July 1918 and everything of his was lost at sea.76