During the inter-war years a host of European literary figures and intellectuals attempted to make sense of the unmitigated human tragedy that was the First World War. The notable novels of the war – French, British, German, American and Australian – emerged within a decade of the war’s conclusion in 1918. Prominent British novelists singled out Anglican chaplains as malingerers, wowsers and incompetent timewasters whose class position kept them out of touch with the working class that made up the bulk of Britain’s citizen Army. Anglican chaplains were also held up as archetypes of an uncritical, remote establishment. Yet, as historian Michael Snape observes, with extended historical hindsight these facile caricatures lack historical credibility and should be seen more accurately as the product of several prominent writers’ own anti-war and anticlerical agendas – perhaps most famously that of Robert Graves, whose Goodbye To All That was an attempt to use chaplains as scapegoats on which to impose his disgust at the war and its attendant carnage.Footnote 1
It is striking that there was no equivalent vilification of chaplains in Australian intellectual and public life. Australian poets and novelists were more inclined to forget the war than to criticize it. The Anzac spirit, as Mary Wilson points out, was noticeably absent from the literature of the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote 2 Where religion did impinge on writing about the war, it was most commonly in the trope of Christ as a digger who was intimately involved in the comradeship of battle, as Henry Pryce’s famous poem of the period suggests:
Here Christ with eyes and cap of steel is known
to such as need …
In your dark hour you’ll find him there; although
your eyes but see
A comrade with a cigarette, stooping to give Godspeed.Footnote 3
‘O Galilee Thy shadow walked Gallipoli,’ wrote Mary Gilmore in a more mystical vein. The idea was also developed in the two truly great Australian novels inspired by the war: Henry Mann’s Flesh in Armour and Frederic Manning’s Middle Parts of Fortune. ‘Where then, was Christ?,’ asked the Anglican chaplain’s character in Flesh in Armour rhetorically during a church service on the eve of battle:
if Christ should exist anywhere … (He) must be in each; … in the flesh within the armour, making war, the general slaughter and the individual killing … immaterial.Footnote 4
Manning’ s Middle Parts of Fortune, hailed by Ernest Hemingway as one of the finest war novels ever written, presents the Anglican chaplain in a warm and sympathetic light: ‘the tall lean … padre was one of the best.’Footnote 5 He was a confidant to whom men could unburden themselves; an advocate who could pull strings for soldiers’ postings and who successfully fought for a reduced sentence for a deserter; and was a kindly patron who lent soldiers money and cashed their cheques.Footnote 6 Wilson adds that it was churches, and not least their chaplains, who ‘did more than anyone to preserve the Anzac tradition in the very shaky years of the 1920s.’Footnote 7
The comparatively positive literary representations of Australian Anglican chaplains and the pivotal role of churches and chaplains for Australian war commemoration in the inter-war years raises questions about the lives, ministries and legacies of returned Anglican chaplains in Australia during the inter-war period. Although a significant historical literature has in recent years examined both the wartime and post-war experience of British First World War chaplains, with a significant sub-literature focusing on Anglican chaplains, relatively little has been written on the post-war experience of Australian First World War chaplains.Footnote 8 Even less is known about the post-war lives of the Anglican component (some 175 chaplains) who represented nearly half of Australia’s total chaplaincy contingent (414 chaplains) in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) during the First World War. This is largely because the experience of Australian chaplains during the First World War has received the lion’s share of scholarly attention.Footnote 9
The purpose of this article, then, is to examine the impact of First World War service on the lives and ministries of Australian Anglican Army chaplains (or ‘padres,’ as they were affectionately known by soldiers). A key contention of this article is that although war experience damaged the lives (physically and psychologically) and vocations of a minority of returned Anglican chaplains, for a significant number their war experience recalibrated pre-war imperialistic lines of sight for nationalistic and Australian ones. In so doing, these returned chaplains brought a distinctly Christian voice to bear in public discussions of an increasingly radicalized world order and its ideological contest – between the extremes of the right and the left – for the hearts and minds of Australians. It was also returned Anglican chaplains and the Anglican liturgy, more than any other ecclesial tradition, that profoundly shaped the post-war Anzac commemoration that to this day lies at the heart of Australian war commemoration and civil religion. Wartime acquaintance with working men and their aspirations (despite most Anglican chaplains being products of the middle class) and a context of economic depression also fuelled many veteran chaplains’ campaigns for social justice and equitable solutions to post-war impasses between labour and capital. Chaplains also attempted to harness the esprit de corps and brotherhood experienced in war for their outreach to Australian men. A striking expression of this priority was the creation by Anglican chaplains of several religious brotherhoods, grounded in their experience of metropolitan English communities while on active service.
‘After all this Amongst Men’
Australian chaplains returned after 1918 to an Australia that had been obviously and irrevocably changed by the war. In some cases, a four-year absence from Australia had denied chaplains opportunities for ecclesiastical preferment; in other cases returning chaplains were regarded with suspicion; and in yet others, the horrors and trauma of war experience affected a few chaplains to the point that they either left the ministry or were just unable to continue with their pre-war vocation. Several chaplains would carry the physical scars of war to their graves, with lives and ministries truncated by illness and early death.Footnote 10
Some chaplains left the ministry to take up land through the ‘Land for Returned Soldiers’ Soldier Settlement scheme. The scheme was designed, as a New South Wales (NSW) Government poster put it, to ‘make available certain areas for the special purpose of providing for returned soldiers’ and ‘to give preference to returned soldiers in ballots for any ordinary Crown lands which may from time to time become available.’Footnote 11
The Rev. William McClemans, for example, had been in the years leading up to 1914 an ‘energetic and popular’ educationalist, rector and canon of St George’s Cathedral, Perth. But he was later described as having been ‘deeply affected’ by war experience in the Sinai and subsequently in the blood-sodden casualty clearing stations of the Western Front.Footnote 12 Upon his return to Australia in 1917 he increasingly sought consolation in alcohol. By 1922, McClemans had resigned his rectorship and within seven years had divorced his wife, Ada, and abandoned a family that included five daughters, forcing Ada to work a variety of odd jobs and take in boarders to provide for the family. McClemans took up farming on a Soldier Settlement farm and became increasingly estranged from both his family and his social circle (in later years, however, there was a rapprochement with his family).Footnote 13
Another veteran chaplain who left the ministry for a soldier-settler farm was the Rev. Walter Dexter DSO MC DCM, a beloved and highly decorated senior chaplain whose storied life included world travel as a master mariner, soldiering experience as a trooper in the South African War and wartime fame as the ‘Pinching Padre’ (on account of his ability to scrounge all manner of comforts for troops on the Western Front). Dexter returned from the war harbouring doubts about whether he could resume parish work. “It comes to me with great force,” he had written to his wife, Dorrie, as early as December 1914, after several months ministering with great success to Australian soldiers:
How can I take up parish work when I get back after all this amongst men. I leave it in God’s hands for He will open my path before me. Possibly by the end of the campaign I will be glad to go back to the quiet? calm? untroubled? parochial life. However, all will come in due time.Footnote 14
After his discharge from the AIF in July 1920, Dexter, Dorrie and their four boys took up a soldier-settlement block around Kilsyth, Victoria. Like so many other returned soldiers-turned-farmers, however, Dexter’s venture failed dismally. Unlike McClemans, Dexter eventually felt able to return to the Anglican ministry in 1924 after five years’ farming. He combined parish work in rural Victorian parishes with part-time teaching at the prestigious Geelong Grammar until his retirement in 1947, aged 74 years. He also supported and raised a family of eight. Right up to his death in 1950 he remained active in veteran networks and in commemoration activities on Anzac and Armistice Days (including one memorable Armistice Day service in his Lara parish in November 1934, during which the poet laureate John Masefield read publicly for the first time his poem, ‘For the Dead at Gallipoli’).Footnote 15
At least one chaplain never even returned to Australia. The Rev. Thomas Reynolds’ Australian wife reported in 1921 that he had been discharged in London and had last been heard of with another woman in Bruges, Belgium.Footnote 16 The Rev. Kenneth Henderson was another Anglican chaplain who left ordained ministry after the war after being invalided out with lung problems. He eventually eschewed links with any particular theology or religious party. Henderson nevertheless maintained a broad, undogmatic faith in Christ’s lordship that was shaped by the philosophy of Ernst Troeltsch, whose sociological vision Henderson imbibed during post-war study at Oxford. Henderson brought his experience and beliefs to bear on a successful post-ministry career as a journalist and religious broadcaster with the fledgling ABC. Nevertheless, he spent the rest of his life wrestling with the ghosts of his two dead brothers, Rupert and Alan (both killed at Gallipoli), and theological problems raised by war experience and the philosophical currents of his day.Footnote 17
Nevertheless, those who left the Anglican ministry altogether were still relatively few in number: only 14 out of 175 Anglicans (8 per cent).Footnote 18 For those who remained, war service did not result in accelerated advancement to high leadership positions within the churches. Only 7 of the 175 Anglican chaplains (4 per cent) became bishops, with 5 of these in country dioceses. Two veteran padres became archbishops: Frederick Waldegrave Head MC, Archbishop of Melbourne from 1929 to 1941 (he had been a chaplain with the British Guards); and his successor Joseph Booth MC, archbishop from 1942 to 1957.
Returned chaplains did have to contend with the devastating impact of the loss of so many young men from their churches. This loss was especially magnified in Anglican and Methodist churches, whose strong support for the war had resulted in high enlistment rates. Consequently, a generation of future lay and clerical leaders was more than decimated by the war. One Anglican clergymen, the Rev. John Howell Price, rector of St Mary’s Balmain in Sydney, saw only two out of five sons return from the war. The shame of another son’s imprisonment for fraud added to the Howell-Price’s grievous burden.Footnote 19 St Michael’s, a parish in Wollongong, NSW, lost 55 out of its 110 men who had enlisted. The wartime comments of Anglican chaplain (and later Dean and Archdeacon of Sydney) Albert Talbot are poignant in this regard: ‘I had a choir of 12 men the day before Lone Pine [one of Australia’s most costly attacks in the Gallipoli campaign]. I have only been able to trace one of them since.’Footnote 20 Talbot had himself been wounded by a Turkish bullet at Lone Pine, although he did not report the wound for several days due to the ministry demands placed on him by the desperate fighting.Footnote 21
Another result of these losses was a shortage of clergymen, which quickly translated into a higher workload for returning chaplains. The 39-year-old Rev. Johnston Redmond observed in 1921 that he was now serving alone in a Victorian rural parish that had had a pre-war staff of four. In addition to the shortage of priests and deacons, he was further hampered by ‘a broken constitution’ and breathing difficulties, another difficult legacy of the war for which he had been invalided out of the AIF in 1918.Footnote 22 Another returned chaplain who spent the rest of his life dealing with war-induced health problems was the Rev. William Keith Douglas MC, who remained in and out of hospitals on a regular basis during and after his war service.Footnote 23
Commemoration: Anglican Chaplains and the Creation of Anzac Day
A fissure in Australian society had opened up between returned soldiers and those who had stayed at home. Historian Bob Linder observes that soldiers’ experience of death and killing alienated many from civilian life and made the transition back to civilian life difficult, resulting in serious communication problems and distorted relationships. Friends and relatives tended to surround veterans with an aura of horror or mystery. ‘[B]etween the civilian and the fighting man,’ observed one veteran chaplain, ‘there is a great gulf fixed.’Footnote 24 The war has been described by some as the ‘birthplace’ of a new Australian nationalism and the essence of its civil religion, born out of the sacrifice and heroism of Australian soldiers and issuing in the construction and maintenance of Anzac myths and legends. Yet the war also sowed the seeds of bitterness, cynicism and an evaporating idealism, not least among veterans.Footnote 25 Something of that disaffection is apparent in the postwar experience of the Rev. James Wilson, who served as an MLA in the NSW Parliament after a stint as chaplain to the AIF tunnelling companies in France. Wilson complained in 1921 of:
many an insult hurled at me on the floor of the assembly by men who never went to the war zone. Yet a man like myself over 50 years of age served only at the real front with his only fit son fighting in the ranks never had a word of appreciation in all the years I toiled raising money and helping men. Our nation is a great hand at forgetting.Footnote 26
It is not surprising, therefore, that many chaplains found solidarity and close links with returned servicemen, marching at the increasingly popular Anzac Day parades and lending their support to returned servicemen’s leagues and organizations. The Rev. Thomas Pearse Bennett, revered widely as ‘The Padre (T. P.)’ or ‘the Padre of Gallipoli’ (and to whom Patsy Adam-Smith devoted a whole chapter in her classic account of The Anzacs), was one such beloved Anglican chaplain who helped establish a branch of the Returned Services League in his local town of Warrnambool, of which he was also first president.Footnote 27 Bennett went even further, however, when he relinquished a parish post to become archdeacon so that he could seek out returned soldiers and distressed relatives of men killed in the war.Footnote 28
It was the custom for chaplains to remain honorary chaplains of the brigades and battalions with which they had served during the war. Chaplains also played a prominent part in commemoration of the war, being responsible for writing a raft of unit histories and personal memoirs. The Rev. George Cuttriss, for example, wrote a well-regarded history of the famous 3rd AIF Division that was prefaced by General Sir John Monash (who commanded it).Footnote 29 We have already noted Mary Wilson’s observations that it was churches who most kept alive the Anzac tradition during the immediate post-war period.Footnote 30 Historian of the British Royal Army Chaplains’ Department (RAChD), Michael Snape, observes a similar close relationship in Britain between British chaplains, returned servicemen and commemoration activities.Footnote 31
Architects of Anzac Day
A veteran Anglican chaplain, Canon David Garland, was a principal driving force and architect of Anzac Day commemoration and its public character. It was Garland who organized the first Anzac Day commemoration in Brisbane during 1916 (during this period public holidays were a state responsibility). His influence, imbued by his Anglo-Catholic theology and aesthetic sensibilities, is indelibly imprinted on Anzac Day ceremonies that gained traction in other states: in special church services; in the non-sectarian Anzac ceremonies and badges that he devised; in the march past and time for silent reflection; in the wreath-laying ceremonies at memorials; in the royal blue silk badges emblazoned with the winged-lion emblem of St Mark, whose feast day is 25 April; and in the returned soldiers’ luncheon.Footnote 32 A member of the Anzac Day Commemoration Committee (Queensland), he campaigned incessantly after 1916 for government legislation to set apart Anzac Day as a day of solemn commemoration for the Australian fallen of the First World War. That legislation was finally passed in 1921.
Another framer and architect of Anzac Day commemoration – in this case in NSW – was Dean Albert Talbot. Having served as a senior chaplain on Gallipoli, he led Sydney’s first formal Anzac Day service in 1916 and played a pivotal role in its commemoration in Sydney for two decades after the war. Talbot and his archbishop, John Wright, began the traditions of wreath laying, silence, hymn singing and the dawn service in Sydney.Footnote 33 They also worked closely with government and veterans’ organizations to ensure both the success of Anzac Day and that Anglican liturgy and mourning rites would become the ‘core of Anzac Day repertory.’Footnote 34 Their Evangelical Anglican theology and churchmanship profoundly shaped many of the ceremonial components of commemoration in Sydney, not least the ways in which the arc of Christ’s death elicited the solemnity of Good Friday and its analogue in solemn morning Anzac services, followed by the celebration of Easter Sunday and its analogue of celebration in the afternoon.Footnote 35 The pattern ensured that Anglican liturgy, language and symbolism would shape both remembrance occasions and the more formal war memorial unveiling ceremonies that would mushroom around Australia during and after the 1920s.Footnote 36
Another crucial aspect of Anzac commemoration that Anglican chaplains solidified during these years was the dawn service. The first formal dawn service was held at 4.30 am at the Cenotaph in Martin Place, Sydney, in 1928. Historian Darren Mitchell observes that reports of this first service focused on:
how ‘the silence was all’ and that the spirit had been captured by ‘one old woman, partly crippled with age and long distress, [who] haltingly made her way to the foot of the Cenotaph, where, among the brilliant array of beautiful and expensive wreaths she hid modestly her token of long remembering – a tiny bunch of white daisies, held together with a piece of cord.’Footnote 37
Ensuing reportage linked the solemn moment with an origin story drawing comparisons with what had ‘occurred at dawn at the equivalent of an empty tomb, the Cenotaph, corresponding with the discovery of the absent, risen Christ as well as the moment when the Anzacs came ashore [on] Gallipoli.’Footnote 38 Dean Talbot was invited to preside at the following year’s service, in an effort to ‘add more formality and liturgical tradition.’Footnote 39
Another returned Anglican chaplain, Arthur Ernest White, conducted requiem masses during 1918 in St John’s Church, Albany for the locally known war dead. In 1930 he was among the first to conduct a formal dawn service in the west, a practice he would continue until his death in 1954. A sung eucharist was followed by a procession to the war memorial to lay wreaths at 5.50 am. A lone bugler in the church tower played the Reveille. The next year White had a wreath tossed out to sea and introduced lines from Lawrence Binyon’s poem, For the Fallen, with its now familiar refrain, ‘we will remember them.’ The location was poignant because Albany was the last piece of Australia many AIF troops would see when they sailed to what they thought would be Europe in 1914.
Other returned chaplains were involved in commemoration through their support of local efforts to erect public war memorials, memorial halls and ‘soldiers’ chapels,’ often in the form of miniature Gothic churches. A notable example is the memorial chapel of St Michael, the ‘Warrior of Heaven,’ in Christ Church Cathedral, Newcastle. Inspired by its dean, Horace Crotty, another veteran Anglican chaplain, the chapel’s altar is carved out of Australian marble. At its western end is a life-size recumbent bronze statue of a fallen soldier beneath the rising sun badge of the AIF. From 1925 the so-called Warriors’ Chapel also became the spiritual home of the Toc H movement in Australia. Toc H had been founded during the war by an Australian-born Anglican chaplain who served British forces, the Rev. P. B. ‘Tubby’ Clayton. The organsation provided practical social and spiritual support for soldiers returning from the frontlines. Toc H spread rapidly to all Australian states and pioneered services such as the Blood Transfusion Service, the Junior Farmers Movement, the Royal Queensland Bush Children’s Health Scheme and the Camping Program for children in need or with disabilities.Footnote 40
Sectarian divisions sometimes provoked protests from veteran Anglican chaplains in Australian cities. In Melbourne in 1938, for example, the Anzac Day Commemoration Committee (ADCC) replaced the traditional ‘united’ religious service with a civic ceremony at the Shrine of Remembrance. The Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne (and Chaplain-General of Catholic chaplains), Daniel Mannix, approved the decision, but a chorus of prominent veteran Anglican chaplains deplored it, as did the Anglican synod, contending that it might pave the way for a public holiday in which Anzac Day would be commemorated on the nearest Sunday. The Rev. Walter Dexter, the ‘Pinching Padre’ who became a soldier settler before returning to parish ministry, worried that Anzac Day would be turned into a ‘carnival’ by greedy commercial interest who ‘saw diggers come to Melbourne with a few bob in their pockets and hated to see them go away with their money intact.’ Dexter also lamented the sectarian temper of the times that had forced the loss of the ecumenism experienced in the trenches of the First World War. He added that even prominent Jews such as General Sir John Monash and Sir Isaac Isaacs had happily attended united services and had never once complained about the Christian prayers, such as the Lord’s Prayer, that were prayed during the service.Footnote 41 Anglican Archbishop Frederick Head MC another veteran First World War chaplain, declaimed that he would march at Anzac Day services but boycott the Shrine service. His synod backed him, as did General Sir Harry Chauvel who had led the march since the death of Monash. The synod motion reveals a conventional mixture of piety and nationalism: the motion of protest was greeted with prolonged applause, after which ‘members stood and sang the National Anthem.’Footnote 42
Chaplains from other denominations attended and led at Anzac Day commemorations, but it was Anglican chaplains who exerted the most influence on the forms and ritual of Anzac Day.Footnote 43 At a time when nearly all Australians declared belief in God, and some fifty per cent of Australians were at least nominal adherents of the Church of England, it is not surprising that Anglican liturgical patterns – which profoundly knitted together grief and hope – were embraced by Australians in the midst of collective grief.Footnote 44 Taken together, these findings regarding Anglican influence on Anzac commemoration contribute to a powerful revisionist case that challenges a previously influential historiography – in the wake of Ken Inglis’s seminal work on commemoration, Sacred Places – that assumed Anzac Day was largely secular, rather than religious.Footnote 45 While Inglis paid close and insightful attention to the architectural forms of ‘sacred places’ on the Australian landscape, he paid surprisingly little attention to the rituals – pregnant with Anglican religious forms, practices and liturgy – that were being enacted, and often led, by veteran Anglican chaplains around those same memorials.Footnote 46
Fresh Insights Gained from the War: Ministry to Men and Class Conciliation
Although wartime hopes of structural societal change and the embrace of widespread ecumenism may have been largely disappointed, the war recalibrated many returned chaplains’ approaches to ministry. Not a few chaplains returned from the war buoyed by their experience of ecumenical and interdenominational cooperation, authentic community and a deeper understanding of the concerns of men ‘of all sorts and conditions.’ This experience would reshape their postwar ministries, providing fresh insights and new models of ministry that were sometimes at odds with the conventional parochial models they had left when hostilities commenced. Three striking marks of the postwar careers of returned chaplains are a passionate concern for ministry to unchurched men; a newfound emphasis on social justice; and aspirations for a more distinctly Australian national outlook, rather than a British and imperial one. Each of these will be considered in turn.
The ‘Young Man Problem’ and Anglican Orders
The war provided many chaplains with an extraordinary sense of community and esprit de corps among men. It is therefore not surprising that a persistent theme in numerous chaplains’ postwar ministries and writings is an emphasis on the Church’s mission to men, namely how it might identify and promote a characteristically masculine faith.
The Rev. (and later Archbishop) Joseph John Booth MC was one such chaplain who found, after nineteen months with the 8th Battalion in the trenches of the Western Front, that he been able to earn the respect and affection of soldiers of all ranks. His ability to appeal to soldiers had been helped by his humble beginnings as the son of a Yorkshire pawnbroker and his courage under fire in caring for the wounded, providing coffee at frontline posts and leading squads of stretcher bearers under heavy artillery barrages. His citation for the Military Cross at Lagnicourt and Quéant acknowledged how his ‘devotion to duty and courageous work in the line’ had ‘endeared him to the men to whom he had always set a splendid example of cheerfulness and courage.’Footnote 47 In his post-war ministry he was admired for being a ‘good mixer’ with natural authority and ‘totally without side’ (without pretentiousness or arrogance).Footnote 48 Such character qualities were aided by his ‘toughness, directness, honesty, integrity and, above all, a sense of reality,’ along with a commanding, stentorian voice that made him a powerful and popular preacher. Booth himself credited a great deal to his war experience.Footnote 49
Kenneth Henderson, the chaplain-turned-journalist, stressed in his voluminous post-war writings men’s need for love and devotion to a ‘a living and fighting Comrade and Saviour,’ whose love for all men ‘stopped at nothing – a love deep, practical, immediate – to which their lives must be a response.’ In Henderson’s opinion the Christian church needed to reorient its mission efforts towards men. All had ‘their own dogmas, no matter how illogical or superficial,’ but needed to be inspired ‘with sufficient confidence to ask their questions of us.’ ‘Our appeal to men,’ he declared:
must be to live for the fine and heroic in life, to live dangerously for the faith that it is in them—not to live in the fear of death—or to worry over much about ‘getting to heaven’ (vile phrase).
Comradeship among men was ‘a strongly rooted ethic, if not a religion.’ Men therefore needed to find authentic fellowship in religion, otherwise it would seem unreal. There was a further need to transform the individualism inherent in Protestantism into real community through ‘the sense of comradeship.’ ‘The young Australian seeking a religion,’ added Henderson, ‘will certainly make for the most virile and attractive personality within his range of vision.’ Modern Protestantism, in Henderson’s opinion, had also tended too much towards ‘abstract thought and personal mysticism’ to be able to reach the ‘man on the street.’ The simple symbolism characteristic of Jesus’ teaching was best designed to reach the absolute beginner. Likewise, Henderson deplored men’s ‘rather anaemic view’ of the personality of Jesus, drawn from ‘stained-glass windows and treacley hymns’; and their notions of God as a ‘slack old gentleman’ and ‘a good fellow.’ Such ‘foggy emotionalism’ lost sight of the ‘tremendous demands and gifts of Christianity.’ Having observed in both soldiers and ‘the national sub-consciousness’ an anti-authoritarian streak and a fetish for pragmatism and for ‘thinking for oneself,’ Henderson insisted that the Church’s mission work needed to employ discussion rather than exhortation, giving men a share in the discovery of truth. Undergirding all was the need for Christ’s principle of brotherhood and love, carried into the practical details and to the working out of life’s finest ideals. Finally, men needed the discipline of consecration to something that was worth living and dying for. In these ways, he contended, the Church could take a lead in expressing the ‘inmost life of the people by an awakening national consciousness.’ At the same time, it is worth noting Henderson’s arguments – radical among Anglicans of his time – that the increasing numbers of educated women should be given room within the Church to exercise leadership.Footnote 50
Australian Anglicans were exploring in these years practical expressions of this impulse towards men’s ministry and hunger for a deeper experience of community. An important locus was the Church of England Men’s Society (CEMS), which had been operating in Australia since 1905 (and in Britain since 1899). In Melbourne, for example, veteran chaplain Archbishop Frederick Head MC (a rare twice winner of the Military Cross, awarded for feats in action) was a strong advocate of both the CEMS and the Church of England Boys’ Society (CEBS). Similarly, in Sydney the CEMS was headquartered with Dean Talbot at St Andrew’s Cathedral. Talbot for his part was a strong advocate of the CEMS.Footnote 51
During the century after the Anglo-Catholic revival of the Church of England in the 1830s there had also been a wave of interest in religious communities across the British World. In the nineteenth-century Australian Anglican Church such models of religious community were embraced as a means of extending the mission of individual dioceses where the normal models of parochial ministry were inadequate, first by religious women’s orders and only later by men. Veteran Anglican chaplains played a key role in various orders during the inter-war period.
There was good historical precedent. The first Anglican men’s order in Britain (at least since the dissolution of monasteries during the Reformation) was the Society of St John the Evangelist (the Cowley Fathers), founded in 1866 at Oxford. One of the largest was the Community of the Resurrection (Mirfield Fathers), founded in 1892 at Mirfield, Yorkshire. Australian ‘Bush Brotherhoods’ were also founded during the late nineteenth century, with members accepting short-term commitments of celibacy to bring a muscular brand of Christianity to the ‘swaggies’ (itinerant vagrants and workers), bush workers and inhabitants of remote rural Queensland and NSW. Returned Anglican chaplain Cecil Howard Edwards, for example, became head of the Bush Brotherhood in Charlesville, Queensland after the war.Footnote 52
Historian Tom Frame observes that the ‘impetus for the first Australian Anglican order originated during World War I.’Footnote 53 The Community of the Ascension was founded in 1920 by three Anglican chaplains who had served with the AIF: the Revs Arthur Homersham, Maurice Kelly and Edward Kempe. Modelled on the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield in Yorkshire, where all three chaplains had spent time at the close of the war, the Community of the Ascension was formed in Goulburn, NSW, in late 1921.
The chaplains’ aim in forming the community was, as they put it in a press release, to establish:
a place for retreat for parochial clergy, a source of supply for missioners, a testing and training school for young laymen with a view to the selection of candidates for holy orders or for lay work at home or in the mission field, and perhaps a base for operations for literary and educational work for the Church … It is the beginning of an independent Australian community for the fostering of the spiritual life and the sense of vocation to spiritual work among the young manhood of Australia.Footnote 54
A broader stated aim was to ‘work towards awakening and deepening the spiritual life of the Australian Church and nation.’ Their daily routine, prescribed by a simple Common Rule, was disciplined and austere: prayer at 6am followed by Eucharist, prayer and study until midday; mostly manual labour until the evening meal; a Compline service to mark the end of the day; silence until prayers at 6am the following morning; and self-imposed deprivations such as year-round cold showers (an invigorating prospect given the bracing sub-zero morning temperatures of Goulburn winters). It is tempting to suggest that the rigours of the Western Front had played an important part in inuring the trio of young chaplains to such physical privations.
Fraternities of lay people began to support the community through chapters around Australia. Some observers deplored the community as evidence of a trend to ‘Romanism,’ while the community was hampered from time to time by internal dramas such as the resignation of several novices who could not endure the austere conditions, and Kempe’s resignation after he developed ‘an intimate relationship’ with a woman during a parish mission. Nevertheless, the community gained a reputation for its leavening effect in deepening the spiritual and devotional life of the diocese’s leaders and, in turn, the diocese’s spiritual tone. Their bishop, Lewis Radford (another former First World War chaplain) defended the community for its importance in reviving the ‘inmost soul of some priests of this diocese,’ for giving new life to their ministry in church and parish, and for setting ideals of ‘prayer and devotion and sacrifice’ before men and women who were living a dutiful but relatively superficial religious life.
The community continued to flourish into the early 1930s, during which its membership peaked at twelve, including priests, novices and lay aspirants. It continued its retreats and various initiatives to foster spiritual formation, enriching the diocese’s life by attracting earnest Christians from around Australia. By the mid-1930s, however, the community faced renewed criticism for promoting a brand of Christianity perceived as too narrowly Anglo-Catholic and unnecessarily cloistered. It came to be seen as out of step with the pressing social problems arising from the Great Depression, and with the radical social concern of the diocese’s new bishop, Ernest Burgmann (consecrated in 1934). The community’s recruiting base also dwindled after the outbreak of war in 1939, which saw a demand for clergy to serve as chaplains and for able-bodied men to serve as combatants. The community, at that time one of the few Anglican men’s religious orders in Australia, was finally dissolved in 1943.Footnote 55
Brothers in Alms: Chaplains and Social Justice
The period before and during the war witnessed an intensification of what contemporaries described as a growing class war between labour and capital. There had been a general strike among NSW transport workers in 1917 and disaffection in the Hunter (NSW) coalfields as the local economy had shifted to steelworking. An increasingly radicalized labour movement at home, and news in 1917 of the Russian Revolution abroad, provoked deep concern about left-wing extremes of communism and socialism. In this climate, observes Peter Cochrane, panicky conservatives employed ‘Bolshevism’ as a pejorative to denote everything from revolutionary agitation to strikes, ‘loose morals,’ jazz music, modernist art and ‘the new woman.’ A fraction of ex-soldiers became socialists, while others lashed out violently at socialist and anti-war agitators. Most, however, wanted to slip quietly away from military and public life to make sense of what they had seen and done in the less heated confines of suburban anonymity.Footnote 56
A number of Anglican chaplains had returned to this changing Australia with a renewed concern for social justice and a desire to help de-escalate the emerging conflict between labour and capital. They were not alone. Several Protestant denominations articulated visions of social justice and formed working and study groups to consider the churches’ responses to the socio-economic and ideological dislocation of the period. One of the most prominent was the Anglican Social Gospel Movement.Footnote 57 In this sense Anglicans were catching up to the Roman Catholic Church, which had developed a significant body of social theory in the wake of Pope Leo XIII’s influential 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum. Catholic social thought found enduring Australian expression in Catholic Action and the Jesuit Institute for Social Order.Footnote 58
Dean Talbot was one of many veteran chaplains who sought to alert his church to the needs of working men. Prior to the war this intellectually gifted priest had imbibed an Anglican form of Evangelicalism that was shaped by his ministry among working-class men in Salford, Manchester and his involvement in the Group Movement in England (later called the Anglican Evangelical Group Movement, founded in 1906 to create study groups for considering pressing social and theological issues).Footnote 59 This issued in a concern for social justice and labour politics, as well as an interest in the theological debates of the day, which still centred around higher criticism of the Bible and new scientific and social-scientificdisciplines of psychology, sociology and the biological sciences. As a doughty chaplain who had ignored a bullet wound to keep ministering to troops at Lone Pine, Talbot had established a strong rapport with his troops and a keen ecumenical outlook before being evacuated (his dugout, eight feet by five feet and less than 100 yards from the firing line over which bullets continually whistled, was known by soldiers as ‘the Deanery’).Footnote 60
In addition to his leadership of Anzac commemmoration and election as Vice President of the Returned Soldiers’ Association upon his return to Sydney, Talbot helped co-found the Industrial Christian Fellowship in 1923 with trade unionist Albert Willis. By this means Talbot sought to bring Christian values to bear on Labour politics.Footnote 61 Talbot refused a ‘Yes’ vote for the conscription referenda and opposed government policy during the general strike of transport and mining workers, which divided NSW in 1917, pleading with fellow clergymen not to align the Church unthinkingly with the interests of capital. For these efforts, and for his cooperation with Roman Catholic priest Maurice O’Reilly during the 1917 strike, Talbot attracted bitter antagonism from conservatives among both Anglicans and Presbyterians. The Church Record expressed its surprise at such an attitude ‘from one of the heroes of Gallipoli.’Footnote 62 The Labour party and strikers were effusive in their praise of Talbot, although he was swimming against the tide of Anglican opinion. By this time, as one historian of Sydney Anglicanism puts it, ‘most churchpeople had already cast their lot in with the bosses, the conscriptionists and the middle class.’Footnote 63 Talbot nonetheless remained firm in his belief – strengthened by the insights into labour problems gleaned from his close and sustained contact with working men in the AIF – that the Church should mediate in such matters. Talbot also continued to campaign, albeit unsuccessfully, for Anglican reunion with other Protestant denominations.Footnote 64
Talbot was joined in the 1930s by a coterie of Anglican clergy and intellectuals, labelled the ‘Social Gospel Movement,’ who likewise dissented from reactionary conservatism. Among them was another veteran chaplain who had made close contact with Australian soldiers on the Somme as a chaplain, and later as an education officer, the Rev. Horace Crotty, who was now the Bishop of Bathurst. One 1919 newspaper editorial described him as ‘a warm friend and admirer of the Digger.’Footnote 65 These thoughtful Anglican clergymen sought to do away with an artificial ‘sacred versus secular’ compartmentalization of religious and economic life. While abhorring the totalitarian and atheistic drift of communism and fascism, Crotty and several other Anglican leaders believed that the application of Christian principles to every part of life – an integrated sacramental view of life – could transform capitalism and democracy and mitigate the seductive allure of revolutionary fascism and communism.Footnote 66 Kenneth Henderson echoed these sentiments in his opposition to what he called the ‘class war of Capital and Labour.’ At a time when Chambers of Commerce and trade unions waged a political struggle ‘actuated by greed and fear,’ Henderson urged justice and brotherhood and the claim of the deeper depths of man’s spirit. Henderson berated the atheistic materialism and economic determinism of Marxism, but at the same time he lamented the disunity, intellectual idleness and self-interest that had prevented churches from embodying a social gospel that could constructively criticize the social order in light of their principles. ‘We have to go outside our churches,’ he added, ‘into the press and the streets, and lecture halls and factories, if we are to be heard.’Footnote 67
Anglo-Catholic chaplains fused their war experience with a theology of incarnation that expressed itself in welfare programmes and justice for the poor, identifying Christ as incarnate ‘in the world of the lost and forsaken.’Footnote 68 There is another important connection here with the Community of the Ascension in Goulburn. One of the founders of that brotherhood, Maurice Kelly, was a close friend of fellow Anglican chaplain, Gerard Tucker, whose perceptive diary entries had been published in 1919 with the title As Private and Padre.Footnote 69 At the end of the war, Kelly inspired Tucker to formulate plans for a brotherhood, but they parted ways when both men realized that they had different visions of what that meant in practical terms. The scholarly Kelly envisioned a contemplative life of withdrawal from the profane world to foster spiritual depth and devotion. Tucker, in contrast, envisioned an ‘action brotherhood,’ similar to the bush brotherhoods, that would revitalize the Church at the parochial level and stem the Church’s decline, particularly among working men in tough urban parishes. Using the bush brotherhoods as inspiration, Tucker reasoned that because priests in the community could live frugally and unencumbered by families, they could devote twice as much time to ministry as married priests and for a third of the cost. They could become the shock troops of the Church, going into the hard places and rescuing the ‘lost sheep.’Footnote 70
Tucker’s AIF experience was clearly formative in these plans. His decision to enlist as a private soldier prior to becoming a chaplain had brought him into intimate contact with working-class men for the first time (after enlistment as a private in the Medical Corps, he found that his closest friends were a seller of newspapers in Toorak Road, a porter at Flinders Street railway station, a builder and a farmhand from Gippsland). Like many other chaplains, his experience of soldiers confirmed the importance of not judging by appearances, while his experience of their camaraderie and his role as chaplain deepened his confidence and leadership abilities (he had struggled in early youth with nervousness and a stammer). Another carry-over from the war, apart from Tucker’s lifelong chain-smoking habit, was the creation in his postwar Newcastle parish of scout troops and a young people’s group called ‘Soldiers for Christ,’ whose members received medals and ribbons for their study of the Bible and the Prayer Book.Footnote 71
During the 1920s Tucker discipled and supported financially a stream of young ordinands within his parish who were too poor to afford theological training on their own. Tucker also conducted healing missions with a fellow returned chaplain and surgeon, Walter Burkitt, with whom he had ministered in France. During the war Tucker and Burkitt witnessed a number of extraordinary healings as Tucker prayed for hopeless cases who subsequently recovered unexpectedly. Tucker also built a memorial hall, named Trois Arbres for the casualty clearing station he and Burkitt had laboured in during the war. In the wake of the October 1929 stock market crash and the onset of the Depression, Tucker formed cooperatives to help provide parishioners with food and jobs. In December 1930, amid high unemployment, strikes and communist agitation, Tucker finally realized his vision for a brotherhood when he founded the Brotherhood of St Laurence with three young protégés. Their rule consisted of frugal living, celibacy, communal life and active community involvement. During this time, Tucker also befriended Ernest Burgmann. Burgmann, an outspoken priest and later Bishop of Canberra and Goulburn (1934–60), denounced police brutality at Tighes Hill, Newcastle (where police and several protestors were injured in fighting that broke out over the eviction of a returned servicemen and his family), gaining wide community support in 1932.Footnote 72
The Brotherhood moved to inner-city Melbourne at the invitation of veteran chaplain Archbishop Frederick Head MC, in 1933, where it commenced an influential ministry that expanded and continues to this day pursuing Tucker’s original charter. The location of the new mission in Fitzroy, in the heart of Depression-ravaged Melbourne, was one where lone police officers did not walk even in daylight, but where religious and clergy moved around safely by day or night (because they did not represent the law or landlords). By the early 1930s around one-third of the unemployed in Melbourne had not seen work for three years. Under Tucker’s leadership the Brotherhood campaigned for the abolition of slums and established hostels for homeless and unemployed men and boys, housing schemes, a community retirement village and hospital, a club for elderly pensioners, a seaside holiday house for poor families and an opportunity shop. At times Tucker and other members resorted to civil obedience, acting as human barricades to prevent police from carrying out evictions of poor tenants. The Brotherhood later established Community Aid Abroad and opened the first non-government welfare organization to employ full-time social workers. Like the Community of Ascension, the outbreak of the Second World War led to an exodus of men from the Brotherhood and closure of its men’s hostels. The Brotherhood only just managed to avoid dissolution.Footnote 73
George Merrick Long’s ministry is another example of the way in which First World War experience fired the postwar social concern of chaplains. The tall and athletic Long had served in bush districts (where he was one of the founders of the Brotherhood of the Good Shepherd in Dubbo in 1903) and as a headmaster of grammar schools before being consecrated Bishop of Bathurst in 1911. Enlisting as a chaplain in 1917, Long was recruited by General Birdwood in May 1918 to be Director of Education for the whole AIF. In this pivotal role, Long implemented and directed a scheme of civilian and vocational training for the 200,000 men facing demobilization. Classes in England and France concentrated on providing professional, technical and general training, with an emphasis on agriculture. Long secured the assistance of British and European universities and a range of professional, technical and commercial institutions, including various British workers’ federations and educational associations. Around 13,000 soldiers and nurses completed courses of training and work experience; thousands more participated. Charles Bean (who was himself the son of an Anglican priest) described Long as ‘one of the great Australians of his generation’ and a key figure in the ‘turning of the AIF’s effort from destruction to construction.’Footnote 74
Long’s war experience profoundly shaped his postwar ministry in Australia. He was involved in founding and reviving several secondary schools and at least seven hostels for children attending schools in country centres; he was instrumental in reconstituting Morpeth Theological College in Newcastle and in promoting training schemes to assist men without means to enter the priesthood; and, in 1920, he became foundation president of the national council of the CEMS. Long’s Australian nationalist impulses were deepened by the war and imbued his drafting and advocacy of a constitution for the Church of England in Australia that stressed its independence of the English Church. By 1928 the constitution had been ratified by every diocese except Sydney (although divisions, especially between Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics, delayed a reconstituted Anglican Church of Australia until the 1960s). In the same year, Long was elected and installed Bishop of Newcastle. Here his sensitivity to industrial and economic issues, honed by his close wartime contact with British workers’ associations, contributed to his popularity with the mining unions of the Newcastle coalfields who were at that time adjusting with difficulty to a changing industrial landscape. Long also retained his military connections, becoming Chaplain General (Church of England) in 1929. His ministry was cut short, however, by his sudden death from a brain hemorrhage during the 1930 Lambeth Conference in London.Footnote 75
Clergy still exercised an important role in public life: as public figures, occasional writers and preachers in the central churches of major cities, provincial towns and suburban churches (sermons in the major city churches were still being précised and reprinted in major metropolitan Australian dailies up to the 1960s).Footnote 76 A number of returned chaplains made important contributions to public debate in this context, as we have seen above in the contributions of figures such as Talbot, Tucker and Long. In 1932 Tucker’s Brotherhood of St Laurence began publishing its Quarterly Notes, which for nearly 40 years provided an important forum for discussion of pressing social issues. Although Tucker’s work led him to be deeply critical of the human cost of the capitalist system, he nevertheless retained a lifelong fear of communism. That antipathy was forged during his war service and in later encounters with communist agitators in Depression-era Newcastle amid strikes, lock outs and unionist violence.Footnote 77
Conclusions: Australian Anglican Army Chaplains and the Aftermath of the First World War, 1919–1939
In an incisive study of the impact of the First World War on British Anglican chaplains, Linda Parker argues that during the inter-war period the impact of returned chaplains in Britain was actually enhanced by their experience of that global conflict, lending their actions and opinions ‘more moral authority than would otherwise be the case.’Footnote 78 These ‘shellshocked prophets’ wielded influence in inter-war Britain in at least three significant ways: through helping to resolve industrial tensions between capital and labour; through their impact on political debate; and through their leadership and framing of post-war rituals of remembrance and war commemoration.Footnote 79 It is clear from the preceding discussion that a similar case might be made for Australian Anglican chaplains during the inter-war period.
Chaplain Gerard Tucker had prophesied in 1917 that:
many of us will have new ideas to put before the church, but because we hold no leading positions at home we will carry little if any weight. I cannot see the synod of Melbourne sitting spell-bound while the unknown Tucker puts forth the lessons he and hundreds of others have learnt while on service. I can, though, see the same synod paying the greatest heed to the well-known Canon So-and-so, should it have been his privilege to have seen the things that we have seen. But alas, Canon So-and-so stayed at home.Footnote 80
The ensuing sectarianism of the inter-war period – which divided even postwar Anzac commemoration along Protestant and Catholic lines – is evidence that church and society were slow to learn the lessons that chaplains had learned at Gallipoli, in the Middle East, and on the Western Front. Historian Michael McKernan’s much later assessment of the Australian post-war situation echoes Tucker’s:
Thus were the churches deprived of the insights of the clergymen who could claim closest acquaintance with ordinary Australians, church-going and non-church-going alike, and instead of building on these experiences the churches moved further from the spirit that had been created and celebrated in the AIF.Footnote 81
A tragedy of the inter-war years was that the scope of the problems facing Australians – economic, social and political – was beyond the combined power of the churches by themselves to solve, let alone the several hundred returned chaplains within the churches’ ranks.
And yet it is clear, pace Tucker and McKernan, that the Anglican Church was not deprived of the insights of numerous influential clergymen with war experience, especially in their leadership of war commemoration, in their published writings and journalism, and in their institution-building and advocacy of the needs of working men and the poor, at local and national levels. In contrast with his pessimistic wartime prophecy, Tucker would indeed catch the ear of his synod for many decades as he grew and led a nationally recognized ministry. Churches were aided by returned chaplains during the inter-war period, just when they needed to offer means of grieving, consolation and hope through commemoration that was grounded in Anglican ritual and liturgy. This also met what historian Stephen Garton historian identifies as a need of many returned Australian men to make their war experience meaningful and sacred.Footnote 82
The veteran padres offered a vision of human society that could contend with the claims of fascism, communism and market capitalism. This was one of the few times in Australian history when the Church began to focus on what it meant to be a nation, and the goals and aspirations that were worthy of national energy and enthusiasm. The chaplains were able and had earned the right to speak about such matters. Through Anglican liturgy and Anzac commemoration, they were also creating the rituals and symbols that would give voice and shape to an emerging Australian civil religion. Although many physical war memorials fell back on older traditions of classical symbolism (alongside Christian imagery) in an effort ‘to represent continuity, transcendence, and the essential nobility of the war,’ the rituals and services held around those ‘sacred’ places remained profoundly shaped by Anglican liturgy; moreover, many of those rituals and services were led by Anglican chaplains.Footnote 83 The First World War has been described as heralding the end of humanistic optimism in the West. For many Anglican clergy in one of the British Empire’s most far-flung Dominions, the First World War heralded the end of imperial optimism as well. In many Australian vestries the Church of England was slowly becoming the Anglican Church of Australia.
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