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The 9th Brigade, comprised mostly of men from New South Wales, stages a comic entertainment in full costumes as part of their water carnival. At the Australian headquarters in France, General Sir William Birdwood leaves to take command of the British Fifth Army, taking General CBB White with him as his senior staff officer. General John Monash is the new commander of the Australian Corps – their first Australian commander.
Curator’s notes
The 9th Brigade Water Carnival took place on 20 May 1918 at Rivery, on the Somme River, on the outskirts of Amiens. The footage, by photographer unknown, shows boat races and a diving competition, followed by bizarre comic scenes of a pantomime on the riverbank. Still photographs in the Australian War Memorial (E02342, E02140 and E02141) indicate that many of these costumes were ‘souvenired’ in and around Rivery. It’s obvious that much of the show was ribald humour, of the type seen on English music-hall stages of the time. The man dressed as a pantomime ‘principal boy’ who kicks the ‘woman’ in the hoop skirt makes a great show of lifting his own short skirt, presumably meaning he had nothing on underneath. Many of the men in the water carnival sequences are naked. There were few women left in these forward areas who could have seen them, anyway. The men appear not to have cared that they were being photographed.
On this same day, the Australian war correspondent Charles Bean was returning to France from London after a weekend spent in intrigue. He spent the evening of 18 May composing a memo and telegram to the Australian government, through Senator George Pearce, the Minister of Defence, about why Prime Minister WM Hughes should not make John Monash the commander of the Australian forces in France. Bean disliked Monash, and preferred his great friend and mentor General White (see main notes). Bean also opposed General Birdwood’s plan to retain overall command of the Australian forces by having them come under the British Fifth Army, of which Birdwood was about to take command. Bean urged Hughes to appoint Monash, the senior Australian officer, as the administrative commander of the Australian Corps, and make White the operational commander, advising Hughes that such a move would recognise the respective talents of both men and meet with general favour in the Australian staff and other ranks. In essence, he was politely telling the prime minister that White was a better soldier, and Monash better suited to be an organiser.
His trip to London was to lock in the support of Keith Murdoch, the extremely influential Australian correspondent for the Melbourne Herald and Sydney Sun newspapers, for the cable and memo Bean was writing to Senator Pearce. Hughes was then on his way to Europe via the United States. Murdoch cabled him and the acting Australian Prime Minister, WA Watt, urging that they delay any decision about the AIF command until Hughes arrived in England. The scenes we see here of Birdwood and White leaving the Australian Corps headquarters at Bertangles in France were taken on 31 May, when it was becoming clearer to Bean that he and Murdoch had lost. ‘The effort which we made is clearly too late,’ he wrote in his diary on 1 June at Bertangles. ‘I can’t reconcile myself to the loss, without a word, of White to the AIF.’ Bean recounted a conversation he had that morning with Major General TH Dodds, the Deputy Adjutant-General of the AIF. Dodds had told Bean that it was not true that the Australian force ‘universally desired Monash to be GOC (General Officer Commanding), AIF and White GOC, Corps.’ Dodds had made inquiries and telegraphed Australia that ‘we were wrong … I told him that Monash had, I was sure, worked for this job by all sorts of clever, well-hidden subterranean channels; that White had never stirred a finger in his own interest…’ (AWM38-3DRL606-113-1, 1 June 1918, p 52).
Bean felt that it was up to White’s friends to do all they could for him, given that he would not put his own interests forward. He wrote to Murdoch the following day to concede defeat, and to lament the departure of White. ‘That the biggest and ablest influence in it (the AIF), the man who has been far more the father of it than any other, should after four years be suddenly and simply lost to it will always be, in my mind, a big mistake on the part of our Government’.
The faces of Birdwood, White and Monash appear in this film in close-up, a rare kind of shot in this context, all taken on 31 May, the day of the handover. Wilkins may have been under instruction to get these images, although it’s likely he would have done so anyway. He was living in the same makeshift quarters as Bean and FM Cutlack, a new Australian correspondent, and fully aware of Bean’s strong feelings about the situation. Each shot appears to have been set up, with each general seen in profile, somewhat awkward in the gaze of the camera. Monash would soon establish that he was exactly what Bean said he was not – a great military tactician, as well as a great organiser. Indeed, he has been called the great British commander of the final year of the war. Both Bean and Murdoch would admit after the war that they made a mistake in trying to undo his appointment.
