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Clip description
British officers sit in a dug-out ‘mess’ at Suvla Bay in early August 1915, enjoying tea and tobacco. Meanwhile, Anzac troops are attacking at Walker’s Ridge. Naval guns and Anzac artillery shell the Turkish trenches at ‘the Chessboard’, starting brush fires. Australian troops below Sari Bair fire from a newly-won Turkish trench. Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett is visible moving toward camera behind them. In the final pictures of the film, Turkish shells land on Anzac positions high on the ridge, at Lone Pine.
Curator’s notes
This is the most contentious section of the film, and the most dramatic. Opinions differ about who and what it shows, whether the troops in the firefight are Australian or Irish, and whether Charles Bean or Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett was trying to make a point with the scene of the British officers having tea.
Phillip Dutton of the Imperial War Museum in London believes the troops in the firefight are Irish, not Australian. He quotes Ashmead-Bartlett’s book The Uncensored Dardanelles (1928) as evidence that Ashmead-Bartlett, his Australian servant MacNabie (who carried the equipment) and the recently returned cameraman Ernest Brooks went to a frontline trench occupied by Irish troops at Green Hill, near Suvla Bay, on 2 September 1915. Brooks filmed the troops pretending to be under attack; when he complained that it looked fake, the soldiers started to fire in earnest at nearby Turkish trenches, who responded in kind. Dutton believes the soldiers were members of the 5th Royal Irish Fusiliers. ‘There is no doubt that the firefight, though only 23 feet in length (roughly 18 seconds in duration) and somewhat out of focus, remains the most impressive scene of the filming’, writes Phillip Dutton, in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (2004, Vol. 24, No. 2):
It is possibly the first authentic example of British Commonwealth troops in combat during the First World War; it is certainly one of the few surviving examples of genuine live action First World War film; the proximity of the cameraman to the action (and indeed the enemy, who were estimated by Ashmead-Bartlett to be about 30 yards away) is in itself remarkable!
Charles Bean, writing the titles in 1919, thought these men were Australians. He had access to Ashmead-Bartlett (who lived until 1931) and Bean had been at Gallipoli for the whole campaign. How then would he have made such a mistake, given that he was renowned for his attention to detail?
Opinion is also divided over whether Bean or Ashmead-Bartlett was making a veiled criticism of the British leadership with the scene of the officers taking tea. Bean edited the film after the war, so he may have chosen to put that scene next to a title that suggests Anzacs were fighting while these men dithered. The scene is thought to have been filmed at Suvla Bay on 7 August – a significant date. This was the start of the August offensives, aimed at finally dislodging the Turks along a wide section of the stalemated front, but the failure of that offensive is sometimes attributed, at least in part, to the fact that the British troops sent to attack Suvla Bay did not press on immediately after securing their landing site.
That is why images of tea-drinking officers at Suvla Bay had a particular resonance for anyone who knew the story – which in the years immediately after the war, would have been a considerable number. Whether Ashmead-Bartlett intended this criticism as well is hard to know, but he was certainly increasingly critical of the way the campaign was being run, so it’s reasonable to assume that both Bean and Ashmead-Bartlett intended this scene as somewhat critical.
There is some dispute also whether the shelling at the end of the clip is where Bean says it is. Phillip Dutton believes the scenes describing ‘shelling of the Chessboard’ and Lone Pine might actually be the shelling of Sari Bair as viewed from Suvla Bay.
One final mystery: in the officers’ tea party, the man sitting second from left is wearing a tie, shorts and a dark khaki shirt and carrying binoculars. He also looks very like the man in the tie from clip one and clip two. Could this be the same man? If it is the same man, it suggests he was with Ashmead-Bartlett on more than the day he visited Quinn’s Post, which was two weeks before this shot was taken.
