War, Sport and the Anzac Tradition

Kevin Blackburn

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137487599
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137487605
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

                                         

1

The ‘Race of Athletes’ of World War I

Abstract: Soon after the Gallipoli landing on 25 April 1915, the Australian soldiers were described as a ‘race of athletes’ in the first despatch to make it back to Australia. The use of this sports metaphor by British journalist Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett reflected the prevalence in both Britain and Australia of the late Victorian and Edwardian idea of masculinity which decreed that proving one’s manhood on the sports field was preparation for the ‘greater game’ of proving manhood on the battlefield. The notion that Australian men, who excelled at sports before World War I, had at Gallipoli proven themselves and upheld the manhood of their nation found its way into Australian national identity.

Blackburn, Kevin. War, Sport and the Anzac Tradition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137487605.0003.

This chapter explores the striking parallels between the discussion of war and sport in Australia with similar debates in Britain during World War I. It argues that these similarities suggest that the intertwining of sport and war in the public imagination had similar origins. However, in Australia because the Anzac tradition became central to the Australian identity this connection between sport and war was elevated to an aspect of national character. Australian historian Carolyn Holbrook in her study of the history of Anzac in public culture has briefly commented that ‘Sport seems to have a particular affiliation with the Anzac tradition.’¹ In Britain, sport was also strong in military life, but the connection between war and sport did not become part of constructions of national character as it did in Australia.

‘This Race of Athletes’

The first report describing in detail the landing of the Anzacs at Gallipoli reached Australia on 8 May 1915. The despatch was written by the distinguished British war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. He described the Australians as a ‘race of athletes’ scaling cliffs and hurling back the Turks with their bayonets. He recounted what happened when the Australians encountered sheer cliffs after the initial landing:

Here was a tough proposition to tackle in the darkness, but those colonials were practical above all else and went about it in a practical way. They stopped a few minutes to pull themselves together, get rid of their packs, and charge their rifle magazines. Then this race of athletes proceeded to scale the cliff without responding to the enemy’s fire. They lost some men, but didn’t worry, and in less than a quarter of an hour the Turks were out of their second position, and either bayoneted or fleeing.²

The description of Australian soldiers as a ‘race of athletes’ was emblazoned in the headlines of Australian newspapers and sports magazines in the week following 8 May 1915. The most popular sports journal of the Australian State of New South Wales, The Referee, used ‘This Race of Athletes’ as a front page headline. It further embellished the description on the front page with a banner that read: ‘Deeds that Thrill by our Athletes and Sportsmen’, expressing the assumption that the Australians who landed at Gallipoli were mainly athletes and sportsmen. Its subtitle below this front page banner compared Gallipoli to a football game, implying that the time spent by the sportsmen playing football had prepared them well for battle: ‘Rushes of the Football Field Repeated with the Bayonet Against the Turks’.³ On its front page, The Referee chronicled the life of the most well-known Australian sportsman who had been killed on the first day of the Gallipoli landing, a rugby union international for both Britain and Australia, Blair I. Swannell.⁴ This use of the description of the Australians as a ‘race of athletes’ caught on. The Referee and other Australian newspapers used it repeatedly in the weeks that followed the release of Ashmead-Bartlett’s despatch.⁵

Before Gallipoli, there was a perception that Australian manhood was seen to have proven itself on the sports field but not yet on the battlefield. Just before the outbreak of the war, writers such as Gordon Inglis, with the assistance of his fellow journalist C. E. W. Bean, helped popularise the perception that just as in sport young Australian males have ‘proved equal to defeating the world’s best’, so too they would take equally well to ‘the stern game of soldiering’.⁶ Writers such as Inglis reflected a widely held view at the beginning of the twentieth century that Australian sporting prowess was perceived to have been due to the effects of the Australian climate physically improving the manhood of the British race.⁷

Australians, it was believed, had inherited and improved upon what was called ‘the spirit of sport’ that ‘has always been inherent in the people of Great Britain and Ireland’.⁸ Publicly endorsing Inglis’ view, former conservative Prime Minister George H. Reid wrote the preface of his book, Sport and Pastime in Australia, and noted that ‘the true sportsman learns to obey, exercise self-control, to subordinate self-interest’, which were also perceived as good qualities for soldiering.⁹ Liberal Prime Minister Alfred Deakin, when delivering a speech on 28 August 1908 marking 50 years of Australian rules football, proclaimed that Australians were a ‘sporting people’, who, when ‘toscin sounds the call to arms’, will ‘play the Australian game of nation-making’.¹⁰ Success in fighting at Gallipoli appeared to remove any doubts that Australian manhood was not an improvement on its British racial origins.¹¹ According to Ashmead-Bartlett’s despatch, the Anzacs ‘knew they had been tried for the first time, and had not been found wanting.’¹²

At the beginning of the twentieth century it was commonly accepted that a nation had to be ‘blooded’ in war to prove itself. Battle was the test of the manhood of a nation.¹³ The Australian poet Edward Dyson had expressed this in his well-known poem, ‘Men of Australia’, that had been written in 1898 as the country moved towards the 1901 federation of the group of British colonies on the Australian continent into a nation. Dyson regretted that the Australian nation was not ‘blooded’ in battle: ‘We are named to march unblooded to the winning of a nation.’¹⁴ He hoped that soon the young men of Australia would ‘crown her with a glory that may evermore abide’.¹⁵

The idea that a nation has to be ‘blooded’, and that Australia had been indeed ‘blooded’ at Gallipoli, was a theme in the Australian official war histories, which helped foster the Anzac legend after the war. The Anzacs were described by H. S. Gullett, an official Australian correspondent who worked with C. E. W. Bean, as ‘children of a virgin unblooded country’, who at Gallipoli ‘fought with all the might and resource of their proud exuberant manhood’. Gullett extolled in the official history: ‘By their work at Anzac would the world know them ... By their work would the standard of valour be set for all time’ for Australian men to follow.¹⁶

The ‘race of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  The ‘Race of Athletes’ of World War I
• 2  Anzac Day and the Language of Sport and War
• 3  The ‘Army of Athletes’ of World War II
• 4  Anzac and Sport after World War II
• Conclusion
• Index