Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean
Charles Bean was 34 in October 1914 when he accompanied Australian troops on their voyage from Melbourne to Egypt as Australia's official war correspondent. His press pass described him as 5 ft 11 1/2 inches tall, of slight build, with red hair, blue eyes and glasses. (Kevin Fewster, 'Military Censorship in Australia during the Great War', AWM MSS0836 p. 76).
Bean was already established as a respected journalist. Recognition of his work at The Sydney Morning Herald and strong lobbying by the New South Wales members of the Australian Journalists Association helped him win the AJA nomination for the official position ahead of the Victorian journalist Keith Murdoch, who was five years Bean's junior. Bean's strong sense of national identity, and his concern with defining national (and imperial) character in his pre-war writings, also helped him win the position.
Given the honorary rank of captain, his pay was £600 a year with a 10/- a day 'field and maintenance allowance'. From a clothing allowance of £15, he had a Melbourne tailor make what became his distinctive outfit. As he explained in a letter to his mother on the eve of his departure, 'I am not going in uniform but am getting a very close copy of a uniform-without buttons etc. and badges-made by some tailors here'.
He was also to be provided with 'one horse plus saddlery and horse furniture, and . . . the services of one batman'. Private Arthur Bazley, formerly a clerical assistant at the Melbourne newspaper The Argus, was assigned to Bean as batman, beginning an association that lasted through Bean's coverage of Gallipoli and the Western Front, the writing of the official history series and the foundation of the Australian War Memorial.
Bean disembarked with the AIF at Alexandria in Egypt in December 1914 and spent most of the next four months at the army's training camp in Mena. Phillip Schuler, the correspondent sent by the Melbourne Age, was there at the same time. Bean alone was able to join the Australian troops when they sailed for the Dardanelles on 10 April 1915, because of his official status, although this was dependent on confirmation by the British. He left with his trademark items, a small portable Corona typewriter brought from Australia and a military telescope purchased in Cairo for £4.6.0 and described on his expense account as 'indispensable'.
The troops were stationed on the island of Lemnos until the night of 24 April, when they boarded their ships and headed for Gallipoli, where Bean landed 5 1⁄2 hours after the first troops went ashore at dawn on 25 April. Aside from visits to military headquarters on the island of Imbros, Bean would remain at Gallipoli for the eight months until the evacuation of the peninsula in December 1915. He was one of the few correspondents present at Gallipoli for the duration of the campaign and the only Australian.
Bean sent many despatches home to Australia, and some to Britain. His despatches were often delayed by both censorship and primitive communications from Gallipoli, and, to his consternation, by the time they arrived in Australia, were often given second place to despatches from other correspondents. His report of the landing of 25 April was delayed by British authorities in Alexandria and did not appear in Australian newspapers until 13 May. His permission to travel with the troops to the Dardanelles had been conditional on his reports not appearing until British military authorities had endorsed his official status. The clearance did not come through until eight days after the landing and so Australians learned of the first Anzac Day from the report of the British correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett.
As early as July 1915 some Australian newspapers, particularly those in Melbourne, came to prefer despatches like Ashmead-Bartlett's because of their dramatic descriptions of battle and their praise and glorification of Australian troops. Bean recorded more dispassionately. A decision by The Age and The Argus not to take Bean's work was later reversed. A letter from the Department of Defence informing him of this included the comment, 'your accounts are regarded by us as very interesting and we know that they can be relied upon as a true and faithful account of happenings at the Front'.
In a letter home from Egypt before the troops went into battle, he described himself as having been asked by the Australian Government to be 'its eyewitness' and when directed during the campaign to move his base from the Gallipoli Peninsula to General Headquarters at Imbros he refused, on the grounds that his ability to report as an eyewitness would be inhibited.
Troops soon became accustomed to finding Bean in the trenches with them during, or soon after, battles on the front line. For Bean, the facts were paramount.
Bean was a clerk of facts; he didn't understand what to leave out. His opening sentences often washed over the reader like an anaesthetic and in his fussiness to get the little things right, he often overlooked the big things; eventually The Age and The Argus stopped taking his copy. Yet it is hard to think of a war correspondent, before or since, who was more conscientious, so obsessed with accuracy that he was careless with his own life.
- Les Carlyon, Gallipoli, Sydney: Macmillan, 2001, p. 248
During the 6 August offensive Bean was shot in the leg, just below the thigh. He was to carry this bullet for the rest of his life as to have it removed would have meant leaving Gallipoli for a short while. Instead, Bean quietly retired to his dugout for a few days, where Phillip Schuler, among others, visited him and brought him news of battle.
He had a rare sensitivity for the soldiers and what they had endured, noting of the evacuation from Gallipoli for example, that the hardest thing for the men, was leaving their dead mates. He wrote in his official despatch:
But the uppermost thought in the mind of every man I have spoken to was regret at leaving the little mountain cemeteries which every valley and hillside contains. For weeks past, at any time of the day, you saw small parties of men carefully lettering in the half-obliterated name of some comrade on a rough wooden cross, or carefully raking a mound, and bordering it neatly with fuse caps from fallen shells ... I notice some chaplains sowing wattle and manuka on graves.
Early in the war Bean had assumed the task of recording the experiences of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) for posterity, which led to his role in the founding of the Australian War Memorial. Also, on his return to Australia at the war's end, he set about writing, editing and supervising the series, Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918. This work, which was completed between 1920 and 1942, stands as a great achievement in Australian history. Together with the compilation of Bean's war journals and notebooks, the official history helped cement Bean's reputation as the most significant Australian witness to Gallipoli and the First World War.
Thirty years on in 1946, and following another world war, he encapsulated the meaning of Anzac in Anzac to Amiens. 'Anzac stood, and still stands, for reckless valor in a good cause, for enterprise, resourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship, and endurance that will never own defeat.' (C.E.W. Bean Anzac to Amiens, Sydney: Halstead Press, 1946, p. 181)
When Charles Bean died in 1968, Guy Harriott, a leading Second World War correspondent from Bean's former newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald, wrote of Bean that it was he who 'in the last analysis acted as midwife at the birth of Australia's national conscience'.







