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Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett

An entry in The Anzac Book of reminiscences of Australia's Gallipoli soldiers (London: Cassell, 1916) reads: 'It is fairly certain that future historians will teach that Australia was discovered not by Captain Cook, explorer, but by Mr. Ashmead-Bartlett, war correspondent'.

REFERENCE
Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett's despatch on the landing at Gallipoli
The Sydney Morning Herald, 8 May 1915 pp. 13-14. NLA newspaper call no. NX354.
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Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett was the British war correspondent whose first report on the landing at Gallipoli by the Australians and New Zealanders on 25 April 1915 sparked the Anzac legend.

Bartlett's despatch was published first in English newspapers, then by their Australian counterparts, who took it from the English wire services a day later, on 8 May 1915. The fact that such stirring material was written by an Englishman who was a very experienced war correspondent and published first for an English readership gave it added authority. The report of Australia's official war correspondent, Charles Bean, had been held up by officials pending Bean's accreditation to report from Gallipoli. Bean's report did not appear in the Australian press until six days later.

When Ashmead-Bartlett died in 1931, Bean wrote 'the tradition of the Anzac landing is probably more influenced by that first story than by all the other accounts that have since been written'.

Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett was born in 1881 in England. By the time he arrived in the Dardanelles he was not only an experienced war correspondent but had himself been a soldier. He had interrupted his studies for the Bar to join his regiment briefly in the Boer War in South Africa in 1901. His first experience of war was at 17 years of age when, with his father on a visit to Turkey, he followed the Turkish troops in a battle against the Greeks. Subsequently, he became a war correspondent, covering the Russo-Japanese war in 1904 and battles involving the French, Spanish and Italians in Morocco and Tripoli between 1907 and 1911. From 1912 to 1913 he covered two Balkan wars for the London Daily Telegraph, through which he obtained official accreditation as the London press representative for the Dardanelles campaign.

In his work on war correspondents, The First Casualty (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), Phillip Knightley described Ashmead-Bartlett as 'the most interesting and dominating' of the war correspondents camped at General Ian Hamilton's headquarters on Imbros off Gallipoli. 'He appeared to have an unlimited expense account and used a large portion of it to purchase liquor from the navy. One of the sights of Imbros was the regular line of Greek porters staggering up the hill to the press camp loaded with supplies for Ashmead-Bartlett.'

He sailed to Gallipoli with the Australians who formed the covering party for the troops that landed on 25 April and went ashore 24 hours later. Subsequently, unlike Charles Bean who lived with the troops on the peninsula, he was based at the official press camp on Imbros. He never resiled from his initial descriptions of the courage and skill of the Anzac troops, which he also recorded on film, making the only moving picture of the campaign.

REFERENCE
Ashmead-Bartlett's letter to Prime Minister Asquith
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Ashmead-Bartlett became increasingly hostile to Hamilton's conduct of the campaign. He resented being restrained by Hamilton and the field censor on Imbros and soon saw the campaign as degenerating into a 'bloody fiasco'. In September, he briefed the visiting Australian journalist Keith Murdoch on the failures as he saw them and Murdoch agreed to take a letter from him to British Prime Minister Asquith, detailing the concerns. In his letter, Ashmead-Bartlett expressed his beliefs that the Gallipoli campaign was headed for a disaster that had been pre-determined by incompetent planning. Furthermore, he stated that this incompetence had created an 'absolute lack of confidence [amongst the troops] in all ranks in the Headquarters staff'.

The letter was confiscated by British authorities at Marseilles, leading Murdoch, on his arrival in London, to write his own letter of criticism of the Dardanelles campaign. Following its circulation, Hamilton had Ashmead-Bartlett expelled immediately from the Dardanelles for breaching censorship regulations. His Australian colleagues from Gallipoli did not let him go unnoticed. Charles Smith, in the Middle East, wrote in the Melbourne Argus of 1 November 1915, 'Mr Ashmead-Bartlett has done almost as much towards bringing Australians into the limelight of world-fame as have the heroic deeds of our soldiers themselves'.

Ashmead-Bartlett returned to London where he continued his attack on Hamilton through further press articles. Whilst the articles criticised the conduct of the Dardanelles campaign, they also continued to praise the Anzac troops, praise which Ashmead-Bartlett furthered in a lecture tour of Australia the following year.

IMAGE
Imbros 1915. C.E.W. Bean (front) and Ashmead-Bartlett (British correspondent)
ENLARGE IMAGE
Imbros 1915. C.E.W. Bean (front) and Ashmead-Bartlett (British correspondent)
Australian War Memorial, AWM A05382
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