Address by Gregor Macaulay, Opoho Presbyterian Church, 26 April 2015

Yesterday was ANZAC Day.  It is a curious public holiday.  The date commemorates not the very first but the first major action in the Great War of 1914-1918 involving New Zealand soldiers. It is common for countries to celebrate the anniversaries of military triumphs, but Gallipoli was a military failure. 

The 25th of April was marked as a special day as early as 1916 and since then has had an interesting history.  It became a public holiday in the 1920s – to be considered “as sacred as a Sunday”.  It is now probably more sacred than a Sunday for most people.  Not even the garden centres that so selflessly open every Sunday and on Good Friday would dare to open on the morning of ANZAC Day.

At first, ANZAC Day was a day of commemoration of the men of New Zealand who had died while serving in the armed forces of the British Empire in the war against the German and Ottoman Empires and their allies.  After 1939 its ambit was extended to include those who died in the war against Hitler’s Germany and Japan.  And then there was Korea – and Malaya – and Vietnam – and more recent conflicts.  Its scope was extended backwards to include the South African War.  It has been a focus for aggressive pacifism from time to time.  And as the returned men of the First World War disappeared, and even those of the Second World War became fewer, it became a day of celebration of the living and of a woolly nationalism and half-baked historical analysis and sometimes mere sentimentality.

The proximity of ANZAC Day to Easter and ideas of sacrifice and the hope of resurrection would have been of deep significance to much of New Zealand’s population a century ago.  Today, I suggest, that vocabulary of ideas is a closed book to many, if not most, people; but as a nation we still look back. 

I am often puzzled about what it is that people think they are doing on ANZAC Day.  They are not mourning or recalling people they knew personally, at least not in the case of those who died in the First World War.  One cannot very usefully thank the dead.  As Protestants, we know it is pointless to pray for the dead.  I think it unlikely that everyone at a dawn service believes in God, so they are not thanking him.  I have seen a televised ANZAC service from the National War Memorial in Wellington, conducted by military chaplains, that was almost entirely secular – something that would not have been out of place in Soviet Russia or North Korea. 

So what are we doing today?  I will leave that question hanging for the moment.

Let’s move from the general to the particular.

We have in front of us the Opoho roll of honour, which normally hangs in the Morrison Lounge, and I have in my hand a little book about it that I have been working on sporadically for the last three or four years.  I got it finished just a couple of weeks ago.  Just in time.

The roll lists 80 men associated with Opoho who served in the armed forces of the British Empire in the Great War of 1914-1918 (now usually called the First World War or World War One). It also lists one woman, a nurse.  There are asterisks beside 15 names, indicating, we are told, that the men concerned had been killed in the war.

I thought it would be interesting, and a quick and easy job, to find out a little about these 15 men.  And then the trouble began.  First of all, one of the men hadn’t been killed at all – he survived the war and died in Christchurch in 1935.  His brother was killed.  Not all of them had been killed in battle: there was a death from pneumonia and a death from a bacterial infection (the soldier concerned hadn’t even left New Zealand and died at Featherston) – both conditions could probably have been easily treated if antibiotics had been available.  There was a death from scarlet fever. 

I looked further.  There were five other men who were not marked as having been killed but who had died while they were soldiers or whose deaths were treated as having been caused by the war.

One involved another death from pneumonia, following on from influenza; the soldier concerned was on Quarantine Island, where we have had church camps, but the disease for which he had been sent there was not influenza.  I will not spell out the details.  He is buried in the Northern Cemetery, just along the road.

And then I found that there were more than 30 men associated with Opoho who had served in the war but who were not listed on the roll.  There may well be others.  In some cases they were the brothers of men who were listed so it is puzzling that they were left off. And of these 30, seven had died on active service or as a result of active service.

The nurse on the roll was Mary Watson Anderson, born 1879, the fourth child in a family of 7 boys and 5 girls.  She trained at Dunedin Hospital and qualified as a nurse in 1913.  She stood 5 feet and half an inch tall, weighed 95 pounds, and had blue eyes, brown hair, and a complexion described variously as fair and ruddy.  She served in Egypt and England from August 1915 to February 1920 and was promoted to Sister in 1917.  According to her service record, she died in Nelson in 1949, but I haven’t found confirmation of that date in the Nelson cemetery records or the indexes of births, deaths, and marriages.

And what of the men?  The overwhelming impression of the men who are named on the roll, or who should have been listed, is that they were ordinary. Ordinary men in ordinary jobs, mainly labouring or trades.  No-one famous.  Mainly Presbyterian, or at least Protestant, with very few Roman Catholics.  All but two were in the New Zealand army – one was in the Australian forces, and one in the British Army and then the Royal Naval Reserve. Only two were officers.  The rest were privates or NCOs.  There were only a couple of gallantry awards – a Distinguished Conduct Medal and a Military Medal.  No VCs.  There were several sets of brothers and cousins.  Most were single.  A few had lost one parent, and I have noticed only one whose parents were living apart. As was usual for the time, very few would have been educated beyond primary school level.  They were ordinary men.

Their surnames indicate that they were all of British or Irish descent.  A few were born in the United Kingdom or Australia, but most were of the first generation or at most the second generation to have been born in this country.

Their Christian names are mainly fairly conventional names of their generation.  No-one called Josh or Zac or Liam.  But 17 called John, 11 called James, 11 Williams. There are Leonards, Fredericks, Alberts, Alfreds, Georges, Sidneys, and Harolds and Henrys, a Cyril, and a Ferdinand Horatio.

I haven’t analysed the ages of all who enlisted, but the range of ages of those who died during the war was 18 to 37, with an average age at death of 24.  They were young men.

I also have not analysed their medical reports properly, but most appear to have been very ordinary in terms of height and build.  George Gladstone Russell, killed at Gallipoli in August 1915 was an exception.  He was over 6’ 3”: 6’ 4” according to a newspaper report of his death; 6’ 3¼” according to his service record; his nickname was Tiny.  The newspaper report described him as “a fine specimen of New Zealand manhood”.

They were not all heroes or saints: George Russell had been sacked from the Railways in 1913 and two other men were discharged from the army after being convicted of offences, one by court martial and one in a civil court in Australia.

These ordinary men from Opoho served at Gallipoli and in Palestine and on the Western Front and some are buried in Turkey and Israel and France.

But the first Opoho boy to die in the war was buried at sea.  William Harvey, an apprentice piano tuner from 38 Warden Street, died of tuberculosis on board ship on 16 April 1915. He was 21.  He was an Anglican.

The next to die was a Roman Catholic.  Frank Pearson, an anxious-looking 18-year-old who had worked as an electrician for the Dunedin City Corporation, was killed at Gallipoli on 28 April 1915 – a hundred years ago on Tuesday.  He has no known grave, but his name is on the Lone Pine Memorial at Gallipoli.  His parents lived in Signal Hill Road, just up from McGregor Street.  At enlistment he had claimed to be 16 months older than he actually was.

Another soldier, John Williams, had bumped his age up by more than two years when he enlisted in May 1915.  He had also used an assumed name, Jack Mackenzie.  It was just a month after his 19th birthday when he was killed at the Somme in July 1916.

And towards the end of the Gallipoli campaign, on 8 November 1915, Sapper Cyril Fancourt was killed in action.  He is buried in the Embarkation Pier Cemetery in Turkey.  His parents lived next door to us, at 5 Farquharson Street.  Cyril was a plumber.  He had married Nellie Taylor (8 years his senior) at the North East Valley Presbyterian Church on 8 May 1915 and enlisted 8 days later.  He sailed from Wellington on 14 August 1915 and was dead less than three months later.  He was 22.  Nellie later married a returned soldier, Harold McMaster, and lived in Musselburgh, and later in Melville Street.  She died in 1927, aged 41.

And similar brief biographies are easily deduced from the service records of all the others listed on the roll, or who should have been listed on the roll.  Their records are available online from Archives New Zealand.  You can easily look them up for yourselves.

So what are we to make of their stories?  These stories of ordinary people caught up in a war of unprecedented scale and carnage.

The First World War was the result of militarism, nationalism, alliances, fanaticism, and folly, but New Zealand entered the war enthusiastically.  And 3 men from Farquharson Street, and 5 men from Signal Hill Road, and 6 men from Warden Street died as a result.  

And here at Opoho we have particular cause to remember that Germany also entered the war enthusiastically and lost many of its young men.

The First World War was seen as a just war by intelligent and humane people in Britain and in New Zealand.  It was called the Great War for Civilisation on the Victory Medal awarded to those who served in it.  It was called the war to end war.  But it also led directly to the horrors of totalitarianism in Russia and Germany and to another world war a generation later.  And we are still living with the consequences of the First World War in the Middle East.

So what are we doing today?  And what are we to make of the stories of the people named on the roll of honour?

I don’t think there is a single, simple answer.  There are not necessarily profound conclusions to be drawn from historical events.  Things happen.  People live and die. It is not always clear who is a goody and who is a baddy.  Historical events and anniversaries can be remembered or interpreted in different ways by different people.  But every person is part of a family, a community, and a country, and today I suggest we simply recall before God those people associated with Opoho – the soldiers, the nurse, and their families – who took part in or who were otherwise affected by the First World War, a war that helped to shape the world we live in today.  Their stories are part of our stories, as nation, church, community, families, and individuals.

And in this place we also recall that we are part of a much older and a much bigger story – a story of deliverance and hope.  I read from Isaiah chapter 51:

Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness
and who seek the Lord:
Look to the rock from which you were cut
and to the quarry from which you were hewn;
² look to Abraham, your father,
and to Sarah, who gave you birth.
When I called him he was only one man,
and I blessed him and made him many.
³ The Lord will surely comfort Zion
and will look with compassion on all her ruins;
he will make her deserts like Eden,
her wastelands like the garden of the Lord.
Joy and gladness will be found in her,
thanksgiving and the sound of singing.