G’Day from snowy England! An Australian greeting today, and for good reason. In a slight deviation to my usual rants and adventures in Europe, I am reporting back on a very true blue topic – Anzac Day! Yes a little weird since it’s still four months away, however please allow me to digress, it will all make sense in a moment.
Let it be known to all members, I now have written advice which confirms my long held suspicion; that despite being over 15,443 kilometres from Cronulla Beach, this is still apparently no excuse to escape my responsibilities to Cronulla Surf Life Saving Club…
And so it was, approximately nine months ago, around about Anzac Day 2009, that the Daily Telegraph in Sydney published an article about the small village of Harefield, situated 20 miles north-west of central London, where the local community continues to hold an annual tribute to the Anzacs. You can read the full story online here…
In a nutshell, back in 1915 a bloke by the name of Charles Billyard-Leake (an expat from Sydney) loaned his manor house and 100ha of parkland in Harefield to the Australian Government for use as an auxiliary hospital in World War I. It is here that over 50,000 Anzac troops were treated over the course of the war. Now, zoom back (forward?) to 2009, where our beloved Patron Barry Ezzy has hired a private investigator to research his family history. As it turns out, at some point during World War 1, Barry’s father was one of the diggers who was injured on the Western Front, shipped back to England and wonderfully cared for by the nuns and nurses at this very Harefield Hospital.
As you can imagine, upon learning of the promixity of Harefield to London, your faithful Foreign Correspondent was never far from dearest Patron’s thoughts. This was revealed shortly after said Patron had bombarded the Vicar of Harefield and his assistant with a series of lengthy letters, to which shortly after I also received several equally essay-esque emails, in which Barry demonstrated that he had wasted no time in filling Bill Marshall’s still warm shoes and asserting his new found authority…
“After I read (the story) I felt that I had to share the information with some one, so unfortunately you’re it. I would dearly like to hear something about the Hospital seen through Aussie eyes, and possibly some photos. I know that you have a very busy calendar, and I will understand if this request just isn’t possible to organise. However seeing that I’m now Patron, I do believe that rank permits me to instruct the foreign correspondent to carry out certain duties.”
Be it not my position to judge whether or not this is an abuse of the Patron’s powers for personal gain; I will leave this to the Executive Committee to discuss in due course whether our Patron should be held accountable in front of a Judiciary hearing. But ultimately, orders are orders and had I been an Anzac trooper, disregarding a senior officer would surely have seen me shot. And so it was after several gentle prods (and one stern ‘pull your finger out’) that I found myself with a day off over the Christmas holidays, heading out to Harefield, on an Anzac pilgrimage.
The first Sunday after Christmas, 27th December 2009, was a bloody cold morning. I had decided that the best way to tackle the mission was to take my bike out to Harefield on the train from Marylebone Station (another property knocked off the Monopoly list – tick!) to a place called Denham, where I could then cycle the rest of the way to Harefield and easily potter around the town. I would need to be quick, since I was due back in London to help out at a homeless shelter for the evening (well, there’s no beaches to patrol, so gotta keep up my community service somehow!) Despite being at the station 15 minutes prior to departure, I was not helped at the ticket booth when a combination of having recently been issued an emergency replacement VISA card, along with the British fetish for ‘queuing’ caused me to miss my train by about 20 seconds. An hour later, I’m back on track (literally) though by now I now may as well have cycled the whole way in the first place. Anyway, I don’t want to sound like a pommie whinger so I’ll continue.
You know that you’re “a long way from home” when, despite living in London for over a year, you suddenly realise that even on a train to the outer suburbs of London, people start staring at you and wondering who you are, where you are from. You don’t get those stares in the crush of London – I could probably wear a mankini on the Tube during peak hour and nobody would pay me any attention so long as I didn’t hold up the throng of people moving about the underground. I ended up in a conversation with an old man who was clearly a local from out this way. Before I could even mention where I was heading, he had picked my accent and started rattling on about how Harefield had a lot of history with ‘the Aussies from the first war’. Immediately I knew that the Anzac commemoration was very much ingrained in the history of the area – indeed I would discover that the young children from the area were taught the Anzac story from a young school age. I now believe that you will not find another community in all of Great Britain that celebrates the Anzac legend more so than the residents of Harefield. The old man gave me directions from Denham to Harefield and before long, I was heading up Church Hill Road into the centre of town. There was still snow, frost and ice alongside the road for much of the short ride – it really does get cold here. It was -4 when I got up this morning, and that’s nothing compared to the weather up North these past few days. I just read about 60 villagers in Yorkshire who were ‘snowed in’ at their local pub for 3 days, until a snow-plough managed to get through and clear a path to the front door. (Well I could think of worse places to be stuck!)
I had arranged to meet the Reverend Andrew Gandon, Vicar of St Mary the Virgin Church, just after he had finished the morning service. Andrew has been the Vicar since 1995, just over 14 years, though that pales with Albert Augustus Harland, who was the incumbent during the war – Harland was Vicar from 1870 until his death until 1920 – some 50 years. Poor bugger must have retired due to his health as he died a year later. Yes Barry, as you can see I have done my homework.
There was a fair bit more to see at Harefield than just what was located in the church grounds, so more on this later. Since I’d arrived fairly early before the Sunday morning service had finished, I decided to first visit Harefield Hospital itself.
If you can imagine the old Prince Henry Hospital from out at La Perouse, before it was turned into multi-million dollar apartments… This is what best describes how it feels to wander around the site of Harefield Hospital, what was once the Harefield Park estate. Imagine a large, spread out facility with old brown-brick buildings. The original mansion is now the doctor’s residence. It’s eerily quiet, despite the fact that it’s just two days after Christmas – I initially thought that the hospital may have been abandoned, however this is not the case – it is actually one of the most important regional hospitals in England. Pride of place in its history, beyond its Anzac roots, is the medical advances that have been made here in terms of treatment for tuberculosis, and more recently heart and lung transplants. Outside the main entrance is a blue plaque recognising Sir Alexander Fleming (1881-1955) who was appointed to the hospital in 1939. Fleming was a leading biologist, pharmacologist and Nobel Prize winner for the discovery of penicillin.
I walked into the main reception area with the intention of asking somebody if there was a leaflet or some information on the history of the hospital, but again there is no receptionist and the area is completely abandoned, even though the hospital is evidently fully operational. Just beyond the reception desk however, is a sign pointing towards the ‘Anzac Centre’.
It may not be much, but as I walk inside, it is evident that this somewhat newly refurbished area of the hospital pays homage to the Anzacs in terms of commemorative plaques, historical photos and several displays outlining the history of Anzac Harefield. One of the more memorable photos – all of which were taken at Harefield during WW1 – shows an Anzac digger batting in a game of cricket – with an amputated left leg! Another photo portrays a group of diggers hanging around some old army medical trucks, hand feeding a kangaroo – God only knows what the little bugger was up to at Harefield, possibly shipped in to provide a morale boost to the homesick injured. A final drawing is called the ‘Amnesty Wheel’ which is a circular illustration that is broken up like a pie chart, and each ‘piece of pie’ represents one hospital ward. Inside that ward are the names and signatures of every Anzac digger that was present at the Hospital at the time of the ceasefire on 11th November 1918.
After these pleasant discoveries around the hospital grounds, I jumped back on Bessie (my Ridgeback touring bike, of course she has a name!) and pottered back into town, riding casually up and down the side streets and around the outskirts, which extend no more than about 3 blocks in any direction from the main street. At one point, I get a fabulous view from the hill next to Harefield Estate, which surely would have been a fantastic memory of the troops nearly a century ago. Rolling hills, green fields full of sheep and horses, lovely evergreen trees dotting the canal that runs by at the bottom of the hill, just a small distance from the centre of town. West Harefield actually borders the Grand Union Canal – one of the largest canal systems in the UK at 220 km (137 miles) long, with 166 locks to shuffle boats up/down waterways of differing heights. Canal history is a whole wonderful subject of its own, and they are extremely beautiful, peaceful areas, some of which run through the busiest parts of central London and often you don’t even realise they are there until you properly open your eyes and look a little closer. Undoubtably during the war years, these canals were a vital part of the transportation infrastructure around the countryside. Whilst they would have been mainly used to move goods and raw materials, such as gravel, it is possible that they were also used to move personnel – possible even Anzac diggers to and from the hospital – though I have not been able to confirm this.
By the time I’d finished wandering Harefield it was a little before lunch, though unfortunately still a bit too early for the pubs to be open, so I figured I might as well head straight to the church. Mass was still in progress, so I followed the road another 50-100m past the main building, and came across the graveyard.
First impressions of the church were that it looked pretty much exactly as I’d imagined it (from the photo that I’d googled on the Internet). There were no surprises and it was an extremely beautiful design, built in the traditional style of most of the old village churches that you see scattered around England.
Right beside the church was the village cemetary – hundreds of old (and not-so-old) graves, some well kept, most left to deteriorate, falling apart with grass and weeds overcoming the old burial plots.
But right in the middle of all this, one cannot help but notice the immaculately presented patch of grass, where over a hundred identical graves are presented in perfect alignment, row by row, each decorated with its perfectly pruned garden of shrubs and flowers. Standing tall in the centre of this is the Anzac memorial itself, a stone obelisk who’s only rivalry is the dominance of an Australian flag flying high to its immediate north.
Entering the graveyard, I pass under the memorial archway engraved with the words “There names liveth forevermore”. Beyond this gate is the Harefield Parish Churchyard, Australian Military Cemetary – the official resting place of 111 members of the Australian Army plus one nursing sister, all of whom died at Harefield Hospital during the Great War of 1914-18 (however there was one further interment in 1956).
The Australian Cemetary is officially designated a Commonwealth Cemetary by the War Graves Commission, who continues to maintain it. Next to the general graveyard eitherside, the first observation I could make to describe the difference, was what a typical Australian suburban street might look like, if one neighbour religiously started up the Victa every Sunday, whilst both his neighbours didn’t even know what a lawnmower looked like.
As I pay my respects, it is hard not to notice the youth of the fallen. For the most part, those young men buried here were no older than their late teens and early twenties. If I had been buried alongside, at 29 years I would have been one of the oldest casualties.
After a short while, the morning service was over and people started filing out of the church – cue entrance of Foreign Correspondent. There were still a lot of people hanging around, distracting the Vicar in the foyer, but that was fine since it allowed me to take in the magnificent interior of the Church building. The Vicar would tell me later that they had only just recently completed a total restoration and refurbishment of the main chapel, and I had to agree it looked sensational with the beautiful wood work, the stone walls and original stained-glass windows.
Off to the front-left side was a glass doorway which led into the ‘Anzac Chapel’ – a room that was probably once used frequently by the church kindergarten group, but is now decorated as a place where the history of the Anzacs is proudly displayed for all to see. In the top left corner above a doorway, hangs both the Australian National Flag and the Australian Red Ensign, as well as the flag of the Anzac Association. (I have never actually heard of the Anzac Association before, and unfortunately can’t find any other information regarding its existence, or any other images of this flags use on the Internet. Somebody else may know more about what this association was?)
To the right of me, I notice a very old book on a lecturn. On further investigation I’m delighted to discover that it is infact a very valuable historical record, containing the hand-written names, addresses and designations of supposedly every Anzac that visited St Marys Church. To this day, all visitors to this church who are of Anzac, Australian or New Zealand ancestry, are invited to sign the book. (If you ever go to Harefield, you can now see that on the 27.12.09, Matthew Bruce of Cronulla SLSC was here!) I did attempt to locate an ‘Ezzy’ in the long list of names, but I could not easily skim-read the manuscript – even though it was written in English, it’s amazing how much difference there is between what is considered common script these days, especially with most of what we read printed off in an easy to read computer font. (Plus Barry, to be honest, you didn’t even tell me your father’s first name in any of the emails that you sent me!). On the inside cover of the book are hand-drawn illustrations of aboriginal faces, gumtrees, emus and the like. Finally, the back section of the book contains a beautifully caligraphed alphabetical list of the names of all the 112 people buried in the Australian Military Cemetary just outside.
At this point, I finally meet Reverend Andrew, the Vicar at St Marys. He’s been expecting me and is happy to answer a few questions and give a talk about local Anzac history. Much of what he says is repeated in the short publications I obtained from the ‘church shop’ for a small donation. What’s not included are some general insights into Harefield as a whole. I state to the Vicar how much the countryside seems to just ‘open up’, as I recall the train ride here was for the best part a bland journey through endless suburban sprawl – identical terrace houses as far as the eye can see. That is, until you are within one station/stop of Harefield and suddenly everything is green pastures and scenic countyside. It really does feel like you have left London, even though we have not crossed the ‘border’, the M25 circular road which is kind of similar to the M7 orbital in Sydney.
Andrew tells me this is because of some fantastic government planning foresight; a few decades ago they established what is called the ‘green belt’ around London, aimed at preserving natural forest and farmland and protecting it from future development. Harefield is actually the only town left that still retains its unique ‘country feel’ yet remains technically a part of Greater London.
One little amusing feature that Andrew pointed out, was an old tapestry that hung on the wall below the window sill, next to the signatory book. Apparently this was the original tapestry that hung behind the alter in the main Chapel for many years in commemoration of the Anzac troops, however since the renovations, it has been moved inside the Anzac Chapel. I couldn’t help stifle a laugh at the hundreds of ‘sheep’ that were embroidered around the edge of the tapestry as a border, in rememberance of our New Zealand neighbours.
Andrew provides me with a quick run down of how the Anzac Day service plays out. Essentially the local school children all pick flowers, before gathering to march towards the cemetary where they place their flowers on the graves of the fallen Anzacs. This is a tradition that has continued every year since it first started in 1921. After lunch, a full Anzac ceremony is held with visiting representatives from the Australian Government and various Harefield institutions such as the school, hospital, local government, etc. Andrew invited me out to see the ceremony for myself in a few months time. I may take him up on the offer.
For the most part it was now mission accomplished. I managed to steal a parting photo with the Vicar outside the church, jumped on my bike and headed for the pub down by the canal, on the way back to the station. If you are ever looking at Harefield on a map and wondering what all the lakes and streams are around the canal, I can tell you. They are all disused gravel pits that have now been filled up with water. Some of them even contribute as a source of water to the canal system. I would say that the Grand Union Canal was integral in transporting much of the raw material up and down the countryside from this location.
Back at London, I arrive home with over an hour to spare to make it to my homeless shelter at Hammersmith. It’s been a wonderful morning and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my research into a part of the Anzac legend that you don’t often hear about back home. When most people think of Anzac Day in Europe, the best they can come up with is a trip to Gallipoli, or perhaps attending the dawn service at Hyde Park in central London. I’m glad to have been able to dig a bit further and provide the Patron with a bit more insight into this chapter of Anzac history.
I’ve uploaded a few photos with commentary to accompany this story. It is somewhat of a different approach to my regular blogging style (the usual über-dry comical foray into my impressions of Europe), but none-the-less, hopefully you all enjoyed the slightly more historical angle. I imagine that it could be an interesting read, and not just for the members of Cronulla SLSC.
So, ta ta for now, enjoy the summer heat you buggers. I’m about to make a phone call to find out why my heating and hot-water system hasn’t worked since New Years Eve…
MATTHEW BRUCE
Foreign Correspondent | Cronulla SLSC
