It
often surprises people just how many Light Horsemen were recruited
not from the outback, or even from the farms and rural settlements
closer to the coast, but from the big cities of Australia. Even
so, every regiment contained its quota of real bushmen and few men
fitted that description better than George Milson. He was the second
son of Robert and Florence Milson, of Springvale Station, a 1600-square
mile (1.02 million acre) cattle property about 250 kms south west
of Winton, in the Channel Country of western Queensland. Like his
older brother Arthur he had been born on neighbouring Diamantina
Lakes, an even bigger cattle place and at that time also a police
post where one of the trooper's wives was a midwife. Their early
schooling was at home, in between time spent in the mustering camp
and around the stockyards, clocking up hours in the saddle, or with
their guns and dogs, stalking ducks and pigeons around the waters
at the homestead. In 1905 the two brothers were sent to Sydney to
board at The King's School, in Parramatta, from where they came
home once a year at Christmas, catching a steamer north to Rockhampton
then the train to Longreach. From there they would ride for five
or six days back to the station, across the hard red country to
the Mayne, then down the Diamantina before leaving the River for
the last 20 miles to Springvale. At the end of the holidays they
did the trip in reverse.
At King's George distinguished himself as an excellent sportsman
- 1st XV in football, a champion sprinter (earning him the nickname
of Jellylegs) and a crack shot, for two years a member of the school's
GPS_winning shooting team. He was also a Colour Sergeant in the
cadet unit, of which every boy in the senior school was a member.
On leaving in 1911 he went to Hawkesbury Agricultural College for
a year before going on to Sydney Technical College to do wool classing.
Ill-health forced their father Robert Milson to retire to Sydney
at the beginning of 1914, leaving the 21 year old Arthur to carry
on running the place. George also returned to Springvale to help
out as severe drought loomed. Indeed, when war broke out in August
that year George was on the road with a large mob of Springvale
cattle up on the Georgina River near Cloncurry. He did not return
until the end of 1915, when he enlisted in the Light Horse. Because
he actually signed his papers in Sydney he was posted to a NSW-based
unit, the 7th ALH.
He trained at Menangle, just outside Sydney, and must have made
a big impression on the fellow recruits in his 16-man training group.
Just under 6 foot, he had clear blue eyes, a square jaw and an outgoing,
sunny personality, with a love of practical jokes. Among Milson's
papers after he died was a long poem written by another recruit,
one John Murray, called the Ballad of Squad No 10, in which there
is a verse describing each member. George's reads:
Here
comes the Grand, Almighty One,
The Germans look, then madly run.
It's Milson, men! The Light Horse king,
Without his horse, or anything.
His spurs clank upon the floor,
He's marching proudly on to war.
He's marching boys, that means of course,
He's mounted, but without a horse.
Fear not at this, this noble Corps
Is mounted when they go to war
Upon their leg: They find a man
Runs faster than their horses can.
Milson left Australia in June 1916 and joined his regiment then
engaged in action against the Turks in the Sinai Desert. Before
long he was promoted to sergeant, taking part in the endless deep
patrolling and sudden, sharp skirmishes that characterised this
phase of the war in the Middle East. It was tiring and dangerous
work, brutal on both men and horses.
By late March 1917 the Allied forces were attacking Gaza, the first
big Turkish defence system in Palestine. "On the day of the
scrap," Milson wrote home to his father a week later, "another
troop and ours were on the screen, that is, the foremost position,
and most exciting. We moved out of camp at 3am and worked around
the back of the city while the infantry attacked from the front,
thus completely surrounding them. From before daylight until 8 or
9 o'clock we were hampered by very heavy fog. The guns opened up
about 9am and kept up a heavy bombardment all day and did a considerable
amount of damage to Jacko. However, at the end of the day, after
very stranuous fighting by the infantry and some good charges made
by part of the 7th, 5th, and NZ Mounted Regts, we held a very good
position, but owing to a large body of reinforcements coming up
in our rear, all the Light Horse had to get out. So at 9pm we mounted
and rode all night, getting back here to our desert camp at 8am.
We captured several hundred prisoners, among them a general and
his staff, and the civilian givernor of Gaza."
This so-called first battle of Gaza was in fact a costly failure,
largely due to a loss of nerve on the part of the Allied commanding
officer. George later sent the family a photograph of himself and
a couple of other regimental colleagues escorting a captured Turkish
cavalry Captain during this battle. His sisters ever after referred
to George's capture of the General, a claim Milson just as doggedly
kept denying for the rest of his life!
Gaza was finally taken in April, and thereafter there was much hard
fighting throughout the rest of 1917 as the Allied army moved north
up into Palestine. Again, for the Light Horsemen, these were months
of hard patrolling intermixed with deadly firefights with Turkish
cavalry. Other times there were quick rushes on foot against dug-in
positions, invariably ending with brief, close-quarter bayonet fighting.
The 7th was one of a number of Light Horse units that was holding
the ring around Beersheba at the time of the famous charge by the
4th and 12th ALH regiments that captured the town on October 31,
1917. "We left on October 21 for this big push and have kept
going solidly ever since," he wrote home in early December.
"It's been a most interesting time. Our Brigade (the 2nd ALH
Bde) was sent out in advance to prepare the way on the right of
the forces coming on. Our main work for the first week to make crossings
in the many wadis and clean out wells which the Turks had blown
in as they were forced to evacuate. On these we have had shifts
day and night, our horses going 48 hours on occasion without a drink.
That would be nothing to station horses, but it means a lot to these
when they are working all the time on dry rations, and not too much
of it. On the 30th, at sundown, we moved out to take Beersheba,
attacking it from the east, a thing that jacko thought was impossible
and least expected, with all his fortifications made for an attack
from the south and south-west. After travelling all night we got
right around and took up our positions early in the morning with
little opposition. From then on we had Jacko thinking, with the
infantry in the front and the LH on the rear and right.
"At about 4 o'clock in the afternoon the infantry pushed well
up and the LH worked their way right in behind and cut off a nice
little haul of about 1600 prisoners and 9 field guns, then charged
and occupied the town before they had time to blow up the water
supplies, railway station or anything else beneficial to our troops."
By November the 7th was up the coast at Jaffa, where the troops
were given a brief rest. "About a week ago we had a day's spell
near jaffa, where some of the boys were given leave for 5 to 6 hours
to ride up and have a look at it. I was one of them. The town itself
has some rather fine buildings, but a great number of them are closed,
the inhabitants having run away with Jacko. While in there we bought
some bread and fresh mutton and a few other little things. The great
difficulty was to get change. Among the natives our main way of
dealing is with tins of bully beef or a few biscuits in exchange
for oranges. It is a wonderful country for fruit, and oranges are
ripe at present and we had so many we are almost sick of them."
After a bout of malaria for which he was hospitalised in Cairo,
Milson was with his regiment outside Jerusalem in April 1918 when
the High Command ordered a raid across the Jordan River to the Turkish
stronghold of Amman.
He wrote a vivid description of this operation in a letter to his
brother Arthur. "The day we moved it rained solidly until 2pm,
and by 5pm we got to Jerusalem and camped on a slope of the Valley
of Jehosephat, looking onto the Mount of Olives.. All our clothes
and blankets were wet, so six of us decided to rent a room for the
night after dark, which was strictly against orders. We were back
in the lines by 6 next morning, no one the wiser," The regiment
moved off to the east, through Jericho and down into the valley
of the Jordan. "There is a drop of nearly 4000 feet in 20 miles,
and a climb of 4000 feet on the other side. We travelled all night,
crossing the Jordan at sunrise. After a brief rest we went on, and
again travelled all night. By this time the rain had set in and
was coming down all it knew how. It was the coldest time I have
ever put in in my life."
After winding their way down towards Amman along a mountain track
that required the men to lead their horses single file, the regiment
deployed for the attack. "The following morning," Milson's
letter continued, "we went on and attacked Amman, where I stopped
a piece of lead and by doing so got myself a holiday." Some
holiday! He was shot through the hip and it took 10 days in excruciating
pain to get him passed back down the line - by horse, camel, motor
truck, hospital train and finally boat - to a hospital on the Suez
Canal.
By the middle of the year he was well on the way to recovery and
was able to join his regiment to take part in the final Allied sweep
up into Syria and the capture of Damascus. By then he had been commissioned
as a lieutenant. Although the fighting ended in November, for him
duties had not ended. In December he and his Squadron from the 7th
embarked for Gallipoli, where they acted as an escort for the burial
parties that went back to the old battlefield and for Charles Bean,
the official historian of the First AIF, who came back to study
what had happened four years before. It was not until June 1919
that Milson arrived back in Australia and was demobilised.
George Milson was, .ile just about every other member of the First
AIF, a citizen soldier, and he ws among the lucky ones to come back
and be able to settle down again to civilian life. He returned to
Springvale, again helping his brother Arthur run the place and working
in the mustering camp. In 1922 he took charge of taking 1000 Springvale
bullocks sold to Sir Sidney Kidman down the Birdsville Track to
Farina, in South Australia, a distance of about 800 kms. It was
a dry time, but the mob was successfully delivered, a testament
to his skill and maturity though still not yet 28. In the following
year George, in partnership with Arthur and their younger brother
David, bought a sheep place north of Winton named Brooklyn. While
Arthur stayed on at Springvale the two younger brothers settled
on Brooklyn and gradually built it up, constructing much of the
homestead themselves and then guiding the place through the terrible
drought of the late 1920s and the Great Depression that followed.
These were cruel times of hardship and financial stringency that
brought many of their neighbours in the district undone. In the
little spare time he had George had two great loves. One was racing,
training and racing his own horses for the local picnic meetings
and serving for many years on the local organising committee. His
other great love was reading, building up a library that took up
the whole side of one room at Brooklyn.
When war came and David went off to join the army George not only
ran the place but took on another job as a travelling inspector
for one of the big pastoral companies. In late 1942 he returned
full time to Brooklyn after the brothers acquired the neighbouring
Ingle Downs. Soon after the war ended and David returned from service
in Bougainville they bought a third sheep property, Fairview, near
Kynuna.
George Milson became in time something of an institution in the
Winton district, a long-time shire councillor, RSL member and race
committee member. He was a gregarious fellow, generous with his
time and money, full of fun and good advice, especially to his nephews,
the life of every party but still a man with a huge appetite for
work. He was also a shrewd and successful sheepman. In 1960 he sold
Brooklyn and retired to Double Bay in Sydney, where he married and
enjoyed his beloved racing, rarely missing a Saturday meeting. He
hardly ever spoke about the war, and when he did it was invariably
some funny anecdote. He died in 1975 after a long illness triggered
by his war wound, his wife Helen having died the year before.
BOTH ARTICLES SUPPLIED BY SCOTT
MILSON.
SCOTT IS A GREAT NEPHEW OF BOTH GEORGE MILSON AND COLIN
MORGAN READE.
