Out of the horrors of the First World War came an appreciation
for the first time of the lives and stories of ordinary soldiers
- the little teeth at the cutting edge of the great war machine.
This was especially so in Australia, from whose shores some 332,000
citizen soldiers volunteered to fight overseas. One of that daunting
number was Colin Morgan-Reade, a young man from a sheep station
outside Winton, in western Queensland. While the details of his
brief life are unique, the tragedy of his experience was not.
Colin was born in Rockhampton in August 1896, the only son of George
and Charlotte Morgan-Reade. George, London-born and the son of a
Royal navy officer, had come out to Australia as a child and gone
onto the land as a stockman. By 1896 he was manager of Vergemont,
a large cattle station south-west of longreach. Colin's mother Charlotte
(nee Macalister) had been the first white woman born on the Peak
Downs, where her father had been overseer on one of the early stations
taken up on that fertile region centred on Clermont.
When Colin was five his family, including by then his sister Valerie,
moved from Vergemont to Bladensburg, a big sheep run outside Winton.
In the year of Federation George had been appointed manager of what
was then one of the bigger pastoral enterprises in the district.
We know few details about Colin's childhood except to say that it
was a fairly normal upbringing for a bush boy at the time - lots
of riding and stockwork, on a property notable for its vivid landscapes
of red earth and shimmering white ghost gums. Bladensburg is now
in fact a National Park. His early schooling was from his mother,
but in 1906 he went away to the coast to board at The Southport
School, where he was an average student and an above-average cricketer.
He left
school at the end of 1912 and was working back at Bladensburg with
his father when World War One broke out. It seems he stayed at home
for his 18th birthday on August 17, then got the train down to Brisbane
where he enlisted the following week. For some reason his enlistment
papers had him down as aged 19 years and one month, either a clerical
error or Colin put his age up a year just in case his youthful looks
mislead the recruiting officer.
According to his medical record he was 5ft 61/2 inches tall and
116 lbs - a small, wiry fellow with brown hair, grey eyes and a
wide smile. He was posted to B Squadron, 2nd Australian Light Horse
Regt, and began training immediately at Enoggera Camp.
The training was fast and furious but, and this now seems incredible,
lasted little more than three weeks. On September 21 the Queensland-raised
units for the first convoy boarded their ships in the Brisbane River,
with the 2nd ALH allotted to the troopship Star of England. It was
off the NSW coast that Colin wrote what is his only surviving wartime
letter. It is a short note to his sister Valerie, then at boarding
school in Toowoomba:
"Dear Girlie,
Just a few lines to let you know that all is well on board ship.
We did not call in at Sydney as we were going direct to Albany in
West Australia for coal, but now we are going into Port Melbourne
for repairs. Captain Markwell (CO of A Squadron and also an old
Southport School boy) has been as sick as a dog, but not so Sunny
Jim who has been in good health bar a slight cold, which has given
me fits for a day or so. The work on board is a bit hard, especially
stables. It seems very funny sleeping in hammocks after the hard
ground. Tell Dad we are going via the Suez Canal, calling at Port
Said for coal.
I remain your ever loving bro,
Colin.PS: Remember me to all the people I know."
Rather than needing repairs, the ships in fact had been hastily
ordered to Melbourne on the strength of reports, unfounded as it
happened, that the German Pacific Fleet was heading for the Australian
east coast. Although the stop-over in Melbourne had been caused
by a false alarm, it did produce one decision that was to leave
its mark. The Regiment's CO, Lt-Col Robert Stodart, used the time
to seek and obtain permission from Prime Minister Andrew Fisher
for emu plumes to be worn as part of the uniform. The plumes had
been a "battle honour" awarded to the old Queensland Mounted
Infantry for their work during the great shearers' strike of 1891,
and an adornment the unit had worn during its later service in South
Africa during the Boer War. Fisher now agreed that the plumes could
be adopted by all the Light Horse regiments.
Colin, like everyone else on the convoy, thought he'd be passing
through the Suez en route to England, and then the Western Front.
As we now know of course, the whole convoy of 19 ships disembarked
their troops in Egypt. This was the beginning of December 1914,
and so began a period of intense training in the desert close to
Cairo and the Pyramids in preparation for a battle much closer to
hand. When the ANZAC troops embarked in April of the following year
for the Dardanelles, the Light Horse regiments remained behind.
The plan was that once the initial breakthrough had been made by
the infantry these mounted units would be shipped over to follow
through and pursue the fleeing Turks. In the meantime it was said
that some of the Light Horse officers were busily studying street
maps of Constantinople. Alas, within ten days of the landing at
Gallipoli the need for reinforcements was so desperate that these
regiments, without their horses, were ordered to join the stalemated
battle. (The story is told in Forward - History of the Second Light
Horse by Joan Starr and Christopher Sweeney).
Colin's regiment, together with the 1st ALH from NSW, arrived under
fire at Anzac Cove on May 12. The official history makes an interesting
observation at this point. "These regiments were composed of
a fine class of men, mostly coming from farms or from sheep and
cattle stations; but many of them were very young and almost entirely
inexperienced. So raw indeed were they that when, during their transfer
to the Beach, two shrapnel shells with a shriek like a steam siren
burst over the water near them, some of the men thought that their
own troops were "having a game" with them. They were undeceived
only when a man in one of the punts slid into the bottom, wounded."
(The Story of Anzac by C W Bean, Vol 2, page 117).
The 500 men of the 2nd ALH were rushed up to Quinn's Post two days
later, an extremely dangerous position clinging precariously to
the edge of the high ridge overlooking Anzac Cove. This was a desperately
contested position where the opposing trenches were no more than
15 to 20 metres apart. Major Quinn, after whom the post was named,
was himself also an ex-Southport School boy, though of course older
than Reade. The 2nd's Baptism of fire was immediate and was graphically
recorded by Maurice Weeks, a South African-born member of the regiment.
"The enemy's trenches are only a few yards away," he wrote
that day in his diary. "It is nearly impossible to put a rifle
out of a loop hole without getting hit. There were three or four
rifles smashed up in the afternoon. Bombs came in fairly thich and
our casualties soon began to get heavy, a good many by bombs. Could
not use a periscope - they used to break them every time."
The men however soon became adept at either tossing the bombs back
to the Turks or smothering them with sandbags. This was warfare
of medieval closeness and savagery. At the end of his first day
at Quinn's, Weeks added: "They put 23 bombs around us in the
afternoon. It breaks one's nerves a bit. There are hundreds of men
piled up between the trenches and in the gully to the right. The
smell is pretty solid. Our trenches are alive with maggots. There
are Turks, Australians and (Royal) Marines piled together in places.
This entry from Weeks diary was published in ALHA 'Spur' April 2002
issue, page 19.
By the time of the great Turkish attack against the Anzac positions
a week later the 2nd ALH had been rotated out of Quinn's to the
only slightly less-deadly Pope's Hill, across the way at the top
of Monash Gully. From there the Light Horsemen joined in what became
known afterwards as "the great slaughter" that saw 10,000
Turks killed in a matter of hours. Ten days later the Turks tried
again, an assault in which Major Quinn himself was killed. It was
during the aftermath on Sunday May 30 that Reade, still on Pope's
Hill, was shot dead. The commander of B Squadron, Major George Bourne,
who knew the family from before the war, wrote to Colin's father
telling him what had happened. "He was in the trenches at Pope's
Hill and during an attack on Quinn's Post by the Turks, we were
pouring fire into the advancing enemy. Colin had just shot a Turk
and, elated by his success, raised his head a little over the parapet
to have another try, but a bullet hit him in the forehead. He died
before the bearers could carry him to the beach . . . He was buried
by Captain Green, our CE Chaplain."
The Rev. George Green had been busy with burials and trips to the
firing line since 1.30am that morning. He and another chaplain had
buried 26 Australians and 20 Turks, a task made even more unpleasant
and hazardous by the fact that the Turks had turned a machine gun
on the cemetery at daylight. Green however had a particular reason
for noting in his diary Colin's death. "Among the casualties
of the 2nd Regt," he wrote, "was Colin Morgan Reade -
a taking lad of Southport School, the youngest member of the Regiment
- not much more than 18 years. He was shot through the head this
morning. I was with him at the last, but thank God he was quite
unconscious . . . ."
It was over a month before his parents on Bladensburg received the
cable notifying them of his death. In due course they received a
photograph of his grave, and "one brown paper parcel",
as the "Inventory of Effects" form-letter carefully noted,
containing: "Disc, patent-lighter, letters, belt, coins and
note-book." After the war ended came three medals - the 1914/15
Star, the British War Medal and the Victory Medal, and a little
pamphlet entitled Where the Australians Rest.
His mother apparently never recovered from the loss. His sister
named her eldest son after him.
This was Colin George Milson (1919-1975) who emerged from the Second
World War a Wing Commander and one of the RAAF's most decorated
airman, winning the Distinguished Services Order and Bar and the
Distinguished Flying Cross and Bar.
In May 1976 I visited Gallipoli and the old battlefield. It was
then still a quiet, deserted place, off the beaten track and visited
by only a handful of people, quite unlike the way it is now. There
had been a big bushfire some months previously so the battlefield
was laid out like a model, stripped of virtually all vegetation
except the tall pines clustered around the big Australian memorial
at Lone Pine. You could still walk along the shallow trenches on
Pope's Hill (I even picked up a pile of old bullet clips there)
- and from them you felt you could reach out and touch Quinn's Post.
It was staggering to think that so much blood and effort had been
expended in such a tiny area.
Colin is buried just down the way at Shrapnel Gully cemetery, a
few hundred metres or so from the Beach. It was a small, stony place
then, shaded by a few gum trees. It is a bit more landscaped now,
and there are lawns. The bronze plaque over his grave simply says:
"383, Trooper C M Reade, 2nd Aust Light Horse, May 30, 1915".
