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Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean, historian and journalist
was born on 18 November 1879 in Bathurst where his
father was headmaster of All Saints’ College.
In 1889, his father resigned owing to ill health and
took his family to England.
In England, Charles attended Clifton, a school rich
in British imperial tradition, and in his last year
he became house captain. In 1898 he won a scholarship
to Oxford where he studied classics. He graduated
with second-class honours and then studied law and
was called to the bar of the Inner Temple in 1903.
He taught briefly at Brentwood School in Essex where
his father was headmaster and then sailed to Sydney
in 1904. He was admitted to the New South Wales bar
that year.
While Bean was establishing his practice, he wrote
some articles for the Evening News, a paper
edited by A B ‘Banjo’ Paterson, and worked
as an assistant master at Sydney Grammar School. Finding
that he preferred writing to teaching or law, Bean
became a junior reporter on the Sydney Morning
Herald in 1908. In 1909 he was sent to write
a series of articles on the wool industry in the far
west of the state. This assignment influenced his
perceptions of nationality and the differences between
urban and rural Australians as well as between Englishmen
and Australians. During this time he wrote a passage
about comradeship in outback Australia and he finished
with a prophecy that if ever England were in trouble
she would discover in Australia ‘the quality
of sticking ... to an old mate’.
Between 1910 and 1912 Bean lived with his parents
in London while he represented the Herald over
there and reported on the building of the three Royal
Australian Navy cruisers: Australia, Melbourne
and Sydney. In 1913 he returned to Sydney
but disliked his job as leader-writer and took several
assignments out of the country. From June 1914 he
wrote a daily commentary on the European crisis.
In September 1914, each dominion was invited to attach
an official correspondent to its forces. Bean narrowly
beat Keith Murdoch of the Melbourne Herald
in the Australian Journalists’ Association nomination
ballot and was elected to be Australia’s first
official war correspondent.
He travelled to Egypt with the first contingent of
the Australian Imperial Force in 1914, as a civilian
with the honorary title of captain. While he was there
he caused some resentment both in Australia and Egypt
when, under instructions from General Bridges, commander
of the Australian forces, he sent an early dispatch
about the rowdiness of Australian soldiers.
In April 1915, Bean sailed from Egypt with the main
body of the AIF. He went ashore at Anzac Cove on 25
April about five and a half-hours after the first
troops. Despite that, Australians didn’t read
his dispatch about the landing: it was held up by
the British authorities in Alexandria until 13 May.
Instead they read a more sensational account written
by English war correspondent, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett.
One army private wrote to his mother in July 1915:
Bean accompanied two Australian brigades during an
unsuccessful and costly attack at Cape Helles two
weeks later. He was recommended for the Military Cross
for the help he gave to wounded men under fire on
the night of 8 May but as a civilian was ineligible
so was mentioned in dispatches. His bravery was well
known and he was the only correspondent to stay on
Gallipoli from April until December, despite being
hit by a bullet in the right leg on 6 August 1915.
Instead of being evacuated to a hospital ship he lay
in his dugout until 24 August having the wound dressed
each day until he was able to go out and watch the
fighting again.
After the evacuation of Gallipoli Bean edited The
Anzac Book (London, 1916) which he compiled from
drawings and writing by the soldiers.
The seeds of the official history series were sown
when he was in France in 1916–18 with the AIF.
Conscious of his responsibilities to the men, he decided
that:
Even earlier, at Gallipoli, Bean had noticed the Australians
avidly collecting battlefield relics and it occurred
to him that there should be a war museum in Australia.
When the Australian War Records Section was set up
in London, John Treloar who headed the section, together
with Bean and others, organised collecting stations
for relics from the Western Front. Australian troops
went into the field carrying labels to attach to the
more than 25,000 relics which they collected. Official
war artists and photographers were commissioned to
document Australians at war. John Treloar, who became
the director of the Australian War Memorial in 1920
and remained there for thirty-two years, did more
than anyone to ensure that Bean’s vision was
achieved.
In 1919 Bean returned to Gallipoli where he studied
the battle from the Turkish perspective and reported
to the Commonwealth Government on the disposal and
maintenance of the Australian graves. In May he returned
to Australia and recommended an official history and
a national war memorial which ‘for all time’
would ‘hold the sacred memories of the AIF.’
The government accepted his proposals and later in
1919 the historian, his staff and all their records
moved into Tuggeranong homestead near Canberra to
write The Official History of Australia in the
War of 1914–1918.
In January 1921 Bean married Ethel Clara Young, a
nursing sister at the Queanbeyan hospital. Padre Dexter,
a chaplain who had been on Gallipoli, conducted the
ceremony.
The first two volumes of the official history –The
Story of Anzac –appeared in 1921 and 1924.
Bean himself wrote six volumes about the infantry
divisions – two on Gallipoli and four on France
– and he edited eight of the other volumes.
The huge project contained nearly four million words
and the last volume appeared in 1942, 23 years after
he started the project.
His theme, Bean wrote:
Bean’s diaries (226 note-books) were full of
the men’s experiences and what caused them to
react differently in battle. Bean wrote of the AIF
and the ordinary soldiers:
His approach brought a colonial scepticism to the
traditional British style. He wanted to produce an
account that could be read by everyone and he was
also very conscious of his responsibility as a war
correspondent:
The Official History was paid for by the Defence Department
and published by Angus and Robertson in Sydney. Despite
Bean’s request that it be uncensored, critical
passages were removed from The Royal Australian
Navy volume, at the request of the Australian
Commonwealth Naval Board and one other passage was
questioned and ‘easily settled’.
Bean’s view that ‘the consciousness of Australian
nationhood was born’ on the 25th of April 1915
is embodied in both his own writings and in his vision
for a war memorial. He envisaged a monument to honour
the victims of war: a place where families and friends
could come and grieve; a museum for war relics and
safe storage for the records that would contribute
to an understanding of war. The long-awaited Australian
War Memorial was finally opened in Canberra in 1941.
During these years Bean was also working hard to create
the Commonwealth Archives and in 1942 he became chairman
of the new Commonwealth Archives Committee. He declined
offers of a knighthood but did accept honorary degrees
from two universities in recognition of his achievement
with the official history series. In 1952, Bean became
chairman of the Australian War Memorial board.
Bean had travelled to England for medical treatment
in 1924 and he and his wife moved to Lindfield in
Sydney when they returned. In 1956 they moved from
Lindfield to Collaroy. Eight years later he was admitted
to the Concord Repatriation General Hospital. He died
there on 30 August 1968 aged 88.
Sources:
‘Charles Bean’, in B Nairn & G Serle
(eds), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol
7, Melbourne, 1979, pp 226–229.
Dr Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean, personal records, manuscript:
‘Ashmead Bartlett and a crisis’, item 892,
3DRL/6673, Australian War Memorial 38.
Private John Sloan, letters, PR00035, Australian
War Memorial.
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