Kiwi Mutiny
The soldiers who gave the bullies the bash
Kiwi bugler Jock Healy never fired a shot in anger during World War I, and yet he still managed to start a mutiny that exposed the British Army’s inhumane treatment towards its own soldiers, and the men who had travelled halfway around the world to fight for the empire.
One hundred years on, the uprising at the infamous training camp next to the fishing port of Etaples on the northern French coast, just south of Boulogne, remains the subject of censorship and speculation over what really went on.
This army city was a brutal, hated place of route marches in the sand dunes, exposure to chlorine gas and endless bayonet drills. It was a place where ‘‘canaries’’ (instructors) and ‘‘redcaps’’ (military police) with safe jobs far behind the front lines could bully and torment even veterans of the trenches recovering from wounds. The slightest sign of dissent could result in field punishments that included a form of crucifixion against the wheel of a howitzer.
Respite from this hell of bullying and boredom involved a surreptitious journey across the estuary into the town of Etaples and the seaside resort of Le Touquet and back before the tide came in.
And at 3pm on the Sunday afternoon of September 9, 1917, Arthur ‘‘Jock’’ Healy, a wheelwright from Blenheim who had enlisted in the New Zealand Rifle Brigade a year earlier, found himself stranded by the rising River Canche.
He had no choice but to return to camp over the Three Arch Bridge, where the military police were waiting. The routine beating that followed was trivial by Etaples standards, and many thousands of soldiers endured this regime in silent resentment.
But on this day, it would be the Kiwis who led the uprising.
An enraged group of Healy’s New Zealand comrades descended on the police hut; a crowd started to gather and the mood turned ugly. The Kiwis had thrown a match on an enormous dry pyre of resentment. Stones were thrown, scuffles broke out, shots were fired at the crowd. And then the redcaps ran for their lives.
The Etaples mutiny had begun.
The historic town of Williamsburg, Virginia, (population 14,800) might seem an unlikely source of insights into the story of Jock Healy. But keen family historian Alison Rhodes, a retired US Navy chief information officer and the grand-daughter of a Kiwi war bride, has spent decades researching her New Zealand connections. Being a child of divorced parents in the early 60s, Rhodes says she felt the sting of the loss of her extended family. ‘‘Especially since my mother was a World War II bride from New Zealand and I had never met any of my maternal extended family. I yearned to know more about them; consequently, researching my maternal ancestors was the perfect complement to my love of history.’’ Her mission is to understand the people behind the faded fountain-pen entries on official documents. ‘‘Each of my ancestor’s stories is unique and unusual to me. I have come to love and respect each of them, and to cry and laugh along with them as they experienced triumphant highs and tragic lows.’’
Fourteen of her ancestors served in the Great War, and eventually she came across the story of the Blenheim bugler and a late-summer Sunday in 1917.
Etaples entered a kind of twilight state in the days after Healy’s arrest. Armed Australians went out into the sand dunes hunting for Canaries – so-named for their yellow armbands. Unbelievably, the mutineers even seized the hated camp commander, Brigadier General A. Graham Thomson, and tipped him into the river. Elsewhere, British soldiers marched to the Bull Ring training ground as ordered, but then just sat down in a silent strike.
Soldiers were ordered to block the bridge out of the camp; but the troops laughingly formed scrum-like formations and swept them aside, heading out to cause mayhem.
And then, almost all of them returned. In the end, of the thousands of troops who went out either for revenge or a drink, just 23 never came back.
Of course, the good times were never going to last. The Battle of Passchendaele was raging, and the dithering British high command eventually restored order, with the help of machine guns trained on the parade ground. More than 50 soldiers were court-martialed; one was shot.
However, the brief outbreak did achieve a victory of sorts. The hated Bull Ring was abandoned; soldiers were allowed to swim in the sea and go into Etaples for tea and chips. The commander and military police were replaced.
Of all the millions of men who passed through Etaples, why did the mutiny start with the Kiwis?
In one of the few scholarly articles on the episode, published in the Oxford University Press journal Past
& Present in November 1975, historians Douglas Gill and Gloden Dallas speculated that Anzac troops were ‘‘contemptuous of the narrow discipline to which British troops subscribed, and were led by officers who had invariably first shown their qualities as privates in the ranks’’.
In France, the men from Down Under – ‘‘a band of adventurers, all volunteers who had travelled across the world’’ – were the bane of authority.
Rhodes can empathise with the Kiwis, given her own experiences of army hierarchies in the United States.
‘‘I was the daughter of an enlisted man, but most of my friends’ fathers were officers. The segregation and class consciousness of the military is as denigrating to those in the lower classes as any class social system.
‘‘My military ID card was a ‘badge of shame’ – and I will never forget the first time I felt the sting of it – when I could only socialise with my friends at their officers’ pool by being their ‘guest’.’’
Gill and Dallas also speculated that the bond the easygoing Anzacs shared with the Scots was a factor.
‘‘At Etaples, this close relationship built a degree of trust and understanding which helped to convert the sudden riot of four thousand men into a series of daily demonstrations.
‘‘If the insubordination of the Anzacs played an important part on the first day of the mutiny, it was the Scottish troops, present in far greater numbers, who gave the mutiny its force.’’
Asea mist of censorship immediately rolled over the events of September 1917. A letter writer to the Otago Daily
Times in 1922 – a witness to the mutiny – demanded to know why the official history of the New Zealand Division published that year fails to mention it.
In 1978, British journalists William Allison and John Fairly published
The Monocled Mutineer, set in part at Etaples. Eight years later, Alan Bleasdale’s BBC adaptation of the book caused outrage among establishment figures in Britain, leading to the discovery that the records of the 1917 board of inquiry had been destroyed.
However, a detailed and vivid account of the mutiny can be found in an unlikely place – a story in Battle, a 1980s British war comic.
Charley’s War artist Joe Colquhoun was an assiduous researcher and the pages dealing with Etaples clearly show the lemonsqueezer hats of Kiwi troops as they confront the armed guards sent to block the troops on Three Arch Bridge.
In an afterword to a collated edition printed by Titan Books,
Charley’s War writer Pat Mills muses that inquiry documents suppressed for 100 years, purportedly to protect the privacy of the families of those punished – might be released on the centenary. But in April this year, Mark Lancaster, the UK UnderSecretary of State for Defence, told the House of Commons the ministry had no documents to release..
As for Jock Healy, the Blenheim bugler disappeared from centre stage after his sudden elevation.
A week after the outbreak he was in hospital with influenza, part of a recurring pattern of serious illness during his overseas service. The following April he was diagnosed with a heart murmur and by June he was back in Blenheim, having never fired a shot in anger.
In 1921 Jock married Martha, and they had five children – one of whom, Noel, served in the Italian campaign of World War II – and he lived out his days in Nelson, where he died in November 1966.
Rhodes believes Jock Healy, her second cousin three times removed, was ‘‘just not a man meant for war’’. He had enlisted as a bugler, a clue that he was not interested in ‘‘real fighting’’.
‘‘The last and most ironic aspect of Jock’s association with the Etaples mutiny is that he was simply trying to ‘sneak back’ into camp from that wonderful Le Touquet – and in no way meant to start the mutiny.
‘‘He was definitely the trigger after his beating and incarceration (though brief) for all that pent-up resentment to the surface. His example is so typical of events in history – seemingly random or innocuous events triggering much larger and momentous aftermaths.’’
The men from Down Under – ‘a band of adventurers, all volunteers who had travelled across the world’ – were the bane of authority.