Shattered lives
Sir Graeme Harrison recounts how his grandmother dealt with the death of two of her brothers and the maiming of her third.
Kitty King (née McKay) grew up with her three brothers, Hugh, Jack and Ben, on the family farm at Winchmore in South Canterbury. The three young McKay men set off for World War I, but only one came home. Hugh is buried at the East Mudros Military Cemetery on the Greek island of Lemnos. Jack is buried at the Kantara War Memorial Cemetery, near the Suez Canal Bridge.
Kitty’s third brother, Ben, made it home but had lost a leg and was invalided. Two large oval framed photographs of Hugh and Jack hung in the dining room of their parents’ home. The absences cast a cloud over family gatherings, their images a vivid reminder of the high price paid by the family in a war that no one wanted to talk about.
Graeme Harrison would sit at family dinners at his grandparents’ home wondering about the story behind the men’s pictures. He finally plucked up the courage to ask his grandmother about the young men in the photographs and found out about his great-uncles’ war service and their deaths. Kitty told him that losing her brothers made her staunchly anti-war and when it came to World War II, there was no way she would let her two sons go. She appealed to the Military Service Tribunal to argue the case and won.
But it was a family divided, with Kitty and her husband, Wally King, holding opposing views on war. Although Kitty fought to keep their sons out of the conflict, Wally chaired the local Farewell Committee, which celebrated and honoured the service of those leaving for the war.
Mt Hutt arch. Not only that, but the NZMHS has just completed its own research, which proves that New Zealand lost many more citizens to WWI than previously thought.
“If they were doing that memorial today, with the research equipment we have, there would already be
100 names on that memorial right now,” says Farrant. “And Graeme is right about the others. What this shows is that the cut-off date of 1923 for names to go on the Roll of Honour significantly understates our WWI dead.
“A really significant factor in this was shame, not just suicide but the rate of venereal disease. God, we beat the Australians with our rate – 18 infections per thousand on the Western Front. And people in those districts knew who had venereal disease and those guys’ names weren’t put forward. They were just discarded.”
Farrant says that, as a nation, New Zealand needs to put right the injustice to the memories of those men and others who were left off the roll but whose lives ended as a result of injury or illness from the war. “We are beyond living memory of those times. If we carved out our nationhood at Gallipoli, we paid the price on the Western Front. I can’t see any reason why all those who died from their war service shouldn’t be honoured. The poor devils – the prognosis for them on the Western Front wasn’t great.”
The fact that many of the men were sexually active when they had the chance was both predictable and common knowledge. So much so that by 1917, New Zealand was distributing to the troops Ettie Rout’s safesex packages designed to stop sexually transmitted disease – Rout was a Parisbased New Zealander who campaigned to stop the spread of STDs. Lieutenant General Alexander Godley and Major General Andrew Russell, the commanders on the ground, turned a blind eye to Rout’s work – they wanted men on the battlefield despite the moral opposition to prophylactics back home from James Allen, who was Minister of Defence and also Acting Prime Minister for 23 months.
DEATH-TOLL REVISION
It has always been known that New Zealanders served in the war in regiments other than the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. Farrant, like Harrison, points to privilege and background as part of the reason. “Some families were only one or two generations away coming from England. And in many families, particularly those with the means, it was rather demeaning that you would serve with the colonial division. So their sons were sent ‘home’ to England to serve with Imperial units.”
Although Farrant says these arrangements were known of, the numbers have not, until now, been collated or published. ‘There was a published record after the war of the New Zealanders who served in the Australian Imperial Force. Glyn Harper did the major work for his book on WWI and the New Zealanders who served in other units. He found about 11,500 names. We added ours, checked and rechecked, got rid of double-ups, and the total is 12,670, of whom 1660 died. So, our total WWI service deaths are easily more than 20,000.”
Farrant and colleagues haven’t closed their books yet on the uncounted and overlooked men and women who died as a result of the war. He says small numbers emerge in cemetery records from time to time, men who died in all sorts of places where no one previously thought to look or make a connection.
What happens next seems to hang on the determination of people such as Harrison and Farrant. Putting all the names of those who died from their war injuries, mental or physical, into documentation and publications would be a big job, but it’s not impossible. Farrant says it comes down to who pays to change the records and who pays to add the missing names to the incomplete war memorials around the country. It’s also a reason he has been pushing, with others, for many years for the establishment of a New Zealand War Memorial Museum at Le Quesnoy in Northern France where research and education about our contribution to WWI can take place.
For his part, Harrison’s next step is to persuade the Ashburton District Council and the Methven community that the time has come to do the right thing by the young men who left for war, many never to return
“If we carved out our nationhood at Gallipoli, we paid the price on the Western Front”
“As a nation, New Zealand needs to put right the injustice to the memories of those men and others who were left off the roll.”
or who came home with blighted and shortened futures.
“There are some people who believe that you let sleeping dogs lie, that whatever was determined in 1923 when they closed off the Roll of Honour should stand. But when are you ever going to fix this?
“One hundred years have passed and if it isn’t done now, it will never be done. And it’s a very incomplete memorial unless we do record all those that we know who fought in that war and died because of their service.” l