Book honours area’s WWI soldiers
Owaka authors Mike and Anabel McPhee have honoured the Catlins’ World War I soldiers in a book to be launched during the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day this weekend.
The Catlins and the Great War 1914-1918 is about the men who lived within the old Catlins boundary extending from Glenomaru to the Chaslands.
At a special community event to be held at Owaka on Saturday, Mike, a builder and Anabel, a librarian, will present the result of a five-year project that gives the military, personal and family history of 424 soldiers.
The impact of their loss and the hardships of those that survived and returned from war could still be seen and felt in the valleys and isolated communities of the Catlins, Mike McPhee said.
‘‘We wanted to know the stories behind the names on the memorials and those that did not survive who were not listed on the memorials.’’
Mike is no stranger to authorship. He wrote a book about his great grandfather William McPhee who built the first ship to enter Catlins Harbour in Catlins Bound (2009).
For Anabel McPhee the book is more personal. Originally from the United Kingdom, she has partly dedicated the book to her own grandfather Henry Llewellyn Williams who came back severely shell-shocked from WWI and was never able to work again, and her great-uncle Charles Percy Williams who was killed on the Somme.
It sparked an interest in the soldiers of her adopted country and district.
‘‘We wanted their stories to he heard, the things that weren’t talked about or published at the time.’’
However, considering the war went on for four years, and had a
‘‘We wanted to know the stories behind the names on the memorials and those that did not survive who were not listed on the memorials.’’ Mike McPhee
big effect on the district, the biggest surprise was that so little was written about it.
‘‘We expected to find a lot more from the families from the letters they [the soldiers] wrote,’’ she said.
‘‘But there was the censorship and when they got home they didn’t want to talk about it,’’ Mike said.
That was a big motivation, to tell their stories, and record whatever of their personal histories that they could glean.
There were some women as well, war brides who came back with Catlins soldiers.
What struck them about the soldiers and the people of this time – the Catlins was still a bush-clad frontier district 100 years ago – was their strength.
‘‘I don’t think we would handle [what they went through] today,"Mike said.
In a letter that was published in New Zealand newspapers Catlins soldier James Wratten writes about the Allied advance in France of late September 1915, and getting the command ‘‘up and over at 6 o’clock’’.
‘‘The ground was perfectly flat and we must have been a good mark for their machine guns; but anyhow we just walked over and took that redoubt, and, would you believe it, every man had a smile on his face all the time [. . .] We felt as happy as schoolboys.’’
In the book’s preface, the McPhees remark on the great courage of those who died.
‘‘But the strength and courage needed by those who returned home ill, wounded, gassed or shell-shocked, who faced years of pain and disrupted lives was perhaps greater.’’
Catlins-born Lieutenant Colonel Magnus Latta of the Royal New Zealand Police who wrote the forward to the book, described the impact of war on mental health: Uncles who lived out the rest of their days in the back cottage on the farm away from others, neighbours who lost limbs, relatives who were forever in ill-health from exposure to chemicals and trauma.
‘‘The effects of war were felt throughout New Zealand, but I suspect that in rural and small town areas the gaps left by those who did not return were more noticeable.’’
The close-knit community would have felt every loss and the affected families would have never forgotten those losses, he said. By the end of the war, there was a definite shift in attitude: ‘‘Soldiers realised that war wasn’t an adventure,’’ Anabel said.
‘‘There was nothing glamorous about it;’’ Mike said.
‘‘Even if farm life was tedious work it was better than being blown to bits.’’
The toll on the Owaka Rugby Club senior players provided a chilling microcosm of what WWI cost the Catlins. Most of the members were wounded, some honoured with medals but others killed, or died later of warrelated illness.
World and national events such as the influenza epidemic of 1918 took the focus off the end of the war and the suffering of those who served in it.
‘‘I think those men are owed a debt because their stories were never told,’’ Mike said.
They were overtaken by the depression, then onto another war. ‘‘Their stories never saw the light of day.’’
The McPhees were determined to ‘‘do right by them’’.