The ANZAC story of Arthur J. Gilmour of Manaia, Taranaki

It may be 2023, but the extraordinary stories of World War One soldiers continue to emerge.  Powerful letters written home from the battlefields by Arthur John Gilmour of Manaia, Taranaki, have recently been donated to Puke Ariki’s Archive Collection by his family.  They were kept for over 100 years, and tell the lively story of Arthur’s journey from Manaia to Nelson College, to Otago University, then Trentham Military Camp, and dispatch to fight at Gallipoli and the Somme.  Arthur served as part of the Otago Infantry Battalion, in the Sixth Reinforcements of New Zealand’s Expeditionary Force.  His story is told here with permission of the donors.

An educated young man

Arthur was the son of John and Jessie Gilmour, and his family had lived in south Taranaki for three generations.  Arthur’s connections to home were strong, but he had spent long periods away from it since his teenage years when he boarded in Nelson (1906-1911). He writes to his parents in 1909 as the school year at Nelson College drew to a close.  He was busy swotting for exams, while outside summer had arrived.  The cherries were ripening, and there was cricket to be played.  In the holidays he hoped to go camping with a boy named Lawson, who was particularly good at fishing.  He signs off, “I remain, your affectionate son, Arthur”.  He misses his parents, who cannot visit him any time soon.

Arthur’s New Zealand world appears as a vivid network of social connections that stretched from Taranaki to Otago.  On returning to Knox College in Dunedin during the 1914 academic year, he describes everything from the car journey to Hāwera, to chatting to Mr Graves at the train station, to meeting another “Knox man” at Fielding with whom to travel south.  Dunedin shines as a place with “fine new buildings” and Arthur burns some energy at the new baths where he writes that “they have a shoot away up in the air and it is a great sensation sailing down this into the water”.  Everywhere he is stopping to have a yarn with someone, and he passes on regards to his family from those who had “asked after the Manaia people”.

New formations

That same year, just as university success was within reach, and Arthur’s career in dentistry was set to begin, war broke out in Europe.  The military camp at Trentham is a hive of activity when Arthur arrives in March 1915, fresh from working on an Otago oat farm over the summer.  The scale of the human resource being amassed makes an impression.  Arthur describes how on Saturday afternoons they walk to the Hutt River to swim and do their washing:

...it is a beautiful spot and we walk through lovely bush to get there; the water is beautifully clear and fresh.  It is a great scene to see a few thousand men in the water at once; some doing high dives from the bank, and others doing fancy strokes in the water.

He takes well to the training, judging himself to be “fit as a fiddle and feeling very well”, as other men fall sick and are dismissed from camp.  Again in this extraordinary setting, Arthur finds friends from Nelson, Dunedin and Manaia.  Other friends are thinking of joining, as the army takes on its own social pull.

There are glimpses of how women were responding to the mobilisation of their male relatives and friends.  As Arthur learns how to load, aim and pull the trigger on a gun, his sister Mabel is making him a balaclava.  He asks that his father stop her making anything else, as he has already been made a lot of things by “the Dunedin ladies”, including three scarfs.  Ever needing to consider food supplies however, he goes on to add, “What would not be amiss would be a nice big cake”.

Time must have dragged as three months’ training turned into a six-month wait for departure.  Having visited home before departure, Arthur is seen off from Wellington by his sister and friends, including a young lady named Sylvia, who gifted him handsewn handkerchiefs and a cake which dropped into the sea.  In a remarkable feat, Sylvia found another cake to have sent out to the troopship by mail boat, and the cake reached Arthur in the morning.   Throughout his war experience over the following year, Arthur is always sure to thank those who have sent cake, and he reports which friends it was shared with, and how much it was enjoyed.

Battle at Gallipoli

The Greek island of Lemnos was the staging ground for Allied troops being sent to the Gallipoli Peninsula, then part of the Ottoman Empire.  On arriving, the young men, many of whom like Arthur would never have left New Zealand, were suddenly aware of their own identity.  

We are all New Zealanders living together here so we still have the same talk & the same customs etc, which is much better than being among strangers.  We are a happy crowd and have nothing to complain about...

Going into battle at Gallipoli changes everything.  By December 1915 Arthur had been in the firing line during snowstorm conditions, on one occasion for an eight-hour stretch.  The soldiers were given capes to keep them warm in the trenches, and hoped for gumboots.  In a brief moment of respite, he wrote to his mother Jessie and explained that “There is not have [sic] so much danger in the firing line as out of it.  The biggest danger is from shrapnel & there is often a chance of being hit when wandering about.”  He was lucky to survive, as over two thousand seven hundred New Zealanders lost their lives before troops withdrew from Gallipoli Peninsula, the last leaving weaponry traps for the Turkish as they went.

The evacuation was perilous.  After days of walking with their packs, Arthur writes that he has never been so tired.  On the way down to the beach to meet the transport, a soldier in his party is shot in the back, and died minutes afterwards.  Another is shot in the leg on the barge where they were “packed like sardines” as they moved out on the water, and a further three soldiers from the Indian army were wounded on the ship as they departed Anzac Cove.  These were the last of the Allied operations in the Suvla and Anzac areas before troops were returned to Lemnos, then southwards to Alexandria and on to Ismailia in Egypt, near the Suez Canal.

Another kind of summer

The hot February days in Ismailia had Arthur reminiscing about summers at home in south Taranaki.  Writing to his sister Mabel in early 1916, he asks – 

How are you all getting on in Manaia?  Plenty of tennis & picnics during the summer months I suppose & the usual Mountain party; I hope we will be back for the party next year.  We are having summer weather here now although it is winter time. The days are about as hot as the summer days in N.Z.

Arthur concludes the letter by saying that he will be able to tell everybody much more when he gets back to New Zealand.  In another letter he tells his father of life in the desert.  A dust storm has raged for two days, and the huts the soldiers have built for themselves out of reed matting and a few sticks are not providing much shelter.  Ever enthusiastic about swimming, he adds that they had had a lovely swim in a salt water lake.  He notes that he has not seen his cousin Boyd since they first left Lemnos Island in Greece for Gallipoli, but that he has heard he is well.  

Fighting in France

May 1916 sees Arthur facing more intensive frontline fighting - this time from the trenches in France.  Before describing it to his sister Mabel, he wishes her a happy birthday, and sweetly hopes that she will have many more.  As usual, he tells her of all the letters he has received from friends and family at home.

We have not undressed for almost a week now as we have been up in the firing line and now are back in the subsidiary lines or reserves & have to be ready at a moment’s notice.  The firing line here or anywhere near it is a bit hotter than at Gallipoli & we have been exposed to plenty of danger during the last week.

The danger Arthur mentions includes shrapnel and torpedo bombs fired from German trench mortar guns, being “tossed” at them.  One landed a dozen yards from Arthur, and he writes “I just sat tight and smoked my pipe while the earth came pouring down on top of the dug-out (with only a corrugated iron roof)”.  He bravely claims to unafraid of bullets and shrapnel, but the ‘high explosives’ frighten everybody, and leave huge holes in the ground.  He encloses a letter for a Miss McEwan with this one to his sister, as he is out of envelopes.

In between frontline duties, men are billeted for eight-day stretches.   Arthur expects to see cousin Boyd soon, as he lives nearby, and hopes to travel to London, Glasgow and Edinburgh when he next gets leave, in a couple of months’ time.  In June Arthur writes to his mother, telling her that he and Boyd had visited Taranaki friend Gordon, who “had had his share of shells, etc”.  He also writes that he had been taken for a hot bath and change of underclothing, “which we greatly appreciated”.  This is the last letter in this collection to his mother, in which he signs off with – “I must say goodbye just now.  I remain your affectionate son, Arthur”.

Friends till the end

Arthur’s service in France continues for another three months.  A July letter to his parents was later published in the Nelsonian Magazine of Nelson College, titled ‘An experience of the late Corporal A.J. Gilmour’.  In this very frank letter, he recounts a raid on the German trenches of a few nights earlier.  Of thirteen scouts, Arthur is the only one left not dead or wounded.  He has lost “many a friend”, including a fellow soldier who “has been my friend right from my first day at Trentham”.  After a particularly heavy bombardment, Arthur assisted the wounded.  The first was a friend from Knox College, who had five wounds including a broken leg.  There were many more that Arthur helped to safety.  Ambitious to the end, he notes he is a lance-corporal now, but a corporal in three weeks’ time.  By the time he is out of the trenches, his party will have been there for thirty days straight.

Arthur continued fighting until he was fatally wounded on the twenty-fifth of September, 1916, in the Somme region.  The Puke Ariki collection includes a letter from Private Herbert Jenkins to Arthur’s father John, in which he recalls talking to Arthur an hour before going into action that day.  Herbert had also served in the Otago Infantry Battalion, as part of the Sixth Reinforcements.  He reports Arthur had been “enjoying the best of health”, and that after being wounded, he had died October 3rd at General Hospital No 6 in Rouen.

Back at the mountain

Arthur’s loss must have been keenly felt by his parents and his only sibling Mabel.  In the years that followed, each season must have brought back its own memories of Arthur and his time spent at home in Taranaki.  With Arthur’s letters, there are various photographs of summer mountain parties and other happy family occasions.  Arthur’s dress suit, a prized possession which he had carefully sent home from Dunedin, must have hung solemnly in a wardrobe.  His friend Gordon returned, and later married.  The fate of cousin Boyd, whom Arthur kept a watch over throughout their army service, is unknown.  With all of his friends and acquaintances, and their obvious importance to Arthur, it is certain that Corporal Arthur J. Gilmour must have been fondly remembered by many after his courageous ending in France, where he is buried.  His letters ensure that many more will be able to gain an understanding of what it was to be a young New Zealander at war, just over a century ago.

References

A.J. Gilmour’s attendance dates provided by Nelson College Old Boys Association.
The World War I letters of Corporal A.J. Gilmour, Collection of Puke Ariki, ARC2023-005.
Letter dated 17th July 1916, Arthur to his parents, France. Published in the December 1916 edition of Nelsonian Magazine, Nelson College for Boys