british war memorials · charles bean

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use the down arrow to view option ========================= ---------- section a ---------- argentine graves [Rem] asquith, lieutenant raymond [BWM] ========================= ---------- section b ---------- baltic exchange [BWM] battle britain memorial flight [BWM] bayes, gilbert [BWM] bean, charles [BWM] blighty, a soldier's dream of [BWM] british medical association [BWM] ========================= ---------- section c ---------- canada and liverpool [BWM] cenotaph, new zealand [BWM] chopsticks memorial [BWM] cochrane, admiral lord thomas [Rem] collingwood, vice admiral lord [BWM] ========================= ---------- section f ---------- fishguard [BWM] ========================= ---------- section g ---------- glasgow university memorial chapel [BWM] grenfell, captain the honourable julian [Rem] ========================= ---------- section h ---------- halifax bomber lw 340 [Rem] havelock, major general sir henry [BWM] helles memorial [BWM] home guard memorial (torbay) [BWM] hollis vc, stanley [BWM] horner, lieutenant edward [BWM] ========================= ---------- section k ---------- king’s own royal regiment memorial chapel [BWM] king's royal rifle corps [BWM] ========================= ---------- section l ---------- lincoln cathedral [BWM] ========================= ---------- section m ---------- malta [BWM] madingly [Rem] montford, paul [BWM] mckenzie, dr r tait [BWM] midleton, lord [BWM] music of remembrance [Rem] ========================= ---------- section n ---------- nelson's island [Rem] newgass, lieutenant harold [BWM] ========================= ---------- section p ---------- polish war memorial [BWM] ========================= ---------- section r ---------- rugby school memorial chapel [BWM] ========================= ---------- section s ---------- sandhurst, royal memorial chapel [BWM] sicily [Rem] st brides church [BWM] stirling bomber n 3654 [Rem] strange burial, a [Rem] ========================= ---------- section t ---------- turing, alan [BWM] ========================= ---------- section w ---------- wakeful, HMS [Rem] wakenshaw vc, private adam [BWM] williams, lieutenant colonel henry [Rem] women at war memorial [BWM]

Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean was born in Bathurst, New South Wales on 18 November 1879. His family moved to England ten years later. At the age of 10 he was taken by his father to the museum room in the Hotel du Musée, near the battlefield of Waterloo and it was there that the seed of an idea was planted.

“Bean thought it would take five years to write, it took 23 and the final volume did not appear until 1942”

He won a scholarship to Hertford College, Oxford, where he studied Classics. Bean returned to Australia in 1904 and was admitted to the New South Wales Bar. After two years, he became a journalist and joined the Herald as a junior reporter in June 1908.

In 1914 he was given the task of writing a daily commentary on the crisis in Europe. Although he could not have known it, he had embarked on the task that would dominate his life. In September 1914 he won a ballot held by the Australian Journalists Association to become Australia's official war correspondent, narrowly defeating Keith Murdoch. He travelled to Egypt with the AIF and landed at Gallipoli on 25 April.

He was wounded in the leg but refused to leave, remaining in his dugout until it healed and he filled the first of the 226 notebooks he would amass by the end of the war. Bean noted that Australian soldiers were devoted collectors of battlefield souvenirs and believed that a museum featuring these objects might be created after the war, but it was not until he had witnessed the carnage on the Western Front in 1916 that he began to conceive of a memorial that would not only house battle relics, but also commemorate those who had been killed.

Perhaps with the possibility of a detailed history in mind, Bean also urged the systematic collection of records, but it was not until 16 May 1917 that a unit known as the Australian War Records Section was established. In September 1917 he outlined his thinking in the Commonwealth Gazette, describing war relics as 'sacred things'. Amid the horror of the Western Front, Bean became more sensitive to the sacrifice of the troops and as the number of dead increased, his sense of obligation to the fallen became stronger.

In 1919 he returned to Gallipoli as the head of the Australian Historical Mission to collect relics for the Memorial, obtain Turkish accounts of the campaign and report on the condition of war graves. The book in which he described the mission did not appear until 1948, when the official histories had been completed. On his return to Australia in 1919, Bean and his staff moved into Tuggeranong homestead, south of Canberra, to work on the official history. Bean thought it would take five years to write, it took 23 and the final volume did not appear until 1942.

In 1946 he produced a single-volume history of the war, ANZAC to Amiens. In 1930 the RUSI gave Bean an award for the first three volumes and he received an honorary degree from the University of Melbourne that same year. Just before the final volume was published, Bean's second ambition came to fruition with the opening of the Australian War Memorial on 11 November 1941. During the Second World War Bean assisted the Department of Information by providing liaison between the Chiefs of Staff and the press and in 1942 he became Chairman of the Commonwealth Archives Committee.

After the war, he sought employment where he could, but he was 66 and the volumes he had produced generated no income. In 1952 he was appointed Chairman of the Board of Management of the War Memorial (an unpaid position). Often described as a modest man, it appears that Bean was also quite shy. He admitted that he was 'too self conscious to mix well with the great mass of men', yet it was the great mass of men that he sought to commemorate in his work and whose respect he hoped to earn.

His performance on Gallipoli cemented his reputation for bravery, and many of those with whom he worked closely, both during and after the war, held him in high regard. His long-time assistant, Arthur Bazley, described Bean as one of the finest men he had ever known.

In 1964 with his health failing, he was admitted to Concord Repatriation Hospital and remained there until he died in August 1968. His Official History of Australia in the Great War is his greatest monument and the Memorial that he first imagined in the summer of 1916 has become a major repository of Australian military history, a museum and a memorial to the fallen. Included in its collection are the voluminous notebooks, letters and diaries that Charles Bean started when he sailed from Australia with the AIF in November 1914.