Families and Friends of the First AIF

The Joint Identification Board, co-chaired by Major General Mike O’Brien from the Australian Army, and Air Commodore Chris Bray from the Royal Air Force convened on 1 March 2010 at Australia House, London to try to identify as many of the 250 soldiers whose remains have been recovered from the burial pits at Pheasant Wood and have been re-buried in the new Fromelles (Pheasant Wood) Military Cemetery. The Board will end on March 12 but is likely to meet again in late April or early May to consider any further evidence. 

Photo: Major General Mike O’Brien, Co-chair of the Fromelles Joint Identification Board [Chris Munro]

The Australian Army has provided some details about the identification process on its web site at Key Activities – Identification.

A joint media release by the Minister for Defence Personnel, Materiel and Science, The Hon. Greg Combet MP, and the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, The Hon Alan Griffin MP gives the following information:

Identification of Fromelles fallen begins
A joint Australian/British Identification Board is now considering evidence in an attempt to identify the 250 soldiers recovered from the World War One mass grave at Fromelles, France. 
Minister for Defence Personnel, Materiel and Science, Greg Combet, and Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, Alan Griffin, welcomed the commencement of this important process.
“The identification of the remains is an extremely complex process involving the review of anthropological, archaeological, historical and DNA information,” Mr Combet said.
“The Joint Identification Board will seek to determine as many of the soldiers identities as possible. The Army will then notify registered relatives of identified soldiers.”

“More than 1300 Australians soldiers died at Fromelles and have no known grave,” Mr Griffin said.
“Almost all of the 250 sets of remains have yielded viable DNA samples.
“Nearly 600 DNA samples collected from descendants will be considered by the Joint Identification Board.

“A commemorative event to open the cemetery is scheduled for the 94th anniversary of the Battle of Fromelles on 19 July 2010.  The battle was the bloodiest 24 hours in Australian history with 5,533 Australian soldiers killed, wounded or missing,” Mr Griffin said.

The Board will be co-chaired by Major General Mike O’Brien (Australian Army) and Air Commodore Chris Bray (RAF). The Board will convene on 1 March 2010 at Australia House, London and will conclude on 12 March 2010. Planning is also underway for an additional board in late April or early May to consider samples that were not available for the March board.

People who believe their relative may be buried at Fromelles and have not already registered should do so at www.army.gov.au/fromelles or by calling 1800 019 090.

The inaugural meeting of the Joint Identification Board is reported in the media report ID process begins for Fromelles soldiers.

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The Families and Friends of the First AIF applauds the joint Australian–UK decision to conduct a full DNA testing program on the remains of Australian and British soldiers found in mass graves at Pheasant Wood (Fromelles), and for their continuing commitment to identify as many of the fallen as is possible. We also thank the Australian, UK and French governments for affording dignified individual reburials for these soldiers, buried by German soldiers following the Battle of Fromelles on 19/20 July 1916, in the new Fromelles (Pheasant Wood) Military Cemetery.

Photo: Bearer Party at Re-burial Service January 2010
[Anny DeDecker]

A number of web-sites provide an overview of the Battle of Fromelles, the search for the “missing” soldiers, the archaeological digs and the recovery and re-burial services.

Commonwealth War Graves Commission: Remembering Fromelles

Australian Army Fromelles Project Group: Don’t forget me Cobber

Fromelles Descendant Database Project: Fromelles Descendant Database

ABC NEWS Special: Fromelles Fallen

Fairfax Sydney Morning Herald: Pheasant Wood: The  Lost Diggers of Fromelles

 Royal British Legion Rheindahlen Branch (Germany) Report on the Reburial service of 30 January 2010

Association pour le Souvenir de la Bataille de Fromelles en 1916 / F.W.T.M. ,Fromelles Weppes Terre de Mémoire 1914-1918: Fromelles Museum

The cornet presented to the 31^st Battalion at Enoggera Army Barracks in Brisbane, Queensland, in August 1915, on the occasion of the Battalion’s inclusion as part of the  8^th Brigade has been sounding the Last Post and the Rouse at the re-burial of soldiers killed at the Battle of Fromelles whose remains were recovered from the burial pits at Pheasant Wood.

The cornet, made in about 1911 by Boosey & Co, of London, was presented to the 31^st Battalion by Mr A J Cotton of “Hidden Vale”, a sizeable property at Grandchester.

The cornet is a close relative of the trumpet and is typically pitched in B-flat. Larger brass bands usually include an e-flat soprano cornet. The cornet is the smallest instrument used in the brass band. When played, the cornet is held straight out from the lips with the valves vertical or slightly inclined to the player’s right. The right hand is used to manipulate the valves and the left hand supports the instrument.

The cornet is engraved with “Solbron (Registered) Class A Trademark BOOSEY Light Valve Boosey & Co, Makers, London, 90735, Guaranteed British Made Throughout. Presented to 31^st Battalion A.I.F. by Mr. A. J. Cotton, “Hidden Vale”, Grandchester, August, 1915”.

Shortly after the presentation of the cornet, 31^st Bn had a Ragtime Band that may have included the cornet, as evidenced by the following photo held in the Australian War Memorial Collection.  While it is not possible to detect the engraving in the photo and the mouthpiece was longer in 1915, the cornet looks to be otherwise identical to the 96 year old cornet that was presented to the 31^st Bn.

Portrait of A Company, 31^st Battalion, Ragtime Band October 1915 AWM DAX0831

The names of the 31^st Bn soldiers who played the cornet are not known, however it is known that the 31^st Bn, as part of the 8^th Brigade, 5^th Australian Division was one of the attacking battalions in the Battle of Fromelles on 19 July, 1916, the battalion’s first major battle.

Presumably the cornet remained with the 31^st Bn for some or all of its time during The Great War before returning to Australia. The battalion’s other Great War Battle Honours include Somme 1916, Bapaume (March 1917), Bullecourt (May 1917), Menin Road (September 1917), Polygon Wood (October 1917), Poelcappelle (October 1917), 1^st Passchendaele (October 1917), Ancre (April 1918), Amiens (August 1918), Albert (August 1918), Mont St. Quentin (September 1918), Hindenburg Line (September – October 1918), and St. Quentin Canal (September – October 1918).

What happened to the cornet after that is a bit of a mystery until FFFAIF member and long-time researcher into historical aspects of the 31^st Battalion in World War I, Peter Nelson, saw an engraved brass cornet appear in eBay on-line auctions in mid 2009.

Peter had also found a photograph in his grandfather’s photo collection showing  three soldiers, two of whom are holding bugles.  They are thought to be from the 31^st Battalion based on Peter’s grandfather’s war service and supported by the shape and shades of their colour patches.  The photo was possibly taken in later in the war – perhaps in 1917 or 1918 based on comparisons of uniforms and buttons. Peter would appreciate any information identifying the soldiers or location.

The cornet needed some repairs after 96 years, so in early September 2009 Peter decided to have the cornet brought back to working order and placed it with a restorer, Legato, in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. This firm was set-up in the 1930s and specialises in brass and woodwind instruments. They have parts for musical instruments dating back to the 1890s and had a true understanding of the significance of the history of this instrument. They have also provided bugles to Army Messes over the years and know a bit about military bands.

The task was to find and replace two valves, repair the small tear to the back of the tube, get the sliding parts moving again, and remove a couple of dents, but leave enough to keep the ‘feeling’ of the journey that this instrument has been through, and lightly highlight significant parts of the cornet.

It was Peter’s hope to have the instrument played at the dedication of the cemetery at Fromelles on July 19 this year, as quite a few of the missing are 31^st men — and the cornet would have been with the battalion at this first terrible action.  Peter commented to the 31^st Infantry Battalion Association’s News Bulletin The Whispering Boomerang “This seems a wonderful opportunity to restore some of the cornet’s former glory, at a ceremony which is sure to resonate with poignant memories of the brave Australian soldiers — some of whom served in the 31^st — who will be re-buried with honours at Fromelles in a final, full recognition of their sacrifice.”

Peter’s hopes have been exceeded in that the cornet will be played at the Fromelles Cemetery Dedication on 19 July 2010 and Peter will be at Fromelles with the FFFAIF Western Front Tour and hopes to be able to see the Dedication Service. In addition, special dispensation was obtained to allow the Last Post to be sounded on the cornet at the military funerals accompanying the re-burials of all of the soldiers killed at the Battle of Fromelles whose remains were recovered from the burial pits at Pheasant Wood.

The Last Post is sounded on the cornet of the 31^st Battalion AIF

The Cornet has been played in Fromelles for each day of re-burials, where it has performed either the Last Post or the Rouse.  The Cornet also sounded The Rouse at the Last Post Ceremony at Menin Gate on Thursday 11 February.

BBC News carried an interview with MUSC Jeffrey Poole, who sounded the Last Post on the cornet during the ceremony.  Click on the following link to see the informative BBC News interview from Saturday, 30 January 2010: ‘Special significance’ of cornet played at Fromelles.

FFFAIF would like to thank the 31^st Infantry Battalion Association’s News Bulletin The Whispering Boomerang and its editor Colin Jackson as well as Peter Nelson for permission to use extracts from the December 2009 issue of The Whispering Boomerang.

Neil McDonald contributed an Opinion piece Best intentions can dishonour diggers published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 5 February 2010. 

Families and Friends of the First AIF, Vice President, Jim Munro has responded as follows:

In Mr McDonald’s opinion, in relation to the Australian and British soldiers buried by the German Army at Pheasant Wood in France following the Battle of Fromelles on 19/20 July 1916, “it would have been better to have left the grave as they found it and to have set up some kind of memorial nearby”. We respect his right to his opinion – that’s one of our democratic freedoms worth defending – even if we don’t agree with him.

Unfortunately for Mr McDonald, this argument was run in early 2008 and was lost on Thursday 30 July 2008 when The Hon. Warren Snowdon MP, Minister for Defence Science and Personnel, in the presence of the Friends of the Fifteenth Brigade, announced at the ‘Cobbers’ statue in the grounds of Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance that:
a new Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery would be created at or near the Pheasant Wood site and the soldiers’ remains would be exhumed and reburied with full military honours beneath individual headstones.

(Refer to the web posting of 1 August 2008 Reaction to decision at http://fffaif.org.au/2008/08/01/reaction-to-decision/)

Mr McDonald’s credentials as a historian are greatly diminished with statements such as:

“Haking, however, believed in all-out attack which, in a war of machine-guns, heavy artillery and barbed wire, was ludicrous.

The British general had already presided over more than 50,000 casualties – 20,000 men dead – on the notorious first day of the Somme.”

To claim that the beliefs of a distinguished British General in 1916 were “ludicrous” would not have been a contemporary judgement, but is a modern view, distant in time and geography from the circumstances.  Secondly, General Haking was a Corps commander in the British First Army commanded by General Monro which had no direct involvement in the fighting on the first day of the Battle of the Somme (more than 80 km from Fromelles and separated by the Third Army). The first day of the Battle of the Somme involved the British Fourth Army commanded by General Rawlinson and the Reserve Army commanded by General Gough.  Mr McDonald would do well to check his facts by looking at the Background to the Battle of Fromelles at  http://fffaif.org.au/research-tools/background-to-the-battle-of-fromelles-part-2-1916-and-the-battle-of-the-somme/.

Mr McDonald’s credentials as a historian are further diminished with statements such as:

 “The Australian and British dead were pitched into these mass graves in France and Germany because, in a day and a night of fighting to retake a salient north of the German-occupied village, 1500 British soldiers and 5535 Australian troops were killed on July 19-20, 1916”.

His reference to Australians being buried in mass graves in Germany shows little knowledge of The Great War. As to the numbers of troops killed in the battle, the Australian Army Fromelles web site states:

The Battle of Fromelles cost the following casualties:

5th Australian Division 5,533 casualties, including 1917 killed;
61st British Division 1,547 casualties, including 519 killed.

If Mr McDonald was more familiar with Battle of Fromelles and its aftermath he would know that the soldiers whose remains were recovered from Pheasant Wood were those who had died in or behind the German front line and that the Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment issued specific orders for the recovery and burial of both German and “English” bodies.  Major General von Braun’s order is reproduced in full in Patrick Lindsay’s book Fromelles. To the credit of the German Army, the identity disks were removed from the Australian and British soldiers’ bodies and returned through the Red Cross to London by November 1916 and Australian families had received these and personal effects by April 1917.

Mr McDonald’s opinion piece states that “The full story of Fromelles was covered up at the time ..”.  This is true and contributes to Mr McDonald not having a full understanding of the facts of the Battle and its consequences. It is a sad fact that while the Battle of Fromelles ranks alongside other major battles involving Australian soldiers, the sacrifice of the Australian soldiers is not recognised by inscription on the National and State war memorials in Australia.  It is recognised on the 5th Division Memorial at Polygon Wood in Belgium, on the Australian War Memorial in Hyde Park in London, but is not on the ANZAC Memorial Building in Hyde Park Sydney, or The Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, or the State memorials in Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart or Perth. 

 The ceremonies at Fromelles are very moving and the dedication ceremony on 19 July 2010 will provide closure for some of the many families who lost relatives in the Battle of Fromelles.  It is hoped that most of the soldiers whose remains have been recovered from the German burial pits at Pheasant Wood can be identified using DNA matching and other archaeological techniques so that their names can be added to their headstones – it is a small form of recognition that means so much to their families and is a very tangible commemoration of an individual life.

 No doubt the upgraded Fromelles Museum and interpretive / research centre that is planned will be significant, as it will enable the circumstances of the Battle of Fromelles to be better understood, the impact on Australia and its families to be better appreciated and hopefully the service and sacrifice of the soldiers and their families to be appropriately recognised.

Jim Munro
Vice President
Families and Friends of the First AIF