D. W. P. Borthwick

The following brief article was published after Uncle David was rescued from the North African desert, but presumably before the military censors authorized the publication of his name. Granny clipped and kept it, evidently with much pride and enormous relief. David was shot down by a Messerschmidt Me109 on November 9, 1942, and the family was immediately notified in Geelong that David was missing in action, presumed dead.

Sergeant X, an Australian

Among the episodes of bravery cited is that of a 21-year-old fighter pilot baldly referred to as “Sergeant X, an Australian.” Wounded by cannon shell in both legs, entangled in the oxygen tube when he started to bale out, and having scarcely time to pull the rip cord of his parachute before reaching the ground, he landed in the desert without water bottle or emergency rations, which had been torn from his equipment. After dressing his wounds with pieces of parachute, he found he could not stand up, and started to crawl across the desert. By using his left foot and both arms he was able to propel himself slowly. In this way he crawled for four days and nights. He sucked early morning dew from desert flowers to assuage thirst; sometimes, while he lay motionless, he caught large beetles, cutting off their heads and eating their bodies. When found in the shade of an old Arab tomb by a patrol he was still conscious, and able to thank his rescuers for his first drink for four days. He had lost four stone, and the palms of his hands had been worn to sores. One wonders why the identity of such heroes is cloaked under an algebraic symbol.

Mosspeeble

According to the meticulous notes left to us by our great-great-grandfather, Alexander Hay Borthwick, his forebear, William Borthwick of Glendinning, married in 1701 a Miss Janet Scott of Merrylaw.

His son and namesake took over that farm, and married a Miss Elliot of Borthwickbrae, near Hawick in the same Dumfriesshire border country with which the family had been closely connected since the fifteenth century.

After a ruinous stock sale of 1753, Mr. and Mrs. William Borthwick retired to the coastal town of Irvine in North Ayrshire, where, in somewhat reduced circumstances, he practiced, it is said, as a “tide waiter” or coastal customs inspector.

Of their three daughters and two sons, the eldest, another William, joined the British army, attained the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, and was present with his own son, inevitably also William, at the Great Siege of Gibraltar in 1782–83. This younger William prospered in the army, became a general, and went on to assume senior commands in the Peninsular War. Major-General William Borthwick was wounded in the Siege of Cuidad Rodrigo, and died in comfortable retirement at Cheltenham.

However, it is Thomas, the second son of William and Janet Borthwick of Glendinning, that concerns us here. “In 1732 Thomas Borthwick took the farm of Shaws in the Parish of Yarrow (Ettrick to be correct). He got Langshawburn [Glenkerry, Dumfries and Galloway] in 1760, after his elder brother failed in Cassock, as a led farm [i.e. he lived elsewhere]. He also held land in England. He left Shaws in 1783, and for one year he lived at Langshawburn and then came to Sorbie in the Parish of Ewes, where he died in December 1793, aged 85 years.”

Thomas Borthwick married a Miss Jean Elliot of Borthwickbrae—who was in fact the niece of his own brother William’s wife (her brother’s daughter).

Undeterred by the immense confusion arising from so many Williams, Thomas and Jean Borthwick decided to name their eldest son William also. Aged only forty-two, this William died in Edinburgh in 1792, a year before his father. He married Elizabeth, the only daughter of Alexander Hay, Portioner of Inveresk, and a Burgess of the City of Edinburgh.

Upon his grandfather’s death, our great-great-great-grandfather, Alexander Hay Borthwick, the eldest son of William Borthwick and Elizabeth Hay, inherited the farms of Sorbie and Langshawburn, and scooped up his younger brother Walter’s property called Hopsprig farm, as well as Meikledale, Mosspeeble (above), and Lodgegill. He married Agnes, the eldest daughter of Thomas Chalmers, and died at Hopsprig on February 16, 1837.

In a curious twist, Alexander Hay Borthwick was for a period factor to Sir Frederick Johnstone, Bart., of Westerhall, a descendant of the doughty Lady Johnstone who tried her best to confiscate our crafty Borthwick ancestor’s sheep.

As a young man, Alexander Hay Borthwick’s fourth son and namesake was factor to the fifth Earl of Hopetoun at Queensferry. After his father’s death in 1837 he farmed Mosspeeble and Lodgegill until 1866, when he retired, went to live at Melrose, and drafted his family’s proud but curious border history, presumably for the benefit of his son, our pioneering great-grandfather William Borthwick of Bald Hills at Fulham, near Sale in East Gippsland.

The Borthwicks of Raeshaw

In times of merriment, my late father used to enjoy tormenting Mum by referring to her, and her Borthwick forebears as “filthy lowlanders.” This was based on the presumption that his own mother’s Campbell antecedents were sufficiently embedded in the Highland clans, notwithstanding the Hanoverian outrages of Colloden and Glencoe, of which Mum was careful to remind him, somewhat sniffily, by way of slightly less good-humoured risposte.

The Borthwicks were indeed a border family, but with some distinction.

According to a lengthy memorandum drafted in his elegant longhand by my great-great-grandfather, Alexander Hay Borthwick, and prudently preserved for posterity by Aunt Jean—evidently much consulted in her researches—the Borthwicks of Raeshaw, meaning the border-dwelling Borthwicks of Dumfriesshire and Midlothian, were descended from William Borthwick, fourth Lord Borthwick of that Ilk, of Borthwick Castle in Midlothian (above).

Lord Borthwick was Governor of Stirling Castle and guardian of the infant King James V following the catastrophic defeat by the English in Northumberland of the invading Scots army at the bloody Battle of Flodden Field on September 9, 1513. Lady Borthwick, whom this Lord Borthwick married in 1491, was Margaret, the daughter of John Hay of Yester.

In the early seventeenth century, Lord Borthwick’s junior, junior, junior descendant, William Borthwick, wound up as Laird of Raeshaw at the head of Gala Water in the Scottish borders, about twenty miles southeast of Edinburgh.

“The families of Borthwick and Pringle,” wrote Mr. Borthwick, “were at that time the most influential in that [unpromising] part of the country, and as even happens in these present times [c. 1880], they had constant disputes about their marches [boundaries] which led to a quarrel between the above William Borthwick and James Pringle, resulting in a duel with swords in which James Pringle was killed.”

The wording here is intriguingly passive, as if James Pringle’s death was some kind of regrettable accident, and William Borthwick did not, in fact, slay him in cold blood.

“William Borthwick fled to Eskdale in Dumfriesshire and remained hid in the woods there for a long time, his property and everything belonging to him being confiscated. He never returned to Gala Water, but when he had reason to think the duel was forgotten and that he was safe from prosecution, he took the big sheep farm of Howpasley at Howick on Borthwick Water in Roxburghshire, where he died, leaving two sons, William and Thomas.

It is not clear what Mr. Borthwick meant here by the hold-all term “took.”

In any event, “They kept Howpasley until the disturbances in ‘Bluidy Clavers’ time, c. 1685 [the death of King Charles II] when they were advised not ‘to sign.’”

John Graham of Claverhouse, first Viscount Dundee (c. 1648–1689) was responsible for policing the Scottish borders during the long period of religious unrest during the 1670s and 1680s, and was notorious for his persecution of the Covenanters. “Not signing,” here, apparently refers to the Borthwicks’ determination along with many others in the southwest of Scotland to adhere to the Presbyterian conventicles, and to resist the imposition of bishops, the Church of Scotland, and everything else to do with the Catholic King James VII [of Scotland; II of England], and the Stuart hegemony.

“In consequence of this their farm and stock were taken from them. All they had left were a few sheep which were ‘at grass’ on the farm of Glendinning on the Westerhall Estate.” According to a marginal note, Mr. Borthwick fastidiously notes that property was farmed by his father until 1874.

“The Lady Johnstone of that day had the farm of Glendinning in her own hands. She ordered all her sheep into the faulds so that those belonging to William and Thomas Borthwick might be secured (possibly for herself as she was on the other side of religious opinion). However a shepherd named Reeve slipped the sheep over the fauld dyke. Thus they got to the hill and were preserved for their rightful owners. Soon after this William Borthwick took the farm of Glendinning, and in 1701 married Janet Scott, sister of David Scott of Merrylaw.”

Again one notices Mr. Borthwick’s use of the term “took,” and one wonders where this left Margaret, Lady Johnstone, daughter of John Bannatyne of Corehouse and relict of Sir James Johnstone of Westerhall, Member of Parliament, Sheriff of Dumfries, who was thoroughly bound to the Restoration Stuart Court, but let us presume that she was not in any way a beneficiary of the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

The eldest son of William Borthwick and Janet Scott was naturally also William. This William Borthwick farmed Glendinning up to 1753, when he sold his stock by public auction: namely 820 ewes, 520 quinter ewes [meaning ewes in their third year], 490 gimmers [two year-old ewes], 60 dimmonts [ewe lambs after weaning], 560 ewe hoggs [roughly half way between a dimmont and a gimmer], 480 wedder hoggs [castrated rams of the same age as ewe hoggs], 50 old tups [rams], and 40 tup hoggs [uncastrated rams of the same age as wedder hogs], yielding a grand total of 2,960 beasts, not including black cattle and goats. Unfortunately the hammer prices have not survived, and although William purchased with the proceeds a farm called Cassock, he was forced to retire, aged sixty, a ruined man.

This is not by any means the only instance of financial incompetence on the part of our various Scottish ancestors, nor indeed of the tendency to resort to violence, and those patterns offer surprisingly little reassurance from the genetic standpoint. Still, there is some pluck and resilience also, and, in common with “Egon, Fool of the Forest,” that wild and undaunted person from whom Dad claimed direct descent via the Campbells, Mum’s Borthwick ancestor was evidently shrewd enough to survive in the woods of Dumfriesshire for quite a long time. Whether either strand has better equipped us to lead productive lives in modern Australia, or elsewhere, is another question entirely.

Lieutenant-Colonel William Borthwick, V.D.

Like their wives, our maternal great-grandfathers, William Borthwick (above) and William Pearson, were lifelong friends and neighbours near Sale in East Gippsland, but they also shared a close involvement in military matters. While not managing his bank, practising as a stock and station agent, or running his property called Bald Hills, William Borthwick was an auxiliary officer in the Australian Light Horse, with various responsibilities, it seems, to do with cavalry training, which took place each year at Kilmany Park. William Pearson gladly made his land available for that important purpose.

As a Member of Parliament, William Pearson took an active interest in defence matters, and was from time to time co-opted onto colonial defence committees as, for example, when he received the following urgent 27-word official cable from the Bourke Street East Post Office addressed to Kilmany Park at 7.12 a.m. on March 5, 1900:

Cabinet desires you to act on committee select men Imperial contingent can you act if so kindly attend meeting Defence Department Thursday next eleven o’clock reply paid [signed] D. Melville, [Victorian] Minister for Defence.

At least 12,000 Australians served in the Boer War (1899–1902) in contingents raised first by the six colonies and from 1901 by the new Commonwealth of Australia (about a third of the men enlisted twice). Many more Australians joined British or South African colonial units. Most of the 12,000 served in cavalry units formed in each colony, and were often known as mounted rifles, bushmen, or imperial bushmen. They fought in both the British counter-offensive of 1900 which resulted in the capture of the Boer capitals, and in the long, weary guerrilla phases of the war. Colonial troops were valued for their ability to “shoot and ride,” and they performed well on the veldt, which is not unlike Gippsland, the Wimmera, or the Riverina. Indeed, upon their arrival in South Africa, the Australians were described as the fittest, healthiest, best-fed, strongest, in other words the most spectacular fighting force ever assembled in the British Empire. Great-Grandfather William Borthwick helped to train them, and Great-Grandfather William Pearson helped the colonial government decide which ones to send.

At least 600 Australians died in South Africa, roughly half in action and half from exotic diseases.

On January 11, 1910, Colonel Borthwick was among the many guests assembled in the Queen’s Hall at Parliament House in Melbourne for an all-male dinner hosted by the Deputy Governor-General “in honour of the visit of Field-Marshal The Right Honourable Viscount Kitchener of Khartoum, G.C.B., O.M., G.C.M.G., G.C.I.E., &c., &c.,” for which the table plans have happily survived. Apart from William Pearson, who must have been at home at Kilmany Park, every other notable was there, from the prime minister down, including the cabinet, members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, senior army and navy officers, the diplomatic corps, Archbishop Clarke, Drs. Leeper and Sugden of Trinity and Queen’s respectively, the press (even-handedly represented by the Age, the Argus, and the Sydney Morning Herald), even the mayors of Ballarat and Brisbane, and, presumably unaware of the curious genetic congruence, seated towards the end of Table H—between Major Luscombe and Commissioner J. Hay, and opposite Dr. McInerney, Messrs. Bingle, Cerrutty and Hake—“Mr. Trumble.”

My dear Friend

Our two maternal great-grandmothers, Sophie Pearson (above) and Ada Borthwick, were lifelong friends, long before our grandparents, Sophie’s daughter Helen and Ada’s fourth son William, got married in 1920.

When Sophie returned briefly to Kilmany Park in the summer of 1915, she wrote to Ada, prompted to do so by the anniversary of the departure from Sale of Ada’s son Malcolm, who left to take up a commission in the British Army. He died at Aden of a fever contracted on board ship in the middle of 1908.

Kilmany Park

21^st February 1915.

My dear Friend,

It is seven long years today since dear Malcolm left Australia, yet tho’ so long ago everything is so clearly stamped on one’s memory. I still have his little book [of days], and love it. We were so dreadfully disappointed to miss Keith and Lex [Malcolm’s brothers] as we had been looking forward so much to seeing them. Ten days today since we came home, and we sometimes wonder if we have ever been away. One falls back so quickly into the old rut. Kilmany is looking beautiful and certainly Lilly and Alex [Gooch, her brother and sister-in-law] have not spared themselves. It is so lovely to be with them all again, and to see my dear old Father growing stronger again. Of course it is a great joy that Nance and Arthur [Gellion, her sister and brother-in-law] are in Sale, and such a perfect little home. Kittie [Gooch], too, is coming to Copeford for three or four weeks so that will add to our delight.

Have you seen the Bobs? They are due in Sale today, and I’m sure will get a great welcome.

We had a letter from Roy [Pearson] on Monday, dear son was in great spirits. I almost dread to hear any day now that he has gone to France, yet of course know that it must come, and he would be sadly disappointed if he did not go. Oh! This awful war! I wonder when it will all be over.

Very much love.

Ever yours affectionately,

E. S. Pearson

Six months later Lieutenant Keith A. Borthwick was killed in action at Gallipoli, and over the remaining three and a half years of relentless industrialized slaughter, Aunt Mim’s first husband, Captain Pat Jackson, and Granny’s fiancé, Lieutenant Campbell Russell, R.N., were both also killed. Roy Pearson, Lex and Ronald Borthwick, to say nothing of all three of the Trumble brothers, including our grandfather, Tom Compson Trumble, the naval flying ace and future senior partner of Mallesons, were lucky to survive the war.

The bridegroom

Our maternal grandfather, William Arthur Borthwick, the fourth son and namesake of Lieutenant-Colonel and Mrs. William Borthwick of Sale, East Gippsland, balancing lackadaisically on a roof whilst holidaying with the rest of his family in Norfolk, c. 1911.

Granny’s wedding

Weddings

BORTHWICK—PEARSON

A wedding which aroused a considerable amount of district interest, affecting as it did two of our best known and leading families of a great many years standing, took place in St. Paul’s Cathedral yesterday, when Helen, second [sic] daughter of the late Mr. William and Mrs. Pearson of Kilmany Park, Sale, was married to William, fourth son of Colonel and Mrs. Wm. Borthwick, of Sale. The Cathedral was nicely decorated for the occasion by the many friends of the bride, and the sacred building was filled with interested spectators when the ceremony took place. The bride, who charmed the onlookers by her prettiness, was given away by her uncle, Mr. Alex[ander]. Gooch [Uncle Sandy], and was attended by Miss Mollie Gooch as bridesmaid, and four little pages—two cousins, and [the] two sons of Mrs. M[innie]. Grant Bruce [the novelist, and her husband and distant cousin Major George Evans Bruce]. The bridegroom’s brother, Ronald, acted as best man. The Bishop of Gippsland (Dr. Cranswick), assisted by Canon Haultain, tied the nuptial knot, and the service was choral, Mrs. S. Napper presiding at the organ. The wedding breakfast at Kilmany Park was a particularly happy one, and there were no speeches. The happy couple left on their honeymoon by the afternoon train, when again there was a very large attendance of friends to wish them well. Mr. and Mrs. W. A. Borthwick’s future home will be at Fulham [Raeshaw].

—undated clipping from The Gippsland Times or The Gippsland Mercury

Da

Our great-grandmother, Ada Maud Mary, Mrs. William Borthwick, was the daughter of Edward Connor Bell and his wife Katherine Anne (née Wallen). According to Aunt Anne, the first occasion William Borthwick set eyes on Ada was soon after he arrived in Maffra to be manager of the local branch of the National Bank of Australasia, and she was kicking a football in the grounds of the branch of a rival bank of which her uncle was manager. In old age, Da (as she was affectionately known) enjoyed telling her grandchildren that she invariably wore this pretty beaded black silk neck-band to keep her head on.

This charming portrait photograph was taken in Melbourne in the mid-1920s by Ruth Hollick, who was more famous for her portraits of children. Hollick worked from 1920 to about 1929 in a busy studio at 167 Collins Street, and afterwards at Moonee Ponds.

After the death of her husband, Colonel William Borthwick, Da moved from Sale, East Gippsland, to Melbourne, and, accompanied by her two unmarried daughters, Aunt Jean and Aunt Kath, settled in a comfortable house on the east side of Adelaide Street, Armadale.

Lieutenant Keith A. Borthwick, 8 L.H.R., A.I.F.

CHARGE TO CERTAIN DEATH.

AUSTRALIAN LIGHT HORSE’S SUPERB DEED.

IMPASSABLE FIRE ZONE.

LINE AFTER LINE SHOT DOWN, BUT NO CHECK.

The charge of the First and Third Australian Light Horse Brigades (on foot) in Gallipoli on August 7th [1915] was one of the most superbly devoted deeds it is possible to conceive. The object was to hold the Turks at Anzac where they were, while a landing was being made elsewhere, and this object was attained—at cost of the life of nearly every man who took part in the charge. The story here given is told by Captain C. E. W. Bean, official Press representative with the Australians in the Dardanelles.

Before daybreak the attacking parties filed into the trenches from which they were to make the rush. They were in their shirts, with their sleeves rolled up and the brown forearm muscles showing. Their knees were bare and sunburnt. Each man carried his full kit, with 200 rounds of ammunition. Water-bottles were full; they carried food for a day or two. Each man had stowed carefully into his pack such little mementoes as he especially prized—a fragment of Turkish shell, some Turkish coins bought off a prisoner, a home letter and a photograph or two. They were saying goodbye to their own trenches—that night they would sleep in the scrub.

The attack on the left-hand side of the apex was to be made by the 8th Light Horse, with the 10th Light Horse following. Four lines would start of a hundred and fifty each, the first and second lines being from the 8th Light Horse—that is, Victorians—and the third and fourth lines being 10th. Light Horse—Western Australians. The first line was to carry, among other things, two scaling ladders made for the occasion. The fourth line would carry picks, shovels, and a dozen sorts of engineering supplies, but it was to fight like the others if necessary.

THE BOMBARDMENT.

In order to help the men to get out of the trench like a flash, pegs had been driven into the side of the trench and the footholds cut. As the moment for the charge came near the first line got its foothold on these, and the second stood in the trench behind it ready to give it a leg up. And then at four o’clock to the moment the bombardment by our guns began. For half an hour the slope in front of our trenches was an inferno, and then the uproar ceased as suddenly as it had begun—ceased as if cut off short by the stroke of a knife. And that same instant the Light Horse attack was launched.

The men were standing there in the trench without the least sign of excitement hitching up their packs, getting a firm foothold below the parapet. The colonel of the 8th, Lieut.-Col. A. H. White, insisted on leading his regiment. Ten minutes before the start he walked into the brigade office and held out his hand to the brigade-major. “Good-bye, Antill!” he said. A couple of minutes later he was at his place on the parapet with his men.

AN APPALLING FIRE.

Colonel White stood by the parapet with his watch in his hand. He and two other officers [one of whom was Keith Borthwick] had carefully set and compared their watches, and the three now stood under the parapet at three points in the line watching the second hand fidget its way round. “Three minutes to go,” said the Colonel. Then simply, “Go!”

They were over the parapet like a flash, the colonel among them, the officers in line with the men. I shall never forget that moment. I was passing not very far away when that tremendous fusillade broke out. It rose from a fierce crackle into a roar in which you could distinguish neither rifle nor machine-gun, but just one continuous roaring tempest. One could not help an involuntary shiver—God help anyone that was out in that tornado. But one knew very well that men were out in it—the time put the meaning of it beyond all possible doubt. Exactly 4.30—the Light Horse were making their charge. There were no British rifles in all that fire—it was the greeting of the Turkish rifles and machine-guns as the Light Horse cleared the Australian parapet.

NONE WILL EVER KNOW.

One knew that nobody could live in it. Many fell back into the trench wounded before they had cleared even the parapet. Others wounded just outside managed to crawl back and tumble in before they were hit a second and third time and killed as they certainly would be if they remained lying out there. Practically all those that were wounded were hit in this way on our own parapet. Colonel White managed to run eight or ten yards before he was killed. The scaling ladders are lying out there about the same distance out. Exactly two minutes after the first line had cleared the parapet the second one jumped out without the slightest hesitation and followed them.

No one knows how it happened. And probably no one will ever know. But some either of that first line or of the second line managed to get into the extreme right hand corner of the enemy’s trench. They carried with them a small flag to put up in the enemy’s trench if they captured it, and the appearance of this flag was to be the signal for a party of Royal Welsh Fusiliers to attack up the gully to the right. Two men were put in the head of one of our foremost saps with periscopes to watch for the first sign of this flag in the enemy’s trench. By this time a French “75”—a gun captured by the Turks from the Serbians in the Balkan war—was pouring her shell at the rate of about one in ten seconds to the neck. Machine-guns, far too many to count by their noise, were whipping up the dust, and it was next to impossible to distinguish anything in the haze. But in the extreme south-eastern corner of the Turkish trench there did appear just for two minutes the small flag which our men had taken.

THE FLAG.

No one ever saw them get there. No one will ever know who they were or how they did it. Only for those two minutes the flag fluttered up behind the parapet, and then someone unseen tore it down.

In the meantime, ten minutes after the second line, the third line had gone over the parapet as straight and as quick as the others. The attack was then stopped, and, fortunately, was stopped in time to prevent a small part of this third line reaching the fire zone. There was one point where our trenches were under the cover of the slope, and the men had to crawl out some ten yards or so before they put up their heads into the torrent of lead. A dozen or so were stopped here before they made their rush.

It was all over within a quarter of an hour. Except for the wild fire which burst out again at intervals there was not a movement in front of the trenches—only the scrub and the tumbled khaki here and there. All day long the brilliant sun of a perfect sky poured down upon them from a cloudless sky. That night after dark one or two maimed figures appeared over our parapet and tumbled home into the trench. They were men who had fallen wounded into some corner where there was a scrap of cover and had waited for this chance to get back. One of them came from below the parapet of the Turkish trench on the right. He had lain there all day, too close to the Turks to see him without exposing themselves. There was another wounded Australian near him. After dark they heard the Turks come out over the parapet of their trench searching for the bodies of the men there for papers and diaries, so they arranged to make as fast as they could for our trenches. The man who arrived back was shot through the ankle. His mate never came.

But from that man we know all that will probably ever be known of what those Light Horse men found facing them as they ran through the dust haze. The nearer trenches were crammed with troops. The bayonets of the front row of Turks could be seen just over the parapet—and behind them were appeared to be two rows of Turks standing waist-high above the parapet emptying their rifles as fast as they could fire them.

VALUE OF THE CHARGE.

There is no question that the charge of the Light Horse pinned down to that position during its continuance and for hours afterwards every available Turkish soldier within call. Our own machine-guns were able to get in some good work among those crowded Turks, and those who know say that their losses must have been an ample set-off to our own.

So ended the attack of the two Light Horse Brigades. The one man who came back from the parapet of the Turkish trenches on the Neck reported that the Turks there had their packs on and were in full marching order—evidently part of a battalion that had been hurried up from the reserves or else which was being hurried off to reinforce further north when this attack in the centre delayed it. The Australian Light Horse in the richest and fullest manner achieved the object for which their help had become necessary at a critical period of a great movement.

And as for the boys—the single-minded loyal Australian country lads—who left their trenches in the grey light of that morning with all their simple treasures on their backs to bivouac in the scrub that evening—the shades of evening found them lying in the scrub with God’s wide sky above them. The green arbutus and the holly of the Peninsula not unlike their native bush will some day claim this Neck in those wild ranges for its own. But the place will always be sacred as the scene of two very brave deeds, the first—let us not forget it—the desperate attack made by the Turks across that same Neck in the dawn of June 30th, and, secondly, of a deed of self-sacrificing bravery which has never been surpassed in military history—the charge of the Australian Light Horse into certain death at the call of their comrades’ need during a crisis in the greatest battle that has ever been fought on Turkish soil.

—C. E. W. Bean, The Daily Graphic, Monday, October 4, 1915.

In the circumstances it is something of a miracle that Bean’s extraordinarily affecting account of this horrific episode passed the military censor, and hardly surprising also that emphasis was laid so heavily on the larger usefulness of the operation. However, in keeping with the general mismanagement of the entire Gallipoli campaign, the British naval bombardment and landings which the Australians were supposed to make possible by this diversionary assault never happened, and, orders being orders, they were permitted simply to go ahead regardless.

Without question the Australians all knew they were certain to die, and the few survivors reported that, like Colonel White, many men in the first and second lines exchanged handshakes and said goodbye to each other in the minutes prior to the launch of the attack. Those who have been to the Nek say that the area of no-man’s-land between the allied and Turkish trenches is not much bigger than a suburban quarter-acre block.

It is hard to know how public opinion at home or, indeed, in Britain would have reacted if the truth had been made known, even if Bean had absorbed and reported it accurately, but this bleak pattern of human sacrifice piled upon human sacrifice ground on and on until the very end of the war.

As First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill devised the Gallipoli campaign, and took responsibility for its failure by resigning from his post in the cabinet. It was the right thing to do, but although the memory of Gallipoli haunted him for the rest of his life, unfortunately it did not extinguish Churchill’s fundamental belief in the tactical potential of “the soft underbelly” of Europe.

Commander Hugh Pearson, R.N.

This is a portrait miniature (c. 1815) of another member of our not particularly exclusive club of thirty-two great-great-great-grandparents. I have lately inherited it from my mother.

Dashing Commander Hugh Pearson, R.N., was born at Kippenross, in the parish of Kilmany, Fifeshire, Scotland, in 1778, the same year in which his father, William Pearson, forfeited the freehold of the family estate to his neighbor, John Stirling of Kippendavie, an appalling consequence of losing drastically in a game of cards or dice. Hugh Pearson entered the Royal Navy in 1793, aged fourteen or fifteen.

He was first mentioned in despatches relating to Admiral Lord Bridport’s defeat of the French fleet off Port L’Orient on Tuesday, June 23, 1795. Port L’Orient is about forty miles east of Quimper on the southern coast of Brittany, and was the home base of the French East India Company, with important naval shipyards. According to William Belsham’s Memoirs of the Reign of George III, Lord Bridport’s squadron was augmented by five ships of the line under the command of Admiral Cornwallis, who had been cruising for several weeks off Belle Île, capturing French merchant ships in-bound from the West Indies. “The engagement began early in the morning, and lasted till three in the afternoon, by which time three [French] capital ships had struck their colours [i.e. surrendered to the British, namely Le Tigre (80 guns), the Alexander, and, satisfactorily, Le Formidable]. The rest of the [French] squadron, keeping close in shore, escaped into L’Orient.”

Young Hugh Pearson was mentioned in despatches again following Admiral Sir John Jervis’s crushing victory over the Spanish fleet under Admiral José de Córdoba on Tuesday, February 14, 1797, off Cape St. Vincent in Portugal. That battle secured for Jervis a peerage (as Earl of St. Vincent—Cape Jervis and the Gulf of St. Vincent were both named after him), but it also made the reputation of Captain Horatio Nelson of H.M.S. Captain.

And it is in connection with the brilliant capture of the 74-gun San Nicolás, that we read, in Nelson’s own account of the battle, that the nineteen-year-old Hugh Pearson was in the captain’s boarding party:

A soldier of the 69th Regiment having broken the upper quarter-gallery window, I jumped in myself, and was followed by others as fast as possible. I found the cabin doors fastened, and some Spanish officers fired their pistols: but, having broke open the doors, the [British] soldiers fired, and the Spanish Brigadier fell...I pushed immediately onwards for the quarter-deck, where I found Commander Berry in possession of the poop, and the Spanish ensign hauling down. I passed with my people, and Sub-Lieutenant Pearson, on the larboard gangway, to the forecastle, where I met two or three Spanish officers, prisoners to my seamen: they delivered me their swords. A fire of pistols, or muskets opening from the stern gallery of the San Josef, I directed the soldiers to fire into her stern; and calling to Captain Miller, ordered him to send more men into the San Nicolás; and directed my people to board the first-rate, which was done in an instant, Commander Berry assisting me into the main chains. At this moment a Spanish officers looked over the quarter deck rail, and said they surrendered. From this most welcome intelligence, it was not long before I was on the quarter deck, where the captain, with a bow, presented me his sword, and said the admiral [aboard the crippled 130-gun Santísima Trinidad] was dying of his wounds. I asked him on his honour if the ship was surrendered. He declared she was: on which I gave him my hand, and desired him to call on his officers and ship’s company and tell them of it: which he did—and on the quarter deck of a Spanish first-rate, extravagant as the story may seem, did I receive the swords of vanquished Spaniards: which as I received, I gave to William Fearney, one of my bargemen, who put them, with the greatest sang-froid, under his arm.

Soon afterwards, brave Hugh Pearson was among the twenty officers and crew who were severely wounded aboard Captain G. H. Stephens’s 98-gun H.M.S. Barfleur in Lord Nelson’s audacious amphibious attacks on Cádiz on Monday, July 3, 1797.

Presumably on the basis of these distinctions, fearless Hugh Pearson was, according to the Navy List, on Wednesday, December 11, 1799, gazetted as a full Lieutenant. He was twenty-one.

Lieutenant Hugh Pearson, R.N., served aboard H.M.S. Elephant, and bore Nelson’s flag at the Battle of Copenhagen on Thursday, April 2, 1801. Soon afterwards, during comparatively genial ceasefire negotiations, the admiral confided to his Danish opponent, Crown Prince Frederik, that this battle was the most savage he had ever fought.

Hugh Pearson’s most conspicuous gallantry, however, came towards the end of his naval career, in 1809, by which time he was first lieutenant of the frigate H.M.S. Arethusa, which was built in 1781. From that vessel he conducted a series of commando-style raids against the French along the Cantabrian coast of northeastern Spain, on the Bay of Biscay, near Basque country.

Together with Lieutenant T. Joseph Scott of the Royal Marines (whose company was assigned to the sloop Ariel), intrepid Hugh Pearson led a party of sailors and marines who landed at daybreak on Wednesday, March 15, at Lequito (modern Lekeitio), about twenty miles west of San Sebastián. There they destroyed more than twenty guns mounted in French batteries.

Taken completely by surprise, a French sergeant and twenty terrified soldiers flung down their arms and were taken prisoner, while the rest of their comrades ran away. A small chaloupe laden with brandy was brought out from the harbor and confiscated. Only three British sailors or marines were wounded in the attack.

The following day the same party landed about four miles up the river Andero (upstream from Lequito), discovered more brandy hidden aboard two chasse-marées, and “destroyed” that stash also. These small vessels, meanwhile, were seized from the French and thoughtfully restored to their rightful owners.

Hugh Pearson may have been unlucky in that between the previous October and December (1808), his fellow officers aboard H.M.S. Narcissus had seized far more valuable goods from similar chasse-marées, and were paid handsome prize money through Messrs. Sykes, Hunt, and Malcolm, Agents, at Mr. Hunt’s office in Stonehouse, Plymouth.

A few days later, on Monday, March 20, a party under Lieutenant Elms Steele destroyed the guns at Baignio (Bakio), and captured a small vessel removing valuable bales of merino wool from Santander to Bayonne. Lieutenant Fennel of the marines and Mr. John Elliott, purser of the Arethusa, destroyed the French signal posts on the mountain behind.

That same evening daring Hugh Pearson, jointly leading the same party of seamen and marines from Lequito, destroyed all the French guns in the battery at Paisance (Pasaia).

In July 1810, Admiral Lord Gambier (after whom Mount Gambier is named) placed Captain Robert Mends, master of H.M.S. Arethusa, in command of a small squadron, consisting also of the Dryad, the Amazon, the Cossack, and the Narcissus, with secret orders to co-operate with the anti-French Junta General del Principado de Asturias by making further punitive attacks against French occupying forces along the Cantabrian coast.

The purpose of these raids was actually to force the French to divert troops from the interior, thereby relieving the Duke of Wellington of dangerous pressure exerted by the advancing armies of Marshal Jean-André Masséna, Duc de Rivoli, first at the siege of Cuidad Rodrigo (at which another of our relations, General William Borthwick, was wounded and mentioned in despatches) and onwards into Portugal. The Duke badly needed some breathing space, and some morale-lifting good news to report to Whitehall, and for the time being Gambier’s scratch squadron effectively provided it.

On Sunday, June 24, 1810, the Spanish Brigadier-General Rosendo José Antonio Porlier y Asteguieta and five hundred of his soldiers embarked on board Commodore Mends’s ships. On the morning of Thursday, July 5, they were joined by a brigade of seamen and marines under the command of Captain Aylmer of the Narcissus.

These combined forces landed at Santoña, whereupon brilliant Lieutenant Hugh Pearson of the Arethusa, leading a detachment of able seamen, in short order completely obliterated the French batteries in skirmishes at each of the four surrounding forts, namely Monte Buciero, San Martín, San Carlos, and El Mazo.

Eventually, without losing a single man, this unit of the Royal Navy systematically destroyed all French fortifications, more than one hundred heavy cannon, stretching about seventy miles from San Sebastián to Santander (except for the well-nigh impregnable Castro-Urdiales). In the process more than two hundred French troops were killed, and three hundred local volunteers deftly recruited to the burgeoning Anglo-Spanish side.

For this and other achievements aboard the Arethusa, reliable Hugh Pearson had conferred upon him the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in the Spanish service, which of course fell under the nominal command of the Duke of Wellington. By July, 1811, the Arethusa was nonchalantly cruising off Brest.

Doughty Hugh Pearson retired from the navy with the rank of Commander in 1815, at the end of the Napoleonic wars. He had slightly earlier inherited the property of Myrecairnie in the Parish of Kilmany in Fifeshire either from his father, William, or more probably his far less incompetent mother Jane (q.v.) (the only daughter of Sir James Campbell of Aberuchill and Kilbride, fourth baronet) but the place, which is quite elevated and exposed to North Sea gales, may not have been much chop.

Instead, or in addition, with his half-pay, pension, accumulated naval lieutenant’s income of slightly more than £100 per annum (after tax), and presumably a modest share of the proceeds of the Spanish ships of war seized at St. Vincent (payable at the Plough, Beaufort Buildings, Strand), and the £305,665 7s 1d in carefully documented booty from Copenhagen (which filled ninety-two transport vessels), plus, other than brandy, whatever else was soaked up in prizes seized from the French in northeastern Spain and elsewhere, canny Commander Hugh Pearson purchased Vellore, in Linlithgowshire, not more than about ten miles west of Edinburgh, where he settled in comfortable retirement, aged thirty-seven or thirty-eight.

The story of his career could not more closely resemble that of C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower, except of course for the fact that Hornblower eventually attained the rank of Admiral of the Fleet, a peerage, and a G.C.B.

In 1817 handsome Hugh Pearson married Helen, the daughter of Thomas Littlejohn, Esq., of Stirling, and proceeded to produce an enormous family of seven sons and seven daughters, of whom four sons and five daughters survived infancy. The eldest of these was our pioneering great-great-grandfather, William Pearson of Kilmany Park, near Sale in east Gippsland.

It is not entirely clear why Commander Hugh Pearson, R.N., was so determined to dissuade his eldest son from following him into the Royal Navy or even the merchant marine, nor why young William was by all accounts so determined to proceed with this plan in spite of his father’s declared opposition.

Perhaps one senses here some residual but otherwise carefully concealed damage done to the older man by so many years of active service on the Channel, North Sea, Baltic, Spain, Portugal, and Gibraltar stations, damage that extended far beyond his wounds, or else a not particularly unusual effort on the part of a Scottish Regency parent to exert firm control over a son who had the misfortune to inherit every bit of his father’s grit and determination.

Certainly the fact that young William Pearson waited somewhat impatiently until after his father’s death in about 1838 or 1839 before carrying out his plan to emigrate to Victoria suggests that, while he was alive, Hugh Pearson did indeed exert a strong, possibly even tyrannical hold over his eldest son and heir.

No doubt at times William was genuinely frightened of him, as, it seems his own children in turn were frightened of him.