MUTINY, MURDER AND POLITICAL CONTROVERSY

Robert Hadler is the author of Dark Secrets – The True Story of Murder in HMAS Australia  and, most recently, Mutineers – A True Story of Heroes and Villains which records the history of how five young Australian sailors seeking adventure in a far off war fell foul of British Imperial authority and sparked one of the most controversial events in the annals of the RAN. On Tuesday 18 May 2021, Robert Hadler addressed The Sydney Institute to talk about his books.

MUTINY, MURDER AND POLITICAL CONTROVERSY

ROBERT HADLER

It is a pleasure to be in a room full of people here at The Sydney Institute tonight after a prolonged period of COVID-19 lockdown.

Before I start this talk I would like to recognise and thank a number of people, starting with Gerard and Anne Henderson for hosting one of their first face-to-face events after the COVID-19 lockdown (with the inevitable supporting zoom video conference). I was working in London as a foreign correspondent for The Australian newspaper when Gerard and Anne established the Sydney Institute in 1989 and I immediately became a member when I came back to Australia in 1991 – 30 years ago.

It is particularly pleasing to see so many members and old friends in the audience tonight, including relatives and friends of the key characters in my two books whose lives brought my stories to life. It is a pleasure to have Cheryl Langford, and her husband Robert, here tonight. Cheryl is related to Dalmorton Rudd, the chief hero and villain in my book, Mutineers. I am also pleased to see Giles Yates who was a close friend of Ron Gordon, a key character in Dark Secrets. Without their help, I would not have been about to write the essential human interest stories that added flesh and blood to the bare bones of the facts in the National Archives. I am forever indebted to them. I would also like to thank my agent, Margaret Gee and my publisher, Michael Wilkinson for supporting me as a first time author and giving me the chance to bring these quintessential Australian stories to print.

Prominent naval historians, David Stevens and Rear Admiral James Goldrick, also played important roles in guiding me, challenging me and fact check my manuscripts. David Stevens gave me advice and material on events in the First World War that helped shape Mutineers and James Goldrick provided the spark for the human-interest story in Dark Secrets.

Mutineers

So what is my presentation about? It starts with a mutiny in Fremantle in 1919 and reaches its crisis point with a murder in the Coral Sea in 1942. Both events sparked political and diplomatic controversy and eventually resulted in national independence. In effect, the two stories bookend the long, slow and at times, painful transition from a colony to dependent Dominion and finally independent nation status in the 50 years after Federation. My two books therefore deal with serious military, legal and political issues, which are covered with academic rigour.

I did not want these books to be academic tomes gathering dust in lonely libraries. I wanted these books to be engaging human stories, backed by true events, covering complex and sensitive issues, that would capture the interest of as many readers as possible in Australian history, our history.

Mutineers is based on the lives of five working class boys who grew up in Sydney and Melbourne in the years immediately after Federation when national pride in our new country was its strongest. Dalmorton Rudd and his younger brother Lenny where rough, knock-about boys from Campsie in the western suburbs of Sydney. Their boyhood friend, Ken Paterson was a shy country lad born in Young in central NSW but grew up quickly when his family moved to the neighbouring suburb of Canterbury on the Cooks River. Their two other wartime friends were Bill McIntosh, who grew up in Coburg and Pitta Thompson who grew up in Richmond,

National pride, a desire for adventure and the thrill of fighting for the Empire against the Germans drove them to join the fledgling Royal Australian Navy at the start of the war. They were young and brave but naive and they were in for a rude shock when the war actually started. Fate brought the five boys together on the battle cruiser, HMAS Australia. It was the flagship of the Australian fleet that had only arrived from Britain in October 1913. The Australian fleet comprised the battlecruiser, two light cruisers, Sydney and Melbourne and six River-class torpedo destroyers.

While Australia was the biggest and deadliest warship in the Southern Hemisphere, the Australian Fleet was small compared to the Great White Fleet of American warships that visited in 1908. At this stage of its development, the RAN was never intended to stand alone in any major war. It was always intended to be part of the much bigger Royal Navy squadron in the Far East based in Hong Kong. And, so, when the war started in August 1914, the Governor General, Ronald Munro Ferguson, under an executive order by the Federal Government, transferred operational control of the RAN to the Admiralty in London for the duration of the war.

The Australian Government did not realise it then, but this meant that the British Admiralty took total control of our warships and sailors, posting them all over the world without consultation. The unintended effect of the executive order was to place Australian sailors under Royal Navy regulations dating back to 1865 that applied severe punishment for breaches of discipline. In some cases, the punishments under the Kings Regulations were much stronger than sentences under Australian law.

The officers that led the RAN in its early years were all British Royal Navy career professionals. The RAN officer cadet school had only just been established and Australia did not have qualified or experienced officers to lead the RAN. The RAN could not have survived and flourished without Royal Navy officers. But it sometimes led to an “us and them” atmosphere and disciplinary problems on RAN warships, especially on an unlucky warship such as Australia.

Australia spent the first six months of the war fruitlessly chasing the German East Asia Squadron around the Pacific. The Admiralty ordered it to seize largely undefended German possessions and protect French islands in the Pacific. This was demoralising for the young crew who were desperate for action.

Australia missed the Battle of Coronel off Chile in late 1914 where the German Squadron outclassed an old British Squadron, and the Battle of the Falklands in early 1915 when a new, and bigger British Squadron got revenge and sank the German Squadron. And when Australia finally captured the German auxiliary vessel, Eleonore Woermann, it was forced to sink it rather than claim it as a valuable prize. This rubbed salt into the wounded pride of the Australia crew.

Once it arrived in Britain, Australia was seconded to the 2nd Battlecruiser Squadron based at Rosyth in northern Scotland and spent many cold winter months at the desolate base of Scapa Flow in the Orkney islands. Bad luck struck again, twice, when Australia collided with two Royal Navy warships, HMS New Zealand in 1916 and HMS Repulse in 1917. As a result of the first collision, Australia missed the Battle of Jutland and it would never face the enemy again in a fleet action.

The only time Australia fired its guns in anger at the enemy again was December 1917 when it tried to sink a suspected German submarine in the English Channel. As a result, the Australia crew were forced to endure four years of lonely, monotonous and dangerous convoy and mine laying operations without any glory of action. They also suffered from pneumonia and an outbreak of mumps that forced the warship to be placed in quarantine.

Boredom, sickness and frustration at what was seen as harsh Royal Navy discipline increasingly resulted in disciplinary breaches. Because of their frustration, the Rudd brothers and their friends all bore the brunt of harsh Royal Navy sanctions. It got so bad that Bill McIntosh deserted to try and join the AIF in France but he was captured by the Metropolitan Police in London and returned to the battlecruiser to spend days in gaol. The only highlight of the war for the boys was when Dalmorton Rudd, and 10 other volunteers from the battlecruiser were selected to participate on a Royal Navy raid on the German submarine port of Zeebrugge in Belgium in April 1918.

Dalmorton Rudd and a shipmate Harry Gillard were in the thick of the action and became involved in hand to hand combat against German defenders on the Mole, a sea wall guarding the port. For his bravery, Dalmorton Rudd was included in a ballot for the Victoria Cross but the superior numbers of Royal Navy and Royal Marines in the ballot saw the awards go to their countrymen. Dalmorton Rudd was eventually awarded the Distinguished Service Medal that gave him serious bragging rights amongst the shipmates on the battlecruiser.

During shore leave, Dalmorton Rudd became reacquainted with an older barmaid, Isabel Whitley, whom he had met when he first came to her bar in Leeds in 1915. He fell in love with Isabel and promised to catch up with her when the war was over. He did not know it then, but he left Isabel pregnant and it would be a complete surprise when he saw her again six months later. He was overjoyed by the pregnancy and immediately proposed. His brother Lenny was his best man at the wedding in Leeds in January 1919.

But misfortune struck Dalmorton Rudd. Three months later Isabel succumbed to the Spanish Flu and, very weak, died giving birth to a baby girl. Dalmorton was devastated and did not know how to cope with a new baby. Dalmorton eventually agreed to hand the baby girl, also called Isabel, to her Isabel’s family to look after until he could arrange for her to join him in Australia. He did not know it then, but the baby would also succumb to the Spanish Flu several months later.

When he went back to the battlecruiser, Dalmorton was morose, increasingly prone to heavy drinking and ill discipline. His brother and friends coaxed him through the tough times as best they could but there were increasingly dangerous signs of reckless behaviour.

Australia sailed for home in May 1919 with a new Captain, Claude Cumberlege, and a new Commodore, John Dumaresq. Neither were the first choice for the roles and their leadership qualities were to be tested on the homeward journey to Australia. Both Cumberlege and Dumaresq were aware of a small group of disgruntled sailors, self-titled the FIF – F..k It I’m Finished – time served sailors who simply wanted to leave the ship and get back home. They decided not to take any action but wait until they got back home and simply get the time served sailors to leave the RAN.

However, there was trouble in Port Said where Dalmorton Rudd was punished and demoted after resisting the shore patrol when found drunk ashore. During the traditional crossing of the line ceremony, the FIF formed Neptune’s Guard and were overly rough with the Engineer Officer in the dunking pool. When they arrived in Fremantle, the FIF were initially quiet during three days of official visits but Saturday night leave, just before Australia sailed, released pent up tension. Cumberlege wanted to do the right thing by the crew after a month at sea but was worried about letting the sailors go ashore the night before they sailed. Unfortunately it was a mistake.

The FIF, led by the Rudd brothers, socialised with Fremantle Lumpers Union members in local hotels. Striking Lumpers Union members had fought the WA police in the Battle of the Barricades earlier in the year and one of their members had been killed. A coronial inquest into the death occurred just as Australia docked in Fremantle and there was there was a mood of Bolshevism in the air.

The FIF sailors drank all night with the Lumpers and went back to Australia on Sunday 1 June, full of Dutch courage. They came back determined to stop the ship sailing. They encouraged 80-100 of the crew to gather on the quarterdeck and request sailing be delayed for one day so they could repay the people of Fremantle for their warm welcome. After Cumberlege abruptly dismissed the request, the FIF went to the engine room and cajoled the stokers to go on strike – this was the moment a mutiny occurred.

Cumberlege was not to be out-manoeuvred and ordered his junior officers and Petty Officers to fire up the boilers and get the ship underway. The Captain had experienced crew unrest during the war and was prepared to let the sailors sleep off their hangovers and simply dismiss the ringleaders later. However, Commodore Dumaresq was a strict disciplinarian and wanted the ringleaders found and court-martialled.

The Rudd brothers and their three friends were quickly identified as the FIF ringleaders and were locked up in the ship’s cells pending a court martial. The court martial took place in Sydney Harbour three weeks later on Friday 20 June. It only lasted a few hours. The men were advised to plead guilty in return for reduced sentences. The court martial panel quickly found them guilty and they were sentenced under Kings Regulations to several years’ hard labour in Goulburn Gaol, and were then to be dishonourably discharged from the RAN.

A former Nationalist MP, Dick Orchard, acted as the Prisoners Friend, or defence attorney, and offered to lobby the Navy Minister to intervene. A NSW Labour MLC, Michael Connington, also knew the Rudd family and encouraged his State and Federal colleagues to pressure the federal government to release the five men. The Labor Party seized on the “savage sentences” to embarrass the Nationalist Government in the lead up to the 1919 Federal election later in the year. Both the Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, and the Navy Minister, Sir Joseph Cook, were in Paris negotiating the peace agreement. This left acting Prime Minister, Bill Watt, and acting Navy Minister, Alec Poynton, in the political firing line and they did not manage the Labor attack well.

The Nationalist government was left defending naval discipline and lost the battle over the sailors’ plight in the court of public opinion. When Billy Hughes and Sir Joseph Cook returned to Australia, in August 1919, they faced a hostile Parliament and aggressive media.

Hughes and Cook wanted to set the prisoners free but they were told they did not have the power to do so as the sailors had been sentenced under Kings Regulations after the transfer of the RAN to the Admiralty at the start of the war. As a result, they were forced to lobby the Admiralty for early release of the sailors to stop the debate damaging their re-election chances.

The Admiralty was slow to respond and when they did respond only offered a phased release of the prisoners that would not meet the government’s election imperative. Hughes and Cook therefore decided to bypass the Admiralty and go straight to their political masters in Whitehall to seek their agreement for early release of the sailors. Whitehall was more attuned to the political issues facing the Australian government and forced the Admiralty to acquiesce and agree to early release in December 1919.

Hughes and Cook were jubilant, and the sailors relieved that they would only spend six months in gaol for the mutiny. However, the two most senior British naval officers in charge of the RAN, Rear Admiral Percy Grant and Commodore Dumaresq were aghast at political interference in the chain of command, that they threatened to resign. While early release put an end to any election debate, naval resignations would rekindle a domestic political controversy and spark a diplomatic furore. It would also undermine the development of the RAN at a critical post war stage of its development.

Cook worked hard behind the scenes over several months to appease Grant and Dumaresq and made some face-saving concessions to stop the resignations. While Cook achieved a peaceful behind the scenes settlement, the underlying issues of sovereignty and political interference in the chain of command were unresolved.

The issues were forgotten during the tough inter-war years when the RAN was subject to spending cuts. And the decision not to adopt the Statute of Westminster on the suggestion of the British Parliament in 1931 left Australia a dependent Dominion in the British Empire. Conservative governments simply did not want to cut the apron strings with Great Britain as the threat of war with Japan was rising.

The five sailors were released from gaol and gradually built normal lives after the war but their stories would develop in different and dramatic ways.

Dark Secrets

When the Second World War commenced in August 1939, the Australian government, led by Robert Menzies, authorised the Governor General, Alexander Hore-Ruthven, the 1st Earl of Gowrie, to transfer the RAN to Admiralty control again, despite the issues this created in 1919. The transfer of the RAN to the Admiralty may have made sense when the war was against the Germans, Italians and Vichy French in 1939-41 but it made no sense when the RAN was jointly operating with the US Navy in the Pacific in 1942.

The Menzies Government had not learnt the lessons of the past and was condemned to repeat the mistakes of ceding national sovereignty over our naval forces to Great Britain. This would have dramatic unintended consequences for two lowly stokers on the second HMAS Australia in 1942. The two sailors, Rob Gordon and Ted Elias joined the RAN in 1936 and met another young Tasmanian sailor, Jack Riley in the engine room of the heavy cruiser in 1939.

A combination of factors caused friction between the three sailors and one dark night in the Coral Sea, Gordon and Elias attacked Riley and left him mortally wounded. Jack Riley took 24 hours to die from 14 stab wounds incurred during the fight with Gordon and Elias. Before he died, Riley told the ship’s surgeon, Malcolm Stening, that Gordon and Elias attacked him because they were “poofters” (sic) but he did not sign a witness statement to effect before he was buried at sea. The officers on HMAS Australia were shocked by the brutal attack and ordered an immediate inquiry. The Executive Officer, “Blackjack” John Armstrong, interrogated the stokers and sent a secret report to Captain, Harold Farncomb that repeated the rumours about Gordon and Elias.

The Armstrong Report concluded Gordon and Elias had attacked Riley because he was trying to blackmail them for being homosexual. Farncomb and Squadron Commodore, Rear Admiral Jack Crace, decided to keep the Armstrong Report secret as they did not have any evidence to back the charge of homosexual blackmail and they did not want to hand the Japanese damaging propaganda in the dark days of the war. They decided to charge Gordon and Elias with murder but they did not have any eye witness accounts of the murder in the dark, they did not have murder weapon (presumed thrown overboard) and they did not have a public motive. As such, Farncomb, who acted as prosecutor during the Court Martial, was forced to rely heavily on circumstantial evidence, and his personal comments about the guilt of the accused, to secure a guilty sentence.

Under the Kings Regulations, the death sentence was mandatory for a guilty verdict of murder. The Court Martial Panel had no choice but to order the two sailors to be hanged from the yardarm. The defence attorney, Paymaster Lieutenant Trevor Rapke, was convinced that there had been a miscarriage of justice and decided to appeal the sentence. To his surprise, Farncomb agreed to ask the Australian Commonwealth Naval Board to amend the death sentence. However, they did not have the power to do so without the authority of the Admiralty.

The ACNB wisely decided to notify the Navy Minister, Norman Makin, and he ordered the death sentence to be stayed until the new Labor government could consider the matter. The Curtin Government was opposed to capital punishment and was aghast when it was told they could not do so without the agreement of the Admiralty. Two civil rights lawyers, Frank Luoat and David Hall, launched a High Court appeal against the death sentences but the full bench rejected the appeal on the grounds that the court martial sentence was valid because of the 1939 transfer to the Admiralty. Norman Makin requested that the Admiralty amend the death sentence to life imprisonment but they declined to create a precedent in the middle if the war for all Dominion sailors to save two lowly Australian stokers.

Like Billy Hughes before him, the Labor Prime Minister, John Curtin, went over the heads of the Admiralty to Whitehall to commute the death sentence to life imprisonment. This time, Whitehall also baulked at intervening but advised the Australian Government to seek Royal Clemency to save Gordon and Elias. Despite reservations about asking King George VI for help, Curtin subsequently did so and the King commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment. This was unexpected good news for Gordon and Elias even if it meant they would be incarcerated in Goulburn Gaol for the rest of their lives. However, the Labor Attorney General and External Affairs Minister, Bert Evatt, was so angry at the lack of control over the RAN that he decided to adopt the Statute of Westminster. This was a huge gamble during the middle of the war because Labor did not control the Senate and the conservatives remained opposed to adopting the Statute.

Evatt held a secret briefing of Parliament to brief the Opposition MPs and Senators about the fallout from the murder and convince them to vote for the Statute. Despite lengthy grandstanding by both Robert Menzies and Billy Hughes, the Opposition parties eventually voted to adopt the Statute. The adoption of the Statute meant that Australia became legally independent of Great Britain for the first time since Federation.

While Royal Clemency and adoption of the Statute took the political heat out of the Gordon and Elias case, family and friends and civil rights lawyers maintained an active campaign for years to free them. In 1944, Bert Evatt agreed to hold an independent judicial inquiry into the case to review the sentences. The inquiry, under NSW Supreme Court Justice, Alan Maxwell, found Gordon and Elias were guilty as charged but that defects in the court martial, and extenuating circumstances, meant the sailors should be released early. After a further six years of bureaucratic warfare between the Attorney Generals Department and the Navy, Gordon and Elias were released in September 1950.

Writer-philosopher George Santayana once wrote: “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” There are two clear lessons from Mutineers and Dark Secrets that are relevant today. Firstly, Australian governments should be careful in ceding operational control of our armed forces to foreign governments without clear rules of engagement about military discipline. Secondly, Australian governments should be careful when intervening in military disciplinary issues with popular political reasons that they do not undermine the chain of command.

Some may question the relevance of these lessons for the future. However, they are both relevant in contemporary circumstances. There have been two recent instances where senior politicians have intervened in the chain of command for popular political reasons. Earlier this year, the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, acted on advice of an independent panel to award a posthumous Victoria Cross to Teddy Sheean for his heroic sacrifice in defence of his comrades against Japanese aircraft in the Second World War. The Defence Minister, Peter Dutton, also recently intervened in the chain of command to overturn a decision to withdraw service medals to Australian special forces in Afghanistan.

Australia’s military leaders are clearly more politically astute now than they, and their Royal Navy counterparts, were in the First and Second World War but there are limits to military tolerance of political intervention in military matters. There is also a high level of secrecy about the manner in which Australian troops are deployed on overseas missions, especially those involving our special forces.

As Australia remains part of ANZUS and enters into a new Quad alliance with the United States, Japan and India, it is possible that our military forces may in future be transferred to the operational central of foreign forces under different military discipline and legal regimes. It is therefore critical that future Australian governments provide clear and unequivocal rules under which our troops operate as part of any military alliance operations. I hope that these lessons are not learned the hard way in the future.