Pillars of Bathurst Cultural Garden
Stanley Street
Bathurst NSW 2300
Amongst an arrangement of historic verandah posts commemorating Bathurst's prominent citizens is a memorial to Charles Edwin Woodrow (CEW) Bean, Australia's official First World War historian and founder of the Australian War Memorial. It stands in a cultural garden along with memorials that include the Wiradjuri leader and warrior Windradyne, Blair Anderson Wark VC and the Federation activist William Astley.
Bean was born at Bathurst on 18 November 1879, where his father was headmaster at All Saints' College. He began his education at the college before his father took the family to England in 1889. In England he completed his schooling and studied law at Oxford. He was called to the Bar in 1903 but returned to Sydney and took up full-time journalism with The Sydney Morning Herald.
In August 1914, Bean won a ballot to accompany the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) as a war correspondent when it sailed for Egypt. He was a civilian but accorded the honorary rank of captain.
He landed at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 and was the only war correspondent to remain until the December evacuation. Under heavy fire at Cape Helles he assisted the wounded and was recommended for the Military Cross, but being a civilian he was ineligible. At Lone Pine in August 1915 he was wounded but refused to leave the peninsula.
From 1916 to 1918 he witnessed almost every major battle that the AIF engaged in on the Western Front. After visiting the battlefield at Pozières in August 1916, Bean first mentioned his thoughts on establishing an Australian war memorial museum, to his batman Staff Sergeant Arthur Bazley. In 1919, he returned to Gallipoli to study the battlefield and report on how the Australian graves should be maintained.
Fellow journalist Keith Murdoch wrote of Bean:
No accounts of actions could be more accurate than his - no description of the men's suffering and gallantry could be more sympathetic. He is always in the place where he can see and help most, however dangerous it may be.
During the war, Bean filled more than two hundred notebooks that he later used to write his Official History of Australia in the War 1914-1918 between 1921 and 1943. He wrote numerous military and historical works and was awarded several honorary degrees, but he refused a knighthood.
Bean died on 30 August 1968 at Concord Repatriation General Hospital in Sydney, aged 84. He was survived by his wife Ethel 'Effie' and an adopted daughter, Joyce.
References
- Australian Dictionary of Biography, Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean, KS Inglis. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/bean-charles-edwin-5166
- Service Records of Captain Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean, National Archives of Australia.
- Charles Bean, Ross Coulthart, Sydney, 2014
- Gallipoli correspondent: the frontline diary of CEW Bean, Kevin Fewster, Sydney 1983
- War correspondent Charles Bean, Anzac Portal.
- Australians on the Western Front 1914-1918, Anzac Portal.