‘Sport in the most dangerous place on earth’: How men like Tibby Cotter and Tiny Ryan became heroes on a more fatal field
An Australian sporting hero was slain by enemy deception, at the moment of victory in a legendary battle still celebrated today – after a premonition of his own death.
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As towns burned and turned to rubble, and the stark white crosses of the dead sprouted at an alarming pace, the Western Front was no place to be throughout 1917-18.
During an eight-week period beginning in September, Australia suffered 38,000 casualties in the Third Battle of Ypres, its heaviest losses in the war.
At Polygon Wood Australians played a key role in a crucial Allied victory that opened the way to the tactically important Broodseinde Ridge. But that involvement came at the cost of 5770 Australians killed or wounded.
Among the injured was cricketer Charlie Macartney’s fellow Sydney first-grade player and future Test teammate Bert Oldfield.
Hours after a bombardment, he was found semiconscious and partly buried. Evacuated to England, he would later recall: ‘For six months I suffered from shellshock.’
Oldfield was among the lucky.
Also on the Western Front was Private Alfred ‘Tiny’ Ryan, twenty-five years old, from Peak Hill, New South Wales, attached to the 1st Australian Machine Gun Company. Tiny was a shearer and boxer.
He was Indigenous, yet when he enlisted, he slipped through the race provisions of the 1903 Defence Act, which exempted people who were not ‘substantially of European origin or descent’ from joining the army. A tall man standing 1.8 metres and weighing 109 kilos, he had won a twenty-round fight at Dubbo Stadium marked by ‘glorious fighting’, according to a local newspaper.
On enlistment, Tiny was the heavyweight boxing champion of western New South Wales. The Sydney Sun reported in March 1915: ‘Tiny Ryan, the heavyweight pride of the Dubbo and surrounding district, has shouldered a gun, and is just now preparing, at the Liverpool Camp, to go to the front.’
‘SHRIEKING ABOUT A WHITE AUSTRALIA’
At Gallipoli on 1 June 1915, Tiny was wounded when a shell burst along a main trench. ‘I was hit by a piece of it, which knocked me flat,’ he wrote in a letter to the Sydney Sun. He recovered and was back boxing in Cairo by the end of the year, before moving with the AIF to the Western Front.
While there he reflected on the death of champion Australian boxer Les Darcy, who was vilified for not enlisting.
Denied a passport to go to the US for the official world title, he stowed away on a ship bound for the US on the eve of the 1916 conscription plebiscite. By this time, the US had been caught up in war fever. Darcy volunteered for the US Army to avoid further criticism. In the meantime, he trained for the world title.
However, Darcy died from a blood infection on 24 May 1917, aged just twenty-one. Tiny was moved to write of Darcy in September that year that he ‘did not deserve half the tabooing he got, for, when it is all said and done, there are others who, even in the Australian Forces, are only masquerading in the uniform of a soldier, and are not worth their salt … when there are gaps to fill in the trenches’.
In the same letter, Tiny expressed confidence that despite ‘a close shave or two’ he would survive the war and return to Australia to resume his boxing career. ‘I don’t think they will ever get me now.’
But they did, at Polygon Wood on 25 September 1917. In the sporting bible of the time, The Referee, boxing correspondent W.F. Corbett wrote a tribute: ‘Tiny gone – Tiny, the merry-faced, laughter-loving, lighthearted big boy – for he was only a boy – gone. It seemed incredible.’
Corbett added a note from a friend of Tiny’s: ‘One of the gamest lads that ever donned khaki, and a shining example to the coldfoots who are forever shrieking about a white Australia.’
There, in the most dangerous place on earth, the diggers played sport – in the quiet times and under the most unconventional of conditions. In early spring 1917, with the ground drying and the sun growing stronger by the day, the troops were feeling the benefit of rest and the change from the everlasting mud.
On Anzac Day that year, the 12th Infantry Brigade held a sports meeting near Hennencourt Wood, with £100 prize money. There were thirty events on the program, which, besides the usual sprint races, football kicking and grenade throwing, also included a ‘signallers race with dispatches on bicycles’ along a road.
In May 1917, Charles Bean travelled to old sites south of Bapaume, where he found Australian troops filling in shell holes and levelling part of the previous battlefield to form a field for Australian rules football. Later in 1917, Bean spent the day in camp with the 28th Battalion and noted in his diary: ‘Our battalions are full of their football, [and] are just like a lot of Oxford colleges in the October term – more keen on their football for the moment than anything else in the world.’
But just which code of football was a matter of fierce debate among the Australians. Old allegiances to the various codes, and which was better, did not disappear – even as ultimately fruitless attempts were being made in Australia to combine the rival codes into the one game, ‘Universal football’.
‘THAT’S MY LAST BOWL, BLUE’
It seemed the desire to play cricket could not be quelled – the more so when the need for a break from the fighting was pressing. And if they didn’t have equipment, handcrafting a bat from a branch of silver birch did the job.
As with the Australians, the craving for the diversion cricket provided was alive and well with the British troops. Plans were hatched for a match on the Western Front between the two nations.
Englishman Cyril Dennys, of the Royal Garrison Artillery, recalled the outcome as the old foes prepared to do battle at the suggestion of the Australians on a rare corner of an unscathed field. With a break in the fighting, the Australians thought it called for a ‘test match’.
They found a bit of unshelled ground within reach of their positions and ours. And we, or they, or both, got some equipment – bats and balls and bales and stumps – and we played cricket with them. What the Germans could have thought was going on, I can’t imagine. But it must’ve been reported by some German. Unfortunately, next morning when the Australians were assembling on the cricket pitch and we were on the way to it, they were heavily shelled. Some were killed and some were wounded.
If he had been in London, famous Test cricketer Albert ‘Tibby’ Cotter, who had enlisted in April 1915, no doubt would have been selected for the Australian teams that played the English that summer of 1917, but he was biding his time in Palestine as a stretcher-bearer with the 12th Light Horse, waiting for the third attempt to capture Gaza.
But first there was Beersheba.
Shortly before the regiment left for Beersheba, Tibby was watering his horse in a wadi at Khalasa when he picked some mud and shaped it into a ball and rolled his arm over before announcing to a mate: ‘That’s my last bowl, Blue, something is going to happen.’
Later that day Tibby rode into action as a mounted stretcherbearer in the famous charge of the 4th and 12th Light Horse Regiments, working coolly amid the dismounted fight around the earthworks. The Official History remarked that ‘he behaved in action as a man without fear’. Trooper Scotty Bolton, 4th Light Horse, saw what happened to Tibby.
[Tibby] rode up to a field gun that was trotting off in front of us, and they surrendered to him, but just as he went past them one of them pulled out a revolver and shot him dead. He fell off his horse and never moved.
Several of our fellows who saw it rushed over with revolvers, and the 4 Turkish drivers came down with no less than 5 bullets in each.
Tibby would be the only Australian Test cricketer killed in action in World War I. He was buried in the Beersheba War Cemetery, one of thirty-one Australians to die in the famous charge.
Tibby was not the only Australian sporting hero to pay a price that day at Beersheba. The casualties also included the skilled horseman and Gallipoli veteran Guy Haydon and his Waler, Midnight, the horse that had stunned the British in the Cavalry Desert Olympics earlier in the war.
As she jumped a Turkish trench, a bullet ripped upwards through the black mare’s flank, before tearing into Guy’s back and lodging near his spine. Guy eventually recovered, but Midnight died on the battlefield.
‘MORAL PRESSURE TO ENLIST’
As the war’s death toll rose, Australia struggled yet again with the question of conscription to boost recruitment to cope with the continuing heavy losses
The more the need for replacement troops for the Western Front failed to keep pace, the more the moral pressure to enlist intensified. If a sportsman did not enlist, well, they were seen as not fair dinkum.
Posters told the story: ‘Which picture would your father like to show his friends?’ demanded one, showing two images: a soldier with a rifle and backpack, and a languid sportsman in whites, reclining in a deck chair, surrounded by tennis racket, cricket bat, football and, to rub it in, a bottle of wine on a side table. Rowers were urged to ‘pull together to victory’, sailors to ‘weather the storm’, and golfers to ‘take their caddy and enlist’.
In Sydney, the Sportsmen’s Battalion was launched at a well-attended meeting at the Town Hall on 3 April 1917 with the aim of recruiting 150 men initially for the unit, with solicitor and footballer Les Seaborn and Sheffield Shield cricketer Austin Diamond leading them overseas.
By the end of April 1917, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the city was ‘absolutely plastered’ with appeals to ‘Be a sport and enlist’.
The appeal to join the Sportsmen’s Unit sought to frankly shame young men into joining the war effort, asking if they were ‘content to let your best pal do your fighting, let your elder or younger brothers take part in the big scrap and fill your place?’
Prime Minister Billy Hughes put his case for a second conscription plebiscite. Focusing on sportsmen was one of Hughes’s key messages, but his appeal failed to turn public sentiment when the nation voted on 20 December 1917: the anti-conscription vote won by a larger margin than it had in the 1916 vote.
And the recruiting rhetoric focusing on sport did not match the result, with less than one per cent of Australia’s fighting force having been enlisted via various Sportsmen’s Battalions during the war.
This is an edited extract fromGuts And Glory: Diggers, Sport and Warby Peter Rees, which examines the extraordinary connection between sport and the Anzac story, from 1914 to the present. It will be published by HarperCollins on July 29.
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