Australians battled for a memorial for war dead at Villers-Bretonneux
AUSTRALIA’S World War I memorial opened 80 years ago by King George VI took almost 20 years to complete.
Today in History
Don't miss out on the headlines from Today in History. Followed categories will be added to My News.
BLOOD spilt from Australian soldiers on wheat fields in northern France had taken us from “youth to manhood”, King George VI told crowds at Villers-Bretonneux 80 years ago.
The bloodletting at the westernmost point of Germany’s World War I march into France had allowed the young Commonwealth to take its “rightful place in the community of nations”, the King continued.
The much-delayed official opening of Australia’s World War I memorial, on a hill 3km from Villers-Bretonneux, on July 22, 1938, came six years after other Allied and Commonwealth memorials opened, and less than two years before Germany reoccupied northern France.
It was envisaged as a grand Australian designed-and-made memorial to 46,000 Australians who died on the Western Front from 1916 to 1918, with the names of nearly 11,000 missing Australians individually engraved on the memorial walls, with a federal government allocation of £100,000.
A year after World War I ended, Perth architect and Australian 1st Division artillery commander Talbot Hobbs had consulted returned Australian soldiers about memorials to their service and their fallen comrades in France and Belgium.
Ex-servicemen favoured granite obelisks fixed with a bronze tablet inscribed with battle honours of each division, and each division would erect a battle memorial on its most-famous battlefield.
The 2nd Division had collected funds and commissioned Australian sculptor Webb Gilbert to design a granite pedestal with a bronze statue representing an Australian soldier bayoneting a German eagle for their battleground at Mont St Quentin. In 1923 Gilbert also won the commission for an Anzac memorial at Port Said, Egypt.
Obelisks had been erected to the Australian 1st Division at Pozieres; the 3rd Division, north of the Somme River on the Bray-Corbie road; the 4th Division at Bellenglise, on the Hindenburg line; and for the 5th Division at Polygon Wood.
In 1919 at a meeting in London to consider monuments and graves, Talbot Hobbs was nominated to head an Australian subcommittee at the Imperial War Graves Commission, charged with maintaining British war memorials and cemeteries.
He told Australian prime minister Billy Hughes he would ensure works were carried out, but warned it would likely take years to complete.
Hobbs nominated Villers-Bretonneux — where operations by Australian forces under his command on April 24 and 25, 1918, marked the turning point of the war by driving Germans from the town — for an Australian national memorial.
The memorial site would be 4ha around a rise just north of the town, known as Hill 104 on battlefield maps. The hill had been strategic in the Australian advance and offered panoramic views across the battle zone.
Hobbs had also ordered construction of a temporary observation tower at the apex of Hill 104 in May 1919.
After budgeting £100,000 in 1926, the federal government opened a design competition in 1927 for the Villers-Bretonneux memorial. Design criteria specified use of Australian materials, such as granite or marble, to be built in Australia and transported to France, and it should include an observation tower. Entries were open to Australian architects living anywhere, who had served in World War I, or designers whose sons or daughters had served. Melbourne architect William Lucas, who lost his son Norman during the war, won the competition with classical porticos and a central tower, although Hobbs was disappointed with all 36 entries.
After the stock market collapsed in 1929, the government withdrew funding for the project and in 1932 offered a disgruntled Lucas £750 as compensation. When Imperial War Graves Commission head Fabian Ware visited Australia in 1935, the Scullin government agreed to provide £30,000 to help fund a memorial to Australia’s missing soldiers, the only Commonwealth war dead then without a memorial.
The Commission, which eventually covered most of the cost of the Australian memorial, approached English architect Edwin Lutyens, who had designed the entry to the
Villers-Bretonneux war cemetery, for a cheaper memorial using French stone.
Construction of the memorial progressed during 1936 and 1937. Hobbs left Australia in April 1938 to attend the opening, but died at sea on April 21, 1938.
Gallipoli to D-Day: Aussie’s epic war story
George Dixon went ashore with the original Anzacs at Gallipoli, aged just 15 – and was shot. Three decades later he was fighting again, at history’s other most famous wartime landing.
Love story behind escape tragedy
An Australian murdered in the infamous wartime Great Escape died after swapping places with another man. And his story is still unfolding, 80 years on.