Ginger Mick in the trenches: Bert and Ivy Tanner’s love story

Bert and Ivy Tanner’s love story goes against all the laws of probability. It will make you believe some things were just meant to happen.

This is a love story between a couple of kids called Bert and Ivy that defied the odds across three centuries. It’s one of those stories that makes you believe some things were just meant to happen, whatever the laws of probability might tell you.

The latest instalment of this unlikely tale began appropriately on Anzac Day this year when Stan Grant, on his ABC show Matter of Fact, interviewed Neil James from the Plain English Foundation about the recently republished Pocket Editions for the Trenches. Thesesmall hardbacks, containing the works of Australia’s best bush balladeers, were designed to fit the pockets of Diggers’ uniforms in World War I.

James was holding in his hands one of the original books from the series, called Ginger Mick, written by the legendary CJ Dennis as his sequel to The Sentimental Bloke. He read out an inscription on the inside cover, which said:

To Bert,

wishing you the best of luck.

From Ivy

12/12/16

Ivy’s inscription in the copy she sent to Bert Tanner in France in 1916.

James and Grant speculated about who Bert and Ivy were and went on to talk about the cultural impact of these beautifully illustrated books on the young Diggers in the trenches during the darkest days of the Great War.

In the first of many coinci­dences, my sister Penny Black Tiong saw the program and asked our brother Steve and me to follow it up, to see if Bert and Ivy were our beloved Nan and Pop.

I contacted James and arranged to meet him in Sydney on my next visit so we could talk about it. To establish our bona fides, James sent me a facsimile of the inscription and asked if I could match it against something my nan had written, to check whether it was her writing. If it was, he ­kindly offered to pass the book back into our family.

As luck or fate would have it, I had kept Nan’s last letter in a cedar chest. The letter and the inscription clearly were written by the same hand. Now, thanks to James’s generosity, the original faded and water-stained Ginger Mick sits on my desk. And so, for Grant and James, and for you, here’s the story of Bert and Ivy.

Bert was born into extreme poverty in early 1898 in a Bedminster, Bristol, slum at the end of Britain’s Long Depression. His dad, Edwin, had been born in the local union workhouse and Bert was one of nine children, eight of them legitimate, which was a pretty good ratio for Bedminster at the time.

After a row with his dad, Bert left Bristol for Sydney, where he had relatives and the chance of a future outside the workhouse in a young country of comparative ­opportunity.

In Bristol, Bert had been christened Rees Albert Tanner, but he was starting a new life. He was a dab hand with pen and ink, keen to start a career as a commercial artist, so he decided to go by the name Albert Rees Tanner, as he felt the initials ART for a budding artist looked a bit more swish than RAT. And who could blame him?

As a 16-year-old slum kid, Bert was small in stature when he arrived in his new country, but he was an athletic young bloke, adept at the noble art of self-defence, and later in life he would enter professional road races, which were then popular in his adopted home, to make a quid.

He had a beautiful tenor voice, which had helped him to win junior competitions at the Bristol ­Cathedral, and he would sing professionally at ceremonies to earn some cash when times were tough.

He was also a dasher. He not only spoke like fellow Bristolian Cary Grant but looked a bit like him, too, and he used to walk lightly, on the balls of his feet, in that rolling gait of the professional athlete, to his job as a porter at The Rocks, skipping up the Argyle Stairs.

Living close by, but on the other end of the local social spectrum, Ivy Florence Nolan was a student at the Young Ladies College of St Patrick’s Catholic Church, The Rocks. Ivy was born in July 1904 into a privileged background at 29 George Street North, The Rocks. Her parents were Charles Daniel Nolan and Ethel Florence Joseph. They loved music and both sang and played at balls around Sydney. The Nolan family had done well for themselves since Ivy’s great-grandfather Daniel had arrived in Sydney Cove from Dublin as a convict in 1835.

During the period 1914 to 1916, Bert was working casual jobs while he learned more about the values and culture of his new surrounds. Chance intervened here, as Ivy, just a schoolgirl not yet in her teens, regularly used to walk up the Argyle Stairs, and she sometimes shared the walk with Bert, as the place was pretty rough and muggings were common.

But the friendship between the young couple was interrupted by the military ambitions of politicians then running the British and Australian governments who ­decided the Great War was a great idea.

Bert and Ivy Tanner in the 1960s; they were married for 61 years.

At that time, Bert evidently agreed with the recruitment posters and in May 1916 he put his age up to 18 and enlisted, along with 124,000 other Australians who joined up that year. The men called him Zac because they reckoned he was as big as a sixpence. But with decent food and exercise he began to grow, in stature and confidence, among his new mates.

After initial army training he left for Plymouth, England, on the SS Ceramic on October 7, 1916. He marched into the 1st Battalion as one of 150 partially trained reinforcements on December 11, 1916, and straight into the frozen wastelands of the Somme battlefields.

In Sydney the following day, Ivy posted Bert the copy of Ginger Mick. The inscription was friendly without being romantic, as Ivy was only 12 years old. The Pocket Editions for the Trenches were immensely popular with the troops and were designed to withstand the rigours of life in combat zones. There were eight of them in total, beautifully illustrated and bought by families and sweethearts in the thousands to be sent to their loved ones at war.

Back in northern France, on February 24, 1917, the 18-year-old Bert, by now with his copy of Ginger Mick in his battle jacket, was trudging in rain, sleet, snow and fog through the waterlogged ­trenches and shell-holes of the Somme ­battlefields as the Germans slowly withdrew. He was introduced to the terrors of trench warfare at the Second Battle of Bullecourt, where the 1st Battalion experienced some of the heaviest fighting in its history. By May 7, from a total strength before the battle of 820 men, 49 had been killed, with 240 wounded. It was a baptism of blood and fire for young Bert, who kept a map of the battlefields in which he had served, titled simply: “Blood Baths I was In”. Bullecourt was coloured in red.

By August 31, 1917, the battalion was nearly back at full strength, with 39 officers and 914 other ranks. The Third Battle of Ypres lay ahead. The battlefield there had been shelled almost continuously for two years and was described in the battalion’s normally dry record as an inferno of mud and shells. The attack on Broodseinde Ridge was the opening phase of the battle and began on October 3. Two days later, after a concentrated 24 hours of shelling, machinegunning and sniping, the battalion had captured 200 yards (less than 183m) of territory at the expense of 299 casualties out of 500 men committed to the battle.

Bert was one of the casualties, hit by shrapnel during the shelling. The 299 wounded men overwhelmed the ambulance post of the medical officer and several injured men near Bert were killed by unremitting shellfire while lying on stretchers in the trench, waiting their turn to be carried to the rear along narrow duckboard tracks over the mud.

After a few weeks to recover from his wounds, during which the men were subjected to severe bombing, Bert and the battalion were back in the canal area, near Ypres. In early November, the men were moved to Anzac Ridge in the Ypres sector for a short tour of the line. On November 9, 1917, at Anzac Ridge, Bert was shot in the face and neck by a German sniper.

Bert Tanner as a Digger in France during World War I.

He was lucky, if you could call it luck, in that the bullet went straight through his mouth and jaw, collecting only teeth and bone on the way through. It could have been a lot worse. There are those odds again.

Certainly, Bert thought he was lucky as it got him off the frontline for a few months and back to hospital in Cardiff, not far from the Bedminster slums of his birth.

After that it was back to the 1st Battalion and by May he was near Amiens, in time for the German spring offensive of 1918. He ­became one of the first Australians to get involved with the early tanks and would go out on night patrol into no-man’s land to map out the path for his tank in the next day’s attack. Sometimes the night ­patrols would venture behind enemy lines and capture a German to get more information on enemy concentrations.

He went out on patrol one night and mapped a course using a small copse of trees as the marker for his tank to change course. What he didn’t realise was that the Germans saw the patrol and came out later, cut down the trees and moved them to an old quarry pit. Bert was observer/navigator on tank A for Annie, and when they got to the trees the massive tank plunged into the gravel pit. Fortunately, Bert was thrown clear. Again, the luck.

During his two years of service, Bert had been shot once, wounded by shrapnel and gassed three times. He couldn’t see the point of getting killed, bugger the generals and the warmongering politicians who’d sent them there in the first place, to no real end. He finally headed home to Sydney on the HMAT Khyber four months after the November 11 armistice. He was discharged in Sydney in May 1919. Bert was just 20 when he moved back into The Rocks area, where the now 15-year-old Ivy was living with her mother, Ethel Florence, and stepfather, Harry Lofthouse, at George Street.

Whatever prayers Ivy had said at St Patrick’s for Bert had been answered and — against all the odds — Bert was back to call on her, with his faded copy of Ginger Mick in his top pocket, with a battle-scarred cheek and a new world-weary bearing. He had remembered her kindness to a young larrikin heading off to war and wanted to say thanks.

During the next four years, the friendship between the pair ­matured into love and they married in 1923. They remained an inseparable, loving couple for the next 61 years.

Bert never talked much about the war to his children, but he did a little to his grandsons, confiding he shared the professional soldier’s distaste for war, but also the unbreakable bond they felt for their fellow troops. At night Pop would read us extracts from his trench editions of Ginger Mick and The Sentimental Bloke.

He was a proud Australian but with none of the pseudo-patriotic humbug of those who have never fought for their country. He loved Australian values and Australian culture; the mateship and the equality between men. If Pop called you a mate, it meant something to both of you. For breakfast at their Earlwood home in Sydney, Nan would cook us kippers before heading off to put a few bob on the races. Nan picked the horses according to whether the feel of their name or number reminded her of her grandchildren and, curiously, she often seemed to win. It was as if she just knew somehow, without the need of any form guides or statistical modelling.

Before Pop died he passed on his copy of Ginger Mick to my mother and went with her to Perth when my parents moved there. Somehow through the years Ginger Mick was left behind, and when Mum died in 2009 we thought it had disappeared forever.

John Black with Dr Neil James from the Plain English Foundation and the World War I copy of Ginger Mick owned by Black's grandfather Bert Tanner. Supplied

But unbeknown to us, James had been collecting copies of the original trench editions for his history of Angus & Robertson and had picked up Pop’s old copy from a Perth bookseller.

I dabble in stats a bit, as you may know, and I know a little about the cumulative odds of Pop migrating to Australia aged 16, of his meeting Nan at The Rocks in 1916, of them becoming friends, of Nan sending Pop a copy of Ginger Mick, of Pop actually getting it, of both Pop and Ginger Mick surviving the shelling, shooting and gas, of Pop and Nan meeting up again at The Rocks, of them falling in love, of Mum and us being born, then the odds of Ginger Mick and Nan’s inscription being found and featuring in a television program watched by my sister, of me finding one of Nan’s original letters and, finally, the odds of the owner being a decent sort of sentimental bloke who’d return Nan and Pop’s memento to the grandkids who loved them both.

But I feel that this isn’t a case of a miraculous outcome defying the odds. It’s just something involving her grandchildren that Nan knew somehow would happen.

And as for Pop, let me finish with these lines from The Sentimental Bloke in his introduction to Ginger Mick:

I intrajuice me cobber ’ere; an’ don’t make no ixcuse

To any culchered click that it’s a peb I intrajuice.

I dunno wot ’is ratin’ was in this ’ere soshul plan;

I only know inside o’ me, I intrajuice a man.

John Black is a former Labor senator for Queensland and is chief executive of Australian Development Strategies. Research by John Black, Steve Black and Penny Black Tiong.