31st Bn AIF
Jun 26 2008, 11:38 AM
QUOTE (ianw @ Jun 26 2008, 03:48 PM)
Tim W - Many thanks for your thought provoking and passionate posting. It has caused me to think again about what I think about the situation at Fromelles. I don't share all your views but they are certainly from the heart.
Many thanks Sandra, Len, Ian and all.
I suppose it might add some weight to my position if I detail just a little of my observations as to the way the boys are lying in some of the pits. General observations as follows:
1.I have seen a handless man in a slumped sitting positon with his arms still positioned above his head- he is frozen in the position he landed. One can almost imagine a German at each end of him doing the old "one, two, three" then tossing him in.
2. Another man is lying in a semi-feotal position with yet another man lying on top of him- this man is on his back, again with his arms extended above his head and is draped most unflatteringly across the chest of the man below him
3. One man still has telephone wire wrapped around his limbs which has been used to drag him into the pit
4.There is a man in there with a torniquet still attached to his severed limb where some friend has vainly tried to save him.
5. There is a man in there with certain very distinct characteristics that would render him very easily identifiable given even very a short investigation. In fact I have struggled with my concience very hard about this man but will trust in the process.
Please don't think I am blaming the Germans or accusing them of ill treatment or anything similar. Far from it. They had an absolutely horrid job to do and I would probably have done the same thing in the circumstances. They also had their own dead and wounded to tend to and a vulnerable and penetrated front which needed urgent defensive repair work. All I am saying is that now that we know where they are, these men should not be left like that when we have the power to lay them out, place them in a coffin with some kind words and a funeral service.
Cheerio and thanks again to all,
Tim Whitford
Fedelmar
Jun 26 2008, 12:19 PM
I decided I would share this piece of research I have been doing for Lambis along with a couple of stories.
One lads I have been working on had four brothers in the AIF all born in New South Wales. After the war the Army were trying to locate the oldest brother who was 'thought to be in Western Australia.' I poked around and found only one man that may have been him ... a fairly common name of Allan Spence and as it happened he was employed as a lumper in Fremantle. I contacted Andrew P to see if he was one of his Fremantle Boys he is researching for his book and he did have an ALAN Spence. Further research yesterday proved conclusively that this man was in fact the brother the Fromelles lad.
The interesting coincidence with the following research another Fromelles lad, Lt Burns ... is in the biography of his older brother. My very first job in 1962 was with Burns Philp & Co in Geraldton W. Australia.
NAME Burns, Robert David
SN
RANK 2nd Lieutenant
UNIT 14th Machine Gun Company
HONOUR Entitlements
BORN 1888 Potts Point Sydney NSW Reg No 1585
OCCUPATION Station Owner
RELIGION Presbyterian
DOE 12.05.1915 Holdsworthy NSW
AGE 27
Residence on embarkation:
STATUS KIA
DATE 20.07.1916 (19.07.1916)
AGE 28
BURIED Unknown
MEMORIAL Villers Brettoneaux
AWM 177
DESCRIPTION 6 foot 1/2 with fair hair
NOTES Identity disk returned by German authorities
Granted commission 2nd Lt 4th Bn 20.01.1916 transferred to 14th MG Coy 30.05.1916
Court of inquiry found he was killed in action. He was last seen after the German
counter attack had succeeded on both flanks and it is supposed that he was killed
whilst visiting the left flank of the 14th Brigade.
Article in Sydney Morning Herald announcing death (prior to April 1917)
NOK Father: Colonel The Hon Sir James Burns KCMG. 'Gowan-Brae' Parramatta NSW
He was the Chairman of Directors Burns Philp & Co 7 Bridge Street Sydney NSW
Mother: Mary H Burns
Sister: Frances M Burns born 1883 Paddington NSW Reg No 7680
Sister: Caroline A Burns born 1884 Sydney NSW Reg No 2150. She married
1921 Parramatta John J R Pearson Reg No 4557
Brother: James Burns
Brother: John Burns born 1885 Sydney NSW Reg No 3302
Died as a result of active service 1921
Child
Child
MORE NOTES BURNS, Sir JAMES (1846-1923), businessman, shipowner and philanthropist, was born
on 10 February 1846 at Polmont, Stirlingshire, Scotland, son of David Burns,
merchant, and his wife Margaret, née Shiress. Educated at Newington Academy and
the Royal High School, Edinburgh, he migrated to Brisbane in 1862 with a brother,
worked as a jackeroo on stations, and in 1865 combined with his brother in
Burns & Scott, Brisbane storekeepers. He joined the Gympie gold rush in 1867, made
large profits from three stores of his own and, after the death of his father in
1868, returned in 1870 to Scotland through the United States of America.
From Scotland he briefly visited war-torn France as an observer.
Burns brought his mother, sister and two brothers to Queensland in 1872 and opened
a store at Townsville, supplying all the North Queensland goldfields. On 8 February
1875 in Brisbane he married Mary Susan Ledingham, who died in May next year, leaving
a daughter. The schooner Isabelle, which he had chartered in 1873 to ensure
supplies from Sydney, became the nucleus of an eventual fleet. Prominent in
promoting coastal shipping services and inland trade, he was a member of an 1876
expedition seeking a route from the Hodgkinson goldfield to Trinity Inlet (Cairns),
but at the end of the year he was induced by constant attacks of malaria to settle
in Sydney. He financed his Townsville manager (Sir) Robert Philp as a partner in a
new firm under Philp's name. On 1 April 1877 Burns opened as a merchant under his
own name in Sydney. At Elsternwick, Victoria, on 31 March 1880 he married with
Presbyterian forms Mary Heron Morris (d.1904).
Concentrating initially on a regular shipping service between Sydney and Townsville,
Burns moved rapidly from sail to steam, and in 1881 joined the British India Steam
Navigation Co. Ltd in promoting the Queensland Steam Shipping Co. Its aggressive
competition soon forced the Australasian Steam Navigation Co. to sell out.
He played an important part in the negotiations for sale and subsequent creation of
the Australasian United Steam Navigation Co. in 1887, and his company became their
agents at Sydney, Townsville and other North Queensland ports.
In 1879 Burns had expanded into a new trading firm in the Gulf of Carpentaria and by
1880 had compelled his main rivals, Clifton & Aplin, to accept his monopoly of the
trade of Normanton and thus later of the Croydon goldfield. He established a store
at Thursday Island at the same time, giving the firm entry to the pearl-shell
industry and enabling it to participate in the exploitation of New Guinea from the
beginning of government in 1884. Branches were established during the 1880s in most
of the major North Queensland ports. The firm also controlled the Townsville lighter
fleet and in 1883-85 flirted with the Pacific island labour trade. Always uneasy
about the trade, Burns withdrew when some members of the crew of his Hopeful were
prosecuted for malpractice.
The firms in Sydney, Townsville, Charters Towers, Cairns, Thursday Island and Normanton were amalgamated in April 1883 into Burns, Philp & Co. Ltd. Burns initially held 43 per cent of the shares and remained chairman and managing director until 1923. Although
senior staff became shareholders, he remained in strict and unsentimental control;
when Philp left the firm in 1893, it was the enterprise of Burns alone that guided its
expansion: during the 1890s branches were established at Geraldton and Fremantle in
Western Australia, and at Port Moresby and Samarai in Papua.
In 1889 Burns became a shareholder in the Australasian New Hebrides Co. Ltd; and the
A.U.S.N. Co. dominated New Hebrides shipping. Following mismanagement and failure of
its settlement scheme, the New Hebrides Co. was reconstructed in 1893 with Burns Philp
as managing agents, and was later taken over. With subsidies from the Victorian and New South Wales governments and the Presbyterian mission to the New Hebrides, the firm
became the principal instrument for Australian imperialism in the group; it also held
extensive mail contracts and received an extra subsidy to run its steamers under
Australian industrial conditions. When the French government began actively promoting
the settlement of its nationals in 1901, the new Commonwealth government accepted a
proposal by Burns to provide land and passages for British settlers in return for a
new extended mail-service contract. The venture seemed to be commercially sound since the proposed settlers would be practically tied to the company, but it was never very
profitable because of labour problems, Australian tariffs and the uncertainties of
international administration. Burns and his Pacific manager W. H. Lucas corresponded
regularly and maintained personal relations with Commonwealth leaders for over twenty
years, often through Atlee Hunt.
The firm's interests slowly extended throughout the Pacific islands as far east as Samoa. Its interests in the South Pacific were linked by its extensive line of steamships
by 1907 operating to the New Hebrides, Solomon, Gilbert and Ellice islands and Papuan
ports. In addition Burns took a particular interest in their service from Sydney through Java to Singapore. In 1905 a company ship trading at Jaluit in the Marshall Islands had been charged what seemed outrageous port-dues by the German authorities on the ground that the company was exempted from international charges born by resident Germans.
The case aroused Burns's Imperial fervour.
Asserting that the claim breached international law, he used his government friends to seek compensation of £17,500 through the British Foreign Office. When negotiations concluded
in 1910, the Germans paid £4100. Complaints from New Hebrides settlers of rapacity and inefficiency
brought an investigation of the firm's activities by a Commonwealth royal commission in 1915.
The complaints were rejected.
Diverse in his business interests, Burns was chairman of the (North) Queensland Insurance Co. Ltd in 1886-1923, the New South Wales Mortgage, Land, & Agency Co. and the Solomon Islands Development Co. Ltd; he was also a director of the Australian Mutual Provident
Society, the Sydney Exchange Co., the Bank of North Queensland, and various collieries.
He was a member of the Union Club, Sydney, from 1896. Much of his spare time was devoted to the volunteer defences: having joined the Parramatta troop of the 1st Light Horse
Regiment (NSW Lancers) as a trooper in June 1891, he was immediately promoted
captain, and major in January 1896. From September 1897 to June 1903 he commanded the regiment as its lieutenant-colonel and, promoted colonel, the 1st Australian Light Horse Brigade from July 1903 to January 1907, when he retired because of age. Through his
efforts and financial aid, detachments of the Lancers attended Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897 and the Aldershot Tattoo in 1899; he also helped the same detachment join the first British armies in the South African War. His deep personal interest in his men
and 'quiet gentlemanly manner' made him 'more beloved than any other of the regiment's commanders'.
In 1906 Burns served on a royal commission of inquiry into railway administration and in 1908 was appointed to the Legislative Council; that year he was a commissioner for the
Franco-British Exhibition, London. Proud of his Scottish descent, he was president of the Highland Society of New South Wales in 1903-23 and probably helped finance its journal, the Scottish Australasian. From the late 1880s he lived at Gowan Brae, near Parramatta;
the Lancers had their rifle-range in a gully of its extensive grounds.
In 1910 he gave land at North Parramatta to endow the Burnside Presbyterian Homes
for Children and was chairman of its board for ten years. A trustee of the Australian Museum, Sydney, he collected Australian minerals, especially opals, Pacific island shells and
curios, and some artefacts for his own museum at Gowan Brae.
During WWI Burns helped establish a scheme for insuring enlisted men with dependants.
At the same time he was quick to establish a shipping service to Rabaul and to profit from the Australian military occupation of German New Guinea. He became a close friend of the governor-general Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson, a fellow Scot, and sometimes lent him Gowan Brae. During World War I Burns supplied him with confidential information on Japanese
movements in the Pacific. Greatly concerned about the 'swarm of Japanese coming South', and their danger to Australian and British political and trading interests, he repeatedly
urged Munro Ferguson and the Commonwealth government to make it clear to the Japanese that they must hand over their recently acquired gains. He also devised a scheme for a Pacific island federation and a single administration for British possessions in the Pacific.
In 1915 he went to London and, with three sons on active service, he was able to visit
France he wrote an account of the trip on his return: his youngest son Robert was killed in France in 1916 and his second son died in 1921 as a result of active service. He was appointed K.C.M.G. in 1917.
Burns died of cancer at Gowan Brae on 22 August 1923 and was buried there in its private cemetery. He was survived by a daughter of his first marriage, and by his eldest son James, managing director of Burns Philp in 1923-67, and by two daughters by his second wife. His estate, valued for probate at £227,604 in NSW and £8853 in Queensland, included
bequests to the Burnside homes, the Presbyterian Church, various hospitals, Presbyterian colleges and the Salvation Army. Gowan Brae is now the site of The King's School.
A shrewd and tough businessman, Burns was willing to make his headquarters in Fiji,
if necessary, to compete with the Japanese; in 1915 he told Munro Ferguson that 'So far as my own company is concerned we can look after ourselves, though very loath to leave the Commonwealth or to have any truck with Asiatics'. Generous in private, he was a stern and somewhat unapproachable father, and would allow no Sunday amusements. Tolerant of other Protestant denominations he was suspicious of the political motivation of the Roman Catholic Church.
Select Bibliography
P. V. Vernon (ed), The Royal New South Wales Lancers, 1885-1860 (Syd, 1961); P. Yeend, Gowan Brae (Syd, 1965); N. L. McKellar, From Derby Round to Burketown (Brisb, 1977); G. C. Bolton, ‘The rise of Burns, Philp 1873-93’, A. Birch and D. S. Macmillan (eds).
Wealth and Progress (Syd, 1967); Parliamentary Papers (Commonwealth), 1914-17, 5, 665; Sydney Morning Herald, 9 July 1908, 4 June 1917, 23 Aug 1923; R. C. Thompson, Australian Imperialism and the New Hebrides, 1862-1922 (Ph.D. thesis, Australian National University, 1970); Atlee Hunt papers and Novar papers (National Library of Australia); Philp papers (State Library of Queensland); Prime Minister's Dept, Pacific Branch, CRS A1108, vols 1, 2, 6, 58 (National Archives of Australia); private information. More on the resources
Author: G. J. Abbott, H. J. Gibbney
Print Publication Details: G. J. Abbott, H. J. Gibbney, 'Burns, Sir James (1846 - 1923)',
Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 7, Melbourne University Press, 1979, pp 489-491.
BURNS, JAMES Jnr (1881-1969), businessman, was born on 30 Dec 1881 at Point Piper, Sydney, eldest of five surviving children of (Sir) James Burns, a Scottish-born
merchant, and his second wife Mary Heron, née Morris, from Victoria. Given an
austere Presbyterian upbringing, Jimmy attended The King's School, Parramatta,
and in 1898 entered his father's firm, Burns, Philp & Co. Ltd. He spent 1902 in
the London office, was assistant-manager (1904) of the Geraldton branch in Western
Australia, joined the company's fleet of small steamships based in the New
Hebrides, then returned to head office in Bridge Street, Sydney.
Six ft 1 in. (185 cm) tall, with brown eyes and dark hair, on 27 March 1913 Burns
married Vida Emily Mills at St Mark's Anglican Church, Darling Point; they were to
have four children. He was commissioned in the Australian Imperial Force on 24
April1916. After training in England, he was promoted lieutenant in September 1917
and next month was attached to the 14th Light Trench Mortar Battery in France.
He was commended for 'coolness and skill under heavy fire' on 29 July 1918. Wounded
in action on 25 August, he recuperated in England and returned to the front in
November. He worked in Burns Philp's London office before coming home to Sydney
where his A.I.F. appointment terminated on 11 September 1919. His youngest brother
Robert had been killed in France in 1916 and his brother John was to die in 1921
as a result of war service in the Mesopotamian desert.
Appointed a director of Burns Philp in 1919, James took over as chairman and
managing director on his father's death in 1923. In addition, he became chairman
or a director of other companies with which his father had been associated, among
them Burns, Philp (South Sea) Co. Ltd, the Queensland Insurance Co. Ltd, Bankers
& Traders Insurance Co. Ltd, Bellambi Coal Co. Ltd, Choiseul Plantations Ltd and
the Solomon Islands Development Co. Ltd. Apart from the times he travelled abroad,
he was also a director of the Bank of New South Wales in 1923-32.
Although less forceful than his father, Burns was a hard negotiator and kept a sharp
eye on the operations of his companies which constituted an extensive Australian
mercantile, shipping, insurance and copra-producing network. Burns Philp was a
powerful force in the South Pacific. The status of Burns and several senior company
executives as ex-servicemen enabled the firm to purchase important plantations in
New Guinea that were previously German-owned. He opposed attempts by German
business interests to move back into New Guinea. In 1934, on being invited to become
associated with the London-based Anglo-German Trade Association, he flatly refused,
and added: 'I think it would be better for you to get representatives who did not
participate actively in the late War'.
Proud of his father's achievements, Burns believed that he should simply do the job,
honourably and intelligently, that fortune had provided for him. In the 1930s he
developed a chain of some forty retail stores known as 'Penneys', entered the trustee
business (Burns, Philp Trustee Co. Ltd was registered in 1938) and later acquired
holdings in 'old established country retail businesses', including Mates Ltd and
Charles Rogers & Sons Pty Ltd.
Although conservative-minded, modest and cheerful, Burns was regarded by the
administration in Papua-New Guinea as a commercial pirate who sought to use
political influence to gain monopolies. He preferred independent, Australian
insurance companies to their huge, English-based competitors; the QBE Insurance
Group Ltd is a monument to his endeavour. Less involved in business affairs after
World War II, he continued to attend the Sydney office several days a week,
travelling by train from his property at Bowral, until age and illness eventually
induced him to retire as chairman and managing director in 1967.
In Sydney, Burns stayed at the Australian Club; he belonged, as well, to Royal
Sydney Golf and the Union clubs, and enjoyed trout-fishing at Thredbo with his
friends Tom Rutledge and (Sir) Edward Knox. He served on the board of the Burnside
Presbyterian Orphan Homes for over forty years and made generous gifts to that
institution. Predeceased by his wife, Burns died on 5 August 1969 at Bowral and
was cremated; his estate was sworn for probate at $1,045,194. He was survived by a
daughter and by his son David who succeeded him as chairman of Burns Philp.
Select Bibliography
K. Buckley and K. Klugman, The History of Burns Philp (Syd, 1981); K. Buckley and
K. Klugman, The Australian Presence in the Pacific (Syd, 1983); Sunday Mirror (Sydney), 11 Feb 1962; Sun-Herald (Sydney), 6 Jan 1963; Sydney Morning Herald, 7 Aug 1969; K. Buckley, QBE: A Century of Australian Insurance (manuscript, held by author); Burns
Philp papers (Australian National University Archives); private information. More on
the resources
Author: Ken Buckley
Print Publication Details: Ken Buckley, 'Burns, James (1881 - 1969)',
Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 13, Melbourne University Press, 1993, p. 313.
