Volunteers of Essendon and Flemington, 1914-1918

Oakley L C        Pte    164    Leslie Cecil          4 LHR    33    Storeman    Married    C of E       

Address:    Kensington, Elizabeth St, 35   

Next of Kin:    Oakley, G, Mrs, mother, 36 Elizabeth St, Kensington   

Enlisted:    18 Aug 1914       

Embarked:     A18 Wiltshire 19 Oct 1914   

Private/Trooper Leslie Cecil Oakley

Rod Martin

In the month after war broke out on 4 August 1914, young Australian men besieged the recruiting offices established around the nation, eager to serve king and country, or perhaps have an adventure and seize a chance to see the world before a predicted short conflict came to an end. 

Not all of the eager souls at the offices were young, however. There were many older men who tried to sign up as well.  One of them was Leslie Oakley, a married storeman from 35 Elizabeth Street, Kensington, who was almost thirty-four years old.  With so many young men pushing for selection, why was this short (164 centimetres) and light (fifty-nine kilos) man accepted?  One possible reason may have been the fact that he had previous military experience.  He had participated in the Boer War (1899-1902) as a member of 2 Light Horse Regiment (militia).  In the early period after the commencement of hostilities in 1914, no one probably had any inkling that the conflict in western Europe would soon boil down to two opposing and inflexible trench lines running from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border, a scenario in which cavalry or mounted infantrymen (such as the Light Horse) were superfluous.  On the plains of southern Africa, the horse and its rider played a significant role just a few years before.  Many of those gallant men who charged enemy machine guns on their steeds in France and Belgium in August and September 1914 were to learn, often fatally, that a battle against a modern, industrialised and belligerent nation was very different to a fight against Dutch-bred farmers in the veldt.  Charges on horses quickly became things of the past on the Western Front.

But that was all in the future in August 1914.  For the time being, the Australian mounted infantryman was seen as being an essential part of any battle (and they still were in the sands of the Middle East, as the attack on Beersheba in 1917 proved).  Leslie Oakley, an experienced horseman, was probably viewed as being a very valuable cog in the allied war machine.  He signed up to 4 Light Horse Regiment (LHR) and trained at Broadmeadows before boarding A18 HMAT Wiltshire at Port Melbourne on 19 October 1914, a part of Australia’s expeditionary force.

                                                       Wiltshire (AWM A04186)

Upon reaching the entrance to the Red Sea, the convoy of ships from Australia and New Zealand was ordered to stop at the Suez Canal rather than proceeding on to its original destination of southern France.  The British and French governments had decided to attack German ally Turkey, knock it out of the war, and open up the Dardanelles Straits to allow access to Russian ports on the Crimean peninsula via the Black Sea.  In that way, they could provide war materiel to their Russian allies and receive valuable food supplies, such as wheat, in return.

While the troops trained in the sand of Egypt from December to March 1915, and while allied warships tried in vain to force their way through the Dardanelles, the allied commanders decided that they needed to invade the Gallipoli Peninsula from the west, cross over it to the shore of the straits and knock out the very effective forts located there.  Thus, on 25 April 1915, a combined force of British, French, Indian, Australian and New Zealand troops carried out a number of landings on and near the peninsula and took on the Turkish troops located there.

Leslie and his Light Horse companions were not there at the landings, however.  They were being held back until battle conditions, especially the terrain involved, were more conducive to mounted attacks.  The hills and gullies of Gallipoli were not considered propitious in that regard.  However, by mid-May, the attrition rate at Gallipoli was becoming so great that the commanders asked the Light Horse commander, General Harry Chauvel, if they could ‘borrow’ his men and use them to bolster the infantry ranks on the slopes of the peninsula.  Accordingly, Leslie and the rest of the light horsemen were sent to what had become known as Anzac Cove between 22 and 24 May.  Initially, they were broken up into smaller groups and assigned to mix in with infantry at various parts of the front.  The reception they received from the infantrymen was varied.  Some were welcomed but others were shunned, being seen as ‘softies’ with their emu plumes in their hats (Chauvel’s way of distinguishing them from the infantry), and arriving after the initial landing and after most of the ‘hard yakka’ (and deaths and injuries) involved in establishing the posts on the heights had occurred.  Fights broke out in some places and this very mixed reception convinced Chauvel and the other commanders that the Light Horse would be better off and more effective if it was fighting as an individual force.  Thus it came about that, by August 1915, discrete LHR units from Victoria and Western Australia were slaughtered in their hundreds in the attack on the Nek and other places as part of a general offensive.

George Lambert: The charge of the 3^rd Light Horse Brigade at the Nek, 7 August 1915   (AWM Art 07965)    

Being in 4 LHR, Leslie was lucky enough to miss that attack at the Nek.  However, he saw plenty of action at other spots.  The Light Horse was generally used to defend precarious positions on the heights. 4 LHR was assigned to a few, but especially Ryrie’s Post from 29 July, after a short break on the island of Imbros.

Ryrie’s Post    ( Reproduced with permission of the Weekly Times)

On 8 August, the day after the attack at the Nek, the Turks attacked Ryrie’s Post.  Fortunately, the LHR was able to repel them after they were discovered crawling into the allied trenches.  This conflict, much of it involving ruses in attempts to test the enemy’s strength, continued until the end of the month.  From 21 August, units of 4 LHR were sent in rotation to relieve 7 LHR at Lone Pine - scene of the only Anzac victory during the offensive of the previous month.

Lone Pine before the offensive in August 1915  (AWM A03228)

The rotations continued at Lone Pine into the first week of September and it is probably safe to assume that Leslie participated in one of them.  On 5 September, however, his war came to an end.  He was hospitalised at Anzac Cove and then on 10 September he was loaded aboard the hospital ship Neuralia and transported to a hospital in Malta.  The diagnosis was kidney trouble, but this may have been mistaken for lumbago, as his kidneys were x-rayed in England in October, and no disease was found in them.

Hospital Ship Neuralia 1915    (IWM ART 4405)

Leslie’s condition must have been quite serious, as he was sent to England on 3 October, transferring to the Southern General Hospital at Birmingham on arrival on the eleventh of the month.  A medical board in December concluded that his disabilities had been aggravated by the climate on the peninsula and his exposure to active service.

Leslie stayed at the hospital until 19 January 1916, when he was invalided to Australia on A16 HMAT Star of  Victoria.

Star of Victoria, courtesy of Australian Light Horse Studies

His medical condition at that time was described as consisting of dysentery and lumbago and he was judged permanently unfit due to those conditions.  The fact that he was still suffering from them four months after being hospitalised may indicate the seriousness of his illnesses.  It is also interesting to note that, according to a medical report written at a hospital in Birmingham in October 1915, Leslie told the doctors that he had had pains in his back ‘on and off’ for five years.  Therefore, the incident in the trenches probably aggravated a pre-existing condition.  One wonders if he told the doctor about that when he enlisted.

As a result of the medical board report, Leslie was formally discharged for the army on 25 July 1916.  It was after the discharge and Leslie’s contact with the repatriation department that the full story of his health problems became known to the authorities.  A big question arises as soon as his enlistment is considered.  On Leslie’s attestation form, the examining doctor listed a ‘Large, Irreg.[ular] Operation Cic.[atrix] above Umbilicus’.  In other words, Leslie had a large scar above his navel.  Just what the doctor asked about this is unknown.  Did he still pass Leslie as fit for service, even though he told the doctor that he had had five operations for hydatids, plus another two for an abscess in his liver?  Or did the doctor not bother to ask, or Leslie not volunteer the information?  We do not know.

Anyway, Leslie got to Gallipoli and spent several months there in the trenches.  It turns out that the lumbago described when he was returned to Australia was probably caused by the fact that, according to him, he was buried twice in the trenches by shellfire, his lower back being concussed on at least one of those occasions.  He was also suffering from shell shock, as were many of his compatriots.

What happened to Leslie after his return?  It probably took him a while to recover and reestablish himself because, by October 1916,  his prewar employer, the Nestlé Company of Dennington (just outside  Warrnambool) was writing to the war office and noting that Leslie had not returned to the job he held at the company before signing up.  It noted that it was still paying war gratuities of two and sixpence per diem and was still keeping his position open.  So, Leslie had obviously not contacted the company after his return.  Was he too ill to do so?  Did his back problem prevent him from doing any physical work?  He obviously recovered to an extent because he returned to Dennington and his job in January 1917.  By that time, he was receiving a full pension from the federal government.  Once he began working again, the pension was reduced to fifty per cent from 1 March 1917.  By 1919, it was down to twenty-five per cent, and it was canceled altogether in 1922.  Although Leslie commented that he had never been really well since returning to Australia, he was nevertheless able to continue with his work (his employer no doubt taking account of his back problems in assigning work to him) for the next seventeen years, supporting his wife and two children.

Sadly, however, the situation had taken a turn for the worse by 1939. In March of that year, it was reported by the repatriation department that Leslie was suffering from cancer of the stomach and a gastric ulcer.  His wife Gertrude wrote a letter to the department in May, noting that his condition was poor, an operation on the ulcer had not led to any improvement, and he had been bed-ridden for almost seven months.  No doubt thinking to provide some support for his wife, Leslie applied for another pension on 21 June.  He died just eight days later, aged fifty-nine.

Gertrude, probably grief-stricken and mentally and physically exhausted, was to suffer even further.  In August of that year, Leslie’s application for a pension was rejected because the stomach cancer and duodenal ulcer had not been caused by his war service.  This was despite a plea from the Warrnambool Sub-Branch of the RSSAILA that, given that he had fought for Australia in two wars, and had suffered injuries in the more recent one,  a pension was the least that the government could do for him.  Sadly, it fell on deaf ears.

Sources

Australian War Memorial

Carlyon, Les: Gallipoli, Sydney, MacMillan, 2001

Australian Light Horse Studies

Imperial War Museum

Lenore Frost

National Archives Australia

Weekly Times

War Service Commemorated

Essendon Gazette Roll of Honour With the Colours

Regimental Register