News from No Man's Land by James Green - HTML preview

VIII
 HORSEFERRY ROAD

When the great war is over there are some places which will live in the minds of the Australians. Mena and the desert around the Pyramids has become a part of the perspective of many Australian lives. It is stamped there by many a long route march, and the training of the Australian Forces there is a page in the annals of the history of Egypt, which includes so much that is military, most noteworthy being the assembling, training, and fighting of Napoleon's Army at the same place. We had our Battle of the Pyramids, strenuous enough if only a sham battle.

Heliopolis, with its old associations—the City of the Sun in the days of Joseph and the place of his marriage, was the centre for our New Zealand troops and also for many of our Australian units. Particularly will it be remembered by the thousands of sick and wounded who came there to our great No. 1 Australian General Hospital, which occupied the largest hotel in the world, the Heliopolis Palace. The classic island of Lemnos, both before our landing at Gallipoli and after our evacuation, loomed large in our life. Salisbury Plain with its ancient towns and its Druidical remains at Stonehenge also comes into the picture.

But Horseferry Road has its special place in our records. Thousands of Australians, on business bent, visit Head Quarters there, and the number who report there on duty or leave every week never falls below four figures. They see that it is a college, and that the officers are working in libraries surrounded by memorial busts and bronzes of old Masters, Tutors, and Scholars. They see hundreds of clerks working in lecture-halls, class-rooms, or College Chapel. It will be interesting for them to know that Horseferry Road is worthy of coming into the historic perspective of the Australian Army.

To begin with, it is probably the oldest road in England, certainly older than Watling Street. The Archbishop's horse ferry began when his Grace was more powerful than any of the several kings in England, and brought the traffic from one side of the Thames to the other before bridges were thought of. The Horseferry Road carried this ancient traffic, and was laid out by use, very much the same as Parramatta Road followed the tracks of the bullock teams along the ridge leading from Sydney to Parramatta—and thus became in a casual way the first road in the history of the new nation under the Southern Cross.

The ancient Archbishop never could in his wildest dreams foreshadow the time when hosts of British soldiers from the other side of the world would march along his narrow horse ferry road.

The building occupied by our Head Quarters is the Westminster Training College for teachers, whose principal is Dr. Workman, a leading scholar of England, and one of the first authorities on Mediaeval History. It was first thought of taking the College for an officers' training depot, but the War Office ultimately handed it over to the Australian Commonwealth.

The Australian Imperial Force but continues the war record of this great college. Of its 800 or more pre-war students who have attested, 735 are on active service: 47 have been killed in action, 23 wounded, 7 reported missing, and 3 are prisoners of war. It has contributed 97 commissioned officers and 218 non-commissioned officers to the army. The men of this college have obtained many distinctions in the field. Lieutenant William F. Forshaw and Lieutenant Donald Simpson Bell have won the V.C. The first case is well known to Australians, for Lieutenant Forshaw won his V.C. in the critical days of Gallipoli by holding up Turks for forty-one hours by throwing bombs. Captain C. H. Hill Roberts and Captain J. W. Wood won the Military Cross, and Lieutenant E. J. Phillips the Distinguished Conduct Medal and the Médaille Militaire. Private Herbert Brindle and Gunner W. L. Cooper, B.A., have won the Military Medal.

This does not profess to be a complete record of the honours won by Westminster Training College men, but just a list dug out of the statistics while the war continues, to show that the Australians have become citizens of no mean city in coming to Horseferry Road, Westminster.

Besides this war work, the Westminster College has done a great deal for Britain in sending one of its old tutors, Dr. Lowry, to the Munition Board. He is a great chemist, and the author of some of the surprise packets which have been sent to Fritz in the shape of new explosives.

In peace, as well as war, the college, which was founded over seventy years ago at Horseferry Road, has gained honourable distinction. Hedley Fitton, the famous etcher, was one of its old pupils. Sir James Yoxall, author and M.P., is another old student. James Smetham, the famous artist and letter-writer, was a tutor here. John Scott, grandfather of the Rev. Dr. Scott Lidgett, was the first Principal, and was followed by Dr. Rigg, the great educational expert and writer on Methodism and Anglican theology. Besides that, it is linked to Australia by the fact that some of its old pupils have gone to occupy honourable positions as teachers and in some cases ministers in the Commonwealth.

At least one of our great Australian schoolmasters, Mr. F. Chapple, M.A., B.Sc., Principal of the largest boys' college in Australia, Prince Alfred College, Adelaide, was a student and a member of the staff here.

One of the strange things that war does is to bring back in khaki men from Australia, on business to the A.I.F. Head Quarters to find that it is their own old college. Men from Westminster Training College are fighting in France, Palestine, Mesopotamia, on the Salonica front, and some of them are in naval work; and while this famous Alma Mater sends out her own sons to the frontiers of the Empire, she opens wide her hospitable portals to receive the brawny pioneers of New Lands away 'down under.' Thus men from back-block townships in Australia are brought into a sort of fellowship of service with the English trainers of the old Horseferry Road Training College.

Our men will think kindly, too, of Horseferry Road, because the War Chest Club, just opposite the Head Quarters, was so often their home. Here, under the hostess, Mrs. Samuel, a capable group of lady workers have dispensed thousands of hot meals to sore-footed and war-weary Australians on leave from France. Then there was the quiet refuge of the Y.M.C.A. Hostel on the other side of the road, in the Wesleyan Central Hall, where, under the lady superintendent, Mrs. Workman, and her voluntary assistants, similar good work was done.

To Horseferry Road the Australian came gladly, leaving it regretfully for war again; and when the war is over it will be a kindly memory. In close proximity to Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, where so many bonds of Empire are forged, the old Westminster Training College will continue to do its useful part in Empire building.