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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this website contains names, images, and voices of deceased persons.

In addition, some articles contain terms or views that were acceptable within mainstream Australian culture in the period in which they were written, but may no longer be considered appropriate.

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Alexander William (Alec) Campbell (1899–2002)

by Tony Stephens

This entry is from Obituaries Australia

Alec Campbell, c.1915

Alec Campbell, c.1915

So now they have all gone. It must have been hard for the last few, and for their families. Their dying has been so public. Australia has counted them off, one by one.

Now Alec Campbell is dead, there may never be quite the same nationwide awareness of old soldiers, although the World War I veterans are now being counted off. We used to know the Anzacs. Now they are history. The remaining 16 Australian survivors of World War I will be history soon, too.

Mr Campbell's widow, Kate, said last June, when Roy Longmore's death left her husband as the last Anzac survivor of Gallipoli, that she had dreaded that day.

Alec Campbell, second from right seated on the ground, aged 16 years old, just after he enlisted.

Alec Campbell had become national property. "I'm not sure Alec realises it the attention that goes with it," she said. "It can be quite dreadful."

However, the old men put up with the attention usually uncomplainingly. They thought it their duty, as a last service to the nation. They were smart enough to realise they were being celebrated as much for their longevity as for any achievement on the battlefield, and they used their ebbing years to ram home the message that most battlefields are unsatisfactory places to resolve arguments.

The details of their stories changed a little along the way. Ted Matthews, the last survivor of the Australians to land on Gallipoli on April 25, 1915 what Manning Clark called "that sad Sabbath morn" said in 1995 that he had not fired a shot on the peninsula, where he was a signaller. A few years later he was saying he had fired a shot and hoped he had missed.

Alec Campbell said in 1996 that he had not fired a shot.

On Anzac Day this year he said he had lost count of the number of Turks he had shot. It is possible that the two men's memories were playing tricks. It is just as likely that they had tired of the same questions and were changing their answers in protest.

Mr Campbell grew tired of pointing out in his last years that his brief time at Gallipoli was a very small part of his rich life.

He had helped build the first Parliament House in Canberra in 1927, graduated in economics after he turned 50 and fathered the last of his nine children at 69. He sailed in six Sydney-Hobart yacht races, was president of the Launceston Trades Hall Council, campaigned with Lady Jessie Street for peace and contributed to the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Yet everyone wanted to talk to him about Gallipoli, so he tried to remember, uncomplainingly. 

Mr Longmore's great-granddaughter, 16-year-old Carly Longmore, made the point at his funeral service in Melbourne: "Roy Longmore was the very essence of modesty, humanity, sacrifice, survival and courage.

"It is unbelievable to think that Roy has lived in three different centuries and had to live with 87 years of graphic memories of those bloody battles of war. Eighty-seven years of waking up every morning and continuing life as normal, 87 years of being nothing less than a hero, 87 years of never once complaining of it."

Len Hall was another. One of the first Australians to enlist for World War I, his service number was 52 and he was only 16 years and five months old.

His regiment needed a bugler and young Len could play. So Major Clive Nicholas, of the 10th Light Horse, put the boy's age up.

Len sailed off to war, after handing an emu plume from his hat to a girl he scarcely knew on the wharf.

Hall put his bugle aside and was a machine-gunner during the mad charge on the Turkish trenches at the Nek, with the job of firing over the heads of the running Australians.

Men of the 10th followed two waves of 8th Light Horse, who were annihilated. "Boys, you have 10 minutes to live," the 10th's commanding officer said. At the end of the day, 375 of the 600 attackers were casualties.

Historian C.E.W. Bean wrote: "The West Australians assumed that death was certain, and each in the secret places of his mind debated how he would go to it. Mate, having said goodbye to mate ... went forward to meet death instantly, running as straight and swiftly as they could at the Turkish rifles. With that regiment went the flower of the youth of Western Australia ..."

Len Hall survived to fight with the 3rd Machine Gun Squadron at Tel el Saba, near the famous charge at Beersheba, to meet Lawrence of Arabia, and was with the Australians who beat Lawrence into Damascus.

In 1919, a young woman stopped him in the street, introduced herself as Eunice Lydiate, and said: "Excuse me, may I give you back your plume?" Len and Eunice married in 1921, had two children and were together until her death at the end of 1995. He had nursed her for 15 years before she entered a nursing home with Alzheimer's disease.

He visited her three times a week, a three-hour trip by public transport, never asking anyone for a lift. "She didn't recognise anyone else to talk to," he said. "But she talked to me."

He phoned from Perth when he was 99, saying he wanted to meet a nephew in Sydney and asking if there were any hotels in this city. I arranged the meeting and offered a home for his four-day stay. He travelled on the Indian Pacific train and arrived at Central carrying his old Globite case. The tiny figure standing on the platform looked both vulnerable and indestructible.

He stayed up, talking, until about midnight every night, our dog at his feet. He spoke not so much about war and dying as about peace and living. He stopped living at 101.

John Masefield said of the Anzacs: "They were the finest body of young men ever brought together in modern times." About 85 years later, the first thing people noticed about Alec, Roy, Ted, Len and the other old men of Gallipoli was their gentleness, and the contrast between this quality and the violent streak in their past.

The next thing was their accepting nature. They rarely asked for anything. They accepted their lot in life, just as they had at Gallipoli.

Some of the 50,000 Australians and 18,000 New Zealanders had enlisted out of dutiful patriotism, some out of an innocent sense of adventure, some to escape boredom or poverty. Some, in their last years, criticised the politicians who sent them to war and one or two of the commanders, but most admired the old Turkish foe.

They felt bitterness to nobody, knowing there was no point.

They were fatalists who strove against the oppression of death, historian Bill Gammage says. They had survived Gallipoli and the grimmer fields of France. They survived the Depression. Their marriages were long and, by most accounts, happy.

They scoffed at the notion they were heroes, although a few remembered the words of General Sir Ian Hamilton, the British commander: "Before the war, who had ever heard of Anzac? Hereafter, who will ever forget it?"

The people of Australia bade Ted Matthews farewell at a state funeral in 1997, making him grander in death than he claimed to be in life. The nation's flags were lowered to half-mast in his honour; the nation's leaders bowed before his coffin.

The governor-general, Sir William Deane, called Mr Matthews "the quintessential Australian". The Prime Minister, John Howard, said that December 9, the day Mr Matthews died, should be marked "as the day Australia grew old enough to sometimes forget what happened that Anzac Day [1915] but determined enough to always remember".

Like most of the others, Mr Matthews talked little about war until pressed in his declining years. Then he criticised war and those who made it. John Howard said: "To those of us who lead nations, let us recall that it was Matthews who said: `Politicians make up the wars. They don't go to them."'

Mr Matthews would also say he was not one of the real heroes. He was a signaller, and the infantry had the worst of it. What is more, those who fought in France suffered much more than the men of Gallipoli.

Yet, Sir William said, "he was there at Gallipoli, without respite, for the whole duration of the stalemate: through the heat, and the flies, and the stench of death, and disease, and attack, and counter-attack, and the cold as winter drew on. And the bonds which transcended and transcend individual mortality were forged between those men and the soul of our nation."

Sir William said Mr Matthews's death marked "a final break in a living thread that united us Australians with the complete Anzac epic".

The same sentiments are now being expressed on Alec Campbell's death.

Manning Clark said the Anzac experience was "something too deep for words".

Jack Buntine would have been puzzled by the grand words used to describe it. His mother died when he was nine and his drunkard father sold him to a German couple in Victoria who wanted his child labour. The woman beat him, so he knocked her out, fled to the bush and joined the 8th Light Horse. "The family was split up to billy-o," he said. "I was very pleased to go to Gallipoli."

So, too, was Tom Epps, from Adelaide. He joined partly to travel. "I was brainless," he said, "but I'm not sorry I went. It taught me how stupid the politicians and military can be. They were boneheads."

Fred Kelly's younger brother, Jim, dragged Fred into the army. Fred was 18, Jim 16. Their father drew the line when another brother, 14-year-old Mick, also tried to enlist.

Fred went from Gallipoli to fight on the Somme. He said much later in his Sydney home: "Gallipoli, as far as I was concerned, was a picnic."

Roy Kyle, who went from Victoria at 17, recalled: "The country was mad with patriotism. I couldn't get there quickly enough to kill a German ... The feeling of nationhood began with Gallipoli, but I don't take any pride in the medals at all.

"I was a silly boy and should have had my bottom smacked for joining up at that age."

Harry Newhouse, from Sydney, landed at Gallipoli on April 26, to learn a few days later that his brother, George, had been killed. "Not only did my brother get killed and a lot of our men, but 86,000 Turks were killed. What was it for? I don't know. It should never have been."

General Hamilton, watching the Anzac landings, had said: "God, one would think, cannot see them at all or he would put a stop to this sort of panorama, and yet it would be a pity if he missed it; for these fellows have been worth the making ... They fight for love all the way from the Southern Cross for love of the Old Country and of liberty."

Walter Parker believed that God guided lives during war and peace. His daughter, Gwen Charlesworth of Melbourne, came to terms with his death long before it happened and before his face was among surviving Anzacs on postage stamps.

"He has been a good father," she said. "Our lives have been comfortable, happy and home-making, like the lives of so many Australians."

Cedric Drysdale Stapylton-Smith, of Christchurch, New Zealand, survived Gallipoli and the Somme and was still smoking and drinking at 104 years.

"My whole life has been pretty fortunate," he said, "not a dog's life."

He recited the Lord's Prayer every night, praying that young people would have a less troubled world than his.

Albert White had never been interviewed about his war until 1995, when he was 100 and living alone in Brisbane.

"Gallipoli was a bastard of a place," he said. "I never understood what we were fighting for. All I could think of was that I never wanted to go back to the bloody place."

He added: "What I do today is forgotten tomorrow. That's how my life has been, really."

Albert White was wrong there. Charles Bean said of the Anzacs: "Their story rises, as it will always rise, above the mists of ages, a monument to great-hearted men …" and for Alec's 73 offspring, a veritable army. Alec Campbell is survived by his wife, nine children, 30 grandchildren, 32 great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.

A state funeral is expected to be held for him in Hobart, although he was never one for too much fuss.

When he was told he was the last Gallipoli veteran, he replied: "Oh well, that won't last forever."

Original Publication

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Citation details

Tony Stephens, 'Campbell, Alexander William (Alec) (1899–2002)', Obituaries Australia, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://labouraustralia.anu.edu.au/biography/campbell-alexander-william-alec-32957/text41065, accessed 19 March 2024.

© Copyright Labour Australia, 2012

Alec Campbell, c.1915

Alec Campbell, c.1915

Life Summary [details]

Birth

26 February, 1899
Launceston, Tasmania, Australia

Death

16 May, 2002 (aged 103)
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

Religious Influence

Includes the religion in which subjects were raised, have chosen themselves, attendance at religious schools and/or religious funeral rites; Atheism and Agnosticism have been included.

Education
Occupation
Military Service
Awards
Key Organisations
Workplaces