Book Review - Slim the Standardbearer by Ronald Lewin

 Slim the Standardbearer: a biography of Field-Marshall The Viscount Slim by Ronald Lewin

Ware, Herts.: Wordsworth Editions, 1999 (first published 1976)  ISBN 184022214X

This is a workmanlike biography of an interesting man. The major part of the book focusses on Slims' Burma Campaign, which in a sense is right and proper, but I when I finished the book I felt a little short-changed, as Slim has written so well about that himself. I was hoping for a little more insight into the man than this book delivered, but it was still worth reading to remind oneself of what an extraordinary life he led.

The son of a failed businessman, Slim dreamed of an early age of joining the army, but funds (lack of) seemed to scupper that wish, until the advent of war in 1914. Despite the myth that Slim became a Field-Marshall from the ranks, he was actually commissioned immediately as a second lieutenant owing to his time spend before the war in the Birmingham University OTC (despite not being a student at the University - the first example of "Slim's luck"). He was sent to Gallipoli, where he was wounded: after his recovery he was sent to Mesopotamia to assist in the relief of Kut, where he was wounded a second time. 

After the war he was transferred to the Indian Army where he served with Gurkhas. It seems that this was one of the happiest times of his life - there was much low-level action against rebellious tribes, he met and married his wife, and slowly made his way through the ranks, impressing at Staff College in Delhi and at the Imperial Defence College.

Interestingly he also spent these years writing short stories for money (even though Lewin's book is only just short of a hagiography, Slim's nose for cash runs through the book, from ensuring expense accounts were suitably large, to augmenting his pension in any way he thought he could), which I think is a fascinating insight, although one that Lewin doesn't ponder too much.

Although he is famous for his campaigning in Burma in World War Two, he also served in Ethiopia against the Italians (where he was wounded yet again), and in Iraq, before being sent East. There, in Burma, he famously led the retreat back to India, and then the advance back to Rangoon, through a series of excellent strategic and tactical manoeuvres, and (with the close support of Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Commander of the South East Asian Theatre) working his way through the politics of logistics, supply and recalcitrant commanders (Wingate, Stilwell).

This is the major part of Lewin's work, and he describes well what is required of someone commanding an Army, and how the fighting is just one part. It was in Burma that Slim's ability to get people to follow him, his ability to listen, to plan on the run, and to connect with the average soldier were so much on display. Burma in many ways was (and is) a forgotten campaign, and so Slim's capability has been lost in time as the European and Pacific Campaigns have garnered most of the glory. He was probably the best British field commander of the War.

After the War Slim finally got the job for which he had been destined for a long time - Chief of General Staff. It was a difficult time to undertake the role, with the Army moving from a wartime footing to understanding what it's role would be during the Cold War. Slim instituted many reforms during this time.

Then seemingly out of the blue he was asked to be Governor-General of Australia. He took on the role with gusto, and was again a trailblazer, being the first of the "modern" G-Gs, touring the country and being a force for unification, while trying to stay outside of politics.

His final years as Constable of Windsor Castle were ones of enjoyment and social activities, before his decline and death in 1970.

Lewin's book covers this all in appropriate detail, but with little verve or insight - there is a later biography by Robert Lyman which may be better than this one.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Gatton Man by Merv Lilley

 Gatton Man by Merv Lilley

Ringwood, Vic.: McPhee Gribble Publishers, 1994       ISBN 0869143344

I first read Gatton Man many years ago, not long after it was published. I had at the time just read Rodney Hall's Captivity Captive which had begun my long-term fascination with the Gatton murders. On my first reading of Gatton Man I was convinced that Lilley may have indeed been the son of the murderer, but on this re-reading many years later it seems to me a much thinner claim.

Which is not to dismiss this book as a waste of a reader's time. Part memoir, part biography of his father, Gatton Man is a story of the other Australia that doesn't make it into what we tell ourselves of our white beginnings - no pastoral stations and glorious cattle runs, no comfortable suburban life with weekends at the beach or the footy, but a life of hard scrabble on small acreages, scratching the barest of livings, and growing up with little education and fated to live a hard life amongst hard people.

In Lilley's case, the small acreage he grew up on was near Rockhampton in Queensland. He was the youngest of four children, who all worked (slaved) for their psychopathic father, W.J. Lilley. W.J. was extremely violent, a schemer who charmed his way into and out of trouble, and was a pederast and a rapist. Merv Lilley's tales (the memoir is more a series of vignettes than a chronological narrative) are about the drudgery of work mixed with fear of what W.J. might do, a world in which each child looked out for themselves before anything or anyone else. Lilley's mother did what she could, always at the risk of a thrashing from W.J., which could (and did) occur at any moment.

The other characters around the farm, itinerant workers, tramps, tin scratchers and gold miners and other farmers, created an ever-changing dynamic of people who could help, might need help themselves, who could be a friend or an enemy depending on the situation. Merv managed to extract himself from the situation entirely by joining up in World War Two. The "skills" he learned from growing up, both with his fists and his brain, served him well during his stint in uniform, and later when he became a communist and committed union activist around Queensland (Merv Lilley eventually married the author Dorothy Hewett and became a member of the left-wing literary scene in Australia).

All of this is fascinating and worth reading in and of itself but what of Lilley's central claim about his father, that he was the perpetrator of the triple murder of the Murphy siblings at Christmas time 1898 near the town of Gatton? The first section of the book provides the reader with a study of a man who could certainly be capable of such a crime. The second section attempts to prove the case.

This section of the book quotes verbatim quite a lot of evidential statements made to the commission of enquiry into the murders. Lilley is very interested in a man called William Day, who arrived in the Gatton area just before the murders, gaining work with Clarke, the butcher. Day left soon after the murders. He was, as they would say now, a "person of interest" at the time, and as Lilley lays out the various statements of detectives and others at Gatton, it does seem to a reader that he would indeed be a prime suspect in the case. After Day moved on, he eventually disappeared into history, although there were people who said he joined up to fight in South Africa and was killed there.

Lilley suggests that it was in fact his father that was William Day. He explains how he may have come up with the nom-de-plume, links the witnesses statements as to Day's cantankerous character to his father's own ways, and lets us know that his father did join up to fight the Boers. Lilley posits that W.J. did so to escape any heat that might be lingering in the investigation, and to cover his tracks. On his return, so Merv writes, he was careful for quite a few years with how and where he presented himself, until he was sure that he no longer could be linked to William Day or to Gatton.

While this all seems plausible, Merv has no hard evidence to back up any of his claims. On this re-reading, I see much more clearly the straw men that Lilley has set up so that he can knock them down all the more easily. He has no confession, he really has nothing to hang his hat on which could be accepted in a court of law as proof, beyond the fact that his father was working itinerantly around Queensland at the time, vaguely fits the description given by (some of) the witnesses who may have seen the killer, and that he soon joined up to go to South Africa. There would have been many young men who could fit that bill.

So, while Gatton Man fails in its main premise, it is still a wonderful insight into pioneering Australia, as well as into one of the most notorious crimes of the Nineteenth Century, which to this day remains unsolved.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell