‘Did I Tell You About The Time?’ The Great War Story of Herbert Godber
‘Of thine unspoken word thou art master;
Thy spoken word is master of thee.’
(Eastern saying, quoted by H.A. Godber in his grand-daughter Sharon Godber’s autograph book, 1966)
On 4 October 1919, Herbert Alfred Godber of Diamond Creek married Ivy Muriel Partington in the garden of her parents’ home in Hailes St. Greensborough. The Great War had been over for just on a year, but Herbert had only returned to Australia three months before. Ivy and Herbert had known each other for years before the war. They were both Methodists and had often met at combined church gatherings and sung together in the choir. They wrote to each other during the three and a half long years that Herbert was overseas.
Ivy was the eldest of four girls and rather shy. Herbert was an only child and very outgoing. His ‘best man’ was Fred Starling, a childhood friend from Diamond Creek, and also a returned soldier. Ivy’s bridesmaid and best friend was Ella Elliott who was soon to be married to Walter West, another soldier of the Great War. Much had happened in the past four years. The women had missed friends and lovers, felt anxiety, longing and uncertainty. Fred and Herbert had endured unspeakable horrors. Suffering, loss and grief were part of their common experience. The war had transformed their peaceful rural lives into something almost inexplicable. But they had survived. The wedding was the beginning of something new, more hopeful, more productive than war.
The bridegroom, Herbert Alfred Godber, would later become my grandfather, my mum’s father. He was born in Diamond Creek (which he always called ‘The Creek’) on 17 November 1892. He was born at his parents’ home in Haley St. and delivered by his grandmother. Herbert’s mother, Alice Haley, was my great grandmother and Herbert’s father was Job Godber. Job and Alice worked their family orchard, growing apples, pears and peaches. ‘Where you can grow apples you can grow peaches’, Grandpa Herbert used to say. Alice and Job came from a long line of orchardists and their families were among the earliest settlers in Diamond Creek. Grandpa left school at the age of twelve and was destined to follow in their footsteps.
For a while Grandpa also worked in one of the Diamond Creek gold mines, looking after the ponies. His father sometimes worked there too, underground, in order to supplement the family income. Alice milked a cow – always called Daisy – made butter and sold eggs. The Godbers were staunch Methodists, just like their forebears and belonged to the local church. They were teetotallers. Grandpa would recount often how strict his upbringing was, but he was very musical and taught himself to play the violin and a button accordion. He would go on to teach himself many things.
When war broke out between the British Empire and the German Empire, Herbert joined up for service in the 1st Australian Imperial Force. In July 1915, he was 23 years old, single, and despite the fact that he was his parents’ only child he felt, like so many others, that it was his duty to fight ‘for King and Country’. His friend Fred Starling joined up on the same day. Herbert was given a send-off by the local branch of the Red Cross Society during a patriotic entertainment and fundraising concert at the Diamond Creek local hall. The brass band played “Australia Will Be There’ and Fred Starling’s sister, Isa, sang one of the many songs. In front of a ‘crowded house’, Herbert and two other recruits were farewelled in a speech given by Councillor Lorimer and presented with a ‘wristlet watch’. His Diamond Creek friends later presented him with a New Testament to take with him to the front.
Herbert entered the Showgrounds Camp at Ascot Vale and soon afterwards responded to an appeal for volunteers to step forward to form a camp band. He took on the E flat bass and although he had not been previously trained on the instrument, must have quickly taught himself. In no time at all the band had earned itself such an excellent reputation, that in September 1915, it was the only band chosen to play at the funeral of Major General Bridges who had been killed on Gallipoli. Bridges was the only Australian soldier whose body was returned home for burial during the war. It was a great honour for the band and the bandsmen who led the funeral procession. The streets of Melbourne were lined with thousands of people.
The Showgrounds Camp Band marked an important stage in Herbert’s life. He made lifelong friends: Ray Membrey, a wheelwright from Stawell and Percy Nash, a gardener, originally from Limpley Stoke in England. The musical experience and training Herbert received meant that he was well qualified to join the 21st Battalion Band overseas. Playing with the band gave him the opportunity to experience a different kind of war to many others. He would play in concerts for the troops and for the wounded. The band was called upon to play at medal awarding ceremonies and funerals of soldiers. At church parades the band would play the familiar hymns of home, ‘Boro hymns’, Herbert called them in a postcard to Win Partington, Ivy’s sister. The old Greensborough hymns. And they are ‘making me a bit homesick’.
The three friends travelled to the front together aboard the troopship ‘Warilda’, leaving Melbourne on 8 February, 1916. Grandpa Herbert would recall how he also sailed to the front with two of his many cousins from ‘The Creek’, Tom and Hugh Coventry. He used to tell the story about the day they sailed from Albany in the west, as the ships always stopped there before setting off for Europe. ‘We were all leaning over the rail’, Grandpa would say, ‘and as we watched the coastline disappear, Hugh said to me, he said, “I wonder if we will ever see it again?”’ Hugh Coventry died during the Battle of Pozières in August 1916. His body was never found and his name is recorded among the missing on the Australian Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux in the Somme area of France. Grandpa would sometimes say after retelling that story. ‘Just goes to show’, or words to that effect, ‘never doubt that you can make it.’ It’s an image and a message that has stayed with me for over half a century now.
It may be that Herbert also trained as a stretcher bearer, as battalion bandsmen often were in the earlier part of the war, but he did not speak of it. Nor did he describe the realities of combat: the scream of shellfire, the hail of machine gun bullets, the choking gas, illness, the seeping cold and the soaking mud of the trenches, the sight of mutilated bodies and blood. The loss of friends. These were the horrors they were all to experience. Grandpa never gave you the details of those battles on the Western Front. But he would recite their names over and over. Their names would punctuate his conversations with their familiar sounds: Pozières, Mouquet Farm, Bullecourt, Wipers (Ypres), Passchendaele, Le Hamel, Villers- Bretonneux, Mont St. Quentin. Looking at those battles now and realising that Herbert and the 21st Battalion were there, makes me understand his reluctance to recall those sounds and sights. But the names of those places would echo and re-echo over the years. For a man who loved to talk, he was silent on many things.
Grandpa was happy to talk about the humorous aspects of the war. He had one of those lovely, drawling Aussie accents with broad vowels, a voice you just don’t hear these days. If I try hard, even now, I can just hear it in my head. ‘Did I tell you about the time?’, he’d say, and we would always answer ‘yes’, but that did not stop him telling you again. ‘Did I tell you about the time I was in leave in England? In London and saw the crowd gathering? “King George is coming”, they said, so I stopped to watch the King go by, and there I was, the only soldier in uniform, a lowly private among that crowd, and as he passed I saluted him. And the King – saluted me.’ He was so proud of that moment. King George the Fifth of course was also the Chief Commander of the Allied Forces.
Grandpa used to rattle on about the French language and trot out lots of French words and phrases in a fairly execrable accent I realised later, but it wasn’t the done thing in those days to have too posh an accent or to be too ‘lardy da’. The first words I ever learnt were: ‘Voulez-vous promenez avec moi ce soir mademoiselle’? This literally means, ‘Do you want to come out with me this evening, miss?’ But it could be interpreted as something a little more risqué. My response to this question was always: ‘Après la guerre monsieur.’ ‘After the war’, of course.
As children in the sixties we would visit Grandma and Grandpa at Greensborough. Dinner time was another great time for war stories. Sometimes for dessert we ate ‘blank mangie’ . This was ‘Aussie’ for ‘blanc mange’, which Grandpa scornfully explained was ‘white eat’, as though the French did not know how to name things properly. ‘Poir-ees’, ‘shockolatte’, ‘orangees’, he would say, recalling the words shouted out by the French women and children who sold their pears, oranges and chocolate to the Australian troops along the roadsides. In reading a postcard much later, after he died, a postcard sent from a French family with whom he was billeted after the war, I learned that his spoken French was deemed ‘très bien’, which is high praise indeed from a Frenchman.
In early 1917 Alice and Job learnt that their son Herbert was suffering from ‘trench feet’, bad enough to send him to hospital in England. It was a circulation problem brought about by the constant wet conditions in the trenches. Feet became painful, swollen and discoloured. The curse of ‘trench feet’ became a chance, even decades later, for Grandpa Herbert to complain about the ‘powers that be’. ‘How could we change into dry socks when our spare socks were wet too?’ Even many years after the war he continued to have problems with his feet, especially in winter.
‘Trench feet’ aside, Grandpa was spared the worst fates that could befall him: death, disease, woundings from shell, shrapnel, rifle and machine gun fire. And shell shock. Once he described how he had been way with the band, playing at the investiture of a general in Le Havre. ‘When I got back to the battalion at ‘Wipers’, so many of them had gone’, he sometimes said, describing the horrific casualties of Ypres. He could easily have been in the same situation, but he could not say that directly. Nor could he be drawn on his own role as a soldier. Asked once by my mum as a child: ‘Dad, did you ever kill a man?’, his response was: ‘If you mean did I ever look a man in the eye as I killed him, then the answer is “no”.’ His rifle fire may have found its mark, but he did not know. He certainly did not want to talk about it. But he often mentioned the horses. How they had suffered as they pulled the huge guns through the mud and under shellfire.
Grandpa wrote back home to his parents, to Ivy Partington. her sister Win and to many of his friends. Only a few postcards survive. These are all very jovial in tone, and reassuring. Despite the fact that correspondence was censored for anything too informative or critical, soldiers also tried to shield family and friends from the realities of ‘over there’. Grandpa made light of it all. Of marching with a full kit, he wrote, ‘it’s lovely being loaded up…it keeps one nice and warm, that’s if you keep walking!’ The old barn where they were living in February 1918 he described as ‘not a bad joint’. In June 1918, just before the big battles at the end of the war he noted: ‘We are having a glorious time and hope to stop here for another fifty years.’
There was another story Grandpa told that seemed quite incredible: that the men of the 21st Battalion won the Battle of Mont St. Quentin on the 1st of September 1918. Well, yes they did, and it was later described as ‘the finest single feat of the war’. In the end, just a dozen men from Nine Platoon had taken the highest point of the mount. Another soldier of the 21st, Alby Lowerson, had won a Victoria Cross for his brave actions at that battle. No wonder Grandpa was so proud of the 21st Battalion. We were ‘the first to go into the line’, he’d say ‘and the last to come out’. That story was true too.
Then, later in September 1918, the 21st Battalion was resting at Cappy, a little village on the Somme. Many of the battalions were down to around 300 men, only one third their battle strength. The solution was to amalgamate battalions to make a more efficient fighting force. In the 6th Brigade, those couple of hundred men of the 21st who had just won that battle of Mont St. Quentin were asked to disband. The announcement caused ‘great dismay’ among the men and their commanding officer broke down as he gave the order.
Grandpa retold this story many times and he always used to say, ‘when the order came, we all just sat on the ground and refused to disband, we just sat on the ground’. Now many years later I wonder whether my child’s ears misheard him. Did he mean, ‘We stood our ground?’ It meant the same thing. The men went on strike, refused the order, they mutinied, although respectfully, as did men of nearly all the other depleted battalions who were asked to disband. It was an act of disobedience for which they could all be courtmartialed. It seemed all rather amazing in a way, but as with all Grandpa’s stories, it proved to be historically accurate.
In the unit of diary of the 21st Battalion there is a description of the men’s actions. They were all very disciplined and went about their normal duties. They maintained excellent discipline, even though their officers had gone to their new battalions. They organised a football match and the band played in the evening. But they would not disband. They would not leave their battalion. Grandpa’s own diary has also has an entry for that day, 25 September. ‘Battle of Cappy won (bloodless). Triumph of discipline’. I often wondered what that meant, as Cappy was not the place of any official battle. The men’s will held sway way. They stayed together and were sent further east to continue their pursuit of the Germans who were losing the war at this stage. Some of those who had so resolutely refused to disband were among the 33 killed in that last battle of the war at Montbrehain.
There was no choice after that. They were too few to carry on. At 10 a.m. on 13 October, just one month before the war officially ended on 11 November, Private Herbert Godber was transferred to the 24th Battalion. During Christmas 1918, he was billeted with a family in Charlerois in Belgium. Later in 1919, he stayed with a family in France, working on his French! It was a long wait before he would return home. Officially he was now in the 24th, but Herbert, like all the rest continued to wear his 21st colour patch, the red and black diamond.
In July 1919, aboard the ‘Mahia’, Herbert became a member of the shipboard band that entertained the troops on the way home. He still had his old B flat bass with him. It came home with him and he had it for many years. After a brief engagement, Herbert and Ivy married in Greensborough. He may have changed in those years away, but their correspondence had kept them connected, perhaps deepened their relationship. While those precious letters no longer exist, the photo of their wedding, taken nearly one hundred years ago has stayed in the family ever since. Herbert and Ivy were married for 55 years, when Ivy died at the age of 81 in 1974.
But Grandpa himself was an incredible survivor. He was a man of great ability and confidence. He made up for lost time after the war and gradually educated himself in all the subjects he needed to become an electrical engineer. During the Great Depression of the 1930s he was lucky to keep his job in the Victorian Railways and at some stage went to work for the State Electricity Commission, becoming the engineer in charge of the control room at the Newport Power Station in Melbourne. He would proudly say that he was the man who ’switched on Victoria’.
When Grandpa retired in 1957 at the age of 65, he was a little perplexed to learn that his successor in the control room was a German engineer who had emigrated to Australia after the Second World War. It was Grandpa’s job ‘to run him in’, but despite the fact that he had ‘beaten the Hun’ in the First World War, this new chap was ‘quite okay.’
Grandpa and Grandma moved from Spotswood where they had been living since the twenties (in a house that Grandpa had built himself) and came back to live in Greensborough where Grandma still had a block of land. Here he built a croquet lawn and planted yet another orchard where he would proudly show his latest attempts at grafting unlikely varieties of fruit onto the one tree. He could still identify an apple variety by its feel and smell. His greatest delight, apart from following Collingwood and talking to whoever would listen, was playing his collection of brass band music on the old long play records. He created his own set of speakers which could handle the very loud volume at which he always played his favourite ‘Radetsky March’. The walls vibrated with the sounds of brass.
Grandpa Herbert was an energetic, sprightly, earthy, slightly cantankerous optimist, always ready for a ‘yack’. He was a great conversationalist and loved a debate, he was sociable, caring, generous with the time he gave to others. He cared for his elderly parents and friends in need. Grandpa kept in touch with his army mates and always marched on Anzac Day. He always talked about the war, but his stories were the lighter ones, the darker truths he kept from us. Perhaps he shared them with Grandma, perhaps with others who had been to the war. He loved always to share his pride in the 21st Battalion, the ‘Red and Black Diamond’.
My mum once asked him about his diary. ‘Dad, it’s just dates and places you went and when you went to band practice. Didn’t anything else happen?’ Herbert just said to her, ‘the rest was too terrible to write about’. The stories he did tell us were the ones he wanted us to know about.
In a postcard to Win Partington written on 2 July, just before Pozières, my grandfather, Herhert Godber wrote, ‘I am sticking in a poppy, see if the seeds will grow in memory of the place.’ I do not know whether those seeds did grow, but his stories were well planted and they grew into the memories he wanted to keep of his place in the history of the Great War.
by Jillian Durance
This story was first published in “Fine Spirit and Pluck: World War One Stories from Banyule, Nillumbik and Whittlesea” published by Yarra Plenty Regional Library, August 2016
Photo Herbert Godber Paris 1916 Durance Family Collection
