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.