Charles Edwin Woodrow (CEW) Bean, Australia's WW1 historian

The Mission was headed by WWI war correspondent CEW Bean. Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean, MA, BCL (Oxon), LittD (Melb), journalist and historian, was the official war correspondent for Australia 1914-1918, and official historian of Australia in the First World War. 

He conceived the idea for an Australian War Memorial Museum. He was on the Committee and Board of the Memorial from 1919, and was Acting Director. 

The portrait depicts Bean wearing an army greatcoat and holding a pencil and notebook.

by George Lambert.

AWM image and text

Some text from the AWM site. Some images & some text from the Anzac Book.

Charles Bean is perhaps best remembered for the official histories of Australia in the First World War, of which he wrote six volumes and edited the remainder. 

Before this, however, he was Australia’s official correspondent to the war. 

He was also the driving force behind the establishment of the Australian War Memorial.

Bean was born on 18 November 1879 at Bathurst, New South Wales and his family moved to England when he was ten. He completed his education there, eventually studying classics and law at Oxford.

He travelled widely in New South Wales as a barrister’s assistant and, struck by the outback way of life, wrote and illustrated a book, The impressions of a new chum. 

The book was never published but in mid-1907 much of its content appeared in a series of Sydney Morning Herald articles under the by-line ‘CW’. 

In these articles Bean introduced a view of Australia, particularly its men, which foreshadowed much of what he would write about the AIF.

In 1913 he returned to Sydney as the Herald’s leader writer. 

When the First World War began, Bean won an Australian Journalists Association ballot and became official correspondent to the AIF. 

He then reported on the Australians on the Western Front where his admiration of the AIF crystallized into a desire to memorialize their sacrifice and achievements. In addition to his journalism, Bean filled hundreds of diaries and notebooks, all with a view to writing a history of the AIF when the war ended. 

In early 1919 he led a historical mission to Gallipoli before returning to Australia and beginning work on the official history series that would consume the next two decades of his life.

During the Second World War, Bean liaised between the Chiefs of Staff and the press for the Department of Information. He became Chairman of the Commonwealth Archives Committee and was instrumental in creating the Commonwealth Archives. Between 1947 and 1958 he was Chairman of the Promotion Appeals Board of the Australian Broadcasting Commission and continued to write – a history of Australia’s independent schools and finally a book on two senior AIF figures, Two men I knew.

Bean didn't like Monash; he certainly didn't understand him, and this was partly Monash's fault. Monash was what these days would be called a self-promoter; he saw little virtue in modesty. He gave Bean 'a good talking to' in June for failing to give the 4th Brigade enough publicity. There are few surer ways of getting a journalist offside. Bean, however, carried his own prejudices. He had a romantic notion of how senior officers should be. Country lads with modest ways who came from good English-Australian families with clergymen or schoolteachers close up in the pedigree - these were fine. This Monash, the son of a Polish merchant, a city man, middle-aged and portly, an engineer who knew how to play political games - he didn't fit the Bean template. In 1918 Bean lobbied against Monash being made commander of the Australian Corps. 'He is not the man,' Bean wrote in his diary. "Besides, we do not want Australia represented by men mainly because of their ability, natural and inborn in Jews, to push themselves." Les Carlyon "Gallipoli" ISBN 0-7329-1128-1 Page 384

Bean received a number of honorary degrees and declined a knighthood. He said he could not bear the thought of his wife going to the butcher and asking for meat for Sir Charles Bean. He had married Ethel Young in 1921 and the couple adopted a daughter. Bean, one of the most admired Australians of his generation, died after a long illness in Concord Repatriation Hospital in 1968.

C E W Bean, Artist, Poet & Photographer

And the guns and stretcher-bearers
But, before the bowl is cool,
There's one chap I'd like to mention,
He's a fellow called ABDUL.

We haven't seen him much of late
Unless it be his hat,
Bobbing down behind a loophole
And we mostly blaze at that;

But we hear him wheezing there at nights,
Patrolling through the dark,
With his signals-hoots and chirrups
Like an early morning lark.

We've heard the twigs a-crackling,
As we crouched upon our knees,
And his big, black shape went smashing,
Like a rhino, through the trees.

We've seen him flung in, rank on rank,
Across the morning sky;
And we've had some pretty shooting,
And -  he knows the way to die.

Yes, we've seen him dying there in front
Our own boys died there, too-
With his poor dark eyes a-rolling,
Staring at the hopeless blue;

With his poor maimed arms a-stretching
To the God we both can name
And it fairly tore our hearts out;
But it's in the beastly game.

So though your name be black as ink
For murder and rapine,
Carried out in happy concert
With your Christians from the Rhine,

We will judge you, Mr. Abdul,
By the test by which we can-
That with all your breath, in life, in death,
You've played the gentleman.

C. E. W. B.