64 Facts About Charles Bean

When Bean died on 30 August 1968, aged 88, an obituary written by Guy Harriott, associate editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and a former war correspondent, described Bean as being "one of Australia's most distinguished men of letters".

Charles Bean was born in Bathurst, New South Wales, the first of three sons of the Reverend Edwin Bean, then headmaster of All Saints' College, Bathurst, and Lucy Madeline Bean, nee Butler.

In 1889, when Charles Bean was nine, the family moved to England, where he was educated at Brentwood School, Essex, of which his father was the newly appointed headmaster.

In 1904, Charles Bean taught at Brentwood and as a private tutor in Tenerife.

In 1908 Charles Bean abandoned law for journalism and, at the suggestion of Paterson, applied to join the staff of the SMH In mid-1908, as a junior reporter he covered the waterside workers' strike and wrote a twelve-part series of articles on country NSW under the banner 'Barrier Railway.

Later in 1908, as a special correspondent for the SMH on HMS Powerful, the flagship of the Royal Navy squadron in Australia, Charles Bean reported on the visit of the United States' Great White Fleet to Australia.

In 1909, Charles Bean was sent by the SMH to far western New South Wales to write a series of articles on the wool industry.

Charles Bean took that sense of an independent Australian character with him to war.

Charles Bean travelled via America, writing a series of articles about the development of the cities he visited and the provision of open spaces.

Early in 1913, Charles Bean returned to Sydney as a leader-writer for the SMH, continuing to write about town planning and the steps that should be taken to control the city's future development.

In September 1914 Charles Bean was elected by his peers, defeating Keith Murdoch in the national ballot.

Charles Bean became an embedded correspondent, whose despatches, reporting on Australia's participation in the war, were to be available to all Australian newspapers and published in the Commonwealth of Australia Gazette.

Charles Bean was accorded the honorary mess rank of captain, provided with a batman and driver and was required to submit his despatches to the British censor.

On 21 October 1914, Charles Bean left Australia on the troopship HMAT Orvieto, which carried Major General Bridges and his headquarters.

Charles Bean was accompanied by Private Arthur Bazley, his formally designated batman, who became his invaluable assistant, researcher, lifelong friend and, later, acting Director of the AWM.

Charles Bean was aware of the limitations of the diaries and of eyewitness accounts.

Charles Bean was asked to send a report covering the issue.

Charles Bean landed on Gallipoli about 10 am on 25 April 1915, a few hours after the dawn attack.

Charles Bean's bravery erased whatever hostility remained from his report from Egypt about those soldiers who were sent home.

The only Allied correspondent who stayed on Gallipoli throughout the campaign, Charles Bean sent a stream of stories back to his newspapers.

Charles Bean sent press despatches back to Australia, continuing to record military actions, conversations, interviews, and the evidence of "what actual experiences, at the point where men lay out behind hedges or on the fringe of woods, caused those on one side to creep, walk, or run forward, and the others to go back".

Charles Bean observed the "fog of war" and he described the devastating effects of shellshock.

Several days after the battle of Fromelles ended, Charles Bean witnessed the battle of Pozieres.

Charles Bean recorded in his diary: 'Pozieres is one vast Australian cemetery'.

The carnage on the Somme caused Charles Bean to conceive the idea of a memorial where Australia could commemorate its war dead and view the relics its troops collected.

Charles Bean had noticed as early as the Gallipoli campaign that Australian soldiers were avid collectors of battlefield souvenirs and imagined a museum where they would be displayed.

Several months after the fighting at Pozieres, Charles Bean returned to retrace the battle where he collected the first relics for what would eventually become the AWM.

Subsequently, at Charles Bean's prompting, the Australian War Records Section was established in London in May 1917, under the command of Lieutenant, later Lieutenant Colonel, John Treloar.

Charles Bean believed that photography was essential to the work of a modern historian, taking his own photographs on Gallipoli.

In 1918, when a successor to General Birdwood as commander of the Australian Corps was being chosen, Charles Bean intervened on behalf of General Brudenell White, Birdwood's Chief Staff Officer.

Charles Bean told the story, related in volume VI of the Official History, of his own "high-intentioned but ill-judged intervention" in this matter.

In correspondence to Brudenell White Charles Bean wrote about the importance to Australia of a planned repatriation of the troops: "To me repatriation means the future of Australia".

Charles Bean returned to Melbourne with the returning troops on the transport Kildonan Castle in May 1919.

Whilst still in France at the end of 1918 when the Germans were seeking an armistice, Charles Bean resumed thinking of a post war Australia.

Charles Bean took leave and in several weeks wrote and published his tract, In Your Hands, Australians, exhorting Australians to pursue the aims of peace with the dedication, organisation and tenacity with which they had fought the war.

At the time of writing it, Charles Bean was a supporter of the White Australia ideology which, Rees has noted, he [Charles Bean] would revisit and re-evaluate over the years ahead.

Charles Bean envisaged a future Australia as being an agrarian society with millions of farms which thinking was, according to Bolleter, "in the ascendant until the mid-twentieth century and beyond".

In London prior to his departure and on the boat voyage home, Charles Bean put into writing his proposals for the official history and for a national war museum which he envisaged not only as the repository of official pictures, photographs, maps, records, dioramas and relics from the battlefield but as a national memorial to Australians who had died in the War.

Charles Bean returned to Australia in May 1919 after an absence of four and a half years.

Charles Bean therefore had available to him resources that were denied to all British historians who were not associated with the Historical Section of the CID.

Charles Bean was unwilling to compromise his values for personal gain or political expediency.

Charles Bean was not influenced by suggestions and criticism from British official historian, Sir James Edmonds, about the direction of his work.

Partly reflecting his background as a journalist, Charles Bean concentrated on both the ordinary soldier and the big themes of the First World War.

In Stanley's view Charles Bean's history is neither definitive nor flawless noting that he tended to lionise those whom he admired and to omit what he found uncomfortable.

Charles Bean's idea was to create a national memorial where families and friends could grieve for those buried in places far away, as well as being a place that would contribute to an understanding of war itself.

In 1919 an Australian War Museum committee was established with the hope that Charles Bean would become the first director of the Memorial as well as official historian, but it was evident to Charles Bean that he could not undertake both tasks.

From selecting the site in 1919, Charles Bean worked on creating the AWM, and was present when the building opened on 11 November 1941.

Charles Bean served continuously as a member of the AWM Board from 1919 and was its chairman from 1952 to 1959 remaining on the Board until 1963.

In support of these interests, Charles Bean wrote to the press, maintained an output of articles, gave lectures and occasional broadcasts.

In 1932 Charles Bean persuaded the AWM to buy the Pozieres windmill ruins in France.

Charles Bean was an active member of the League of Nations Union, believing in the League as guardian of peace.

Charles Bean retained that hope until the German invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Charles Bean was involved in the creation of the National Archives of Australia.

In 1943 Charles Bean published War Aims of a Plain Australian.

Charles Bean recorded it in August 1946 for radio broadcast on Anzac Day, 25 April 1947, and possibly on subsequent Anzac Days.

In 1946 Charles Bean produced a single-volume history of the Great War, Anzac to Amiens: A Shorter History of the Australian Fighting Services in the First World War.

In 1950 Charles Bean's commissioned history of the independent corporate schools of Australia was published.

The strength of "The Arnold Tradition", as Charles Bean there labelled it, is manifest in it.

Charles Bean declined a knighthood on more than one occasion but accepted other acknowledgments and honours for his work.

Charles Bean was admitted to Concord Repatriation Hospital in Sydney in 1964 suffering from dementia and died on 30 August 1968.

The significance of Charles Bean's papers held by the AWM was recognised by their listing on the 2021 UNESCO Memory of the World Programme.

Charles Bean's history is further described as "notable" because "it was the work of a participant, one who instigated the collection of the archive on which it was based, and was the product of an individual vision of one man who worked with a tiny staff of co-authors and dedicated colleagues".

The National Archives of Australia for which Charles Bean was a leading advocate contains more than 40 million items, mainly Australian Government records from Federation in 1901 to the present - records about key events and decisions that have shaped Australian history.

In St Andrew's Cathedral, Sydney, on 24 January 1921, Charles Bean married Ethel Clara "Effie" Young of Tumbarumba, acting matron at Queanbeyan Hospital during the time Charles Bean worked at Tuggeranong.