The Truth about Albert Jacka, Our First War Hero

Twenty-one years ago James Griffin wrote a Quadrant article titled “Albert Jacka and the Choice of Achilles”, in which he lamented the fact that seventy years after Jacka’s death “historians seem unfamiliar with the basic facts of the life of Australia’s most acclaimed war hero”. Griffin’s two primary concerns were that: in a recent article by Michael Evans (Quadrant, October 2001) the author suggested Jacka had “made ‘the choice of Achilles’, to prefer a young glorious death to a long, secure and inconspicuous life”; while “Jacka’s biographer, Ian Grant [Jacka VC: Australia’s Finest Fighting Soldier] … wants us to believe that Jacka was vengefully ruined by his patron [John Wren].” 

Steeped as they were in the Ancient Greek classics, Jacka’s contemporaries did actually compare him to Achilles and Hector. Newton Wanliss, for example, who published a thoroughly researched History of the Fourteenth Battalion AIF in 1929 wrote: 

the recollection of his splendid courage, high personal honour, and outstanding manhood—equal to that of the greatest heroes of antiquity—will stir the blood of Australians for all time, and will serve as a beacon light to illuminate the future of Australia, that native land that he loved so well and served so nobly.

 In the past two decades two more biographies have been published: one by Robert Macklin (Jacka VC: Australian Hero); and my own two volumes (Hard Jacka and Return of the Gallipoli Legend: Jacka VC). Despite the new research, which uncovered more facts, in popular discourse we still see persistent myths about Albert Jacka’s life after the war. It is often implied that, like his father Nathaniel and his brother Bill, Albert was on the left side of politics. Other persistent myths relate to the nature of Jacka’s relationship with John Wren, his attitude to conscription, the cause of his early death in January 1932 at the age of thirty-nine, and his personal situation in his final days.

Albert Jacka’s name was made famous when in 1915 he won the first Australian VC at Gallipoli. While 130,000 soldiers were repatriated to Australia during 1918-19, Jacka (right) came back only near the end in October 1919. In an official letter requesting deferral of repatriation it was stated there were two reasons: he had become engaged to a young woman in England, and was “estranged from his father who is a strong anti-conscriptionist, Jacka being of course a conscriptionist”.

No further information about an engagement in England has ever come to light, but there is much evidence to support the second reason for deferral. The conscription debate split not only Australian society but also the Jacka family. Albert’s father Nathaniel spoke at numerous anti-conscription rallies; at the Melbourne Town Hall he claimed that conscription would place Australians “under the iron heel of Prussianism, and under the mailed fist of capitalism”.

Albert Jacka was accorded a “Roman triumph” on his entry into Melbourne on October 20, 1919, sitting in the lead car of an eighty-five-car convoy travelling down St Kilda Road, to the cheers of thousands of admirers. During the 1916 conscription debate Nathaniel had exposed a forged letter asserting that Albert Jacka was pro-conscription. Noting that the only reporter’s question answered by Jacka at the Melbourne Town Hall reception in 1919 was the clarification that he “was for conscription”, writing in the La Trobe Journal Damian Powell asserted that Jacka may have changed his mind during the war. But that would imply Albert was lying to the reporter, and there is no evidence to support such a hypothesis. Furthermore, a second letter attributed to Jacka, which supported conscription and was published in the Argus on the morning of the 1917 referendum, was not referenced by Powell, and its veracity has never been challenged.

Then there is the “estrangement” letter, and the fact that on the day Albert returned after being away for five years, only his mother and his brother Sid were in Melbourne to greet him. Nathaniel remained in Wedderburn, it seems. It is more than likely that through delaying his return to Australia, Albert was waiting for the emotions aroused during the conscription debate to simmer down. Unfortunately for historians, a box containing letters that Albert Jacka wrote to his family during the war was burned in a fire that destroyed the house at Wedderburn and almost claimed Nathaniel’s life. 

It has been generally known that as a silent partner John Wren helped finance Jacka’s post-war business. When the AIF landed at Gallipoli, Wren offered a £500 reward and a gold watch to the first Australian VC of the war. Unable to fathom how Jacka could become Wren’s business partner except for “naivete”, Ian Grant’s biography asserted that he didn’t accept the money. James Griffin countered that idea with newspaper reports to the contrary, noting that even Donald Bradman didn’t shy away from Wren’s money.

It has generally been assumed that the first business Jacka established was Roxburgh, Jacka & Co Pty Ltd, which included two of Jacka’s subalterns, lieutenants Roxburgh and Edmonds. Having the Roxburgh name ahead of Jacka’s against alphabetical order let alone visibility in Australian society raises immediate questions about Roxburgh, whose father ran an import-export business in the Olderfleet Building at 475 Collins Street. It has been suggested that Roxburgh was an alcoholic, and in any case he withdrew from the business in 1923. It was then reconstituted as Jacka, Edmonds & Co, and went from being a purely importing business to offering retail sales at Briscoe Lane, off Little Collins Street.

Albert started off after the war living in a rented room at the Middle Park Hotel, and was almost immediately thrown into another cauldron. He was a Protestant, and in those sectarian times his Irish Catholic business partner John Wren had hatched a plan to rehabilitate the image that Catholics in general and Archbishop Mannix in particular had developed during the conscription controversy. In March 1920 there was a grand St Patrick’s Day procession of 6000 Catholic veterans in uniform as well as thousands of school children through the city. At the head of the procession were fourteen VCs on horseback, who each received £50 plus expenses for their services. After a tumultuous meeting the Melbourne City Council agreed to the procession on condition that a Union Jack be flown. It was flown all right—as a twelve-inch by fifteen-inch corner on the St Patrick’s Society flag measuring nine feet by twelve feet.

Later in March, Jacka appeared at the Tivoli Theatre, where he and two other VCs were handed “Gold Life Passes” to the theatre by fight promoter and President of the British Empire League of Australia, Hugh D. (“Huge Deal”) McIntosh MLC. The night did not go by without an unscripted political statement on stage from Sergeant Maurice Buckley VC. He noted that the AIF had fought to return freedom to France and Belgium, and the same rights should be granted to Ireland.

It is likely that Albert had already hired the attractive, youthful Vera Carey as his secretary. She had been a fan of his through her teens, and one thing at the office must have led to another. However, there was another glitch—like Albert’s other partner, she was a Catholic. It is likely that Vera was afforded a frosty reception when presented to Albert’s parents in Wedderburn. They were married at St Mary’s Catholic Church, East St Kilda, on Monday, January 17, 1921. Extraordinarily, there appears to be no record of the marriage of Australia’s most famous frontline soldier in any newspaper, and it might appear strange that having so many warrior-veterans to call on who had stood with him throughout the war, the role of best man fell to Vera’s eighteen-year-old brother James, who hardly knew Albert. Bill’s daughter Josephine Eastoe doubted that the Jacka family even attended.   

Jacka’s marriage to a Catholic was likely made more prickly by his membership of the Freemasons. At one point he and Vera lived in a property in East St Kilda that backed onto a Masonic Lodge. Albert and Vera’s adopted daughter Betty told me her mother infuriated her father one night by singing back to him the “secret” Masonic hymn that had been sung inside the hall and was heard by her in their yard. 

It has sometimes been assumed or inferred that Albert Jacka’s politics were left-leaning. Whilst he never formally associated himself with a political party, nothing could be further from the truth.

Nathaniel was clearly staunchly left-wing, and collaborated closely with John Curtin during the anti-conscription campaigns. One of his other sons, Bill, had become radicalised by the slaughter he witnessed during the war, as a failed Victorian dairy farmer subjected to market vagaries, and later at a striking colliery in Wales. In a 1936 pamphlet titled “The Truth about Anzac” published by the communist front organisation, League for Peace and Democracy, Bill wrote that the people of Australia should “unite in a determined refusal to do the bidding of a small minority that thrives on the business of war”. Within weeks of Bill assuming the position of Mayor of Footscray in 1940, a red flag was flying from the Town Hall.  

Albert was a different matter altogether. James Griffin was on the right track when he noted that Jacka “seems far from steeped in Labor ideology, not to say processes”. Jacka had been drawn to the bosom of the empire during the Great War, and mixed freely with senior officers and royalty at their palaces. While he never lost touch with the average digger, and risked all for them on and off the battlefield, he was incorporated into the Australian officer class. That much was clear, not just from the swagger-stick trappings but also from his 1917 testimony at the Dardanelles Commission in London and his subsequent behaviour.

As early as August 1921 Albert Jacka was present at the Victoria Hall in Charlton to support his friend and Nationalist Party candidate, Peter Hansen. At an April 1925 meeting of Melbourne’s business elite at Scott’s Hotel to recognise Frank Boileau for his stand against taxation, Albert Jacka was quoted as saying:

The Allan-Peacock Ministry had had the audacity to adopt the Labor Party’s extravagant proposals, and it was in a great measure due to the alertness of Mr Boileau that the proposals had been rejected. Had the Labor Party continued in office taxpayers would have expected to fight against an unscrupulous onslaught upon their savings.

Later in 1925, Jacka chaired a meeting of businessmen who were being affected by a strike on the wharves. At the 1928 Armistice Day gathering of VCs at Government House, Melbourne, only Captain Albert Jacka VC and Major-General Sir Neville Smyth VC wore white tie, while lords Somers and Stonehaven (both leading Freemasons) and Melbourne Grammar-educated Captain W.D. Joynt VC all wore lounge suits. As discussed further below, Jacka appeared to be heavily influenced by Burnett Gray, his free-enterprise mentor at the St Kilda Council.   

Jacka’s business partner Ernest Edmonds suggested that Albert and Vera adopt a child. Betty was born in 1926; she told me that her biological father was a digger by the name of Smith who was known to Jacka. She also said that at a function at Government House in 1927 her mother had asked the Duchess of York whether she would give permission to name her daughter after Princess Elizabeth, who had also been born in 1926. The only complaint about Jacka that Betty recalled her mother mention was that he only ever gave her one gift, a vase, on their first wedding anniversary.

For years during the 1920s a controversy had been brewing about how the sacrifices of the First AIF should be remembered, and if it was to be a “Shrine of Remembrance”, where it should be located. Keith Murdoch, editor of the Herald, had run a long campaign against the Shrine. Calling it an “ugly mausoleum”, he favoured an “Anzac Square” that would be cut from existing buildings facing Parliament House on the T-Junction of Bourke and Spring streets, and it looked as if he had won. The state government, with the acquiescence of the Returned Services League and the imprimatur of Sir John Monash, had already drawn up a bill for compulsory acquisition of the land.

Then came the fateful 1927 Anzac Day dinner at the old Anzac House (now part of the T&G Building) in the presence of Prime Minister Bruce, the Returned Services League president Ernest Turnbull, Sir John Monash, and thirty-two VC winners (Jacka among them). W.D. Joynt VC told Sir John that all thirty-two of them will give him a standing ovation if he promotes the Shrine at the King’s Domain. Responding to incentive, Monash gave a stirring speech ending with the words: 

It is my firm conviction that [the Shrine of Remembrance] is the only proposal worthy of the support of the soldiers of Victoria. When the time comes I can give you one hundred good reasons why you should not consider any other form of memorial …    

That settled it, but it had to be funded from public donations, and Albert Jacka threw his name into that ring with vigour. The name attracted people to venues where the money was raised. For example, in June 1928 Jacka was present at the Heathcote Masonic Lodge, while in May he gave a speech at the Theatre Royal where he said:

Thousands of young Australians were killed then and at later times, and they had set for us traditions that we must live up to. It is for us now to do something to keep evergreen the memory of those fine men who had died. (Applause)

Jacka took every opportunity to talk about the sacrifices and achievements of the AIF to community groups aided by lantern slides borrowed from the Australian War Memorial (at that time located at the Exhibition Building). Yet there have been suggestions that Jacka was a man of few words, who preferred not to talk about the war. Robert Macklin asserted without evidence that “Like most returned men, Jacka was reluctant to talk of the war, particularly to those who had not been there.”

It is likely that Albert Jacka became a councillor at the St Kilda Council due to the influence of Cr Burnett Gray—they were both AIF veterans, both were Freemasons, and both were involved with the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Hall in Acland Street, St Kilda. When Jacka later became mayor, the photograph with his councillors shows him sitting with Burnett Gray as Freemasons would, shoulder-to-shoulder, toe-to-toe. Gray was also a Member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly for the small Liberal Party (Victoria) of the day that had split from the Nationalists, and was way ahead of its time in recognising the benefits of free enterprise—ahead even of the conservatives of that time.

We should not therefore be surprised that when a proposal came up for the St Kilda Council to take on a substantial loan to build a new baths on the foreshore (the old one having burned down) and raise everyone’s rates to cover the cost, Jacka was opposed in principle, even though in the end he voted for it. There was an alternative private sector proposal (a public-private-partnership) proposed by Frank Beaurepaire, that would be “user pays”.

Early in 1929 things seemed to be going well for the young Jacka family. Jacka, Edmonds & Co had taken up new and much larger retail space for selling domestic appliances in Elizabeth Street (where a Subway restaurant occupies the ground floor today) “five doors down from Collins Street”. In addition, the family had for the past few years been living in a newly-built Californian bungalow at 23 Murchison Street, St Kilda. Vera’s mother came to live with them, and died there.      

Later that year came the Crash of ’29, which took its toll on the business. The only bright spot in 1930 was the April 27 presentation of the 14th Battalion’s colours, which were to be permanently displayed in the foyer of the St Kilda Council building. It was done on Albert Jacka’s initiative and the colours are still there today.

From December 1929 to the early months of 1930 a series of sales was advertised by Jacka, Edmonds & Co. The banners went from “Practical Gifts for Xmas!”, to “New Year Sale” to “Final Days: Jacka-Edmonds SALE” as prices dropped by 30 to 40 per cent. To save money the Jackas rented out their house in Murchison Street, and themselves rented an apartment at “Narooma” halfway up The Boulevard in Elwood. The last gasp came in June, with the announcement of “Stocktaking bargains”.

Albert knew his business’s days were numbered, and soon he would be looking for a job. W.D. Joynt recalled in an interview in 1977 that he met Jacka in front of his Elizabeth Street store in 1930, and that Jacka told him: 

I’m being closed down. Wren, thinking that he’s bought me, wants me to take a course of action politically, but I refused to do so. Then he said “Alright, if you don’t, I’ll close you down”, and I told him “Close me down. I prefer to be closed down.”

Wren’s biographer James Griffin asked, “What credence can one give to such a rumoured snippet of conversation?” He was under the impression that Anne Longmire in her history of St Kilda had relied on an “unsourced quote included in a folio of materials prepared by City Librarians, St Kilda Public Library”. However, even if the discussion was genuine and had been accurately recalled by Joynt forty-seven years later, it did not change the fact that Jacka’s business was burning Wren’s money, something Joynt seemed not to realise. 

We now know from the board minutes held in the archives of the National Australia Bank, that John Wren absorbed the entire deficit of £19,942 owed by Jacka’s company, leaving Jacka and Ernest Edmonds free of business debt. This was at a time when an average house cost £1500.

Wren did not “intervene” to bring down Jacka; the Great Depression did that. Nor was John Wren the hunched and scowling caricature presented in the deeply flawed mid-1970s representation of him in the ABC’s television series Power Without Glory based on Frank Hardy’s novel of the same name.

It is likely that at that critical moment Burnett Gray persuaded his fellow councillors that the right thing to do was to vote junior councillor Albert Jacka in as Mayor of St Kilda, a position that paid a salary of £500 and provided the use of a car. His term of office, which commenced on September 1, 1930, was distinguished by his focus on alleviating the conditions faced by veterans and families suffering unemployment. Among other initiatives, he brought in the State Relief Committee and in July 1931 employed his leadership skills to organise a community-wide drive to collect shoes for unemployed men. It was executed with the precision of a military operation, engaging the St Kilda Scout Troop, the Automobile Club and other organisations. Jacka, who did not drink alcohol, was called the “Lemonade Mayor”.

The intensity of the 1930-31 mayoral year put massive strain on Albert and Vera’s marriage. There was also a parallel political crisis developing in the country. Far Right movements like the Riverina secessionists, Sydney’s fascist-saluting New Guard, and Victoria’s White Army were on the rise, as were the communists on the far Left. Happily, these extremist groups remained small minorities that fizzled out as economic conditions improved.

Within two weeks of completing his mayoral term on September 1, 1931, Albert Jacka was employed by the Anglo Dominion Soaps factory in Footscray. He was a commercial traveller with his own car, and had he lived would no doubt have risen within that organisation. His position was secure and he was renting a house on the corner of Chaucer and Blessington streets in St Kilda. It was very close to the Acland Street club that his wife later described as his “second home”.

Captain Jacka was a respected councillor and A-lister, who was still doing his best for the unemployed. Yet Manning Clark, in his History of Australia chose, without evidence, to depict Jacka as a down-and-out “knocking on suburban doors and pleading with housewives to buy his soap”. According to Griffin, Clark’s “disciple”, Stuart Macintyre, in his Oxford History of Australia 1901–42, repeated this “furphy”, with the moral being that “Jacka’s fate personified [Australian society’s] betrayal of the digger”.

The last five days before Albert Jacka’s hospitalisation and death are illustrative of the man’s grit and determination to serve the community. It reads like a three-act tragedy. On Monday December 14, 1931, he was presented with an illuminated address in recognition of his and Vera’s efforts during their mayoral year—the year that broke their marriage. Vera had already left him and taken Betty with her, yet at that Monday council meeting Jacka acted as if nothing had happened, assuring all “that both Mrs Jacka and himself would always treasure it”.

Jacka’s medical condition must have worsened the next day, as he presented to Drs Reuben Rosenfield and Montefiore Silberberg at the Caulfield Military Repatriation Hospital on Wednesday. Diagnosing hypertension and acute nephritis (kidney disorder), they prescribed immediate hospitalisation, but he still had one mission to complete. The coming Saturday he was chairing a council sub-committee that was organising a beach carnival to raise money for the unemployed Christmas dinner.

That Friday night Albert Jacka chaired the sub-committee meeting organising the fundraiser, probably experiencing excruciating pain from a urinary tract infection. As Mayor Moroney noted later:

He had left a meeting in the Town Hall on the 18th December to go straight to the Caulfield Military Hospital. No one ever dreamed that his complaint was of a mortal nature, but his illness, undoubtedly due to war service, developed rapidly …

In those days nothing medical could be done for kidney disease patients. They put you in a bed and waited for you to die. Albert Jacka died on January 17, 1932. Perhaps because she had “deserted” Jacka and was therefore seen as “the enemy”, Vera was effectively written out of his final days in some accounts, which relied only on part of the Herald article, which noted that “his last message was to his father: ‘I’m still fighting, Dad,’” and not reporting that “Jacka often in his last days expressed to his wife his appreciation of the way she had struggled on gamely with him.” The death certificate notes that the next of kin present at his bedside the day he died—which happened to be their wedding anniversary—was Vera.

The Herald struck up a campaign to buy a cottage for Mrs Jacka, and that campaign and subsequent writing adopted Cr Moroney’s line that Albert Jacka’s death was “undoubtedly due to war service”. In Jacka’s case genetics probably played the biggest role, given that two of his three brothers also died of a kidney disorder by the age of fifty-five. However, Albert was only thirty-nine when he died, grey-haired and blind, and suffered greater pressures during and after the war than the other two brothers. Those stresses may well have accelerated a genetically-determined early demise.

One mystery about Albert Jacka that remains unresolved is what happened to the “Bendigo gold” miniature Victoria Cross replica that was presented to him on the “Night to Remember”? On that night, October 29, 1919, 600 people packed into the Wedderburn Mechanics Institute for a ceremony to honour Jacka and other local returned men. When I asked his daughter Betty about it, she had no knowledge of the gold replica. I would not be surprised if during the darkest days of the Great Depression, as the debts of Jacka, Edmonds & Co mounted, Albert quietly converted it to cash. Thankfully, his actual Victoria Cross is securely displayed—“for all time”—at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. 

Dr Michael Lawriwsky, a Melbourne-based author and former Trustee of the Shrine of Remembrance, has written two books about Albert Jacka: Hard Jacka and Return of the Gallipoli Legend: Jacka VC