Free and Easy

Plevna: A Biography in Verse: Sir Charles “Plevna” Ryan (1853–1926)
by Geoff Page
UWA Publishing, 2016, 120 pages, $24.99

Plevna is a short biography, in free verse form, of Sir Charles “Plevna” Ryan, who became Surgeon General of the AIF in the First World War. Though the impact is uneven, Canberra poet Geoff Page’s verse produces some vivid descriptions of Ryan’s battlefield surgery at Gallipoli and earlier in the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-78—and on Ned Kelly after Kelly was badly wounded in the siege of Glenrowan in 1880, only to be hanged soon afterwards for the murder of police at Stringybark Creek in 1878.

It is also a nostalgic portrait of a colonial-minded establishment family in Federation times, with a capacious town house, servants, fine dinners and cigars, above the Collins Street surgery opposite the Melbourne Club, children dispatched off to England and Europe for education.

Ryan’s daughter Maie (later Lady Casey) afterwards wondered in public if it was the kindest thing for her father to send her brother Rupert off to Harrow at fourteen and then on to Sandhurst for a career in the British Army.

Charles Snodgrass Ryan was born in 1853 on his family’s station, Killeen, at Longwood, near Euroa in north-eastern Victoria—as it happens, only an hour or so’s buggy ride away and less than two years earlier than the birth of his future highest-profile patient Edward Kelly. Ryan’s Irish grazier father had earlier overlanded down from the Sydney side. His mother was from the Cotton grazing dynasty, of English background. A year after the birth, Charles senior gave up his grazing lease and moved to the easier life of Melbourne business and residence at bayside suburban Brighton.

He established Ryan & Hammond stock and station firm. It was a good time to do so with, as well as the gold boom, the pastoral industry bouncing back after the sluggish prices and erratic seasons of the 1840s. Commercial success seemed to bring the extra affluence that supported lifelong establishment status for the family.

Instead of being sent to an English public school like his own son, Charles junior was sent to the only slightly less salubrious Melbourne Grammar. He went on to study medicine at Melbourne University and then a final year in Edinburgh. Post-graduate work in Bonn and Vienna followed, mixed with holidaying in Europe.

At twenty-three, his first job was as a battlefield surgeon with the Ottoman forces in the Turkish-Russian war of 1877-78. The young Australian tourist had rushed to London after seeing the advertisement in the Times and got the job. The Muslim empire then seemed to be the goodies, and the Russians, as so often, the baddies. His nickname and the book’s title come from his battlefield surgery at the little local hospital at the siege of Plevna in Bulgaria.

Military surgery book-ended his career. He was the oldest surgeon at Gallipoli and became surgeon-general based in London in 1917. Heart disease troubled his later years, but he lived long enough to see Maie, his only daughter, marry the rising politician Richard Gardiner Casey in 1926. The marriage was to take her to Yarralumla when Lord Casey, as he became, ended a long, often ministerial career, as Governor-General from 1965 to 1969. Maie was herself a writer, artist and flyer.

Charles’s son, Rupert, also became a Menzies-era political figure, returning to Australia in 1935 and holding the Mornington Peninsula federal seat of Flinders from 1940 to 1952.

The free-verse format is an interesting approach to short biography. Page’s device is second person, as if speaking to his subject. Many distinguished lives deserve fuller treatment than an obituary or an entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography but do not get a full biography. I would have preferred a longer, more informative introduction, with more context.

Despite the upstairs-downstairs background, Ryan comes across as plain Charlie, as he liked to be called, friendly, honest and fond of a yarn. His own memoir (Under the Red Crescent: Adventures of an English Surgeon with the Turkish Army at Plevna and Erzeroum, co-written with John Sandes, 1897) was a principal source and is liberally quoted; Maie Casey’s An Australian Story (1962) is another. Page has also used the modern internet access to old newspapers.