100 Kiwi Stories: From the mountains to the trenches

A World War I military camp set up in the desert at Serapium, Egypt. Pictures / Alexander Turnbull Library

53 New Zealand’s first official war correspondent hamstrung by slow communications and censorship

Malcolm Ross was New Zealand's first official war correspondent.

Fifty-two when he left for Egypt, he had carved out a reputation as a newspaperman, photographer, mountaineer and sportsman. As a war reporter he had runs on the board, having covered a bloody conflict in Samoa in 1899 and returning to Apia in 1914 when 20 German occupiers surrendered without a fight to a convoy carrying New Zealand troops.

Ross' role covering World War I barely registers in contemporary accounts of the conflict. Unlike celebrated correspondents across the Tasman, the work of Ross has largely been lost to history. His reputation took a pounding in two university theses, though both assessments conceded his failings were not entirely his own. He was hamstrung by Government-imposed censorship and cost-cutting forced him to file copy by ship, rather than cable.

His earliest war stories, when they arrived, were embarrassingly late, and their tone - heroic, sanitised - sat uncomfortably beside bleak columns of dead and missing soldiers.

Ross had a further burden he carried for half the war - his only son Noel was a casualty of the conflict.

Born in July 1862 to Scottish immigrant parents, Malcolm Ross was raised on an Otago farm. In 1881, just before he turned 19, he got a job on the Otago Daily Times.

In 1914 he was appointed to the war job as a safe pair of hands by the Government, which also paid his salary. Ross had the right connections. Prime Minister William Massey often stayed at the house near Parliament where Ross lived with his wife, Forrestina.

The Christchurch-based Spectator, no friend of Massey's Reform Party, remarked: "The wonder is any other journalist had the audacity to apply."

While New Zealand had one reporter with its soldiers, Australia had a pack. Charles Bean, who later edited a landmark 12-volume war history, sailed with the main body of New Zealand and Australian forces. The poet Banjo Paterson went to the front, as did Keith Murdoch, father of Rupert.

Ross' first story from Cairo was filed near the end of May 1915, nearly a month after the disastrous landings at Gallipoli.

Delays in sending his copy back to New Zealand - it went via London - meant an account he wrote of Colonel William Malone's strategy to stiffen the defences of Quinn's Post on Gallipoli Peninsula appeared after reports had been published of Malone's death at Chunuk Bair.

Ironically, one of the most stirring accounts of the Gallipoli landings was filed by Noel Ross, who served with the Canterbury Infantry Battalion.

Lance-Corporal Ross described what he termed "five days of hell" in a report for the Times of London.

Writing from a Cairo military hospital, he described how he was recovering from "a wrecked spine and a rather badly tangled set of nerves, caused through concussion from a shell and a fall."

To a friend in Christchurch, he wrote: "Gallipoli, even at the best of times, is not a nice place and when a shell bursts almost in the small of one's back and one is knocked over a cliff by the concussion, it becomes less and less like a health resort."

Malcolm Ross spent a week with his son in Cairo before Noel left for Britain for more treatment, while the war correspondent sailed for Gallipoli.

In London, Noel got a job with the Times and hooked up with the social elite. He spent a weekend at Rudyard Kipling's Sussex home, stayed at Clivedon, Buckinghamshire home of the Astors, owners of the Observer newspaper, and came to the attention of the media baron Lord Northcliffe.

His parents' happiness bloomed when he announced his engagement to Eileen Buchanan, of Sydney. But their joy was shortlived. On December 19, 1917, on the eve of his wedding, Noel, then 27, died from typhoid.

A letter from Buckingham Palace read: "His Majesty knew him well and was always impressed with his personality."

From the battlefield, General Sir Ian Hamilton wrote to Malcolm and Forrest Ross, telling them he admired their son's "intense vitality, and although that was not a shield against shells or bayonets, it makes it yet more natural and yet more cruel that his young life should have been cut short by an ordinary illness."

Noel Ross was buried at Hampstead Cemetery in London. Malcolm Ross died in New Zealand in 1930, without any high-powered tributes of mourning.