Remembering those who made the ultimate sacrifice. Photo / NZME
OPINION:
This morning, as you hopefully read this column, tea and toast in hand, having just attended your local Anzac Dawn Parade, I’ll be about to address the Riversdale (Southland) Anzac service with the story of my grandfather’s service.
It comes courtesy of my late brother Don, who ended up with a doctorate in war history, after leaving school at 16 to go mustering on a high-country station. An early mid-life crisis in his 30s saw him ditch farming for academia. His PhD examined the political aftermath of the Gallipoli campaign.
Amongst other books, he wrote The Troopers’ Tale – The History of the Otago Mounted Rifles and Chapter 1 chronicled our grandfather’s torturous tale of World War 1. Like many of the old Diggers, Hugh Mackay unfortunately got the unenviable Great War quinella of Gallipoli for an entrée, followed by the Western Front for a main!
So, here’s the story of a Southland farm boy who went to war for King and Country:
Hugh Mackay was an Otago Mounted Rifleman.
Three weeks after he was born at Riversdale in September 1889, his mother Alice rushed out from her house to chase sheep from the garden, caught a chill and died of pneumonia within days. The infant Hugh was sent to live with his uncle and aunt, during which time they were blessed with another baby boy of their own, Peter Mackay. Both children grew up as close cousins and enjoyed a friendship that lasted until the vicious night attack amongst the scrub on the slopes of Bauchop’s Hill at Gallipoli, a quarter of a century later. Peter died in Hugh’s arms.
When Hugh’s father Sandy Mackay also succumbed to pneumonia in February 1902, his four children, the Mataura Ensign rather bluntly declared, were left as orphans. However, his older brother Alec took Hugh under his wing and they both became sheep and crop farmers.
At the outbreak of war in August 1914, Hugh had three years of Territorial training under his belt with the 7th Southland Regiment of the Otago Mounted Rifles (OMR).
Riding into Riversdale township, he met his friend Paddy Ferris at one of the local hotels. Ferris had just joined up and, doubtless with plenty of alcohol-fuelled bravado. Hugh, who was always a bit impulsive, decided he should do likewise. After presenting himself in Invercargill before Lieutenant Eric Alley, his troop leader during his Territorial days, Hugh had to return to the farm to attest again before his older brother to explain the reason for his extended absence. Alec Mackay was apparently horrified but said little.
Hugh Mackay’s first taste of war was as a witness. He was one of 50 men from the OMR selected as a bodyguard for the expedition leader to the Dardanelles, General Sir Ian Hamilton – an honour he and his fellow surviving guardsmen took pride in for the rest of their lives. He was wounded twice at Gallipoli, evacuated to Egypt and returned to the peninsula for the last few months and participated in the rear-guard on the last night of the evacuation.
Back in Egypt, he was transferred to the field artillery and sent to the Western Front in April 1916, where he was “back among shot and shell again”, first as a driver in an ammunition column and then operating a Stokes mortar in the trenches.
On the march up to the forward trenches at Messines in June 1917 the day before the big attack, Hugh badly sprained his ankle evading shellfire laced with poisonous gas. His breathing deteriorated, he was listed as dangerously ill with lobar pneumonia, so he was shipped to Brockenhurst hospital near Southampton, where his condition worsened.
Hugh seemed destined to die the way of his parents. In later years, he recounted the story of being in an overcrowded unsupervised ward and, for reasons unknown, being denied water. Severely dehydrated and in a state of delirium, he refused to give in and in the middle of the night climbed down from his bed and crawled to a bucket of dirty mop water which had been left in the ward and drank it. He always maintained that water saved his life.
Declared unfit for further war service, he returned to his Southland farm in early 1918, married his sweetheart Cissy O’Shea, and reared a family of six children [one of them my father]. Like other soldiers disenchanted by the horror of World War I, he became something of a pacifist, drank heavily in the company of his army cobbers, and spent a lifetime bedevilled by nightmares. Hugh Mackay smoked a tobacco pipe until the last week of his life, his nurses at the hospital in Invercargill having to pry it from his hand. He, too, died of pneumonia in June 1970, aged 80.
As an interesting aside, for media trainspotters, Hugh Mackay is also the grandfather of Barry Soper.
I hope you and yours celebrate this most moving of days, remembering those who made the ultimate sacrifice. Lest we forget.