HMAS Australia Battlecruiser: The Mutiny

[herakles]

The 'HMAS AUSTRALIA Mutiny' occurred on the battle-cruiser while berthed at Fremantle. AUSTRALIA had returned to Fremantle on 28 May 1919, after an absence of over four and half years from Australia.

The ship spent four days alongside, and when she was due to depart about 80 ratings gathered on the quarterdeck and requested that the ship stay longer in port, in order to entertain civilian friends and repay their generous hospitality. The Commanding Officer, CAPT C. Cumberlege, RN, advised that this was not possible, and directed the men to disperse, which they did.

However, when Cumberlege tried to take the ship to sea the stokers walked out of the boiler room. A scratch crew managed to get the ship to sea, and Cumberlege ordered the arrest of five sailors considered to be ringleaders in the 'Mutiny'.

The ensuing courts martial, on board HMAS ENCOUNTER in Sydney Harbour, up to 2 year prison sentences, and intervention by the Australian Government, were to have a dramatic and long lasting effect upon the RAN.

[kookaburra]

HMAS Australia (1) was 'not a happy ship.'

This thread should not have lain neglected and undiscussed for eight months on a naval ships forum.

There were important social history implications in the 1919 HMAS Australia mutiny - not only in the nascent R.A.N.'s subsequent move towards establishing its own traditions and practice more distinct from those of the Royal Navy, but also as a reflection of attitudes between the egalitarianism of the comparative 'frontier' society of Australia at that time, and those of a 'Mother Country' with its very distinct class structure.

Before anyone jumps to the conclusion, however, that this is going to be an Aussies v. Poms bash, it's not - I have a distinct aversion to country v. country conversations. I'd only say that a clash of cultures, between the centuries of Royal Navy tradition and the new young navies of several dominions seems to have arisen again and again.


Just to broaden this, there were 'mutinies' of various kinds on New Zealand and Indian ships also, many others, and I'd remind members that there were three separate 'mutinies' on ships of the then Royal Canadian Navy as late as 1949 -with the underlying causes being rooted in the egalitarianism of Canadians also, and its clash with the the aristocratic and authoritarian service traditions inherited from the Royal Navy.

Alan Filewood, in his work 'Theatre, Navy and The Narrative of 'True Canadianism'" reviewed the immediate grievances that erupted on three seperate Canadian vessels, and added this:

The last issue — an assertion of "an uncaring officer corps harbouring aristocratic British attitudes inappropriate to Canadian democratic sensitivities" — went beyond the question of sailors' morale and touched on the basic identity of the Canadian Navy and indeed, on the national identity of Canada as a whole.

It was to have ramifications in the process undertaken in later decades, painful to many of the officers concerned, of deliberately cutting off many of the British traditions in such areas as ensigns and uniforms.

Almost all Navies have had 'mutinies' of various kinds, although it is a very loose term, which can range from refusing an order to outright insurrection. In the popular mind in Australia, the HMAS Australia mutiny came to be regarded in reality as more of an industrial dispute than a mutiny.

Professional military officers strongly disagreed (see link to a review of the case by an Australian Army officer, Graham Wilson, below) and its perhaps largely forgotten now that when the Australian government prevailed on the Admiralty to release the five men imprisoned for the mutiny before Christmas, 1919, both the Commodore Commanding the Australian Fleet, Commodore (later RearAdmiral) J.S. Dumaresq, CB, CVO, RN (but an Australian - the first Australian-born admiral) and his superior, Rear Admiral Sir Percy Grant, RN, First Naval Member of the Australian Naval Board, tendered their resignations (a face-saving measure was later found, in which the government had a Navy Order posted on all ships linking the releases to the signing of the Versailles Peace Treaty, making them a kind of special amnesty, and this saw Dumaresq and Grant withdraw their resignations in February the next year).

Dumaresq was an outspoken leader, known as 'D-Q' and in fact very popular throughout the Fleet for his vigorous defence of the R.A.N. against government budget cuts.


Inevitably, there had been a good deal more to the HMAS Australia mutiny than the question of crewmen wishing to extend the ship's stay in Fremantle to entertain friends when they landed back in Australia after being away on four years war service.


A document from the Australian War Memorial website hints at some of the underlying causes:

The incident known as the HMAS Australia mutiny occurred on that ship in Fremantle harbour on 1 June 1919. Australia had arrived in Fremantle on 28 May 1919 and after almost four years overseas her crew were expecting several day's leave in their first home port of call. This was not to be. When Australia began to make preparations to sail on the morning of 1 June, to comply with a busy schedule of "welcome home" visits, eighty to one hundred of her crew assembled on the quarterdeck requesting that the ship's departure be delayed to allow further leave ashore. After being addressed by the captain, Captain Claude Cumberlege, the group dispersed. Subsequently, however, all of the duty stokers abandoned their posts in Australia's boiler room, leaving the ship unable to raise sufficient steam to sail. Australia's petty officers were ordered to the boiler room to stoke the ship, and she eventually left port only one hour late.

Although ostensibly the result of crew frustration over shore leave, the mutiny had much deeper causes. Australia's crew had seen little action during the war and duty aboard had been monotonous; there had been several misunderstandings relating to pay and enlistment conditions; leave in Britain had been severely limited; an ongoing rivalry prevailed between the Australian and British members of the crew; and discipline was perceived as being unduly harsh, particularly after the end of hostilities. Australia was not a happy ship.

Thirty-two men were eventually tried for the mutiny. Twenty-seven were dealt with by Australia's captain and confined to cells for 90 days. The remaining five appeared before a court martial in Sydney on 20 June 1919. All pleaded guilty, but appealed for leniency, and were imprisoned for periods ranging from one to two years. After a public outcry, all five were released in December 1919 at the instigation of the Australian government.


Of the five court-martialled, it should be noted, one had been awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for his actions as a volunteer in the Zeebrugge raid during the war. The court martials were convened on HMAS Encounter in Sydney Harbour in June 1919, with Commodore J.C.T. Glossop ( of the Sydney-Emden fight fame) as its president.

Having pleaded guilty, one Stoker was sentenced two years imprisonment with hard labour and dismissal from the service; another Stoker two years imprisonment and dismissal; an Able Seaman 18 months imprisonment and dismissal; and two Ordinary Seaman were given one year's imprisonment. In the end they would all serve only six months because of the public outcry and continuing Opposition attacks in Parliament.

Curiously, Lord Jellicoe was leading a mission to Australia, New Zealand and India at the time, to advise onthe future structure of their Navies (over which the RN wanted continued peace-time control under its 'One Navy' policy for the Empire). Jellicoe's report was prescient, in that he later reported that 'discipline' would be the greatest of all challenges that the new colonial navies would have to deal with.

'Mutiny,' of course, seems to be almost a taboo word in naval circles, and you can find almost no finer detail on the Australia incident, and several others (HMAS Psyche and Encounter herself also had disciplinary troubles) , in the Navy books on my shelves.

Unfortunately there's one book I have missed in years of very random collecting. In 2000 the well-known naval historian Tom Frame and economic historian Kevin Baker published a book , Mutiny!: naval insurrections in Australia and New Zealand, Allen & Unwin, Sydney Somewhere in it, it says: "Since 1916 there have been more mutinies in the Royal Australian Navy than in any other navy maintained by an English-speaking nation.'

An Australian War Memorial historian states that this claim is not backed up by evidence, and that it is reached by extending the definition of mutiny to mere disciplinary hearings and matters such as conscientious objection to support the claim.

The Frame-Baker book devotes a chapter on 'the most serious and protracted mutiny ever suffered by the RAN,' which occurred on the corvette HMAS Pirie in 1943. A number of the corvettes were 'not happy ships' either - they were notoriously bad sea handlers, and Pirie had suffered severe casualties in a bombing attack. But again, reviewing the book, for the Law Society of NSW Journal, solicitor Greg Barter has no doubt who was to blame for the outbreak of defiance that affected her in April that year.

HMAS Pirie, he notes, was 'under the command of the appallingly strict disciplinarian and vain Lieutenant Commander Charles Ferry Mills, who, in the authors’ (Frame and Baker) view was totally unsuited to captain any ship.

Some accused [ Barter notes], were not given any opportunity to speak in their own defence, notwithstanding that the "Articles of war" provided that no man could be convicted of mutiny without the opportunity of a court martial and the right to due process and the entitlement of the accused to have the support of a ‘friend’. The convictions and punishments, for all but two of the accused who ‘did join a mutinous assembly’ were totally erratic – with one of the convicted being a sick-bay attendant who ... had at all times been in the sick-bay attending to his normal duties. Clearly a gross travesty of justice occurred.

Thankfully Mills, who remained in the Navy, died in 1947 before he could commit further travesties of justice under the general allegations of ‘mutiny’. The chapter on this ‘mutiny’ makes fascinating reading.


As I said, I don't have the Frame-Baker book, and can't give details, but an AWM website page on the Australian corvettes also mentions the HMAS Pirie incident. It says: 'Pirie was the scene in April 1943 of something called a "mutiny". It was in reality a stop-work meeting arising out of plummeting morale caused by poor conditions and some dubious leadership.'

Here's the HTML link to the Graham Wilson article on the HMAS Australia 1919 mutiny, which gives a good deal of detail. Wilson supports the actions taken by [I] Captain Cumerlege, arguing that both the charges laid and penalties given were lenient in military terms, and should have been upheld. (Cumerlege remained with HMAS Australia, btw, and later commanded HMAS Melbourne). However, in the climate of Australia immediately after the Great War, the public were easily swayed to the opinion that the nation's servicemen had given and suffered enough for the Empire's cause.

After four years of mass slaughter, the public were not prepared to see men languishing in jail as soon as they got home, for playing up and causing their ship a one hour delay.


I'm afraid this has been a bit messy. I was learning new things as I did checks during the writing of it, so I'm repeating as a diversion below a couple of pics of HMAS Australia receiving a Royal Visit in 1913. Years of dreary war service and a 'mutiny' lay ahead, but everything looked pretty shipshape on that day...

And here's the Wilson article link:
http://72.14.235.132/search?q=cache:4A73zuZkrlEJ:homepages.tesco.net/scaramouche/Pages_from__084__Vol_22-2_May-July_1996.pdf+HMAS+Australia+mutiny+graham+wilson&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=au

[ivorthediver]

Very Interesting article and full of facts that I had no knowledge of


Congratulations on the way it was presented and on your non confrontational approach ........you missed your vocation

I admire your sentiments expressed

Regards Ivor

[Blaydon]

Very interesting looking at it from the perspective of now where the class system is all but dissapearing from the armed forces.

[herakles]

Well K, it's nice that at last it's been noticed! :)

[kookaburra]

Thanks for those kind comments.

Thinking about this, I've decided that one of the morale/discipline problems on HMAS Australia would have related to the fact that she was a capital ship and a flagship. I'm reminded of Jake Holman in Richard McKenna's novel The Sand Pebbles' - a sailor who would much rather be on a river gunboat than a
battleship ...with all that spit and polish and continual saluting.

With little action seen, four years of that would have totally drained the patience of raw Aussie boys in 1919 I'm thinking. :)


The Canadian experience actually seems to have been much more deeply rooted. In July 1943, what was said to be the most severe mutiny of any allied ship in WW11 occurred on the destroyer HMCS Iroquois over the cancellation of shore leave. The underlying explanation appears to have been the 50-fold expansion of the then-RCN, and the failure of training levels to keep abreast of that level of expansion.

A couple of articles:

http://www.jstor.org/pss/2677431

http://images.google.com.au/imgres?imgurl=http://www.phmc.gc.ca/cmh/book_images/med/v3_c6_s04_ss05_03.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.phmc.gc.ca/cmh/en/page_704.asp&usg=__yYENiV8Y_36key5RRfp6Bi5czbY=&h=116&w=215&sz=10&hl=en&start=12&tbnid=BKCG0ifpqvwOZM:&tbnh=57&tbnw=106&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dcanadian%2Bnavy%2Bmutinies%26gbv%3D2% 26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG


The postwar RCN mutinies - and there were quite a few - were wrapped up with emerging Canadian nationalism, the question of whether it was a 'Royal Canadian Navy' or a 'Royal Colonial Navy,' and a lower deck desire to see their service 'Canadianized.'

There was a brief mutiny of a kind on the cruiser HMCS Ontario off Nanoose Harbour, Vancouver Island, in August 1947, and problems too on HMCS Uganda I think, and on HMCS Nootka.


It all came to a head in 1949 when spontaneous outbreaks
occurred almost simultaneously on the the destroyers HMCS Athabaskan at Manzanillo in Mexico; HMCS Crescent at Nanking in China; and on the carrier HMCS Magnificent in the Caribbean, which resulted in Admiral Rollo Maingay's Inquiry.

There were many levels to it, but one interesting issue appears to have been a refusal by the RN-oriented Canadian command structure to allow the men to have the name 'Canada' on their uniform shoulders, or to wear Maple Leaf badges.

It's just a guess of my own, but I'm inclined to think that the ultra RN-attachment of the Canadian officer corps may have been accentuated by the rival presence of the huge USN just across the border.

[herakles]

I think your point is valid. At the time of the HMAS Australia mutiny there were many serving RN officers in the RAN and I can imagine the rigidity that caused. And at that time. emerging Australianism was rampant.

[kookaburra]

That's true Herk - but looking at the level of incidence of outbreaks in the RCN (my last post), I'd say that the claim in the Frame-Baker book that 'since 1916 the R.A.N. had more mutinies than any other English-speaking nation' is looking extremely dubious.

Particularly true since between the wars the RCN was almost legislated out of existence.

[magaoidh]

Further to this interesting item,when units of the Canadian Army sailed into Vladivostok harbour under orders to invade the fledgeling Soviet Union, the soldiers refused to set foot on Russian soil.This was circa 1918 and the ships upped anchor and took their leave.I wonder if there were Canadian naval units involved? Canadian troops also mutinied while their repatriation was delayed after the great slaughter on the Western Front had ended. The Canadian Navy was not alone!!!

[Bear]

I was a part of a mutiny in HMAS Warrego in 1962. There were many unreported acts of insurrection during my 12 years service. It usually came down to how it was handled by the particular captain and officers in the ship.
The HMAS Pirie incident in WWII was disgraceful. The ship had suffered bomb damage and casualties. The crew were forced to live onboard while the damage was made good while the captain stayed at a pub ashore with his wife. This was in the tropics remember, and living in the ship alongside in the crowded mess decks of a Bathurst Class while repairs were being made would have been hell. However, as with all mutinies, this was the straw that broke the camel's back. If you look closely at the culture of a ship, you will find any mutiny has a long gestation.
To have the ship sail back to Sydney with HMAS Hobart abeam and with her guns trained on her all the way was laughable. The blokes in Pirie were not traitors. Nor were they likely to seize the ship and...do what? Sail to Tokyo and surrender?
I wrote a chapter in my book "Tall Tales & True from the Boys in Blue" about the Warrego mutiny. To my knowledge it is the only time anyone has written of this incident.
The navy was--and I imagine still is--a closed culture.
The Royal Navy influence on Royal Australian Naval officers was still pronounced in the 60s and early 70s when I served. Our officers almost to a man spent time with the RN. This was often in their formative years as Midshipmen or Sub-Lieutenants. Some of the more impressionable--or sillier--officers returned from UK service with fake British accents. The Australian lower-deck sailor did not like this attitude of many of their officers. There was a saying on the lower deck, "If it was good enough for Nelson, it's good enough for us". If you understand the Australian sense of irony, you will realise that this was not kindly meant.
This should not be read as an anti-officer diatribe. There were many officers who were considered as fine leaders and men, some of whom the men they led would have gone through fire for. These were the more balanced personalities who tempered discipline with common-sense.

[kookaburra]

Bear, I was fascinated by your reply here on Herakles thread, and the first-hand insight it brings to a pretty closed topic. The idea of one of our ships being taken back to Sydney under escort by Hobart, with its guns trained on her is extraordinary, and the sort of thing the public never hears about.

After the couple of posts here I looked further into the question of mutinies in the Dominion Navies (and some RN incidents), and tried to draw some conclusions - but I suddenly feel like an amateur and a hobbyist, which is all I am here really.


Here's a link to that thread, which is in the 'Battles and Events' section.

http://www.worldnavalships.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3602

I'd be interested to hear your view on anything in it - goes somewhat further into the 'Pirie Incident,' but no, I never knew about the HMAS Warrego incident you describe and have written about.

I was also interested in your first-hand account of relations between the men and their officers. I imagine you get all kinds, but a small encounter I once had has always stuck in my mind. I was a reporter, and went to visit Diamantina when she was in Melbourne - early 1960s - for some reason. I simply couldn't believe the plummy accent and louche manner affected by the young officer who was showing me around, and - in front of me - spoke to the men like they were shXX. I felt Hastings-Harrington with his mutton chops and air set a pretty poor example in that way at the time.

'On me they look distinguished. On you they look ridiculous,' he came down on some poor kid who was copying him (again in front of the press, from memory). Anyway, they looked ridiculous on him too, imo.

On the other hand, must say I've met some very fine types in the RAN too in later years - an X.O. who invited me aboard Parramatta in Sydney years later just couldn't have been more different. Well, look forward to hearing more of your stories. K.


BTW, on that 'mutinies' thread I've put a link in to the HMAS Mildura Association thread. Has some quite amusing stories around their 'mutiny' or incident, but I was busy and running out of steam on that thread a little by the time I got to that part - and not getting any interest from the forum in it. But you might like to read the 'Mildura' reminiscences on that link for old times sake. K.

[Bear]

Hmmm...I came in here tonight for 20 minutes or so to check if I'd had any replies to things I posted yesterday. Some hours later I am typing this. :D This site is so interesting that I better put a couple of days aside to sit and go through it.
Thank you for the 'mutiny link'. I read that with great interest as there is so much I didn't know--especially about the Indian stuff and the RCN.
Hastings-Harrington? Not a well-liked man when I knew him towards the end of his career. I had the experience of being in the escorting destroyer when he was buried from HMAS Vampire in 65 or was it 66?
There is a funny story about that day that I can't relate as I have too much respect for his son--a midshipman when I knew him and a fine officer and man. He too later became an Admiral and from reports I have heard of him did not change a bit during his service. Liked and admired by all that served with him as far as I can work out.
Mutinies in our Navy are a fascinating subject. I haven't read Tom Frame's book on the subject but will soon. As I have said, there were far more than ever were reported. Most were sensibly handled and that is why they didn't come to the attention of the public.
I posted something on the mutiny site about the very near mutiny in HMAS Swan in the early 70s, but will have to check my facts before posting anything about it.