Of the almost 280 College students and alumni who responded to the British Empire’s call, 41 of them were lost during the war, five at Gallipoli.
In the tight-knit pre-war College community of barely 50 resident students, the loss was devastating. Many of the men had come into residence together, or overlapped in their final years. Some had sisters or girlfriends attending the College’s Women’s Hostel (later named Janet Clarke Hall).
Of all the College fallen at Gallipoli, the tragic death of Edward Frederick Robert Bage (TC 1905), pictured, reverberated across Australia. ‘“Bustling Bob,” of infamous memory’, is how the Fleur de Lys magazine remembered him in 1911 when he joined the Australian Engineers. Even then his natural leadership was recognised. He ‘ought to be worth a battalion to Australia in her hour of need,’ his fellow students observed. (1)
Within months he had joined Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition as the team’s Astronomer, Assistant Magnetician and Recorder of Tides. Due to bad weather, several of the team were stranded and forced to spend a second winter in Antarctica. Expedition member Charles Laseron later wrote of how Bage’s ‘quiet determination, resolution, and foresight carried them through ... always cheerful, ready with a hand to anybody who needed it ... he was a born leader of men’. (2)
After returning to Australia, Bage rejoined his unit and in September 1914, only weeks after Britain declared war, became engaged to Dorothy Scantlebury, a friend of his sister’s and likewise fellow student of Trinity’s Women’s Hostel in her 3rd year of an Arts degree. (3) At the end of the month, the 3rd Field Company, Australian Engineers, to which Bage was attached, was sent to Egypt. In February 1915, he was promoted to the rank of Captain; that same month he was awarded the Polar Medal by George V for his involvement in Mawson’s expedition.
On the morning of 24 April 1915, the Australian Engineers were among the first to pour out of the landing boats onto the Turkish beach now known as Anzac Cove. They would establish the roads and ammunition dumps, dig trenches and build the necessary infrastructure. On 7 May, Bage was directed to take
a small party forward 150 yards beyond the ANZAC front line to peg out a position for a new trench. It was broad daylight, across exposed ground, subject to machine gun fire from the heights of Lone Pine, a task better undertaken with the cover of darkness. But the commanding officer was adamant. Bage was hit several times. He was buried, aged 27, in Beach Cemetery, just above Anzac Cove the following day.
Bage’s story is just one of the five who lost their lives during the campaign, but because of his pre-war recognition, the best documented. A day after Bage died, on 8 May, 33-year-old Captain Herbert Humphreys Hunter (TC 1903), a dental surgeon and former VFL footballer for Essendon, was killed at the Peninsula’s tip. Warden Alexander Leeper’s nephew (by marriage), Humphey Osborne Moule (TC 1911), fell during fighting at Leane’s Trench that August. Barely a week later, Gresley Tatlock Harper (TC 1908) was killed.
The youngest two alumni would become the last of the College’s fallen before ANZAC forces were evacuated from the Peninsula in December. Twenty-year-olds Carl Horace Harton and George Risdon Grimwade (both TC 1913) were killed only weeks apart in September. A student of Melbourne Grammar before coming into College, Grimwade’s fellow Grammarians insisted on diggi
