newy.com.au – Historian Mat McLachlan is highlighting the Hunter’s links to the underground war at Hill 60 for Remembrance Day in Belgium, 110 years after the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company began work at the site near Ypres.
The company arrived in November 1916 to relieve Canadian tunnellers. Men from the Newcastle coalfields were among those drawn from mining communities across Australia to maintain and conceal tunnels leading to two mines packed with explosives beneath German positions.
For seven months, the Australians worked to protect the tunnels while German tunnellers dug nearby. Men used stethoscopes pressed against the clay to listen for enemy digging, sometimes only metres away. The underground galleries bore the names of Australian cities, including Newcastle.
Among the men in McLachlan’s account is Lieutenant Arthur Elton Tandy, who was born in Maitland and worked as a miner in Ballarat before becoming a mining and railway surveyor in Cloncurry, Queensland.
Another is Sapper Lyle John Ranger, from the Wallsend and Boolaroo area. He enlisted at 17 years and 11 months old and died aged 18.
Both were among 10 men killed in an explosion beneath Hill 60 on 25 April 1917, two years after the Gallipoli landing. McLachlan’s account describes three officers killed in their dugout and seven men trapped while resting in the tunnels. None survived.
The cause of that blast remains uncertain. McLachlan says some accounts blamed a German shell, while Captain Oliver Woodward, who arrived with a relief party that night, believed a faulty detonator had caused the explosion.
Eight of the dead lie at Railway Dugouts Burial Ground near Zillebeke. Tandy and Captain Wilfred Avery are buried at Poperinghe New Military Cemetery. Other tunnellers killed at Hill 60 were never recovered.
The April deaths preceded the planned detonation of the mines the Australians had maintained. Those charges formed part of a wider operation in which 19 mines were detonated along Messines Ridge on 7 June 1917. Craters remain in the landscape, and a memorial at Hill 60 commemorates the officers and men of the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company.
McLachlan plans to attend the Remembrance Day service at the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing in Ypres on 11 November. His visit comes at the end of a five month journey through Vietnam and European battlefields, during which he led tours and researched future cruises for his company, Mat McLachlan Battlefield Tours.
The journey also took him to Vignacourt in northern France, where Queenslanders Donna and Michael Fiechtner have become caretakers of the Thuillier Farmhouse, used as a photographic studio during the First World War. The couple have launched a crowdfunding appeal to restore the farmhouse.
McLachlan says the couple told him more glass plate negatives had been discovered in the farmhouse’s attic walls as restoration began, adding to the photographic record preserved from the site.
