James William Barrett - Australian Red Cross

liverpool annie · Sep 19, 2009

Sir JAMES WILLIAM BARRETT (1862-1945)

http://app1.lib.unimelb.edu.au/cgi-bin/mua-search?tdetails=1095;imgdetails=1095

On the outbreak of World War I he became honorary secretary of the Australian Red Cross and in October he joined the Australian Imperial Force with the rank of major (serving without pay until the following May, when he was promoted lieutenant-colonel). In December he sailed in the Kyarra, arriving in Egypt on 13 January 1915. He was posted to the 1st Australian General Hospital at Heliopolis as registrar and oculist and was also consultant to the British forces in Egypt; he nurtured a close connexion with the director of medical services, Major General Sir R. W. Ford. He was also executive officer of the Australian Red Cross Society in the region. In June he was appointed by Ford, quite irregularly, as 'Assistant Director of Medical Services, Australian Forces', thus securing authority which went far beyond the 1st A.G.H.

Barrett's shambling figure, often with gaiters on the wrong legs or spurs upside down, was militarily grotesque, but he was enabled to carry out his varied duties by 'immense energy and astonishing indefatigability, great organising and administrative ability, and intellectual capacity, and social flair'. Yet in doing so he made bitter enemies. By 5 April Lieutenant-Colonel John Springthorpe, a student contemporary, was writing in his diary that Barrett was 'playing himself in everywhere with the bigwigs', while sections of a virulent diary written by Major (Sir) Stanley Argyle, referring to Barrett as the 'octopus of Heliopolis', were circulated in Melbourne drawing-rooms.

Barrett, however, was more the victim of an inexperienced administration than of his own personal characteristics. By July the 1st A.G.H. had become 'administratively unmanageable' and in August, as a result of a War Office inquiry into its affairs, its commanding officer and Matron Jane Bell were recalled to Australia. Barrett was relieved of all military duties but was permitted to retain his Red Cross work. However, Springthorpe had circulated in Australia a lengthy and substantially inaccurate charge against his administration in this field. Early in September Barrett was asked to resign by the council of the Australian Red Cross. He did so and immediately asked for an inquiry, which exonerated him, as did further inquiry into the affairs of the 1st A.G.H. that was set up at his request. Shortly after, Barrett was ordered home.

With his military career in the Australian forces clearly at an end, Barrett brought off a remarkable defensive coup by arranging to be invalided to London on two months sick leave. There he quickly made as many influential friends as possible. In January 1916 he was ordered home again, but his busy involvement in military, political and diplomatic intrigue resulted in the Australian government assenting to his transfer to the British Army. He resigned from the A.I.F. in February 1916, and returned to Egypt in the Royal Army Medical Corps in the same rank as before. In 1916-17 he served as consulting aurist to the Egypt Expeditionary Force, and in 1917 as president of the invaliding and classification boards for most of Egypt. Although the attacks on him and the death of his son Keith in France in 1917 had brought him to a low ebb, he became active in the British Red Cross and the Young Men's Christian Association in the area, and wrote with Percy Deane, The Australian Army Medical Corps in Egypt (1918). He also published in London his collected articles in two volumes, The Twin Ideals: An Educated Commonwealth (1918), A Vision of the Possible: What the R.A.M.C. Might Become (1919), and The War Work of the Y.M.C.A. in Egypt (1919). He ended the war with a K.B.E., a C.B. and an Egyptian order—honours which may have softened his relentless determination to have legal vengeance on Springthorpe, Argyle, and the Melbourne Age and Herald.
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And this is his son Keith !

In Memory of
Captain KEITH JOY BARRETT

Mentioned in Despatches

2nd Bn., Royal Fusiliers
who died age 25
on 16 April 1917
Son of James William and Marian Barrett, of "Palmyra," Lansell Rd., Toorah, Melbourne, Australia.

Remembered with honour
ETAPLES MILITARY CEMETERY

http://books.google.com/books?id=uz...v=onepage&q=Captain KEITH JOY BARRETT&f=false

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