HISTORY: Anzac soldier's big secrets

He arrived there as an Army bandsman, playing a cornet, before becoming a stretcher-bearer. Unarmed and exposed to snipers for months, he dodged shot and shell disregarding danger to carry war wounded to safety.

No one realised though, this heroic soldier kept a dark secret all to himself. Coombes was anything but your average Anzac. But more of this later.

Private Coombes was awarded the first of his four military medals for his heroic efforts with Australia’s 13th Battalion on the peninsula. He was one of 11 men in the force of 1000 men singled out for special praise for service they had given in the days after the landing at Anzac Cove on April 25, 1915.

He and fellow soldier Harold Sorrell, a divinity student, were hailed for their “exceptionally splendid and gallant work” in carrying down the wounded from the ridges in a bloody attack in early May 1915, then further risking their lives to gather and bury all the bodies they could find.

The 13th Battalion’s commander was Dungog-born Colonel Granville Burnage.

This older, once derided Colonel, nicknamed ‘Granny’ by the troops, led them into battle and gave special praise to the stretcher bearers who’d saved many lives.

By December 1915, however, only six of the original 13th Battalion bearers remained on the peninsula alive.

Almost a century later, in 2012, British author Kate Summerscale then became the unexpected biographer of Robert Coombes after coming across an account of his earlier arrest in an old newspaper.

Intrigued, she looked up the transcript from his trial at Britain’s Old Bailey. Her investigation then stretched across the globe, as she slowly pieced together the Anzac’s life story both before and after Gallilpoli. The result is an engrossing page-turner of a book.

She found Robert Coombes had somehow escaped serious injury in his first six months at Gallipoli, despite being struck at least twice by shell fragments and once by a bullet.

But in November 1915, as rain, snow and blizzards hit the Gallipoli Peninsula, his toes swelled and blackened in the icy water of the trenches. Besides having the malady of trench foot, he had also contracted hepatitis.

That was the month the Allies finally decided to quit the peninsula.

In truth, it was a wonder Robert Coombes had survived so long among the rattle of machine gun and rifle fire, enemy grenades “falling like showers of peas” and the ever-present stench of war.

Amid men cursing, or screaming “crazed by thirst, pain or terror” the bearers came to symbolise the mateship forged at Gallipoli.

It’s little wonder that among the chaos they didn’t become mentally unhinged. In Robert Coombes case, it was all the more extraordinary he remained stable, clear-headed and didn’t suffer a breakdown himself.

For Coombes had earlier been an inmate at Britain’s notorious Broadmoor asylum for the criminally insane. He’d served a 17-year jail sentence there for the horrific murder of his mother back in July 1895 when aged only 13 years.

With their seaman father absent, Robert and his younger brother Nattie had set out from their East London terrace home on a spending spree, including watching a cricket match at Lord’s.

Over the next 10 days they pawned family items to fund trips to the theatre and the seaside. No one suspected anything until an awful smell came from the building.  

Soon arrested, Robert was found guilty of his mother’s murder. The Press went into a frenzy as the horror and tragedy of the case echoed a plot of the era’s ‘penny dreadful novels’ Robert had so loved to read.

Robert said his mother had become a volatile monster, one who threw knives and threatened him with death before he’d stabbed her in bed. He was sentenced to Broadmoor asylum.  

On his release in 1912, at age 30 years, Robert Coombes emigrated to distant Australia and war duty, following his brother Nattie (the chief witness against him at his trial) who was living in Newcastle, NSW.

Post-war, Robert became a Coffs Harbour farmer, never marrying but keeping in touch with his brother Nattie for whom he apparently bore no ill feelings. Finding peace and safety in the Australian bush, Robert kept to himself taking solace in his violin, cricket, chess and books.

Author Kate Summerscale in her new book, The Wicked Boy, subtitled ‘The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer’ said Robert later enlisted in World War II and trained in army camps near Newcastle. Discharged with heart problems in 1942, he died in 1949.

Summerscale also revealed that on the Western Front in WWI, Coombes had met up with Sgt Frank Rodgers, a clerk, described in his British Army papers as “honest, sober, hardworking and intelligent”.

Rodgers though had once been a fellow Broadmoor inmate who had also killed his mother, but in 1904.  

Author Summerscale stumbled upon the Anzac connection to Robert Coombes while investigating what seemed just a shocking, true Victorian-era murder and morality tale.

At first it had seemed Robert was, in today’s terms, a psychopath, someone with no feelings for others. Yet to her, the revolting killing suggested a catastrophic disturbance.

A modern psychiatrist at Broadmoor told the author it sounded like Robert Coombes had experienced a psychotic breakdown when he murdered his mother, complete with auditory hallucinations and temporary amnesia.

The psychiatrist also said almost every one of the patients she’d treated at Broadmoor had suffered horribly as children, with their violent derangements triggered by certain events. 

Of necessity, because of the trial source material, most of the book covers the actual court case and the era’s social history. It’s the ‘what happened next?’ idea which fascinated the author to give a fuller, rounded end to the book. Meticulously researched, it’s a terrific read. Sad, yet unexpectedly moving towards the end. Author Summerscale’s detective work revealed the end of Robert’s life story to be actually a double redemption tale. But to discover what occurred, you’ll have to read the book.