The Anzacs of Brightlingsea
On Friday 17 June 2016 a three-day ANZAC Centenary weekend will begin in Brightlingsea, Essex, England. This ancient maritime town, located at the mouth of the River Colne, was the location of an Australian Engineers Training Depot (AETD) during the First World War. It housed up to ten thousand Australian and New Zealand soldiers between 1916 and 1919.
The establishment of the AETD, grew out of the need to find additional locations for ANZAC training camps as the camps already established around Bulford, Boscombe and Salisbury Plain soon became full to overflowing.
The AETD consisted of a Headquarters, three Training Companies and a Mounted Section for the training of drivers (both horse and vehicle). Already a part of England’s East Coast garrison, Brightlingsea’s soft mud and tidal creeks were considered a perfect example of conditions in some parts of the Western Front and therefore just the right terrain for practice in bridge, pontoon and road building and trench and dugout digging.
Informal group portrait of officers at the AIF Engineer Training Depot at the Manor House, Brightlingsea, Essex.
At the end of the war the AETD remained in Brightlingsea for a number of months. On January 13 1919 a silver bowl was presented to Captain Geoffrey Charles Payne, Commanding Officer of the AETD on behalf of the townspeople in remembrance of the time the ANZACS had spent in the town.
In April 2016 Ann Berry from the Friends of Brightlingsea Museum contacted the Memorial regarding the whereabouts of the bowl and wondered if by chance it had come into the National Collection. Ensuing research discovered that the bowl had been donated to the Australian War Records Section (the precursor to the Australian War Memorial) soon after the First World War. This news was met with tremendous excitement from Brightlingsea as the whereabouts of the bowl had been a mystery for many years.
When the ANZACS first arrived in Brightlingsea they were initially met with scepticism by the local population. They were taller, broader; they dressed differently and had a strange accent. But they were soon much respected and admired by the locals. While the soldiers camped on the local recreation ground in the summer months, in the winter they were billeted in locals' homes and many became part of the family — literally, in some instances with several marriages ensuing.
As a part of this weekend's celebrations the Brightlingsea Museum is trying to put together some short biographies of those soldiers who married women from the town and establish contact details for their descendants - https://brightlingseaanzaccentenary.org/connections/. There are still some families living in Brightlingsea who are descendants of ANZACS, but there could be others living in Australia who don't realise they have a connection with the English town. Ann Berry is hopeful that this years centenary could lead to tracing some of those families who did not stay in touch with England "just to see how they are, and how they're getting on, and tell them that we remember them," she said.