Anzac Girls: The couple who went to war

The story of Sydney and Elsie Cook, a husband and wife who served at opposite ends of some of World WarI’s most pivotal battles, reads like a checklist of the Anzacs’ deadliest conflicts.

Cook, the son of Australia’s sixth prime minister, Joseph Cook, had been engaged to Elsie Sheppard for a few months when his father declared the colonials would throw their support behind Mother England and go to war.

The couple quickly married, enlisted and set off on transport ships to Egypt – Syd first, as an officer, then Elsie, who joined the Australian Nursing Service under her maiden name to get around a rule requiring nurses to be single.

Within a year, Syd would be shot in the leg at the Gallipoli landing on April25, 1915. Recovered, but still walking with a limp, he led a battalion into the Battle of Lone Pine, where he was shot in the head.

Elsie transferred to Syd’s ward to be at his bedside and, incredibly, he survived.

The story has been immortalised a few times already, in Thomas Keneally’s The Daughters of Mars and the Shift Theatre’s The Girls in Grey. But Peter Rees’ book The Other Anzacs is the most comprehensive account of Syd and Elsie Cook and the men and women who endured war with them. The work formed the basis for ABC mini-series Anzac Girls, which starts tomorrow .

Newcastle-born actor Todd Lasance stars as Syd Cook and says he jumped at the role when he heard about it.

‘‘I think it was important to have the females drive the series and to have a new perspective on it all; that there’s actually two fronts to the war, not just on the actual battlefield itself,’’ Lasance says from his base in Los Angeles.

As filming progressed, realistic make-up and acting created a snapshot of what war might have been like for the nurses.

‘‘I remember a day really specifically when we were in one of the hospitals, and walking in, it looked like an actual post-war scene. They had these stretcher beds, nurses running around with blood on them, and injured soldiers yelling and screaming.

‘‘It was really important, I think, that they reflect these moments properly,’’ Lasance says. ‘‘I think people need to be shocked and need to be grossed out, need to be offended, in order to feel what it was like for these women.’’

The grim realities are evident in diaries kept by Elsie, which are displayed at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

‘‘What an eventful year! My engagement, marriage, finishing my training and old life at Prince Alfred Hospital, the outbreak of the Great War, my joining the Army Nursing Service and leaving home and Australia for the first time,’’ she wrote on December31, 1914.

‘‘New Year’s Day dawned ... a gloriously moonlit morning, calm and beautiful, everyone bright and happy, and so begins 1915. It seems a good omen.’’

Just five months later, as the wounded trickled back from the failed Gallipoli landing, Elsie would write: ‘‘Hundreds of Australian wounded back from the landing at the Dardanelles.

‘‘Frightfully busy, getting off their bandages & dirty blood-stained clothes, washing them, the wounds to be dressed. Some had not been touched for days.

‘‘We have got 700 badly wounded men and six Sisters and a matron! Wounded still arriving in their hundreds.’’

The diaries, which cover a significant chunk of the war, helped Laura Brent get into character  portraying Elsie.

‘‘I was very conscious of the fact that the characters were based on real people.

‘‘I mean, of course, this is our version of Elsie, so obviously we do deviate – it’s not a documentary. There’s the occasional factual thing that’s changed so all the girls can be there together at times and things like that, so their stories can merge.

‘‘However, so much is taken from Elsie’s diary, and I actually met her grandson, Hartley Cook, who was an incredible help.’’

Hartley Cook still lives and works in Sydney, running Grafton Galleries at Rushcutters Bay, the antiques business his grandmother, Elsie, started in 1945.

He  has several strong memories of his grandfather. 

In the first, he is sitting on his grandfather’s lap,  running a finger along the indentation in his skull left by a Lone Pine bullet. 

The second memory is of being at a Sydney church in 1972, as his grandfather’s coffin is carried out through a guard of honour of World WarI veterans.

‘‘They’re all late 70s or more, and these old guys stood to attention the best they could on either side of the stairs,’’ Cook says. ‘‘Even as a 12-year-old, I thought it was one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen.’’

AS the war neared its end, Syd and Elsie found themselves in London on Armistice Day, where Elsie’s diary describes a state of ‘‘great rejoicing and merry making’’.

‘‘People began to hang out flags and bunting, the aeroplanes from the aerodrome opposite arose and circled and dived and made merry in the air. Processions, in which Australians seemed to take a leading part, were in full swing along the Strand.’’

When they returned home, they  lived in Perth, where Syd became a Commonwealth architect and Elsie gave birth to  their son, Hartley’s father, Peter. In Sydney,  Syd designed the net that stretched across Sydney Harbour to keep out Japanese submarines during World WarII.

Hartley Cook is astonished at his grandparents’ resilience. They showed no signs of post-traumatic stress, despite what they faced in the trenches and wards.

‘‘These poor buggers, in Gramps’ case, landed in Gallipoli on the 25th of April, 1915, got patched up twice, and spent most of the war in horrible trenches in France. And then they come back here and design buildings and run antique shops. You know, I’m buggered if I know how they did it,’’ he says. ‘‘I think it’s just extraordinary.’’