In Sept 1916 Albany Bell offered to be a Y.M.C.A. secretary on the front, paying his own way and the expenses of an assistant secretrary. His offer was accepted and in November he embarked on the Troop ship "Afric".
The Colonel on board ship sent a letter to the Y.M.C.A. which was published.
Troopship A19, Afric,
At Sea, November, 1916.
Dear Mr. Wheeler, — On behalf of the troops on board the
Afric, I beg to thank the Y.M.C.A. most heartily for placing on board so much
useful equipment, under the able charge of Mr. Albany Bell. Believe me, it is
being made use of in every detail. The piano and the portable organ are
especially useful. For instructional purposes, as well as for recreation, I
find the .222 sporting rifles which were placed on board at Sydney are very
useful, so that the 3,000 .222 cartridges are a great help. Our voyage has been
a good one so far. Again thinking (sic) your splendid organisation for its
thoroughness. — Yours faithfully,
 |
| Albany Bell (1871-1857) |
See The West Australian of 22 Mar 1917.
Of a rough passage on board he writes:
"We had some lively times with the rough weather; the lads were like a lot of schoolboys let out. One mess orderly lost his balance and capsized a dixie of soup over a man coming up; of course he took it like a lamb (I don't think) and the deck was blue with profanity well sustained for some minutes while all the rest of the deck were screaming with laughter. It's astonishing how quickly we can see the joke when it is on the other fellow, but when the mess orderly told them there was no more soup, the joke immediately lost its point and they started on the orderly with a forceful expression of their opinion on his clumsiness."
and of some of the work of the Y.M.C.A.
"The day or night we landed was bitterly cold and the men were put straight on to their train for a 160-mile journey. You can guess their joy when at a stop half way about 3 a.m. Y.M.C.A. people were at the station with coppers of boiling hot cocoa, also filling their bottles, which with a piece of cake are given free to our Australian soldiers. This is done when disembarking and when they are drafted to France, and I can tell you with snow all over the surface and the ground frozen they appreciate it."
Of his own part in the work he is surprisingly modest in this letter. In a later one he writes in part:
"I am just about through with my job here [in London], and have got the first purely Australian Y.M.C.A. going in England. Any other work our men have done here has, been in the English Y.M.C.A.'s. We are right opposite the gates of the A.I.F. headquarters, and the comforts of a number of small, cosy, warm rooms are already appreciated by our men, who are glad to get off the cold street to a cosy corner, and, with the kind of premises we have (handed over to us by the Horseferry-road Wesleyan Church) I have been able to give plenty of this sort of accommodation, and have put in a canteen on a better class tea-room style that is taking their fancy, and they declare it the 'best in London.' I will enclose you a menu card and a pay ticket, and you will see I have given Australia a big ad. General Anderson, in command at Australian headquarters, has been very interested, and Mrs. Anderson opened the building for us, the general and his staff being present, and about 200 soldiers. I've got the Ladies' Guild of the Church to undertake any mending and darning the boys want, and we are giving all the home touches we can to the rooms. Ladies are giving their services free to the canteen work, and quite a number of Australian ladies are glad of the opportunity we are giving them to help.
"I'm also instituting the very scriptural practice of washing-the saints? no-very much no-soldiers' feet. The boys get very bad feet with the intense cold, and when they come to London can hardly get about, and cannot sleep. If they can get attention in the way of a hot soda bath and a good stiff rubbing, it eases them for the night, so we've put a few tubs in as a side line. A medicine chest our lady superintendent runs as her own speciality, and she doctors up the boys, mostly for colds, which are simply awful-every other man has a terrible graveyard cough-and as she is the wife of the principal of the Wesleyan College, and had 900 boys to deal with, is pretty good at simple remedies. The boys make special journeys from town to tell her how much her medicine eased their cough. We are drawing the sight-seeing parties together from Peel House and the War Chest Club and organising them all from here. I think if they keep running on right lines this will be a very useful centre, and I'll guarantee it's the most economically fitted Y.M.C.A. in London. They simply go to a furnisher and, with a wave of the hand, say 'fire away'; so the furnisher fires away to his heart's content and sends in the bill. I fancy the regular Y.M.C.A. furnisher is disappointed in the Australians."
Later Albany was involved with the Y.M.C.A. in France after setting up another Australian Y.M.C.A. in Portland, Dorset then at the Monte Video camp in Weymouth. He was scathing about the English Y.M.C.A. making profits whereas he did everything he could to provide a service - including buying up big on cigarettes and tobacco just before the prices were raised by the Budget. [Note Bert Harris, the cousin from whom Auntie Bar gleaned her initial Harris Family Tree, worked with the English Y.M.C.A.]
There was a Civic Reception for Albany Bell and Mr M'Kenzie on 15 July 1919 at the Perth Town Hall.
In one of the speeches Mr Prowse:
"said that he had asked a returned friend of his if he had ever seen Mr. Bell at the front, and the reply he received was "Yes, and so has everyone else; he is simply a prodigy of organisation." (Applause.)"
Albany's reflections on the Digger and the likely influence the War would have on the future of Australia are worth a read. See the report on the Civic Reception above and "The Digger Abroad" in The Daily News.
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