BUTLER, Colonel Arthur Graham (and others)

The Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services in the War of 1914-1918. Volume 1 [to] Volume 3

Melbourne (Volume 1) and Canberra, Australian War Memorial, 1930, 1940 and 1943 (all first editions: a second edition of the first volume was published in 1938).

Octavo, three volumes, xxvi, 873, [1] (publisher's advertisement for the Bean and Butler sets) pages with 4 diagrams, 10 graphs, 8 maps and a full-page illustration (page 586), plus a tipped-in errata slip, 4 diagrams, 8 graphs, 16 maps (including 2 double-page maps) and 128 plates; xvi, 1010, [1] (tipped-in publisher's advertisement for the Bean and Butler sets, verso blank) pages with 37 diagrams, 12 graphs, 11 maps and a full-page illustration of 'Conventional Signs' (page 959), plus 2 maps and 91 plates; and xx, 1103 pages plus 35 plates numbered with letters, and 10 diagrams (all strong medical images), and 34 numbered plates (one with 5 small portraits) of more general but relevant interest.

Original dark blue cloth; extremities very slightly rubbed and bumped; edges a little foxed and marked; endpapers browned; an excellent set.

These volumes are the medical companion to the twelve-volume 'Official History of Australia in the War, 1914-1918'. All three volumes are scarce; the third volume must be deemed rare.

Provenance: Colonel Alfred Plumley Derham MC (1885-1957), with his signature and ownership details (amended in the first volume), and the later signed ink inscription (dated 9 April 1955) bequeathing the set to Colonel John George Glyn White (1909-1987) in each volume (and further inscribed in the first volume 'as a token of my love and gratitude'). Alfred Derham 'interrupted his medical studies when World War I broke out. Formerly a subaltern in the Melbourne University Rifles, he enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force on 26 August 1914 and was posted to the 5th Battalion. He was commissioned next month and sailed for Egypt in October. On 25 April 1915 he landed at Gallipoli as a platoon commander. Wounded that day, he refused to be evacuated until the 30th, and conducted himself in the meantime with such gallantry and energy that he was awarded the Military Cross and mentioned in dispatches. Derham transferred to the staff of the 2nd Brigade in August. He left the peninsula in December, moved from Egypt to France in March 1916 and was permitted to embark for Australia in November to complete his degree.... On 10 April 1940 Alfred was appointed colonel in the A.I.F. Made assistant director of medical services to the 8th Division, he organized and trained its medical units and flew to Malaya in April 1941. That month he was appointed A.D.M.S., A.I.F. headquarters, Malaya. In the campaign which followed the Japanese invasion in December, Derham inspired his staff while supervising the evacuation of medical units across the Causeway to Singapore. Captured when Singapore fell on 15 February 1942, he was incarcerated in Changi prisoner-of-war camp for six months, and subsequently shipped to Formosa and then to Manchuria. He arrived home in September 1945 and his A.I.F. appointment terminated on 26 March 1946. That year he was appointed C.B.E. ('Australian Dictionary of Biography').

Colonel John George Glyn White was Derham's deputy and successor in Malaya. With the removal in August 1942 to Manchuria of the higher ranks, including Derham, White was appointed assistant director of medical services. He fearlessly stood up to the Japanese captors, and sometimes persuaded them to compromise. In the tense days leading up to the Japanese surrender in August 1945, he again showed courage and tact. He was appointed OBE in 1941 and was mentioned in despatches in May 1947 (ADB).

Loosely inserted are a number related ephemeral items:

(1) An original pencil and watercolour sketch of a hand with large skin lesions is inserted at page 640 of the first volume, opposite the section relating to Local septic infections-Barcoo. The kind of ulcerations shown are characteristic of this scurvy-like condition.

(2) The retained duplicate typescript, signed, of a letter from Derham to the Town Clerk of the City of Kew (dated 1 December 1930), advocating the purchase of the first volume of Butler's history for the Kew Public Library. 'Perusal of this volume and a personal knowledge of a great part of the operations it describes lead me to the opinion that this History is of great national importance.'

(3) Three newspaper clippings relation to Butler's work and its purchase by the Kew Public Library.

(4) An AAMC (Third Military District) Christmas card from 1935.

Arthur Graham Butler (1872-1949) 'was appointed regimental medical officer of the 9th Battalion which sailed for Egypt in September.... Butler was in one of the first boats ashore at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 ... He was the only medical officer to win the Distinguished Service Order at Anzac, where he remained until October ... In 1923, "against his wish, but from a sense of public duty", he agreed to write the official history of the Australian Army Medical Services in the war; the task was to occupy the next twenty years of his life. He gave up his practice' and lived in relative poverty. He wrote all three volumes 'except part of the first.... His literary work displays the qualities that he showed on the battlefield: courage, compassion and meticulousness. He sought to isolate and analyse important problems as a guide to future policy and management. His arguments are trenchant, his scholarship exact and penetrating. His wide-ranging, critical statistical appendices are especially valuable and shocking in their implications. His three volumes are among the most distinguished war history texts of the English-speaking nations' (ADB).

Dornbusch 254; Fielding and O'Neill, page 209; Trigellis-Smith 313-315 and 737-739. [3 items].

Item #130059

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