diggerdave goes to the movies
Beneath Hill 60
During the First World War of 1914-1918 more than 10,700 men from the towns, hamlets and villages of the Hunter Valley enlisted and served overseas in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF).
Almost three hundred of them enlisted in the Australian Mining Corps or Tunnelling Companies to excavate and tunnel under the enemy trenches along the Western Front of France and Belgium.
About one hundred and fifty of these ‘Digger miners’ were coal miners who were joined in the ranks with a diverse lot of other occupations such as accountants, bakers, builders, butchers, carpenters, cooks, dairymen, farmers, labourers, plumbers, school teachers, watch makers and wharf labourers.
One hundred and forty Hunter men were drafted into 1st Australian Tunnelling Company, about whose deeds and exploits Beneath Hill 60 is based on.
The AIF Mining Corps was formed on the suggestion of Professors T. W. Edgeworth David and E.W. Skeats who had urged the Australian Government that the exceptional resources of Australian miners and engineers equipped with the latest machinery should be utilised at Gallipoli or elsewhere. An offer was accordingly made to the British Government and accepted and the Australian Mining Corps was formed with much enthusiasm drawing volunteers from the mining centres across Australia.
The Mining Corps sailed from Sydney aboard the transport ship Ulysses on 20 February 1916 directly for England under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Albert Cecil Fewtrell, a thirty year old railway and civil engineer. Eminent geologist and Antarctic explorer, fifty eight year old Professor Tannant William Edgeworth David, with the rank of Major, was second in command.
Arriving in France in May 1916 the Australian Mining Corps proceeded to Hazebrouck, as a battalion with a headquarters staff, but it was soon found to be no simple matter to fit them into the existing scheme of organisation, and it was decided to divide the battalion into three companies, with the 1st Tunnelling Company becoming an independent unit. Deployed to the Armentières sector in northern France, they fought on the surface as well as underground and in June 1916 Woodward won the Military Cross for blowing up a snipers' post in no man's land. This is portrayed in the movie.
Early in 1917 the company took over mining operations in a sector south-east of Ypres in Belgium, which included deep galleries under the German lines and for months protected these mines, manning listening posts to detect the enemy’s working parties and using counter-mines to destroy enemy tunnels. This continued until the opening of the battle of Messines at 03.10 am on Thursday 7 June 1917 when the nineteen mines under Messines Ridge were fired with devastating effect.
Film and Facts:
As a military historian I had researched the Mining Corps and Tunnelling Companies of the AIF during the First World War, focussing on the Hunter Valley men who enlisted in these units. “Coal Miner Diggers – Hunter Valley Coal Miners at The Great War” (2001) was the result of that research and contains much detail on the work of the AIF’s 1st Tunnelling Company at Hill 60.
When The Herald’s James Joyce asked me to write a review of Beneath Hill 60 from a military historian’s perspective I jumped at the opportunity. My plan of approach was to see the movie with an open mind but also have an objective view looking for any inaccuracies or anything inauthentic which may have crept into the movie’s script or production.
Having some background knowledge gleaned from the service records of James Brown Sneddon and his son Walter Fitzgerald Sneddon one of the first things I was looking for was to see if Jim Sneddon spoke with a Scottish accent, Jim having been born at Gilmerton near Edinburgh, Scotland in October 1871. I was a “wee bit” disappointed to hear Jim speak without one.
The blurb put out by the movie’s marketing team has the Sneddons as coal miners at the West Wallsend colliery in the Hunter Valley prior to enlisting together in the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company and that Walter enlisted during a recruiting drive and his father enlisted a short time after to “look after him.”
Walter’s service record shows that he was a 19 year old blacksmith's striker living at Whitton Street, Wallsend when he enlisted on 22nd July 1915 at the Liverpool military camp, where he was allocated to the 10th Reinforcements of the 4th Infantry Battalion and embarked at Sydney for overseas on 8th October 1915. After arriving at the AIF base camp in Egypt Walter was transferred to the newly-formed 56th Infantry Battalion on 13th February 1916. The 56th Battalion took part in the disastrous Fromelles campaign of 19/20th July 1916 and it was a month after this battle that Walter transferred to the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company, in France, on 29th August 1916. I truly believe that Walter transferred to the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company to be with his father and to look after him, not vice versa.
In the movie Jim Sneddon is killed in an underground explosion which destroyed the underground gallery in which he was working, which is true, but the cross above his grave shows his rank as “Pte” (Private) when his service record shows his rank as “Sapper” (Spr).
The feat of replicating the Western Front in the scenes filmed in the tunnels and trenches are outstanding, the overall effect on the movie’s viewers actually feeling as if we were there with them among the re-created mud and blood and the claustrophobic conditions of being in a confined space underground.
I was puzzled by the tunnellers armed with a shortened pump action shotgun and carrying .303 rifles underground. I would have thought that pistols would have been more appropriate and effective for close combat, the .303 being cumbersome in the confines of the tunnels and galleries.
The uniforms of the Australian, British and German soldiers and tunnellers appeared to faultless, and the movie’s costumer and uniform provider, Ian Sparke deserves top marks. Ian Sparke purchased a copy of Coal Miner Diggers from me a few years ago and I am wondering if he made use of the various images of uniforms contained in the book for the movie.
Captain Oliver Woodward was awarded the Military Cross and two Bars and was mentioned in despatches (MID). I would have to see the movie again to verify the inclusion of the MID oak leaf attached to his Victory Medal ribbon in the wedding scene at the end of the movie.
The character of Sapper Frank Tiffin is based upon a real soldier who was in the 1st Tunnelling Company, Sapper Frederick Matterson Tiffin, a 27½ year old English-born carpenter living at Stanmore in Sydney when he enlisted on 31 January 1916.
In Beneath Hill 60, Sapper Tiffin is portrayed as a 16 year old miner from Wollongong with a working knowledge of carpentry, who was trapped underground and killed at Hill 60 when the mines were fired.
The real Sapper Tiffin survived the First World War, married an English girl in London on 10 March 1919 and together they returned to Australia in July 1919. The timber box in which Captain Woodward kept his medals in was made by Sapper Tiffin.
Overall Beneath Hill 60 is an exceptionally good movie and is one of the best I have seen for many years and felt the cinematography fully captured the feel of the Western Front and the underground tunnels.
With the resurgence of the Australian film industry in the 1970’s and the production of epic First World War inspired films such as Gallipoli (1981), The Anzacs television mini-series (1985), The Lighthorsemen (1987) and now Beneath Hill 60, the future of films based on the events of World War One is assured to be an enduring one.
The recent discovery of the mass graves containing British and Australian soldiers who perished at Fromelles in the disastrous battle of 19/20 July 1916 comes to mind as a future production, perhaps being in time for the centenary of the battle in 2016.
Australian First World War inspired movies have definitely come along way since the 1940 war film Forty Thousand Horsemen filmed on the Cronulla sand dunes over seventy years ago during the Second World War.
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