Trooper to the Southern Cross

by Angela Thirkell

An Australian army doctor, returning home after World War I, narrates his journey on a troop-carry vessel that includes families, murderers, dope fiends, thieves, a female impersonator, and a padre among its passengers.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Australia, Classics, Travel

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1934

About the author

Angela Margaret Mackail was born on January 30, 1890 at 27 Young Street, Kensington Square, London. Her grandfather was Sir Edward Burne-Jones the pre-Raphaelite painter and partner in the design firm of Morris and Company for whom he designed many stained glass windows - seven of which are in St Margaret's Church in Rottingdean, West Sussex. Her grandmother was Georgiana Macdonald, one of a precocious family which included among others, Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, and Rudyard Kipling. Angela's brother, Denis Mackail, was also a prolific and successful novelist. Angela's mother, Margaret Burne-Jones, married John Mackail - an administrator at the Ministry of Education and Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.

Angela married James Campbell McInnes in 1911. James was a professional Baritone and performed at concert halls throughout the UK. In 1912 their first son Graham was born and in 1914 a second son, Colin. A daughter was born in 1917 at the same time her marriage was breaking up. In November 1917 a divorce was granted and Angela and the children went to live with her parents in Pembroke Gardens in London. The child, Mary, died the next year.

Angela then met and married George Lancelot Thirkell in 1918 and in 1920 they traveled on a troop ship to George's hometown in Australia. Their adventures on the "Friedricksruh" are recounted in her Trooper to the Southern Cross published in 1934. In 1921, in Melbourne Australia, her youngest son Lancelot George was born. Angela left Australia in 1929 with 8 year old Lance and never returned. Although living with her parents in London she badly needed to earn a living so she set forth on the difficult road of the professional writer. Her first book, Three Houses, a memoir of her happy childhood was published in 1931 and was an immediate success. The first of her novels set in Trollope's mythical county of Barsetshire was Demon in the House, followed by 28 others, one each year.

Angela also wrote a book of children's stories entitled The Grateful Sparrow using Ludwig Richter's illustrations; a biography of Harriette Wilson, The Fortunes of Harriette; an historical novel, Coronation Summer, an account of the events in London during Queen Victoria's Coronation in 1838; and three semi-autobiographical novels, Ankle Deep and Oh, These Men, These Men and Trooper to the Southern Cross. When Angela died on the 29th of January 1961 she left unfinished the last of her books, Three Score and Ten which was completed by her friend, Caroline LeJeune. Angela is buried in Rottingdean alongside her daughter Mary and her Burne-Jones grandparents.

Reviews

[Ian]

A 1932 novel based on the real-life reminiscences of the author, an Englishwoman who married an Australian officer in December 1918, and who sailed out to Australia with him in 1920. The ship on which she travelled also carried 800 Australian soldiers returning from service in WW1. The soldiers were a bit on the rough-and-ready side, to put it mildly, and there were only a handful of officers and NCOs available to try and maintain order. (Although with one or two exceptions the author portrays the soldiers as “rough diamonds”).

“Half the troops were the biggest crooks and toughs in the A.I.F., and it didn’t give the decent ones much of a chance.”

The story is told from the perspective of a Major Bowen, who has married an Englishwoman in London. That’s where the similarity with the author seems to end though. The Major’s wife, Celia, seems a rather passive figure, which doesn’t sound much like Thirkell herself, from what I’ve heard about her.

As you would expect, the novel relates the journey, and how the Major and his colleagues struggle to keep the lid on the riotous behaviour of the “diggers”, as Australian WW1 soldiers were known. The story is meant to be humorous but the humour gets an F from me. I’ve mentioned in other reviews that humour is personal, so maybe others would find this more amusing. The novel is written in a sort of conversational style, so that you get sections like:

“he took Celia round and introduced her to the officer in charge of the shipping section, who arranged for all the transport of officers and their families. He was none other than old Larry Sievers, whose people lived up at Wanderagong near Mount Buffalo.”

The book contains a certain amount of interest in its contemporary portrayal of Australian soldiers. Even when on active service during WW1, they had a reputation for being insubordinate, and that they could only be managed by their own officers. British officers tended to attribute this to the Australians’ convict heritage!

On the whole though, I found this novel no more than so-so.

On the plus side, at 167 pages, it didn't detain me for very long.

[Mir]

Not a book I would normally pick up -- I got it for my mother, who loves Thirkell and has read everything she wrote under her own name -- but the first few chapters were really quite funny and well-written. I'll probably pick up one of the novels Thirkell is better known for and give her a try, after all.

[Will]

Great and funny book about a hellish voyage home for a group of Australian soldiers after World War I. Thoroughly enjoyable.

[Alisha]

Sorry, Angela Thirkell, didn't finish this one. Couldn't get into it, flipped ahead and it seemed not to get better.

[Cera]

I suspect this may actually be Thirkell's best book, but I don't read her for the sort of thing this book has to offer.

[Pascale]

This fictionalized account of Angela Thirkell's voyage to Australia with her second husband, a couple of years after the end of WWI, is quite low on plot and rather drags out towards the end, with the narrator basically chronicling one brawl between sailors after another. Although the ship left much to be desired, having been deliberately sabotaged by the Germans, nothing dreadful happened to the passengers. Based on Captain George Thirkell, the narrator is a thoroughly nice guy and competent doctor but not a man of great intellect. To some extent, what fun there is to be had for the reader in this book is at his expense, which I found a bit cheap.

[Darla Ebert]

The writer is excellent and tells a good story however this particular book is just really not within the scope of my interest. I would recommend it to someone interested in the nautical fiction of mid-century Australian writers

[Mark Thuell]

I struggled to finish book with its rambling narrative,language and attitudes but maybe that was the point in a brutal portrayal of Australians in that point of time. Luckily my edition had an Introduction by Tony Gould which was fascinating giving the book more meaning

[Dawn Dorsey]

In a departure from all the other Angela Thiirkell novels I have read, this one is written in the first person, and from the point of view of a man, a medical Major in the Australian Army, about his journey home with his new English wife, to be demobilized after serving in the Great War. The couple travel on a crowded and under-provisioned troop ship, carrying a few officers with their families, several hundred troops, and an unexpected load of Irish prisoners, all commanded by an inept colonel who has no clue how to maintain discipline on the ship, which naturally gives rise to all sorts of mishaps, misadventures and mayhem on the long journey from England to Australia. The story is in how our hero, with a few of his fellow officers whom he deems "the right sort" keep everybody alive and reasonably healthy on the voyage.

This novel is completely different from Thirkell's Barsetshire novels, and shows another side of her. The story is full of Aussie colloquialisms, making it fun if sometimes puzzling reading for a twentieth century American. Although the First World War was obviously before my time, it has always seemed as current history to me as I tried to learn more about it. As I read this novel, published in the 1930's, I realized how far separated current society is from that of the Great War. What was so current to me growing up and knowing that my grandfathers, men I knew and loved, fought in it, is now a full century ago, and society has clearly moved on. Although the narration was probably often tongue-in-cheek, it was still quite interesting to see Major Bowen's social attitudes and what he accepted as normal, and even open-minded in his treatment of his wife, whom he loved dearly, his fellow officers, whom he naturally regarded as social equals, and the soldiers and even ship's staff, whom he saw as men, individually good or bad, but of a lower class or servants, all of which is completely natural to him.

[Andrew Wardle]

3.5 stars. An author I hadn't heard of but liked the jacket summary and wasn't disappointed. Apparently she mainly wrote satirical novels of English rural life, but this is a semi-autobiographical account of a hellish voyage from Britain to Australia following WWI on board a steamer with very undisciplined demobbed Australian soldiers. Very clever writing: the story is told through the voice of a clearly very honourable, but insensitive (and none too bright) Australian Army doctor (actually based on her then husband). For an upper middle class Englishwoman she captures both Australian vernacular and military slang beautifully, and has her narrator tell the story in a rambling, wordy, rather pompous style which was clearly not her own. Doesn't sound like the rest of her fiction would be my cuppa, but this was good.

[Annie]

Even in the age of air travel, Australia is a long way away. Traveling to Australia by sea must have been like traveling to the moon. Traveling to Australia by sea with a shipload of repatriated Aussie infantrymen and a load of prisoners on a sabotaged passenger ship, as Tom Bowen does in Angela Thirkell’s Trooper to the Southern Cross, is even worse. Tom is a cheerful narrator so, in spite of his many trials and tribulations on board the Rudolstadt, the journey becomes a good yarn instead of a torment...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration.

[Mandy]

Wonderfully amusing and entertaining story of Australian Major Bowen’s return to Australia by sea after surviving the First World War. It’s a gentle and affectionate – but sometimes biting – satire on Australian manners and attitudes, and is based on Thirkell’s own journey on a troop ship when she travelled to Australia with her second husband. There’s definitely a ring of authenticity to it; the escapades of some of the soldiers and crew – and the few children aboard - could hardly have been invented. First published in 1934 it’s as fresh as ever, and is a delightful social document of the time and place and a perceptive and insightful read. Good fun indeed.

[Brian Bigelow]

What a delightfully entertaining story. It's a very quick read, or at least was for me.

[Pip Jennings]

Completely different from her Barchester novels. Hard to believe she could have written this in such an Australian voice.