PART ONE
‘AN INFINITE CAPACITY FOR TAKING PAINS’
that left the author of the cadet notes in the Grammarian of June 1921 singularly unimpressed as he expressed his distaste for mass exercise on ‘cold mornings’. That gap, such as it was, virtually ceased to exist in 1921–22, when the military authorities determined that the ‘future safety’ of the Empire seemed assured enough to dispense with the system of compulsory cadet training altogether; as always, the financing of an ever-expensive defence budget played its part in the decision of the Commonwealth government (a Nationalist–Country Party coalition) in November 1921 to reduce the long-standing commitment to universal military service at home. It was fitting that the Camberwell Debating Society’s first topic of 1922 was ‘The Compulsory System of Cadet Training’, a subject that was being discussed well beyond the boundaries of the school.36 The Military Board within the Defence Department determined that from 1 July 1922 (the beginning of a new training year) only sixteen and seventeen year olds would now receive training as ‘Senior Cadets’. Despite their reduced number, training of the Senior Cadets nevertheless continued to consume some 10 per cent of the overall, strained defence and general budget— war debt alone counted for over 75 per cent of the national debt of £416 million. Fourteen-year-old juniors were henceforth to be issued with the appropriate paperwork calling them up only from the February of the year in which they turned sixteen.37 The junior cadet system was thus effectively terminated— it had, in any case, long resembled sports training more than any military drilling. The seniors were disposed of with greater subtlety, becoming the responsibility of the Citizens’ Forces rather than of any school organisation, unless that school could retain a minimum number of four platoons (approximately 180 personnel at this time). This constituted the effective end of the now often derided system of ‘boy conscription’. ‘Cadet Notes’ disappeared from the Grammarian, as did any reference to cadets in the list of ‘School
Office-Bearers’. Camberwell Grammar (school population in 1922: 305, but falling thereafter) was unable to sustain a sufficiently large cadet unit to retain formal unit autonomy, as some other schools were able to do. The Camberwell unit, which could trace an interrupted path back to its foundation in 1888, now nominally (if not in actual practice) ceased to exist, an official passing symbolically marked by the retirement of Lt S.J. Baird OC—‘services no longer required’—who had commanded since 1918, his final school year; he later became a Camberwell pharmacist. Baird did not leave his beloved unit without presenting an ongoing school award for ‘champion shooting’—it was still being presented at the end of 1928. Even the surviving, rump school cadet system was further down-graded in 1924, at the recommendation of Lt. General Chauvel, when senior training was reduced to a single year beginning in a cadet’s seventeenth year, after which each youth would be transferred into the Citizens’ Forces. Camberwell Grammar was only one of many educational communities that now continued without the benefit of a uniformed, compulsory cadet detachment, at least one endorsed by the Defence Department. The more relaxed spirit of the 1920s, the era of ‘Australia Unlimited’, was not apparently one conducive to the concept of unquestioned obedience and respect for authority that the cadet system had enshrined. Brigadier-General Elliott had written to Headmaster Hall in 1922 in order to present to the school the bound volume of The Story of the Fifth Australian Division, intended as a prize for ‘the boy whom you consider the most industrious and persevering’ in accordance, he insisted, with Carlyle’s definition of genius as ‘an infinite capacity for taking pains’.38 However, any prospective Camberwell Grammarian genius receiving such an award could no longer be one wearing the uniform of the Camberwell cadet detachment, at least not a uniform officially approved at Victoria Barracks; nor could he be a recipient of the Lyn James Medal for rifle shooting, which was presented for the last time in late 1922. Those days now seemed over, even though there seems little doubt that the school cadet
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