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Emden Bell Thief Got Work On Shrine!
By Peter Luby
While researching stories of the Shrine’s construction workers, a 1933 headline from the Herald leaped out: ‘German worked at Shrine.’ The almost unbelievable story of Charles Kaolmel forms a strange link between the Shrine and the Australian War Memorial.
A Kaolmel deserted from the French Foreign Legion (and briefly rowed a gondola in Venice) before arriving in Sydney in 1925 as a ‘prohibited immigrant.’ He was known to police under a swag of aliases—Charles King, Colman, Watts, Wise, Konig. Working for General Motors as a mechanic, in 1932 he won a compensation claim worth £250—a fortune. That year he was also a suspect in the theft of the ship’s bell from the German cruiser Emden, a war trophy from the Royal Australian Navy’s first sea battle. The navy had it on display at their Garden Island Depot until it disappeared in August.
Portrait of Charles Kaolmel
AWM (A03161)
In February 1933 Kaolmel confessed to police he didn’t know the bell was stolen when he bought it off some ‘sailors’ for £150. He took detectives to Sydney’s Domain to show them where he’d buried it. The ‘priceless war relic’ was dug up and handed over to the fledgling Australian War Memorial Museum (then in Sydney) where it was bolted to its pedestal with steel cable.
SMS Emden bell on display at the Australian War Museum, Sydney 1933
NLA (6251180)
Shortly after Anzac Day the Emden bell was stolen for the second time. By Kaolmel. He’d later say he hefted the 50-kilogram bell onto a truck in broad daylight and drove off. Worryingly, he was friendly with officers of the German freighter Main who’d just raised the Nazi flag at a pro-Hitler demonstration in Sydney, and it was feared the bell would be spirited away to Germany. Police searched the Main twice on its way out of Australia, but the bell was not found. Neither was Kaolmel. It was suspected he’d jumped a ship bound for San Francisco, where US detectives combed the dockyards.
War Memorial Director John Treloar and Commonwealth ‘secret service men’ traced Kaolmel to Melbourne in October. His girlfriend Christine Wise hurried to the strictly male preserve of the Shrine building site to warn him the coppers were on his tail. He told her to ‘have faith in me’—and bring him a suitcase with clothing and money. When detectives got to the Shrine ‘the bird of passage’ had flown.
It’s likely Kaolmel was one of the hundreds of men working on the grounds of the Shrine for sustenance payments. His workmates thought the German with the soft, white hands was the ‘laziest loafer’ on the job. Threatened with dismissal, he had broken down weeping: he had a wife to keep, wasn’t used to manual labour, he’d once been ‘a gentleman’.
They couldn’t figure out why someone supposed to be broke wore such fine clothes: ‘his underclothing was of the very best…’
RIGHT Detectives dig up the Emden bell in Melbourne 1934
Sydney Morning Herald
Police finally nabbed Kaolmel in Sydney in November. On trial for taking the bell ‘out of the possession of the Commonwealth’, he denied involvement. The bell was probably in Germany ‘and you will never find it.’ Sentenced to 12 months in gaol, he was on bail waiting an appeal when he struck a bargain with Treloar and reporters from the Sydney Morning Herald: £50 in reward money and a reduced sentence if he helped them recover the bell! Reporters raced him by car to Melbourne and after a frantic midnight dig in a field beside the Geelong Road (Royal Park Zoo in some accounts) the Emden bell was once again unearthed. Kaolmel served six months in Long Bay Gaol, and for the next 40 years the War Memorial put a replica of the bell on display, worried perhaps that the German who once worked at the Shrine might strike again.
Peter Luby is a writer and Visitor Experience Officer at the Shrine of Remembrance.
