“Sergeant Pearse’s body was buried at a British camp … but through the fog of war and revolution, the location was forgotten,” RSL national president Greg Melick says. “Old war maps and photos allowed historians to locate a grave belonging to a soldier with one toe missing.”
Melick said that six years after the remains were discovered and the Australian and British embassies were notified, there had been no progress towards a resolution. He said the RSL supported a petition instituted by Pearse’s family, and he has written to the government to ensure his remains are formally identified, potentially returned home or at least afforded an honourable burial.
“After more than 100 years, the time to resolve this indignity is long past,” Melick says.
The grave of Samuel George Pearse.Credit: Australian War Memorial collection
Military historian Damien Wright, who travelled to Russia with Pearse’s grandson Richard Christen in 2019 and worked with the Russian military archaeologist Alexey Suhanovsky to find and identify the VC winner, said the situation was complicated and tied up in red tape because the Australian government did not recognise him as one of their own. Pearse and other Anzacs were required to discharge from the ADF and re-enlist in the British Army to fight in Russia.
“It really is a national disgrace,” says Wright, author of Australia’s Lost Heroes: Anzacs in the Russian Civil War 1919. “It’s a completely untenable position. You can’t say he’s an Australian VC – his VC is on display in the war memorial in Canberra – and then say he’s not our responsibility.”
Pearse, born in Wales but who migrated with his family as a child to Victoria, worked as a fruit picker, labourer and trapper around Mildura. A few days before his 18th birthday he enlisted, and on September 10, 1915, he sailed from Melbourne, serving briefly in Gallipoli in December before returning to Egypt and then going on to France the following March.
He was twice wounded in action, in August 1916 and again in May 1918. He was awarded the Military Medal for bravery in September 1917 when he attacked an enemy post, and for valuable services as a runner during the fighting around Ypres, Belgium.
After his second wound, he was invalided to England, where he met Catherine “Kitty” Knox, a member of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. They would marry in Durham in 1919.
The British War Office, offering 14 shillings a day, then approached Australian troops to sign up with the North Russia Elite Force to go there and help the British force that had been there since the winter of the previous year.
Sent to Archangel and then on to Emptsa, he cut his way through the enemy’s barbed wire while under fire and single-handedly attacked a blockhouse with hand grenades and put it out of action. Moments later he was shot down by a Russian machine gunner. His officer there described him as “the bravest man I [have] ever seen”.
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His daughter Victoria Catherine – initials VC because of his posthumous honour – was born six months after his death. Both mother and daughter would later migrate to Australia.
Australian Veterans Affairs Minister Matt Keogh, answering a formal question in parliament earlier this year, said that since Pearse was in the service of the British Army at the time of his death, responsibility for formally identifying and potentially burying his remains rested with Britain’s Ministry of Defence.
Keogh said that should his remains be positively identified, they would not be repatriated to Australia, with responsibility for the dead during both world wars resting with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, including those who served in the British Army and died in the civil war in North Russia in 1918-19.
A UK government spokesperson said despite numerous requests, Russian authorities had not yet given permission to allow British officials to undertake formal identification.
“We continued to urge the Russian authorities to allow us to carry out DNA testing and formal identification so that they can have the respectful burial they deserve,” they said.
But Wright says the Russian embassy in Canberra has told him Moscow is happy to help. Russia’s Ministry of Defence did not reply to inquiries.
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