Biography | Pompey Elliott — He Measured the Ground and Said the Attack Would Fail

The bronze on the Sturt Street median shows a man in a slouch hat, and Ballarat put it there in 2011, eighty years after he died.

Harold Edward Elliott was born at West Charlton in 1878 and was dux of Ballarat College in 1897.

He served in South Africa, won the Distinguished Conduct Medal there, took a law degree at Melbourne, and was practising at the Victorian Bar when the next war came.

He commanded the 7th Battalion at Gallipoli and was wounded on the day of the landing.

By March 1916 he was a brigadier general raising the 15th Australian Infantry Brigade.

Its first action was Fromelles, and he tried to stop it.

Some days before the attack he went out into no man's land with Major H. C. L. Howard, a staff officer from Haig's General Headquarters, and looked at the ground.

GHQ had just circulated a warning that an attack could not succeed unless it started within 200 yards of the enemy trench.

Elliott's men would have to cross between 350 and 420 yards of open meadow.

Bean's official history records that Elliott pointed this out to Howard on the way back, and that there is evidence Howard privately agreed with him.

The attack went in on the evening of 19 July 1916.

Bean's casualty tables give 1,452 for the two assaulting battalions, the 59th and 60th; Ross McMullin puts the whole brigade above 1,800. Australian losses across the division were 5,533 in a single night.

The account of Elliott meeting the survivors next morning with tears on his face is not in Bean.

It rests on recollections published long afterwards, and the two standard authorities name different witnesses — the Australian Dictionary of Biography credits Bean's assistant Arthur Bazley, while McMullin credits Lieutenant Neil Freeman.

Elliott went on to Polygon Wood in 1917 and the counter-attack at Villers-Bretonneux in April 1918, was passed over for divisional command a month later, and carried that grievance into a decade in the Senate as a member for Victoria.

He died on 23 March 1931, aged fifty-two.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography records an inquest verdict of suicide; the Commonwealth's own Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate states it directly, and notes that the manner of his death was withheld until Smith's Weekly reported it three weeks later.

Louis Laumen made the statue. Four plaques stand around it, and they carry the rest.

📸 Cover: the Pompey Elliott statue by Louis Laumen, unveiled May 2011 in the Sturt Street gardens, Ballarat — photograph by Mattinbgn, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: Elliott at the door of a captured German divisional headquarters near Harbonnières, 9 August 1918, Australian official photograph AWM E02855, public domain.