Now as soon as that appointment was announced, and you got to remember at this stage Harry now has three jobs, but none of the different departments in the Australian government know that Harry's working for the others.
I'm Jen Kelly from the Herald Son and this is in Black and White, a podcast about some of Australia's forgotten characters. Welcome back for part two of the story of Harry Freme, the Marvel of Gallipoli. Make sure you listen to part one first, we're speaking again with Ryan Butter, the author of a new book called The Bravest Scout at Gallipoli. We'll hear soon what Harry did in the Second World War, including being sent to Japan as a spy, and why Ryan describes Harry as the Anzac hero portrayed
by his nation. As we heard in part one, Harry Freme showed incredible bravery in the First World War, but struggled during the tough years of the Depression while raising a family. Let's jump back in and find out what happened next and was Harry still held in high esteem for the incredible things that he had done at Gallipoli by the wider community.
He was held in really high esteem by the ex soldiers. So there's a magazine called Revel which came out in nineteen thirty one, and Harry's on the front cover, and that magazine went out to all the X diggers, and you know, there was seven pages dedicated to his exploits on Gallipoli. He would go around and talk about the war, and there was always sort of excitement in the newspapers that Harry Freme's coming. He's going to be talking, you know,
telling stories of the war. So that was always he was very much loved by it, never forgotten by his comrades. But in that Revelve magazine, it was a really interesting line and it was written in nineteen thirty one, so it's twelve years after they came back, and it says that, you know, twelve years later, the memories of Gallipoli are fading for everybody, and so you can see how quickly things were being forgotten. Now, obviously today you think, wow,
how could that ever be forgotten? But in that time set of ten fifteen years after it happened, there was this fear that what these men had gone through would be forgotten.
Now take us forward to the second World War and the very significant events involving Harry.
So by the outbreak of the Second World War in September of nineteen thirty nine, Harry is in a desperate situation. His farmers failed, there's no fruit, he can't pay off the debt. Four days after the Second World War breaks out, Edith May dies oh and Harry's left absolutely distraught. So now he has two children to raise by himself. He's broke, the farms failed. He tries to enlist in the army and he's told he's too old, so he can't enlist.
So he goes back to his contacts in intelligence and it's unsure if they contact him or he takes them, but he gets a letter from a man called Jack Scott. Jack Scott's a really interesting character in the whole Harry frame story. Jack Scott was also a GLIPI veteran. He
came back to Australia. He helped set up Legacy, the charity Legacy, but he was also a member of a thing called the Old Guard, which was a right wing group set up and had about thirty thousand X diggers involved in it, and it was to you know, sort of promote the values and be a ball walk against Bolshevism back in Australia during the nineteen twenties and early thirties. That kind of fades away in around nineteen thirty one ninety thirty two and Jack Scott becomes an absolute ardent
admirer of Japan. And so throughout the nineteen thirties, Jack Scott's writing all these pro Japanese articles, he visits Japan, he's part of the Australian japan society. He's almost it's
almost propaganda. In nineteen thirty five, as Japan starts to emerge as another real threat to Australia, Jack Scott is recruited into military intelligence and it's really unclear through the files if he was a sympathizer still with Japan, because the intelligence were actually focusing on the Japanese community in Australia and it's really hard to see what side Jack
Scott was on. But he recruits Harry Frem and he becomes Harry Frem's handler because there was a lot of Japanese in New South Wales and Australia, and the Australian intelligence community were unsure how these men and women of Japan would react if Japan declared war on Australia, so they wanted to keep a close eye on them. They mapped where they all lived, they registered where they all lived, and they actually had people tailing them.
Harry Frem was recruited to spy on.
The Japanese community in Sydney, and so he came down from Kentucky and he set himself up in Sydney. Not long after getting to Sydney, he then gets recruited by censorship. So he was then going through the mail that the Japanese people were sending back or was coming to Australia trying to find intelligence information. So he's gone from working on a failed farm to the outbreak of World War two, and all of a sudden he's got two jobs. That's
in August of nineteen forty. In September of nineteen forty, he's then recruited by external affairs. Because what happened then was that Australia decided they couldn't stop war with Japan. They kind of felt that war with Japan was inevitable, but they thought they could push it down the road
a little bit further. So they decided to send an ambassador to Tokyo, and that was a mean called John Latham, and he was going to go and set up the first legation or sort of embassy in Japan for Australia, and Military Intelligence chose Harry Frame to be the interpreter
to John Latham, who would go to Tokyo with him. Now, as soon as that appointment was announced, and you got to remember at this stage, Harry now has three jobs, but none of the different departments in the Australian government know that Harry's working for the others.
So incredible.
Yeah, So when when External Affairs decide that the military intelligence says you should recruit Harry, so external and they don't tell him. They don't tell External Affairs that Harry's already working as a spy. So External affairs to find Harry and they can't find him because of course he's embedded in the Japanese community, he's undercover, he's working. So we can't find Harry, and so they so military Intelligence
put External Affairs in touch with Harry. Harry's nomination or his appointment as the interpreter is reported in the newspapers, but at the bottom of the article it says he's currently engaged in special defense work. Now this puts a huge cat amongst the pigeons. Military Intelligence are furious with External Affairs. They blame them for leaking this and they write to them. McBride, the Minister of the Army writes to black Jack McEwan and says, how has this name
been leaked out? And his real role has been leaked to the press, and then External Affairs says, well, everyone knows what he's working on. Everyone knows that he's doing this, and we actually spoke with the consulate and told them this is who we're sending and so there's this.
Massive breach of security, and.
Military Intelligence says nobody knew that he was working as an intelligence agent. So Harry is at this point he's in Sydney, his cover's been blown. He's starting to be followed by Japanese spies in Sydney. And in addition to that, because of this fear of Japanese in general, he's also been denounced and we've got letters that people have written to local police denouncing Harry Frame as possibly a Fifth columnist obviously you know, a Japanese agent, when in the
reality is he's actually working for the Australians. So he's got a head off to Tokyo, knowing that his cover's been blown already, and that filled him with a lot of fear. He was horrified because in July, just a few months previously, a British agent in Japan, a guy called James Cox, had been caught by the Japanese military police called the Kempetai and he'd been taken in for questioning and then they threw him out of a sixth story window. They said it was suicide, but it was
obviously that he was thrown out. So at this point in the story, you think, why would Harry go or why would they send Harry? But there was this sort of bureaucratic bungling between the three agents sees of what to do and we didn't leak his name, and no, you leaked it. But Harry still gets on that boat. And that was one of the reason that one of the reasons I wrote the book, or I started to really look at Harry's storyer, why would he get on
that boat? And other people who have written a little bit about his history say, it's the Bushido code, it's the loyal the loyal samurai serving the master, or he was obliged to go ok I come to a different conclusion. I think he was broke. He had two children to raise, and I think he thought he could go up there, do his job and come back. So he goes up to Tokyo. He's not well, he's got stomach problems. Just
before leaving, he remarries, which is really surprising. So less than a year after his first wife died, he remarries another lady, a nurse, and that's important. He marries a nurse in Sydney. But he goes on January twenty seventh, he's walking down the street in Tokyo and he gets attacked. He gets attacked by the campetite and they try to strangle him. Somehow breaks free and he sort of hides for a couple of days and then he ends up in a hospital. He goes to the American hospital, Saint Luke's.
He arrives at the.
Hospital and he finds that the Americans have evacuated all of their American doctors and there's only Japanese doctors. And so he's terrified now to say what's happened to him, because they'll either informed the kempatite or the kempt I will find out and they'll come back and finish the job. So he says nothing. They do all these tests on him and they find that he's got damaged vocal cords. He's lost his voice now because obviously he's tried to
strangle him. He doesn't say anything to anyone, he doesn't say anything to his other co workers at the Australian legation, and he gets sent back to Australia. So he arrives back in Australia in April and he's completely broken man because he can hardly eat, he can hardly swallow, and his throats mangled. And they put him in hospital in Sydney and they have all these doctors come and visit him, and eventually they have a throat specialist come and this
is all important information about the throat. But they have a throat specialists come and no one can work out what's wrong with him, and he's still not saying what happened to him. Eventually they said, look, we can't do anything for him. He's going to die. He's better off being at home and dying with his family. So he's released in early May, back back to the care of his wife, Harriet, who's a nurse, and when he's discharged from hospital, his file says undiagnosed, so they could never
find out what was wrong with him. A few weeks later, on twenty seven May, he dies. He dies choking on his own mucus in the arms of Harriet. This immediately sets off a flurry of activity among external affairs military intelligence, and they're trying to call the doctors. They're trying to get hold of the death certificate, find out what happened to him. When the death certificate finally surfaces, it says
that he died of gorebladder cancer. Now, this is really tentious point historically, and the number of people have looked at this. Now I took Harry's We've got really good files on Harry. We've got his medical files from Tokyo. When he was first interned in the hospital there, they did a lot of tests on him, blood test, X rays, no hint of cancer, no hint of gad bladder cancer. When he came back, we've got his repat file and we've got the file that says that he was discharged undiagnosed.
So it's really interesting that three weeks after being discharged undiagnosed, they were confident enough to say it was gallbladder cancer. Now, to give you an idea, gall bladder cancer is extremely rare, extremely rare. And I took Harry's files to two forensic pathologists and their opinion was that without an autopsy, you
can't say that it was gallbladder cancer. And in fact, at the time the doctors who were then investigated by military intelligence and external affairs said well, we think he had a problem with his throat, but we're confident was gall bladder cancer, but we can't really link the cancer. So the throat problem, it was all very unusual, and you think, well, why was this unusual diagnosis given? But then you think what the repercussions were. The Australian government
had leaked his identity as an intelligence agent. They then sent him to Japan, and then he'd been attacked and he's died of those injuries. Now, the last sort of words that Harry's recorded as saying was that they got me. And he finally on his deathbed told the men around him that he'd been grotted. And so after he dies and they get this sort of deathityatet saying god bladder cancer, his wife, Harriet writes to the government said this isn't true.
He was attacked, you know, he was attacked and he was killed and he told us this, but he was never believed. His final words they got me were never believed, and the government stuck to the story that he died of godbladder cancer. They also said that he never worked as an intelligence agent, that he was just an interpreter. So you can see this real sort of muddying of the waters from the austraa In government. All that his wife was asking for was a burial and a headstone.
Now the government paid for the plot of land, but they never gave him a headstone, which to me just seemed remarkable that this man had lived this remarkable life. Was his service was always denied by the Australian government. He served in World War Two. They denied that they were responsible for how he was killed. And I think there's definite responsibility there in one leaking his identity and then sending him.
Still, we'll be back after a short break to find out what happened next, So stay with us. So those final words they got me was that to his wife Harriet.
They were to his final words they got me were to his wife Harriet and five other people standing around his bedside.
Ah okay, and the fact that he was a spy, so that's not acknowledged. For example, his biography on the mini biography, on his Australian War Memorial biography, that's not mentioned there is it, for example, no that talks about his service at Gallipoli, but there's no mentions career.
So my purpose in writing this book was trying to get the Australian government to recognize that Harry Frame had served his country and was deserving of an official he died in service, or he died in connection to his service and was worthy of receiving the official war commemoration headstone. That's what I was trying to do, gather information to do that, because they'd never They just said he died and if your death isn't connected to your service, you
don't get the little ADF badge on your grave. And I thought that badge meant a lot to Harry and it would have been good.
That he had it.
So that's what I set out to try to do. And I'm not the first because in nineteen sixty three, his wife Harriet wrote to Robert Menzies and basically told him the story that I've told you today about Harry and his service and his time in Tokyo. And they went back and said, no, he died of gallbladder cancer, unconnected to his service. There's nothing we can do for him.
He didn't you know, he doesn't deserve a headstone. In twenty nineteen, another author, Brian Tate, who'd written about Harry, he contacted the government and they said, well, he died of gallbladder cancer. There's nothing we can do. So it was the same story. I was a little bit more fortunate, but again it's they never the government said yes, he died because of his service, but not because he was garrotted or strangled in Japan. They say he died of
gallbladder cancer, which was caused from smoking. Oh. Interesting, now, the ANZACs were given cigarettes in their rations, and Harry was a smoker. And so I received this determination from the Veterans Affairs Department and they said, we've reviewed the case. We're going to give him a gravestone because we can connect his service to his death through and to me, it left a bit of taste because I didn't want them to do it that way. I wanted them to
admit that he didn't die of gored bladder cancer. He was strangled as an intelligence agent and he died of that serving Australia. He wasn't just an interpreter. Yes, the cover was he was an interpreter, but he's actually working as an intelligence agent. And if you think of how the US honor their intelligence agents, you know, to get the star on the wall at Langley for their men that have died in service.
Harry didn't get a star. He didn't even get a headstone.
However, they have now said yes he will get it, and they've put up a plaque in honor of Harry frame at the Rookwood Cemetery.
So Ryan tell us more about how Harry has been remembered.
So when I first read about Harry, the story was that he was in an unmarked grave in Macquarie Cemetery in North Sydney, and so I went up and visited it. And when I got there, there's actually a little black marble headstone and it's only small, and I looked at it, but there were details on the headstone that were incorrect. Harry's date of birth was incorrect, and it also had his daughter Grace her birth day and her date of death, and the date of death was also incorrect. It was
out by about thirty years. And so I went in and I said, well, who put this headstone here? And they said, no, we don't know. We've got no record. Maybe someone's just walked in and put it there, which to me seemed a bit strange, so I left it. Later on, when the Wargraves Commission said they will put a commemorative headstone on Harry's grave, they have a condition, and the condition is that there can be no existing
headstone on the grave. And so of course I had a problem that there was now a headstone on there, even though it was incorrect, but they wouldn't touch it as long as that headstone was there. So I went back to the cemetery. I said, look, I really need to find out who put this headstone on there, because we need to remove it so that the Wargraves can
put their proper one on there. And they dug and dug and dug, and they finally they found out who put it in there, and it was actually a man by the name of Malcolm frem Ah, and he'd come across Harry's story, and he was obviously a distant relative. So he was a descendant of William Henry Frame, so Harry's half brother. So when William Henry Freme absconded to Japan, he left a little boy in Australia and Malcolm is descendant from that little boy.
Oh wow, yeah, So I'm not sure what the terminology is.
It's like a distant, distant, distant half uncle maybe something like that. So he'd heard Harry's stories. That is not right that he has an unmutt grave. So he put the headstone. So I contacted Malcolm and Malcolm was great. I said, like, this is what we've got to do now when you go in to start touching headstones and
grave sites. Between when Malcolm had put the headstone and when I had come along with the Wargraves Commission, the laws had changed and now nobody can remove that headstone because Malcolm nor I are the owners of the plot and so we were unable to remove that existing headstone. So instead, what the war Graves Commission does is they put a park up in the memorial cemetery which is at Rookwood.
Okay, convoluted.
And Ryan, what happened to young Harry.
So after Harry died, the government confiscated his land at Kentucky and young Harry had been working on that farm. Now, obviously Harry died in May. In October, the government said you haven't been paying your debt, and so they took the farm off young Harry. So he went into the army and he went down to Duntroon in the officer school. He was a remarkable man, young Harry. He was like
an amazing cricketer, amazing rugby player. He holds the record for the most tries in a rugby match for dun Trouon. He graduated first in class from Duntroun and he got sent to fight the Japanese in Borneo. And he always blamed the Japanese for his father's death, and he said they're going to be paid back in kind.
And so he could have had an easy job. You know.
This was in May of nineteen forty five. He goes up to Borneo, distinguished himself in battle in his first contact, and then he had his was from a tooth problem as a saw tooth, and he gets sent back to the field hospital and that night, this is on May eight, so it's the day that victory was declared in Europe, but obviously not in Borneo. On May eight, a Japanese soldier infiltrated the field hospital and threw a grenade under
his bed and killed him. And it was goodness, it's just such a waste of a life, as so many for those young men. But he was such a brilliant academic athlete, and he was also killed by the Japanese.
Ah my goodness, what a tragedy.
Yeah, definitely.
And then so then only left then was Gracie Young, Gracie Frame. And so she'd lost, you know, within a couple of years and a six year period, she'd lost her stepmother, she'd lost her father, and she lost her brother, and she lived to quite an old age. She passed away in twenty nineteen. So that was the story. And then she was the last descendant directly from Harry.
And just finally, Ryan, how would you like Australians to remember Harry frem.
As the marvel of Gallipoli?
I think he it's such a great So I think we have a lot of stories about who we are that come from Gallipoli, and I think I think what Harry showed was that those men you know the other soldiers that they took him for who he was and for what he could do, you know, his bravery. They didn't care how he talked and think what we looked like.
And I think that's a real instructive lesson for Australia that we have these remarkable men in our history who have done remarkable things for the country, and I think it's important that we remember them and that we don't
get falled into thinking about these myths. You know, the ans at the classic white Bushmen Anzac because there were a lot of different men, a lot of different colors, from a lot of different backgrounds were fighting on Gallipoli and there was Maori troops, there was indigenous soldiers that were Indian, and Sikh troops. You know, the French troops were from the African colonies of black Africans.
So I think the.
Story of Harry Free is, you know, let's embrace all these different types of Australian and let's look at people for who they are and what they can do. I think it makes us a bigger and better country when we do that.
So true and your book The Bravest Scout at Gillipli is out now, congratulations and thank you so much for sharing the story with us today.
Thanks very much for having me Jen.
Thanks for listening. This has been In Black and White, a podcast about some of Australia's forgotten characters, written and hosted by me Jen Kelly, edited by Phoebe Zukowski, and produced by John ty Burton. You can find all the stories and photos associated with our episodes at Heraldsun dot com dot au slash i be aw. If you've enjoyed this podcast, we'd love you to leave a five star rating on Apple Podcasts. Even better, leave a review. It's one simple way you can help us get the word
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