A doctor, he had spent the entire war trying to save lives while all around him were trying to do the opposite. From the burning sands of Egypt to the frozen mud of various battlefields on the Western Front, he’d seen it all from the start in 1914 to the end in 1918.
Begg was one of five sons of Katharine Begg and her husband Alexander, who had arrived in Dunedin from Edinburgh in 1859; Alexander became an accountant and church leader and a prominent figure in 19th-century Dunedin. Three of the sons became doctors Charles Begg, Clarke and Campbell. The oldest brother, James, became prominent in farming politics and the other, John, was a noted astronomer whose name is perpetuated in the Beverly-Begg Observatory, just down the road from where the old family home was on the corner of Ross and Michie Sts in Dunedin.
Charles Begg had been honoured by the British and French governments, promoted by his army superiors and revered by the soldiers he treated. He died aged 39 in his home in the south London suburb of Twickenham on February 2, 1919 with his wife and two small sons by his side. Lillian Begg was so overcome by grief she had to be admitted to the Walton on Thames Hospital, one of several southern England hospitals where her husband had done his rounds.
Charles Begg demonstrated this during 1916. He was so peeved about a fellow officer, William Henry Parkes, being promoted ahead of him he wrote to the Defence Minister, James Allen: "If you and the members of the government mean anything at all by your remarks on New Zealand’s gratitude to the ‘heroes of Gallipoli’, you will not permit this gross injustice. Of course the real reason why Parkes has been made senior to me was that he gave many teas to ladies in Cairo and assisted Lady Godley to run her convalescent home."
Allen let Begg down gently. He told him he should have raised his concerns through the proper channels, that is, in the first instance with his immediate superior. There seemed to have been no recriminations and Begg subsequently asked to withdraw the letter, and was allowed to do so.
Begg in fact had military experience long before most men of the New Zealand Division. Soon after qualifying as a doctor at Edinburgh University, when he was 23, he signed on as medical officer on one of the ships taking British troops to Somaliland (the north of modern Somalia), where a religious leader, Mohammad Abdullah Hassan (nicknamed "the Mad Mullah" by the British), had established the Dervish state.
Begg’s first war patients came after the Ottoman Empire forces tried to capture the Suez Canal in early 1915. Practically all the soldiers Begg treated were enemy: "They were mostly Syrians and did not know what they were fighting about," he wrote in his diary.
He was also in the thick of it when the truce was called on Gallipoli in May 1915 so dead could be buried.
"There must have been about three thousand dead Turks and a good few of our men. Some of them had been built into the parapets of the trenches as protection and the smell was awful. I hope never to see such sights again."
While Charles spent his war years with orthodox hospitals in the field, in England brother Campbell was with the unorthodox. He spent two years as a mine doctor in Johannesburg and returned to Britain when the war began. After service in France, the Sudan and Egypt, he was attached to a Royal Army Medical Corps unit in the campaign in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). Aimed at preserving oil access for the Royal Navy, the campaign was characterised by military mistakes, searing temperatures and unexpectedly dogged opposition by Turkish forces.
Campbell Begg wrote a book in 1919 about his experiences in the campaign, but it was not published until 1967, by which time his photos had faded into nothingness. He told of some of the extremes. A brigadier arrived from Britain and scoffed at the suggestion that men should not be exposed to the sun in the middle of the day. He ordered them to do a route march and a few hundred fell out with heatstroke in the first hour.
"It was in this same period," Begg wrote, "that a general entrained a battalion of raw British troops at Karachi to cross the notorious Sind desert and 40 of them were pulled dead out of their carriages."
Begg returned to Baghdad in 1956 and made a pointed remark: "At this late day, almost fifty years after the event, no family can be hurt by knowing that its loved ones suffered or died not from the inevitable chances of war, but because other men were found wanting and failed in the tasks allotted to them."
In his post-war life, Campbell gained a measure of fame and some notoriety when he agreed to head the newly-formed and short-lived New Zealand Legion, a reform movement aimed at unifying political parties to combat the Depression. He and his family moved to South Africa in 1937.
The third doctor Begg, Alexander Clarke, who was known as Clarke, spent practically all his professional life in Swansea in west Wales. In keeping with the family tradition, he was described as being "stern in manner and very firm in his adherence to his considered views."
Clarke Begg made two return visits to New Zealand, during the first of which, in 1928, his wife Catherine drowned. She had been walking on rocks near Lawyers Head and was presumed to have slipped into the sea.
Charles Begg’s two sons, Charles and Neil, also became doctors and together were noted historians of the Fiordland area, writing four acclaimed books.
- Ron Palenski
