Henry Miller Lanser, a 24-year-old Australian soldier, found himself far from his family in Sydney at Christmas 1914.
His 1st Battalion had arrived in Egypt in early December for training at Mena military camp before deployment in the first months of the Great War.
There, Lanser found a way back home to Chatswood through a “talking-machine shop” in Cairo, where in late December 1914 or early January 1915 he made what is believed to be the oldest surviving recording in the world of an ordinary soldier in wartime.
The three-and-a-half-minute recording was made on a 10-inch shellac disc – a forerunner of vinyl – by the Mechian Company, which had been run by an Armenian businessman, Setrak Mechian, since about 1908.
“This is rather a novelty to come to Australia this way. But here I am, can’t see and can’t be seen, or welcomed in the usual way with a hug and a kiss,” Lanser says in the recording.
Lanser sounds hesitant as he tries to convey the novelty of the process to his parents and siblings Ethel, Edie and Basil: “I can’t leave this instrument, I can’t jump out of it,” he says.
Like so many other members of the first battalion on leave in Egypt, the young soldier – described in his Red Cross papers as “tall, young and well made” – would have wandered the streets of Cairo seeing the sights during his first time overseas.
Before enlisting, Lanser had been a mechanic who travelled around NSW working on shearing equipment. Stephanie Boyle, a senior curator at the Australian War Memorial, believes Lanser’s interest in machinery may have been one reason he took the “unusual and expensive step” of entering a recording studio.
“These recordings were being sold at 10 shillings a pop … that’s an extraordinary amount of money, the equivalent of nearly $60 on a novelty, so he must have really wanted to do it,” Boyle says.
Lanser tells his family in the recording: “The past week, training is getting heavier every day. My word, the Germans or Turks, as we hear, they are making for Egypt. Whatever happens we will stop them – from laughing anyhow – when we do start.”
At one point he checks with the technician that he has a minute left to finish his message.
“I don’t know that I can say a great deal more now, mother, as this is a time-limited sort of affair, but all I can wish is, I hope you all had a real jolly good Christmas – we did, I know.”
Lanser went on to become one of the original Anzacs, landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915. He was twice wounded but eventually rejoined his battalion on the western front in 1916. Sadly his life, like the recording, was “time limited”. He was killed by machine gun fire near the village of Flers in northern France on 5 November 1916.
Lanser’s body lay for four months in no man’s land before before eventually being buried in Grévillers.
Ian Lanser, the son of Henry’s brother Basil, remembers his uncle’s voice ringing out of the gramophone in Sydney whenever he visited his aunts Ethel and Edie.
“As a toddler I remember holding that record, which had a piece broken out of it. And they played it where my aunties lived, and at that stage my grandmother – Lanser’s mother – was still alive,” Ian Lanser says.
Lanser says the family received the record before his uncle landed at Gallipoli, and continued to play it and find solace in hearing his voice after the news of his death.
Jennifer Selby is an assistant curator at the Australian War Memorial, who worked on the restoration of the disc.
“To have this voice of an Australian soldier, recorded before the landing at Gallipoli, when he was still having a good time, exploring foreign parts of the world that he’d never dreamed of seeing, is a really unique thing,” Selby says.
The audio nearly didn’t survive. The original 10-inch shellac disc came to the Memorial with a chunk missing, making it impossible to play. However, the donation included the metal master, which is a negative of the record. “We managed to play back from the negative, taking the sound off the ridges rather than the grooves, the complete recording,” Selby says.
The disc has a unique place in the War Memorial’s sound archive, Boyle says, as the only voice of a young soldier in the first world war.
Australia’s official war correspondent, Charles Bean, conducted an oral history project after the war ended, but interviewed only senior officers, as he thought people would not be interested in diggers.
“I think he thought they were too uneducated or that they wouldn’t have much to say for themselves,” Boyle says.
The War Memorial’s only other recordings of first world war soldiers are the oral histories taken from the 1970s onwards. “Their story is only recorded in their voice decades later, when they are very elderly veterans,” Boyle says.
“Whereas this is a young man at the prime in his life and we’re hearing him before all the events that go on to shape Australians’ understanding of military history.”
The Memorial’s sound archive includes second world war recordings of letters written by prisoners of war in Japan or Europe which were read out by local radio stations, then picked up by an allied receiver and rebroadcast. Boyle said for some countries it might have served as helpful propaganda to show they were looking after enemy soldiers.
By the time of the Vietnam war, technological advances made it easier to record audio tapes, which were sent back and forth from Australia and Vietnam.
Boyle says: “Some of those tape recordings, there will be bombs going off in the background – they’ll say – ‘don’t worry Mum, it’s just the boys practising yeah.’ They were actually under attack but he doesn’t want to scare his mum,” Boyle says.
