Arthur William Bazley (4 August 1896[1] – 31 July 1972) was an Australian soldier who served as batman and unofficial secretary to military historian Charles Bean throughout the First World War and beyond as a research assistant.
He had three years' experience with the Senior Cadets[a] and three months in the militia — with the 19th Battery (St Kilda), 7th Field Artillery Brigade[1][3] — when he enlisted with the First AIF, assigned to Headquarters, on 5 October 1914.
[4] Bean was at Gallipoli from 25 April 1915, some hours after the first landing, and was one of the last to leave, on the night of 17 December 1915, in the meantime recording what he saw of the conflict in official memos and his own notebooks, and sending reports to the various news agencies.
Later that year Bean solicited from the Australian soldiers contributions for what would be an end-of-year magazine, but the evacuation interceded, and the 150-odd poems, essays and drawings were taken by Bazley to Imbros base on the 16 December.
Beazley left for London on 22 January 1916, and helped edit those contributions, plus some of Bean's photographs and poems 'Abdul' and 'Non Nobis', into what became The Anzac Book, published May 1916.
He accompanied Bean on several expeditions to Belgium and France, where they experienced trench warfare at Fleurbaix, Pozières, Bullecourt and Arras, Messines, Passchendaele, Villers-Bretonneux and elsewhere.
[4] For the next 20 years he assisted Bean in compiling his history of the war, working on the first two volumes[b] at the Tuggeranong homestead, near Canberra, and from 1925 at the Victoria Barracks, Sydney.
In 1951 he was appointed chairman of a committee advising the Minister (Arthur Calwell) on the settlement of claims for compensation, under the Temple Society Trust Fund Act 1949,[9] by Templars in Australia whose property was confiscated by the Israeli Government in 1948.