The ideology of the time dictated that enquiry work was best done by men—soldiers would not speak openly to a woman of what war could do to a human body.

Finding suitable searchers proved a constant challenge with so many men enlisted to fight. Red Cross Commissioners in Cairo and London constantly wrote to Lady Helen Munro Ferguson to send more searchers. They named Stanley Addison as an example of the kind of man ‘most suitable’ for the work.

Stanley Addison, a laboratory assistant to Professor William Henry Bragg of Adelaide University, was a quietly spoken and introspective man who joined the Red Cross Enquiry Bureau as a searcher in 1915.

In November 1915, Stanley arrived at the No. 3 Australian General Hospital in Moudros Bay, Lemnos, where he spent his days in wind and bitter cold, enquiry list in hand, interviewing wounded, sick and frostbitten men.

From Lemnos, he went to Anzac and Cape Helles where he was taken through the trenches, on foot and under fire, to within 25 yards of the Turkish guns. Days later, at the No. 2 Australian Stationary Hospital at West Mudros, men suffering terribly from exposure told him of their friends, up to their neck in mud, drowned in the trenches at Suvla.

His early experiences searching at Lemnos and on the front lines at Anzac, along with time spent in an isolation ward on Lemnos dangerously ill with paratyphoid, were felt deeply and he brought these experiences to bear on his enquiry work. He was struck by the ‘self forgetfulness’ of the wounded men he encountered, often when their pain was at its worst. ‘It seems almost heartless sometimes to add to their tortures by questions,’ he wrote in an article for the Australasian Intercollegian, ‘but their thoughts are so much of others that they prefer to have it so…They are as desirous as we are to provide evidence for the War Office and anxious relatives as to the fate of missing men…’

In France, unsatisfied with searching only in the hospitals around Etaples, and anxious that reports be as complete and reliable as possible, Stanley pushed the boundaries of enquiry procedures.

He acquired, repaired and maintained a t-model Ford to allow him to get ‘as close to the front lines as I was able to get’. By the end of 1917, he collected 6,387 reports about wounded and missing men.

Pictured here are Red Cross searchers at Le Toquet near a military hospital in France. Stanley Addison is seated behind the steering wheel. The car was his own car ‘Gladys’, which he brought to France at his own expense.

After the war, Stanley lived the rest of his life in and around Melbourne with his wife Vera. His expertise as a searcher was called upon for the Second World War when a handbook based on his advice was developed for searchers. He addressed new searchers on his 6 Principles of Searching, the most important being the humanitarian Principle, quoting a British Red Cross report, ‘It would have been quite impossible that relatives should have remained content with the mere official report of casualties, and to get what their hearts desired they had to rely on Red Cross.’