This year marks a century since Fred Kelly — an Australian-born rower who won gold for Great Britain at the 1908 London Olympics — was mown down leading an attack on a German machine gun nest in France.
After triumphing in the coxed eight, Kelly went on to become an acclaimed composer, concert pianist and decorated soldier — surviving the horrors of Gallipoli only to die among the trenches of the Somme in 1916.
Described by the Sydney Morning Herald as “an Edwardian man about London”, Kelly was born into a wealthy Australian family.
In keeping with the practices of the British Empire’s elite at the time, he was shipped off to Eton at the age of 12 to be educated as an English gentleman.
There he developed a love of rowing and music, rejecting the notion that sport and art were incompatible.
“A love of outdoor sport, vigorous game, or of travel, is by no means a hindrance to the more purely intellectual or artistic pursuits,” he told The Sportsman magazine in 1914.
Kelly’s Olympics participation came about almost by accident.
He read in a newspaper a few months before the Games that an old rival was competing and managed to wangle a place in an eights crew representing Great Britain.
They defeated Belgium in the final and Kelly never raced competitively again, instead concentrating on music.

‘Firing like Hell’
When the First World War began, Kelly joined up alongside his friend the poet Rupert Brooke, who captured the initial excitement about the conflict, describing combatants as “swimmers into cleanness leaping”.
Kelly was a pallbearer when Brooke died from an infected mosquito bite without seeing a shot fired in anger and was buried on the Greek island of Skyros.
The Australian served with British forces at Gallipoli, where his compatriots suffered heavy casualties in the landings by Australian and New Zealand forces.
He was wounded twice and awarded a Distinguished Service Cross “for conspicuous gallantry” as one of the last men to evacuate from the Turkish peninsula in
January 1916.
Later that year he was posted to the Somme and his diaries reflect the bleakness of life in “nasty, muddy” trenches, detailing gas attacks and ruined villages.
Kelly also recalled how he stopped an enlisted soldier he took a dislike to, Charles Throsby, from transferring behind the lines. The man died from his wounds after Kelly appointed him as his personal runner at the front.
There are flashes of dark humour, such as when he staged a performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture near the front line, using real artillery shelling the Germans for the piece’s famous climax.
“We heard it as Tchaikovsky had wanted to hear it: all the guns were firing like Hell,” one observer said.
He was killed on November 13, 1916, during the final battle of the Somme at Beaucourt sur L’Ancre, aged 35. His Oxford college, Balliol, said in its war history that Kelly’s musical talents were just beginning to mature but “time alone was wanting”.
Despite his achievements, Kelly is little known in Australia, perhaps because he represented Britain at the Olympics and served in the British military.
“For all his talent, being born in Sydney was about the only Australian thing Fred Kelly ever did,”
Herald columnist Alan Ramsey wrote in 2005.