Listen to a Soldier's Voice from Christmas 1914: Anzac Henry Miller Lanser

 

Henry Miller Lanser (1890–1916)

Contributed by James Patton

Henry Miller Lanser, a 24-year-old Australian soldier, found himself far from his family in New South Wales (NSW) at Christmas 1914.

His 1st Battalion Australian Imperial Force had left for Egypt on 18 October 1914 for training at the Mena military camp. Lanser, known familiarly as “Miller,” found a way back home 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 the voice of an ordinary soldier during wartime.

The three-and-a-half-minute recording was made on a 10-inch shellac by the Mechian Company, run by Armenian businessman Setrak Mechian. 

Miller had been a mechanic who traveled around NSW working on shearing equipment. Stephanie Boyle, a senior curator at the Australian War Memorial, believes his interest in machinery may have been one reason he took the “unusual and expensive step” of entering a recording shop.

The Original Disk at the Australian War Memorial

He was one of the original Anzacs who landed at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915. He was twice wounded, the second time at Lone Pine on  6 August.   Subsequently he was commissioned and rejoined his battalion on the Western Front, fought at Pozières, and was killed at Flers on 5 November 1916. His body lay in no man’s land for months before being buried in Grévillers British Cemetery.

Ian Lanser, the son of Miller’s brother Basil, remembers his uncle’s voice ringing out of the gramophone whenever he visited his aunts Ethel and Edie.  “As a toddler I remember holding that record …. And they played it where my aunties lived, and at that stage my grandmother–Miller’s mother–was still alive,” Ian Lanser says.

He 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 of the Australian War Memorial 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.

The original 10-inch shellac disc came to the Memorial with a chunk  missing, making it impossible to play completely.  However, they also had the metal master, which is a negative of the recording. “We managed to play back from the negative, taking the sound off the ridges rather than the grooves, the complete recording,” Selby says.

To listen to the Lanser Disc click

HERE (embedded)   or    HERE (for player)

 https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C289920 

From The Guardian (Australia Edition)