How Bill The Bastard became a Legend

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Limited Edition of 150 Reproductions Only

The story of “Bill the Bastard” has become a legend dramatized and told in Light Horse circles, and has grown with the telling as legends tend to do. Bill was a real horse, and did behave in a manner that earned him his name. That he was 17 hands I have my doubt, as evidence from those contemporary with him as well as the only authentic photo that identified him attest. As stallions were forbidden in the Light Horse, he would have been gelded, especially with such an obnoxious temperament.

The original accounts I have found say that the 2 troopers were “hanging on to” rather than standing in the stirrups. In the re-enactments I have seen, when loaded with the dead weight of five precarious men, the horse cannot gallop or even canter.

This is how Trooper Robert Ellwood of the 2 Light Horse Regiment described him: “Well, Billy the bastard was a horse ridden by Mick Shanahan too. He was about the best part of 14 hands and a light cross between a chestnut and a bay. He was the type of horse that he would be standing on the lines head roped and heel roped with his ears back and half asleep just waiting until somebody walked behind him close enough that he could reach him and then he would bash out and he’d give him a crack.

He never once missed, he never once attempted to kick anybody unless they were within striking distance and he had a very nasty reputation Billy the bastard. And Mick Shanahan used to … ride him, and I didn’t see this but at Romani…he covered himself with glory and he got a wonderful hero’s reputation because they tell me that he had soldiers that he ordinary he would have kicked to pieces, hanging onto his tail, onto his stirrups and even doubling onto his back.

He’d get them out of the firing line…nobody was in the 2nd regiment in the early part of the show that they didn’t know Billy the Bastard. It was like knowing Simpson and his donkey on Gallipoli” Jill Mather: “WAR HORSES HOOF PRINTS IN TIME” p.28 When troopers from 11th Light Horse Warwick Montrose Troop, enacted this with Lyle, a sturdy 16 hands chestnut gelding, for the benefit of this artist, they quickly discovered that with three men on his back it would severely unbalance the horse to have 2 other men standing in the stirrups and clutching their mates as best they could.

In fact it would have been very difficult for the mass of men to have all stayed in place at all! They realised that rather than being an unbalanced dead weight carried by the horse, it was far more feasible to be “hanging on to the stirrups” as the old accounts describe. They found that the most effective method was to hang onto the stirrup leathers and run beside the horse, using its speed to give them impetus. This way the horse could indeed gallop across the loose sand at a much faster pace, and so escape the Turkish bullets that followed their flight. As Bill was inclined to kick as well as buck, makes this method of their escape all the more remarkable.

So this is how I have portrayed “How Bill the Bastard became a Legend”. This is consistent with the official war record by Gullett- “… Mounted cossack posts had been thrown out in front of the Australian line, and the Turks crept or blundered into a number of these without being observed. Some of the men were bayoneted as they attempted to mount their horses.

In front of the 3rd Light Horse Regiment, two posts of eight men each, under Sergeants Bingham 2 and Tolman 3 (both Tasmanians), were almost entirely destroyed, and the sergeants were killed fighting on their ground. Major M. Shanahan, 4 of the 2nd Light Horse Regiment, riding round the listening posts, found four Australians who had lost their horses and had been outflanked by the enemy. Taking two of the men on to his horse, and with a trooper hanging to either stirrup, he dashed safely through the Turks in the darkness.” H. S. Gullett: THE AUSTRALIAN IMPERIAL FORCE IN SINAI AND PALESTINE 1914-1918: The official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918, Volume VII SINAI AND PALESTINE. Angus & Robertson 1923. p.144