To them, he was a respected but humble vet who later headed up the Agriculture Department’s Western District office in Warrnambool, a horse lover who for years volunteered his time as the May Racing Carnival’s veterinary officer.

They knew little of the soldier mentioned in dispatches for “gallant and distinguished services” to the AIF Australian Veterinary Corps in the Middle East in 1918 — the certificate signed by Britain’s then secretary of state for war, one Winston Churchill.

Nor did they know that the young captain and veterinary officer of the 8th Light Horse Regiment, who rose to become a major in the 3rd Light Horse Brigade, had served side by side with the legendary Banjo Paterson. 

On the back of a sepia portrait photograph dated Cairo, 1915, Paterson is clearly identified among a group of Australian Army Veterinary Corps officers, including Stan. The patriotic Paterson — a bush poet, journalist, author and honorary vet — was made commanding officer of the AIF’s 2nd Remount Division in Egypt, a position he held for the best part of World War I.

The photograph forms part of a cache of memorabilia that has helped Stan’s son Bill Mountjoy piece together the largely untold story of his father’s wartime service.

Stan was an avid photographer, for which Bill is grateful. His camera revealed what Stan couldn’t.

His photographic legacy is one of the largest known single collections of the Middle East theatre — more than 650 black-and-white photos spanning more than four years across Egypt, Palestine and Syria.

Collated into five albums and now also digitally preserved, the photos provide a window of daily life on the battlefields in unforgiving desert conditions. 

Apart from the primary concern of fighting the enemy, everyday tasks such as watering and caring for the horses, making camp and negotiating the windswept, sandy terrain in searing heat are all recorded in Stan’s pictorial essay.

Born at Lorne into the pioneering family of Mountjoys (who lend their name to the town’s main street), Stan’s childhood on a grazing property and then as a driver on the family’s coach run between Lorne and Winchelsea, in competition with Cobb and Co, no doubt shaped his decision to become a veterinary surgeon.

When war broke out he was working in a veterinary practice in Kerang and enlisted soon after in September 1914, aged 26, receiving a commission as a captain with the 8th Light Horse Regiment.

He had been in Cairo for less than a month in May 1915 when his regiment received orders for embarkation to Gallipoli and the fateful battle of The Nek. When the decision was made for the horses to remain in Egypt, Stan, as a veterinary officer, was delegated to stay behind to care for them — an order that could well have saved his life. Of about 540 members of the regiment, nearly 200 did not return from Gallipoli.

In a fragile, yellowed, near-hundred-year-old booklet among Bill’s possessions entitled Narrative of Operations of Third Light Horse Brigade, a report by Stan, by then a major with the brigade, provides a detailed account of the conditions and death rate of horses in the 12 months to November 1918.

For November and December, 1917, Stan writes: “Deaths 163. Evacuations 244. This covers period of Beersheba-Jerusalem operations and was an exceedingly strenuous time for all animals engaged. The deaths include 113 horses that were either killed in action, killed by bombs or destroyed as a result of wounds.

“At times during the first fortnight of November, there was a great shortage of water. At one stage the whole brigade (horses), were without water for from 43 to 58 hours, during which time the work was very strenuous, a lot of it being done at the trot. The longest stretch without water was done by two troops of the 9th Regiment, who went without a drink for 76 hours. At the end of it they looked pretty miserable and weary.”

At war’s end it fell to Stan to oversee the dispersal of the brigade’s horses, which because of quarantine regulations could not be returned to Australia. Many went to the British and Indian cavalries. The remainder were classified, mainly by age, as either “fit or unfit”. For a horse lover like Stan, Bill says having to give the order to destroy the many which fell into the latter category would have been heart-wrenching.

“Even at home years later, if he’d had to put a horse down, he would go and have a few beers, you didn’t go near him,” Bill recalls.

Of the crateful of his father’s wartime souvenirs — including old surgical instruments, his riding crop, boots, German and Turkish belt buckles and assorted race books — now in Bill’s keeping at his Warrnambool home, pride of place is given to a silver trophy.

The cup was won by Stan, a slight man with a jockey’s build, for the five-furlong Palais de Koubeh Maiden Stakes at the Heliopolis (Cairo) Military Races on June 28, 1919. 

Although the war officially came to an end in November 1918, it would be January 1920 before Stan was finally back in Australia. He was among a contingent of personnel required to help suppress an Arab uprising until mid-1919, before continuing on to the UK to further his veterinary studies.