Volume IX, A. W. Jose's The Royal Australian Navy. In 1916, the British War Cabinet had agreed to grant Dominion official historians access to the war diaries of all British Army units fighting on either side of a Dominion unit, as well as all headquarters that issued orders to Dominion units, including the GHQ of the British Expeditionary Force. By the end of the war, the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) was less than willing to divulge this information, possibly fearing it would be used to criticise the conduct of the war. It took six years of persistence before Bean was allowed access and a further three years for a clerk to make copies of the enormous quantity of documents. Bean therefore had available to him resources that were denied to all British historians who were not associated with the Historical Section of the CID. Bean was unwilling to compromise his values for personal gain or political expediency. He was not influenced by suggestions and criticism from British official historian, Sir James Edmonds, about the direction of his work. Edmonds reported to the CID that, "The general tone of Bean's narrative is deplorable from the Imperial standpoint." For his stance, it is likely that Bean was denied decorations from King George V, despite being recommended on two occasions during the war by the commander of the Australian Corps. Many years later when he was offered a knighthood, he declined. As noted by Inglis, Bean had no exact model for the history he wanted to write. Bean wrote in "Our War History" published in "The Bulletin" in May 1942: “We knew that – because of the opportunities given to us during the war of seeing what really happened at the cutting edge of battle as well as headquarters - Harry Gullett, Cutlack and I had material for a new kind of war history.” According to Stanley, in writing the Official History Bean was animated by a guiding principle: that the history was to be a memorial to those who had served, suffered and died, and the question which Bean set out to explore, as he later explained, was "how did the Australian people … come through the first universally recognised test of this, their first great war?" It was answered by his conclusion that through service and sacrifice in the war "Australia became fully conscious of itself as a nation." Partly