Department of Veterans' Affairs
Transcript
Family's war history
My dad was the youngest of the three brothers that served and if they came to visit, occasionally, it was more some humorous types of reminiscences that they would start to discuss.
My Dad suffered terribly. At 26 years of age he was given the prognosis that he was going to have an ongoing health problem, gave my mother the opportunity to break the engagement.
She said, 'No. If he was going to be ill, he would need her more than ever'. So, she went into the marriage knowing that she was facing the possibility of health problems and for the next 26 years he was in and out of hospital.
We lived a constant fear of wondering what was going to happen with Dad because there were times like, as I said, when we moved to Sydney he was not expected to come out of hospital in 1937. So that clouded our childhood in many ways, financially, and in other respects but I had a loving family group.
We were encouraged through our schooling and that sort of thing so despite the fact that it was difficult in certain respects also we had a close-knit happy family.
My eldest brother served in the Second World War, a number of cousins as well. He suffered for his service in the air force for nearly six years and he was only 54 when he died of his war and Dad was 52 so, you see, I know what it is in the family to have one's life really, really affected by war service.
Childhood frugality
Those days he was put on to what they called a service pension not to be confused with a TPI pension which was so much generous. It was just like an invalid pension and, yes, they did extremely well to give us the opportunities and everything.
We never went short and we all had the opportunity to learn piano and, you know, doctors, we weren't short whited, in that respect, in terms of going to the hospital for outpatients or something.
If we had a medical problem my parents paid out for us to see doctors and dentists and so forth. So, everything that was important was handled, it was just meant that there was no such thing as pocket money or the like and I can honestly say, back in those days, when most children went Saturday afternoons to the local picture show, as we called it, the cinema, to see the matinee programs there was never any twelve month period when we got to the pictures twice because there simply was not the money there to go.
Wounded in France
He never really talked that much about his war service.
He didn't go to Gallipoli. He was in Egypt and then he went to France and he was in the same slit trench as his commanding officer, Crowshaw, Colonel Crowshaw, when that blast, which killed Crowshaw and a couple of the others and he was in the trench and the blast peppered him through the chest area and the neck, the face and up and that's when he was taken back to England.
He was sent back home and discharged medically unfit. Being a very independent person, he's really the person you need to hear about, he got a letter to go to Auburn post office which he did and found that they were going to pay him a pension and he told them in no uncertain terms what they could do with their pension and walked out and reenlisted a month later but that was about August, I think, of 1918 and he wasn't actually, he hadn't been sent abroad when, armistice, the war ended but he had actually reenlisted rather than, sort of, accept the fact that he'd been pensioned off, so to speak.
Shrapnel removed
In the early 40s apparently around about 1942 or thereabouts, the local GP, Doctor Courtham removed a piece of shrapnel out of his neck, this lump had come up, so that had been there for about twenty-five years, I don't know if there were any other pieces there but certainly that piece was removed.
No he didn't suffer any, draw any pension, to all intents and purposes he just simply got on with life.
He didn't really talk a lot about the war service at all and if something came up it tended to be of a humorous nature, like something funny that happened that, you know, that they could laugh about rather than the blood and guts of the situation which was really ghastly there's no two ways about it.
So, no, he never marched. He belonged to both Auburn and Granville RSL clubs but never went near them, mainly because he was busy as I said.
Paralysis sets in
He had no aftereffects of the war, as I said, apart from that piece of shrapnel that was removed from his neck.
Now he smoked eighty cigarettes a day, I emphasise that point, and he started to feel numbness in his fingers, this was the second half of 1959, and these days you'd say that's circulation to do with nicotine etcetera et cetera and that sort of gradually increased.
Then he felt that his feet were affected and we saw, privately, a doctor who put him into Royal North Shore hospital to do some tests and as a result of that they said there was some spinal damage done, here in the cervical part of the neck and it was at that point that a couple of his mates from the 53rd Battalion had said to him 'I think you had better go back to the Repat' which was the Repatriation Department those days.
He'd not been near them for all that time, all those years, and he begrudgingly approached and they did all those tests and in November 1959, Doctor Dowling, was the neuro surgeon who operated at Concord Hospital, which was Repatriation General Hospital, and he said to me 'There is damage there which is the aftermath of these shrapnel wounds. We've relieved the pressure, but we can't do any more and we give him two years. He will become quite paralysed.'
He was admitted there two or three times after that, and they said to me 'You won't be able to manage him.'
And I said, 'Oh yes I will.' And so it was.
He lived exactly four years and six months. It was May of 1964 that he died. The last two years he'd become so paralysed that I washed, dressed, shaved, bowel washed, did everything for him and the last six weeks of his life when he was totally bedridden, I moved him every two hours in the bed to stop bed sores, pressure points from developing.
He said, 'I don't want to die in hospital' and I said 'You won't. You'll be at home.' And he was. Saturday the 30th of May, a month after his 68th birthday he died at home.