Tag Archives: WWI

V is for Veteran

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I decided to combine my letter V post for the A to Z challenge with Anzac Day and dedicate my V post to Veterans. I have a few in my tree, some who are direct ancestors and some who are collateral ancestors but this post is dedicated to those in my tree who were veterans.

  • Oscar Norman Thompson: served in WWI 1915-1919, enlisted at the age of 21 years and 2 months; completed training in the Middle East before serving in France on the Western Front. Survived after being shot in the neck and left for dead in the desert. Returned to Australia in 1919.
  • Arthur Oswald Thompson: served in WWI 1915-1919, enlisted at the age of 19 years with the permission of his father, brother to Oscar. Served in the same theatres fo war as Oscar; saved Oscar’s life when he came across him wounded in the desert (not knowing it was his brother Oscar).  Returned to Australia in 1919.
  • Edmund “Sonny” Hartley: enlisted in WWI 18 October 1918 at the age of exactly 18, after multiple previous attempts, with his father’s permission. Sonny dodged a bullet though as he never actually left Australia due to the cessation of the conflict.
  • Godfrey Victor Thompson: enlisted in WW1 in 1918 at the age of 18 years and 2 months but due to the cessation of the conflict never saw action. Also served in WWII on the Home Front.
  • Herbert Samuel Starr: served in WWII on the home front, heavily involved in the defence of the west coast of Australia and was based at the Perth barracks for the duration of the war.
  • Herbert Clive Starr: son of Herbert Samuel; served on the home front 1942-1948 in the defence of Sydney.
  • Joseph Roy Starr: son of Herbert Samuel; served in the RAAF 1945-1946 as a Leading Aircraftman.
  • Hilton Iles: served on the home front 1940-1941; was posted at the Cowra prison camp.
  • Kiffin Denis Iles: served on the home front 1940-1941. Discharged on medical grounds.
  • William Edward Thompson: Served in WWII in Papua New Guinea. Spent most of his time being absent without leave. Returned home to Australia, received a dishonourable discharge and deserted his wife and 2 year old child.
  • Neville Clyde Thompson: served on the home front 1941-1945 in depot supply. Discharged for being an essential worker.
  • Noel Jack Thompson: Served in unknown location overseas, WWII 1943-1946.  Returned to civilian life after the war.

Hilton Iles

Kiffin Iles

William Edward Thompson

Herbert Samuel Starr

 

 

Oscar Thompson

O is for Oscar

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Oscar Norman Thompson was my great grandfather and is the subject of today’s A to Z post. Oscar was born 25 May 1895 at Regentville, near Penrith NSW to parents Charles John Thompson and Alice Skeen. Oscar’s mother had a mammoth 13 pregnancies, with a total of 15 children born including two sets of twins. Out of these 15 children, 9 lived into adulthood. Oscar was the seventh child born, so petty much smack dab in the middle of his family. Oscar grew up in various suburbs of Penrith, but by 1915 the family were settled in the suburb of Jamisontown.

The year 1915 was a significant one in Oscar’s life as well as in the wider community. The ANZACS landed at Gallipoli and there was a huge drive in recruiting for World War I. Like so many other young Australians, Oscar enlisted. His attestation papers show his date of enlistment as 24 July 1915 and he was assigned to 5th reinforcements of the 20th Infantry Battalion. Oscar was aged 21 years and 2 months at the time of his enlistment.

Oscar in army uniform

All individuals enlisting underwent a physical examination and Oscar was not exception. Oscar’spapers record his height as 5 feet 7.5 inches (or 171.45cm) which is quite tall even for men today and his weight as 126 lbs (0r 57.15 kgs). At this weight, he certainly wasn’t carrying around any extra weight!! This was a physique he carried for the rest of his life, as later photos show how lean he is. What is interesting to me is that nothing is mentioned about his feet, and rumour has it that he had flat feet. Whether he did or not, he passed all the requirements to enlist in the army. From Australia, Oscar was shipped out to Egypt where he arrived on 30 September 1915. Oscar undertook training with his battalion before being transferred across to the Western Front in France.

 

Oscar was wounded multiple times whilst on the Western Front, including being shot in the head and the neck and also suffered from illness causing him to be admitted to hospital. This may have been a blessing in disguise, as Oscar’s frequent illnesses caused him to be in and out of hospitals both on the Western Front and in England. This may well have helped with his survival, enabling him to return home to Australia in mid 1919. At the time, the Spanish Flu pandemic was still continuing in waves across Australia. However, Oscar returned to a rural area full of wide open spaces which would perhaps have helped with containing the disease. All of Oscar’s immediate family survived the pandemic and life went on as normal.

Oscar on his wedding day

In February 1920, Oscar was married to Edith Jane Hartley and the settled down and started a family. Oscar and Edith had five children together, with the first four being born in the Penrith area. However, as the Great Depression hit Australia the family was forced to move from the Penrith area to a cheaper area. As a result, they settled in Brighton-le-Sands before ending up in the inner city suburb of Ashfield.

Oscar’s health was obviously stable enough after the war for him to continue to work in his job at Sydney’s Schweppes factory, where he had been employed since the age of 15, and raise a family however as he aged his health deteriorated. As a result, Oscar died at the relatively young age of 49 years old in 1945. This may have been due to him being heavily gassed during his war service, which has since been proven to cause serious and ongoing health problems. At the time of his death, Oscar’s two youngest children were aged just 11 and 6 years old respectively.

 

E is for Edith

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Edith Jane Hartley was my great grandmother and is the subject of my letter ‘e’ post. I never had the pleasure of meeting her, but as my mother spent a lot of time with her growing up I’ve heard a lot about her over the years.

Edith was born in 1898 at Jamisonton near Penrith, NSW to parents James Edmund Hartley and Elizabeth Brownlow. She was the first child born to the couple, but had four older half-siblings and a younger brother was to follow her two years later in 1900. Nowadays, Penrith is a busy metropolitan area but in the late 19th Century it was still very much a rural area.

Edith’s father worked as a Railway Guard on the NSW Railways with her mother having the usual occupation of ‘home duties’. We don’t know many details about Edith’s early life, but it would probably have followed the usual form for a girl in those days: learning how to run a house and becoming accomplished in all those domestic science tasks such as cooking and sewing. It seems likely that Edith would also have attended the Anglican Sunday School at Jamisontown, which was established in 1889. Additionally, there would have been the social round that existed in country Australia, with weekly church services and country dances.

Edith as a young woman

But the usual gentle round of country life was interrupted when WWI broke out in 1914. Edith was 16 years old, and over the next four years she would watch many of the local young men leave to go fight overseas. Reading the local Penrith newspaper from the time, there is a plethora of articles relating stories of local men heading off to the front and the going away parties that were held fro them. One such article, from the Nepean Times on 20 November 1915, details how Edith was involved in one such gathering and with another young lady handed each young man heading to the from a going away present of a safety razor.

Edith’s future husband Oscar Norman Thompson was one of these local men to head off to war. Whilst there is no record of a relationship between them prior to him going away to war, the two families did live very close to each other and the couple were well known to each other. More newspaper articles from the time detail the home front effort of knitting socks and mufflers for men at the front, which Edith as a young women would have undoubtedly been involved in.

Edith and Oscar on their wedding day

The war ended in 1918 and by 1919, Edith’s future husband had returned to live with his family in Jamisontown. On 28 February 1920, Edith and Oscar were married at Holy Trinity Church Jamisontown. A beautifully descriptive article appeared in the Windsor and Richmond Gazette in April of that year, with the bride’s dress described as being of “white organdi (sic) trimmed with lace and insertion, finished with a white folded satin belt” complemented by the traditional veil and rope of pearls around her neck and a bouquet of white and pink asters. The article goes on to describe the bridesmaids and flower girls outfits as well as naming all individuals involved in the wedding party, before stating that the reception was held at the residence of the board parents’ and that the wedding gifts “were numerous and costly”!! As a family historian, it is so rare to receive an insight into an ancestor’s life like this and I still remember how excited I was to find this article.

Edith with her three eldest children

The couple’s first child was born in 1921 with a total of five children to be born in the period 1921 to 1939. The couple settled in Jamisontown, on a small parcel of land that was gifted to them by Edith’s father as a wedding present. In recent years, I had some photos shared with me by the couple’s eldest child of their life in Jamisontown and later Penrith itself. However, as the Great Depression began to bite in the 1930s, the family was forced to move to a cheaper location. In those days, cheaper meat closer to the ocean and their new home was in Brighton-le-Sands. Today, this is a bustling seaside suburb but in the 1930s a lot of Australians moved to similar suburbs as they were the cheapest places to live.

It was while they living here that Edith’s eldest son was struck down with Polio and she spent a lot of time going backwards and forwards between home and the hospital. Eventually, he recovered and moved back with the family. By this time, they had moved to the inner western Sydney suburb of Ashfield. The family lived at Ashfield until at least 1945, which was when Edith suffered the loss of her husband. Out of the five children, two were still dependants when Oscar died and Edith relied on the War Widow’s pension to raise them along with any income made by her elder children.

In her later years, Edith lived in the Sydney suburbs of Croydon and Fairfield. When living at

Edith (centre) with her two sisters Amy (left) and Ethel (right)

Fairfield, her eldest daughter (my grandmother) separated form her husband and brought her family to live with Edith. This included my Mum and they lived with Edith for many years until they were allocated a house by Government Housing. During the years my Mum lived with Edith, she heard many family history stories (some of which weren’t entirely true!) and those stories were passed on to me and helped birth my love of family history.

Edith lived at Fairfield until her death in 1980, at the age of 85. In those 85 years, she loved through an immense amount of change in her family and the world around her.

Edith’s memorial plaque at Northern Suburbs cemetery, Sydney

 

 

 

 

B is for Betsey

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Mrs. S. Starr, Senr.                                                                                                                           “The residence of Mrs. S. Starr, senr., of West Molong, was the scene of a happy gathering on Wednesday, the 12th instant, when the members of her family attended to celebrate her 83rd birthday. Needless to say, all the family were pleased to see the old lady looking so well and hearty and as active as one many years her junior. Amongst the members present were — Richard (Copper Hill), William and David (Molong), Mrs. Pearsall (Sydney), and Mrs. W. Crook (Exchange Hotel, Orange), who each presented Mrs. Starr with a memento of the occasion, which was heartily appreciated by the venerable recipient Mrs. Starr, who has resided in the Molong district for upward of 60 years, is highly respected. She has living seven children, 27 grandchildren, and 20 great grandchildren. Amongst the grandchildren, seven are doing their duty for their country at the front and one, Gordon Starr, has made the supreme sacrifice.”                                                                                                                                          – Molong Argus (NSW, 1896-1921), Friday 21 June 1918, Page 1.

The article above relates to my great, great, great grandmother Betsey Starr nee Edwards and Betsey is the subject of my ‘B’ post. On the surface, Betsey led a fairly regular life but she also led quite a long life and saw a lot of changes in that lifetime.

Betsey was born 12 June 1835 in St. Ives, Cambridgeshire, England to parents Richard Edwards and Elisabeth Catley. Her father Richard was a shepherd and the family consisted of five children, of which Betsey was the youngest. By the time Betsey was 6 year old, her mother Elizabeth had died. To date, I have not managed to pinpoint the death of Betsey’s mother but she is absent from both the 184 and 1851 census. Betsey’s father, Richard, never remarried so one can presume that Betsey was left to be raised by her elder sister Edith who was ten years older than Betsey. By 1844, Edith had married and left the family home to start her own family.

Betsey continued to love at home with her father and brothers, with just one brother remaining at home in the 1851 census. The rest of the family also appear in the 1851 census, at different addresses. However, in 1852 Betsey’s sister Edith and her family emigrated to Australia as Assisted Immigrants. Perhaps it was the fact that her sister, who had presumably been a mother figure to Betsey, was a prompt for more  of the family to emigrate to Australia in 1856.

In August of 1856, Betsey arrived in Australia with her father Richard and her brother David. After arriving in Sydney, the family travelled to the township of Molong in central western NSW. For a long time, I wondered why Molong? Why did they choose the town of Molong to settle in? Molong was and still is a farming area and Richard was a shepherd so I figured that was a major reason behind the decision to settle in Molong. Maybe this was part of the reason, however I recently discovered that Betsey’s elder sister and her family had settled in Molong so this was probably the deciding factor behind the move to Molong.

The next 13 years of Betsey’s life saw her give birth to her first child, Phoebe, in 1858; marry Samuel Starr (my 3x great grandfather) in 1860; and give birth to a further six children between 1860 and 1872. Over this time, Betsey settled into the small community of Molong and raised her family with her sister Edith also raising her family in Molong over the same period. The two families were close, with Betsey’s son William marrying Edith’s daughter Hannah Whitley. It seems strange to us in modern times to even consider marrying our first cousins, but in small rural communities it happened quite often in the past.

Now, all of this is very ordinary for a woman of Betsey’s time but Betsey was to live a long life and major world events were just around the corner. First, Betsey was to witness the birth of a new century: the 19th Century. Now, I don’t know what people would have been feeling in 1899 as they thought about the start of a new century but I do know that when we were approaching the start of the 21st Century there were all kinds of conspiracy theories floating around and people just didn’t know what a new century would bring. I have ton assume that perhaps people back in the late 1800s are feeling some similar feelings as they contemplated the start of a new century. And not far into the new century, a major world event was to occur with the death of Queen Victoria in 1901.

For much of the British Empire, this was a major shock and many people could remember no other monarch before Queen Victoria as she had been on the throne for so long. Betsey would have been one of these, as she was born well into Queen Victoria’s reign. But the changes didn’t end there for Betsey. In 1914, World War I broke out and it’s effects would be felt worldwide. At the time of the war breaking out, Betsey had a total of 27 grandchildren living. Of these 27, nine were within the age range to serve their country and seven of these grandchildren enlisted and served overseas. As mentioned in the newspaper article at the start of the post, one of these grandchildren paid the ultimate price: Private (William) Gordon Starr was killed in action 20 July 1916 on the battlefields of France.

I can only imagine what Betsey would have felt at the loss of her grandson, and the continued worry of the other 6 grandchildren that she had serving overseas during WWI. I can only imagine the relief she felt when the remaining 6 grandchildren returned home to Australia with end of the war. Betsey was to have only a few more years with her family, dying in 1923 at the advanced age of 87 years.

In her long life, Betsey had gone from living in rural England to travelling to the other side of the world to a new country. She celebrated the expected events for a woman of her era, marrying and raising a family; but she also witnessed tremendous change in the latter part of her life with the death of a monarch and the outbreak of the First World War. She would have also been around to witness the beginnings of the Roaring Twenties. As her legacy, Betsey left behind a family of six children; twenty-six grandchildren; and 20 great-grandchildren.