Lost Diggers

DIVISION
5th Division Signals Company

OCCUPATION
Fireman for the Veteran Railways

REGIMENT
5th Battalion

MEDALS
Military Cross

Clarence Aspinall

Clarence Aspinall’s story doesn’t begin with titles or aristocratic estates—it begins in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he was born into a modest but respected family in the late 1880s. His father was an Anglican minister, known for his calm authority and steady faith, and his mother came from a lineage of schoolteachers. Clarence inherited both their discipline and their quiet sense of duty.

In the years leading up to the First World War, Clarence moved to Australia, likely drawn by opportunity and the spirit of adventure. He was working in Adelaide when war was declared, and like many young men of his generation, he volunteered without hesitation. His enlistment papers describe him as steady, intelligent, and well-mannered—qualities that would define his service.

Clarence embarked with the 10th Battalion in early 1915 and was among the first Australians to land at Gallipoli. The weeks that followed were marked by exhaustion, confusion, and constant shellfire. He was wounded not long after the landing and evacuated to Egypt for treatment. Records suggest he spent several months recovering in military hospitals before rejoining the war effort on the Western Front.

In France, Clarence was transferred to the 48th Battalion, a unit made up largely of South Australians and veterans of Gallipoli. By 1917, he had risen to the rank of Corporal. He was commended for his reliability under fire during operations near Messines and Passchendaele, where battalion diaries mention his role in maintaining communications under intense artillery bombardment.

Unlike some soldiers who returned home broken or embittered, Clarence carried his war quietly. After the Armistice, he settled in Perth and married Edith Marian, a nurse he had met while recovering in Cairo. He took up a position in the public service, eventually working with the Department of Repatriation, helping returned soldiers navigate civilian life.

He never sought recognition or accolades, but his name appears on veterans’ association rolls, and those who knew him described him as thoughtful, methodical, and kind. He was a fixture at local RSL events, though he rarely spoke of the war.

Clarence Aspinall died in 1962 and was buried with military honours in Karrakatta Cemetery. He left behind three children and a quiet legacy of strength, humility, and service—qualities not recorded in peerage books, but remembered just as deeply by those whose lives he touched.

Unknown Soldier No. 4

‘Goose bumps watching the show…
This is so wonderful, I can hardly believe it’s true. Many of the faces showed signs of great fatigue and yet they managed to smile and pose for a photo forever preserving the moment in time.
A few tears shed knowing some of those fellows never made it home. What a wonderful discovery for many families around the world.’

‘These photos brought tears to my eyes. I had eight great uncles who all fought on the Western Front. Five of them were brothers. One of them was killed in
action five weeks before Armistice Day after surviving three years of that bloody hell. He is our only Digger out of eight that we have no photographic record of.
Maybe he is one of those men.’

‘Thank you so much for making these great photographs available. My mother lost her uncle in France in 1915. We have no info’ on him, not even a photo. We
have always tried to find his records but without a regiment number, we are up against a brick wall. I sit here with tears in my eyes, wondering if he is one of
these brave men. You have done a wonderful thing.
Our grand uncle … died of wounds … How amazing to think his image could be among these photos.
I carefully examined each and every photo looking for any resemblance to the many family members who fought in WW1, some of whom ever returned.’

Unknown Digger No. 5

‘Goose bumps watching the show…
This is so wonderful, I can hardly believe it’s true. Many of the faces showed signs of great fatigue and yet they managed to smile and pose for a photo forever preserving the moment in time.
A few tears shed knowing some of those fellows never made it home. What a wonderful discovery for many families around the world.’

‘These photos brought tears to my eyes. I had eight great uncles who all fought on the Western Front. Five of them were brothers. One of them was killed in
action five weeks before Armistice Day after surviving three years of that bloody hell. He is our only Digger out of eight that we have no photographic record of.
Maybe he is one of those men.’

‘Thank you so much for making these great photographs available. My mother lost her uncle in France in 1915. We have no info’ on him, not even a photo. We
have always tried to find his records but without a regiment number, we are up against a brick wall. I sit here with tears in my eyes, wondering if he is one of
these brave men. You have done a wonderful thing.
Our grand uncle … died of wounds … How amazing to think his image could be among these photos.
I carefully examined each and every photo looking for any resemblance to the many family members who fought in WW1, some of whom ever returned.’

James Holland

THE CLASSIC DIGGER

His cocksure demeanor and jaunty slouch hat implied a fellow who liked a good laugh and a bit of fun especially after what he had probably just experienced in the mud and blood of the Western Front trenches.

Early in the discovery of the Thuiller collection, this was one photograph that stood out begging to be identified by a family member.

It shows a handsome digger who has just stepped off the battlefield in the middle of a freezing French winter, the mud still on his boots, sheepskin vest strapped tightly against his broad chest.

He was the quintessential larrikin Aussie soldier and it became a mission to find out who he was. Had he survived the war? What was his story? Enter the wonders of Facebook and the internet, which eventually helped to solve the mystery of this man.

In Perth a proud granddaughter, Judy Carroll, noticed the image on the Facebook Lost Diggers website and her first thought was, ‘Why have I never seen this pic of granddad before?’ She sent in a copy of her family’s treasured picture of her grandfather Jim Holland, who was a dead ringer for the bloke in the Thuillier picture.

As it happened, the family also had another postcard image of Jim that he had sent home describing his friendship with a French photographer, the writing on the back saying
“If ever you are in need of a good cry gaze on this and you are sure to weep. This is the final effort of our friend the French photographer. Things are still going strong.
All my love Jim”.

The postcard was dated 9 August 1918.

Halfway there, but a simple visual match was not quite enough. A check with the Australian War Memorial and the National Archives in Canberra confirmed Jim’s 7th Machine Gun Company had indeed arrived in Vignacourt on a wintery day on 1 December 1916.

It was highly likely the picture was of Jim but the best confirmation of all came from his two surviving children, ninety-year-old twins Kath Malta and Reg Holland (who is Judy Carroll’s father). Kath’s instant reaction when she unwrapped a framed copy of the Thuillier picture was spine-tingling, ‘Ooooooh it’s a photograph of Father!’ Her tears of joy and Reg’s smile were all the proof needed to confirm this was indeed an image of Jim Holland and one the family had never seen before. “I’m very very proud of my father”, Kath said.

Veteran Australian actress, Val Lehman, is Kath’s eldest daughter. Val is well known for her role as Bea Smith in the television series Prisoner, but while her achievements are considerable she and the rest of her family are fiercely proud of Jim.

“My grandfather was a forward machine gunner. Their life expectancy was about 30 seconds”, she explained.

Because you’re right up the front and they’re shelling like mad because there you are mowing down enemy soldiers and you are the target. He was actually buried alive twice, by shellfire. And they dug him out and he survived and went back again.

Unknown Soldier

SOME COMMENTS POSTED ON OUR WEBSITE

‘Goose bumps watching the show…
This is so wonderful, I can hardly believe it’s true. Many of the faces showed signs of great fatigue and yet they managed to smile and pose for a photo forever preserving the moment in time.
A few tears shed knowing some of those fellows never made it home. What a wonderful discovery for many families around the world.’

‘These photos brought tears to my eyes. I had eight great uncles who all fought on the Western Front. Five of them were brothers. One of them was killed in
action five weeks before Armistice Day after surviving three years of that bloody hell. He is our only Digger out of eight that we have no photographic record of.
Maybe he is one of those men.’

‘Thank you so much for making these great photographs available. My mother lost her uncle in France in 1915. We have no info’ on him, not even a photo. We
have always tried to find his records but without a regiment number, we are up against a brick wall. I sit here with tears in my eyes, wondering if he is one of
these brave men. You have done a wonderful thing.
Our grand uncle … died of wounds … How amazing to think his image could be among these photos.
I carefully examined each and every photo looking for any resemblance to the many family members who fought in WW1, some of whom ever returned.’

Unknown Soldier

TWO FAMOUS QUOTES

‘We must look forward 100, 200, 300 years, to the time when the vast subcontinent of Australia will contain an enormous population. And when that great population will look back through the preceding periods of time to the world-shaking episode of the Great War, and when they will seek out with the most intense care every detail of that struggle; when the movements of every battalion, of every company, will be elaborately unfolded to the gaze of all; when every family will seek to trace some connection with the heroes who landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula, or fought on the Somme, or in the other great battles in France’
– Winston Churchill, 16 December 1918

‘By Jove…Australians. There was no mistaking them. Their slouch hats told one at a glance but without them I should have known. They had a distinctive
type of their own, which marked them out from all the other soldiers of ours along the roads of war…They looked hard, with the hardness of boyhood and
a breeding away from cities or, at least, away from the softer training of our way of life. They had merry eyes (especially for the girls round the stalls), but
resolute clean-cut mouths, and they rode their horses with an easy grace in the saddle, as though born to riding…those clean-shaven, sun-tanned, dustcovered
men, who had just come out of the hell of the Dardanelles and the burning drought of Egyptian sands, looked wonderfully fresh in France. Youth,
keen as steel, with a flash in the eyes, with an utter carelessness of any peril ahead, came riding down the street. They were glad to be there. Everything was
new and good to them…They had none of the discipline imposed on our men by regular traditions. They were gipsy fellows, with none but the gipsy law in
their hearts, intolerant of restraint, with no respect for rank or caste unless it carried strength with it, difficult to handle behind the lines, quick-tempered,
foul-mouthed, primitive men, but lovable, human, generous souls when their bayonets were not red with blood…’
– Philip Gibbs, 1920

Unknown Soldier

The process of identifying as many of the Lost Diggers images as possible for this book (The Lost Diggers) has been a painstaking and often frustrating process.

The vast majority of the images were taken with the distinctive painted Thuillier canvas backdrop and that has been a useful fingerprint in identifying Thuillier pictures that had made their way back to Australia into the museum of family collections. Sometimes it has been impossible to be sufficiently sure that a particular image is the person identified by one or more family members. On occasion, more than one family has adamantly claimed a digger image as their own kin, based on a simple visual identification and comparison with family pictures. It has been heartbreaking to sometimes have to contact a family and explain that an image could not possibly be their relative because their service file shows he was never anywhere near Vignacourt, or the badges and rank insignia show that it is another person. Sometimes the identification was easy because the digger features in one of the rare Thuillier images reproduced in Australian histories or personal collections. The detective work in confirming identification has often been done with the kind of assistance of Australian War Memorial historian Peter Burness, who’s knowledge of military battalion badges and medal ribbons and striped frequently facilitated a positive identification. Personal letters and diaries, battalion war diaries and histories, and family photographs (some with captions) have also enabled the positive identification of diggers in the Thuillier images. Often families have ‘claimed’ a Thuillier image is their relative based on the simple perceived match with a family photograph but, as far as possible, this has been cross-checked by referring to personal military service files and battalion histories to ensure that a particular soldier was indeed in the Vignacourt area during the war.

Private James Dillon

NO LONGER UNKNOWN

BORN
1894
Worked in Richmond as a transport timekeeper.

DIED
Walter survived the war and died in 1973 in a nursing home in Macleod, Victoria.

REGIMENT
29th Battalion and,
5th Division Signal Company

Walter Ernest Theodore Spencer

HE NEVER TALKED ABOUT THE WAR

One of the most common refrains from family of World War I veterans is the comment that their relative never or hardly ever talked about what he experienced in the war. If he did then it was normally a funny tale of him and his mates far removed from the blood and gore of the front line fighting. The face in the photograph hints at a great deal of suffering; those eyes have seen a lot.

Walter Spencers granddaughter Faye Threlfall, says her grandfather rarely talked about the war but he dId march regularly on Anzac Day. She says that there was just two things she remembers her mother saying about Walter – he was distressed that they had to shoot their horses at the end of the war and that the British soldiers laughed at them because of the feathers on their slouch hats.

But like so many of those who served, Walter clearly never spoke to his family about the real horrors he had seen, and survived. It was a very emotional moment for the family to get a copy of his photograph because they had no high quality images of Walter as a soldier; he had returned from the war and tried to forget about it.

Walter was not good at writing letters to his family back in Australia. It was not difficult to speculate that Walter found it difficult to write because of the terrors he had experienced in the few months since he had arrived in France. How could a young lad write home with any degree of levity after what he had seen?

On 19 July, Walters battalion was part of the Fromelles attack and then for another eleven days they had to hold off a fierce German counter-attack from the crack Bavarian troops. The battalion diary records the grim statistics that the 29th battalion lost fiftytwo men killed in action and another 164 men wounded. It was an horrific blooding. In the following years of war, Walter and his 29th were in the thick of major trench warfare in battles such as Polygon Wood, Amiens, the St. Quentin Canal and the Hindenburg Line.

As a signaller, Walter had to ensure the vital communications were kept open between the front lines and rear echelon headquarters. He and his mates often had to expose themselves to enemy artillery, rifle and machine-gun fire as they scurried across between trench lines to reconnect severed cables.

The 29th Battalion diary records that Walter Spencer and his colleagues arrived in Vignacourt on French ‘motor-buses’ on 7 November 1916, staying in billets there for eleven days to re-equip, dry, clean and repair their gear before returning into the line. This was almost certain the period when Walter posed for the Thuilliers.

Soon after the Armistice, Walter went to England where he met 29 year-old Dulcie Pink and were married in March 1919 and by June 1920 they had a son – Ernest William Sidney Spencer. Walter and his new family left England for Australia at the end of August 1920 and arrived in Melbourne in late October. He was officially discharged on 20 January 1921 and returned to work as a clerk, living out the rest of his life in the Melbourne suburbs of Brunswick and Preston.

He and Dulcie had four more children – two sons and two daughters. Walter died in 1973 at a nursing home in Macleod, Victoria. Two of his three sons, Norman and Ernie were old enough to serve in World War II. Norman went on to work as a television producer after the war, introducing one of Australia’s biggest entertainment stars, Graham Kennedy to the TV industry.