Lost Diggers

Unknown Soldier

In July 2011, with the generous support of Seven’s Network Chairman, Kerry Stokes AC, the entire Thullier collection of around 4,000 glass photographic plates were purchased from the living decendants of Louis and Antoinette Thuillier, the couple who had supplemented their farming income during World War 1 by selling pictures to passing Allied soldiers. If Louis and Antoinette were alive today they would no doubt be mighty chuffed and probably very surprised to see just how much passion these portraits of thousands of young soldiers from a war so long ago has aroused.

In late 2011, the Lost Diggers did finally ‘come home’, in a gigantic packing case, purpose-built to carry the plates, along with the Thuillier’s canvas backdrop. After months of planning, cataloguing, careful cleaning and scanning, the Australian digger plates were gifted to the Australian War Memorial for permanent display. Many of the more intriguing digger images and the stories behind them formed the basis of a touring photographic exhibition organised by the AWM.

More than once in our research it has struck us how impermanent many of the records that we rely on today are in comparison with the handwritten files, letters, printed photographs and glass photographic plate negatives that have the Lost Diggers such a rich collection. As we begin examining the plates, drawing on the expertise of people like Peter Burness, it was a revelation to discover how, in many ways, the photographic plates used by the Thuilliers are actually a superior storage medium to the standard celluloid photographic negative, let alone digital imaging. Not only have they lasted nearly a century already, but also so much information is packed into these hugely detailed negative plates that it was often possible for us to zoom in on a colour patch or medal ribbon to enable a Lost Digger to be indentified. There is something terribly poignent about being able to zoom in on the pained and weary eyes of an individual soldier in a group photograph, to actually see the mud on his boots and the texture of his uniform. As we applied modern photo-processing software, it was astonishing to see faces emerge from the murk of so many plates – images that could so easily have been lost forever. Many times we have asked ourselves how much of today’s history will survive to the same extent. How many personal handwritten letters have we preserved today that will record the thoughts and experiences of our loved ones for the future generations to read? What was once recorded in a letter just a few decades ago is now just an electronic impulse stored on magnetic media whos lifespan can still currently only be guessed at. Will the digital records of today- the photographs, emails and writings on other online ephemera such as Facebook, Twitter and websites allow the people of Australia in a hundred years to explore the history of our present era with as many resources as remain from World War 1? How much of our heritage and experiences will be lost as contemporary storage media slowly fade or are carelessly deleted?

Joseph Wood

THE LIMBLESS SOLDIER

He looks like the larrikin his family says he was, but Joseph Wood was another 29th Battalion soldier (the same unit in which Walter Spencer served) whose war experience took a terrible toll on him, although he dealt with it with enormous grace and good humour.

When this image – then anonymous – appeared on the television stories announcing the discovery of the Lost Diggers plates early in 2011, Joseph’s family recognised him immediately. But they were also struck by how much the Joseph they knew looked in this photograph as if he had ‘died behind his eyes’. When this picture was taken in November 1916, Joseph had just survived weeks of gruelling trench warfare in and out of the frontlines around Fromelles and within a year his life was to be blighted by the loss of a limb.

His story highlights the often grim plight of tens of thousands of diggers who survived the war but had to struggle for years with a major disability. In Joe’s case – or ‘Jo’s, as his family dubbed him – he lost his right leg, but Joe’s way of dealing with it was typically often very amusing.

Joseph was born to a poor working-class family in Northern England, he spoke later in life of never having enough to eat. In 1908 he and brother decided their prospects were better on the other side of the world and boarded a ship to Australia. Joseph was just thirteen.

By the time the war began six years later, Joseph was living at Newmarket in Melbourne and working as a bottle blower.

Joseph enlisted in July 1915 part of reinforcements for the 29th Battalion. Perhaps Joseph decided to enlist because he had few ties to Australia and it was a chance for a trip back to England to see his other, a journey that would have been almost certainly unaffordable for him otherwise.

Joseph survived the slaughter of Fromelles, but he was wounded in action in December 1917 – possibly at Messines. Years later he told his family that he was lying in a field with many dead soldiers and the Germans allowed a halt to the guns for the Allies to collect their dead; Joseph said he pretended to be dead until he was rescued. Joseph was being treated for a severe wound to the thigh, he was sent to England and hospitalised until June 1918, but attempts to save his infected leg failed. Twelve days after the Armistice his right leg was amputated.

Joseph Wood arrived back in Australia on a hospital ship in October 1919 and was sent to a recovery hospital for amputees in Sorrento in Melbourne. It was there he met Mary Ethel Murphy – or Molly and soon married and had two children, Graham and Nola.

During the Depression, the Wood family moved to Lithgow, where Joseph worked in the small-arms factory. His grandson, Graham, says he was one of the few men in Lithgow who remained employed during the Depression and he got the job largely because he was a war veteran and an amputee.

Joseph Wood’s daughter, Nola Hayley, says her father never spoke about the war other than to tell the occasional story about his injury and he never complained even though he was often in a lot of pain.

Joseph died of a heart attack in 1980, just one day after visiting a doctor and complaining about pains in his chest.

George Gordon Gilbert

THE SAD YOUNG DIGGER OF POZIERES

The look on the face of this young man saw him dubbed the ‘Sad Young Digger’. He appears three times in the collection twice in the group photographs and once in a single portrait. While some soldiers are smiling or clowning around in portraits, in each of his images, he has the same anguished expression. What horrors might he have seen to make him so achingly sad? It became a priority to put a name to his distinctive face. What emerged was that the sad young digger had indeed been a part of one of the bloodiest battles in Australian history; and he had good reason to be sad.

In the dreadful fighting that was to come in Pozieres, the Australians suffered more than 23,000 casualties in just six weeks – including an estimated 7,000 killed or missing – in an area no more that a square kilometre.

War historian Charles Bean wrote that the Windmill site at Pozieres ‘marks a ridge more densely sown with Australian sacrifice, than any other place on Earth’.

The identification of the sad digger was solved by a letter written by a fellow soldier Horace Parton where he points out George Gilbert in referencing a group photograph.

George Gilbert had blue eyes, brown hair, and was five feet seven inches tall (170 centimetres). He weighed just nine stone (fifty-seven kilograms). An additional description says he had a small scar on his cheek and a careful look at the individual Thuillier portrait shows this small scar just above his right lip.

George Gordon Gilbert was most likely a lot younger that his service records suggest. His enlistment papers point to him being nineteen years old when he enlists in May 1915. It seems more likely that he put up his age when he enlisted and was most likely only seventeen at the time. He was barely eighteen years old when the Thuillier pictures were taken.

Gilbert was from Birmingham in England and had come to Australia when he was sixteen, only to find himself off to war in Europe within a year. His family remained in England; a note on his service record indicates he provided no contact details in Australia. The only address is that of his father, William Martin Gilbert of Kenelm Road, Small Heath, Birmingham. There are few other details on the file except for the from red script, ‘Killed in Action’.

Young George Gilbert died in the front line action at St. Martin’s Wood near Amiens. Horace Parton describes it in a letter to his sister Vera: ‘The night before the stunt we were in support trenches. Everybody was asleep and Fritz was putting a few over and at last he got one right in our section’. Gilbert was killed by the shell and is buried in the Cerisy-Gailly French War Cementery not far from the town of Corbie. At least now the sad young digger – possibly – has the dignity of a name.

Edmond Herbert Lewis

ALL THAT IS LEFT OF THEM – THE 19TH BATTALION MUTINY

The portrait tells and interesting story, about a decision close to the end of the war, which provoked what some have called a mutiny among hardened Australian troops from the 19th Battalion and which others have more gently referred to as a ‘soldiers strike’. The sign at the feet of this soldier reading ‘All that is left of them 19th Battalion N.S.W. France’ is likely to have been a frustrated and angry comment by this digger about a hugely controversial decision made in September 1918 to dissolve the 19th Battalion and to absorb its members into other battalions of the 2nd division.

Edmond Herbert Lewis, a Gallipoli veteran, who had signed up early in the war – his service number just 268 – was one of those diggers who was clearly upset by the decision.

The problem for allied commanders was that, without conscription – which had been rejected in a national referendum – the number of new recruits willing to sign up was beginning to dry up by this late stage of the war. The grim casualty lists printed in newspapers across Australia had long dispelled romantic notions of adventure and fighting for King and country. Among the diggers who were serving, there was a growing sense of anger and frustration that they were carrying so much of the load after so many years of war and some felt they had the right to strike, despite severe military law that defined their actions as mutiny – punishable by death.

The reason for the 19th Battalion’s mutiny was that its soldiers were not refusing to fight – they were objecting to the decision to disband the 19th and to merge its men with other battalions because it was so depleted by years of fighting.

On 23 September, commanders ordered the 19th, 21st, 25th, 37th, 42nd, 54th and 60th battalions to be disbanded to reinforce others. As the Australian War Memorial records, ‘All but the 60th refused to disband and on 27th September (General) Monash postponed the order until after the coming attack on the Hindenburg line. Eventually all the battalions ordered to disband did so – no soldier from the disbanded battalions was changed.

This picture was most likely taken when the 19th was billeted in Vignacourt in October 1918, just after the decision was made to merge its men with other units because of acute manpower shortages. Lewis joined the 18th Battalion on 9 November (the 18th was also in Vignacourt for three weeks in November 1918, so the picture could also have been taken then).

Edmond Lewis was originally a Tasmanian, born in Hobart, but he enlisted in Liverpool in Sydney in February 1915. An older soldier, he was thirty four married to Louisa and working as an accountant when he signed up. Lewis left for Gallipoli with the 19th Battalion in June 1915, arriving in August, but within a week he suffered a shrapnel wound to the head when his company was part of the Hill 60 attack.

Lewis was sent to hospital in England and spent months in a convalescent home before rejoining his unit on the Western Front in France in April 1916. There was to be no rest for the 19th – its Gallipoli – hardened veterans were much admired as shock troops and were thrown into the Battle of Pozieres in July and August.

The 19th Battalion also fought at the Second Battle of Bullecourt, Menin Road, Poelcapelle in Belgium, Battle of Mont St. Quentin and Montbrehain in October.

For Edmond Lewis to have survived to the end of the war as he did was a statistical improbability, for his unit had seen some of the hardest battles of the entire conflict. He was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal (which he appears to be wearing above his left breast pocket in the picture) and died early 1938.

Angus Wilson

ONE OF THE PIONEERS

Pioneer battalions were seen as a less glamorous military unit because they were not primarily intended to be combat troops but to keep roads and supplies open to the front lines for the infantry troops they were there to support. But as 23 year old Private Angus Valentine Wilson soon found out when he joined up in June 1915, the diggers in the Pioneers often found themselves fighting for their lives on the front lines. Their job also required them to dig trenches and build roads and other fortifications in the open plains of the Somme, where the soldiers were easy targets for artillery and snipers.

Angus Valentine Wilson was already married with one child when he signed up; that son was named Donald – who at the time of writing, is still alive aged ninety-seven and has delightedly confirmed that this is his father in the picture as has Donald’s younger sister Joy Davies.

A milkman from Williamstown in Melbourne, Angus joined the 4th Pioneer Battalion when it was created in Egypt in March 1916. He was clearly a bit of a lad: Angus’ service file records him being punished in July 1916 for drunkenness, disobedience of orders and unspecified conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline. It appears they threw the book at him and docked him nearly a month’s pay. Joy Davies, one of Angus’ other two children (the other was Ivy Elizabeth), says: ‘That’d be right’. Dad was a bit of a larrikan. Everybody loved my father because he had such an outgoing personality.

Shortly after, in Junse 1916, the 4th Pioneers operated around Albert and during the Battle of Pozieres; in late August they were constructing trenches near Mouquet Farm.

Angus clearly so impressed his commanders during the battle that in November 1916 he was promoted to Lance Corporal. He was wounded in action near Ypres on 18 October 1917 when a German bomber dropped high explosives. Within weeks of his recovery, Corporal Angus Wilson was promoted to a Sergeant and by July 1918 he was being commented for his gallantry.

17/07/1918 – The Corps Commander congratulates Sergeant Wilson for courage, determination and resources when on 4/07/1918 he went out with a party under very heavy fire to reconnoiter and mark out a line for a communication trench.

Angus Wilson returned to Australia in July 1919 and not long afterwards he was informed that he had been accorded the Military Medal for another act of heroism.

4th Australian Pioneer Battalion, Sergeant Angus Wilson. On the night of September 18-19 near Le Vergier, Sergeant Wilson was in charge of a platoon on wiring work, forward of the front line position. His splendid example of cool determination was alone responsible for his success in getting his men onto the job through much harassing fire on the way out and while actually working, he organised and disposed of his party in a most efficient manner and succeeded in accomplishing a well executed piece of work under very hazardous and trying conditions.

Joy Davies remembers how her father rarely spoke about the ‘nasty side’ of the war until very late in life. But she says, ‘looking back in my childhood, I remember I could hear my father in the night screaming. He would be up the next day laughing and carrying on. He had a wonderful ability to be happy’.

Perhaps Angus figured that after what he had been through in the war, he was entitled to take a few risks because he kept on smoking until he died in his eighties.

Angus’ 97 year old son Donald also served in the army – in World War II. He has fond memories of he and his father travelling from Williamstown on the train to watch Collingwood play football at Victoria Park; the only hint of Angus’ heroic war service was his walking cane and a slight limp.

Alexander Fullford (Ford) Bechervaise

FROM GALLIPOLI TO THE SOMME 1916

The story of the two Bechervaise lads, Noel and Ford, is a fitting curtain-raiser for the Lost Diggers pictures because of what it tells us of a very different era in Australian history, a time of fealty to family, unswerving loyalty to a British sovereign and firm belief in God.

Both young men performed breathtaking acts of heroism, but their role in this awful conflict has largely disappeared from the official history. All the more reason that their status as Lost Diggers now be acknowledged and their story told.

In late September 1914, a young Geelong man by the name of Noel Edward Bechervaise enlisted ‘for King and Country’. He was one of the sons of a local accountant, Edward Bechervaise. Another younger son was Alexander Fullford Bechervaise, better known as Ford. He enlisted a few months after his brother on 11 January 1915, just a few weeks short of his twentieth birthday; a letter from his father appears on his military file giving him permission to enlist because he was not yet twenty-one. Both young men were destined to take over their father’s accountancy business if and when they returned after the war. But by the time this photograph of Ford Bechervaise was taken in mid-November 1916 when his unit visited the Thuillier studio in Vignacourt, a great deal had changed.

At the time Noel was charging up the beach and cliffs at Anzac Cove, Ford now assigned to reinforce the 5th Battalion in Gallipoli, had set sail from Australia. It would be many weeks before he learned of his brother’s fate.

By the time Australian troops evacuated from Gallipoli, Ford Bechervaise had impressed his commanders and by November 1915 he was a Corporal, then a Sergeant by March the following year. By December 1916, his father was proudly boasting to relatives that his 21-year-old son had been made an officer, promoted to Second Lieutenant. “He is only 21, a fine stamp of a youngster and was Geelong’s champion swimmer’.

Ford survived Gallipoli, his 5th Battalion soon arrived in France. We know from the battalion’s regimental diary that it visited Vignacourt for just a couple of weeks – training, resting and getting refitted with new clothes and other personal items – in mid November 1916.

At the end of March 1917, Ford was promoted to First Lieutenant. He later suffered a series of illnesses – scabies, septic knees and a ruptured ligament in his left ankle. They saw him in and out of hospital over several months. Then in mid-1918, the 5th Battalion was involved in the massive effort to hold back the German Spring offensive. For his actions during this offensive, Lieutenant Bechervaise was awarded a Military Cross.

Ford Bechervaise returned safely to Australia in early April 1919. He soon married and went to live on a property at Ferny Creek in Victoria. He and Vera had two daughters. He served as a Major in Darwin in World War ll. Also serving in that later was was Noel Haynes Bechervaise, one of Ford’s nephews, who was born in December 1916 and named after his uncle who had died at Gallipoli.

Alexander Fullford Bechervaise died in 1969. A keen swimmer in his youth – he might have represented Australia in the Olympics if war had not broken out – one of the cups he won has become a perpetual trophy for swimming at Mentone Girls Grammer School. Decades on, the wife of his grandnephew Neil Bechervaise, was principal when Ford’s daughters presented the trophy.

Edward ‘Tiny’ John Falloon

STANDING TALL

Edward Falloon was from Richmond, Victoria, and worked as an electrician before enlisting in 1914. Those who knew him described him as strongly built, standing over 6 feet tall, earning him the nickname Tiny.

He served on Gallipoli with the 2nd Field Company, Australian Engineers, and in March 1916 was sent to France.In July and August 1916 the 2nd Field Company served near the French village of Pozières. Corporal Falloon and his comrades provided support to the infantry, digging and repairing trenches and gun emplacements under some of the heaviest shell fire of the war. It was for is conduct during this battle that Tiny Falloon was awarded the Military Medal.

The recommendation reads:
During the operations against Pozières, from the 20th to the 25th of July, he showed high courage and devotion to duty, setting a fine example to the men under him under very heavy shell fire, and inspired them with great confidence.

Through January and February 1916, the 2nd Field Company was posted around the French town of Vignacourt, and during this period Tiny visited the makeshift photographic studio of Louis and Antoinette Thuillier, and had his photo taken. He is one of a growing number of Australian soldiers who have recently been identified in the collection of glass-plate negatives discovered at Vignacourt, some of which are now in the collection of the Australian War Memorial. It is this image that is displayed today beside the Pool of Reflection. In March 1917, near the French town of Bazentin, Falloon was working with his own section of engineers and inspecting the work of another section some distance away. Both parties came under German artillery fire. Falloon led the second section to cover and, realising that the first section were still exposed, ran over 300 yards under fire to ensure that they, too, were safely under cover. His bravery in risking his own safety to ensure that of his men saw him awarded a bar to his Military Medal.

In October 1917 he was promoted to Company Sergeant Major and transferred to the 1st Field Company, Australian Engineers. He joined his new unit in Belgium, serving in areas around Ypres during the first few months of 1918. In April the Germans started the second part of their Spring Offensive around Ypres. In the early days of this offensive, Tiny Falloon was killed. As he stood in a trench with his men, a single bullet from a burst of machine-gun fire struck him through the head, killing him instantly. He was reportedly buried by his comrades on the grounds of a nearby farm, but the area was devastated in subsequent fighting, and the location of his grave was lost. His name is now recorded on the Villers-Bretonneux Memorial in France.