Alas, after nearly 200 posts and a number of personal messages it is time to call it quits, I think.
The redoubtable Ros (“rosball”) has visited the National Reference Service’s Chester Hill Reading Room and pm’d me a link to 47 photographs she took of Donald’s army medical file.
Unfortunately there is no reference to his death. The file, however, does reveal a little more sadness about Don.
It seems that whatever physical or psychological damage he sustained in the war, it remained with him. He tried life in Scotland at first, working for a farm contractor as a “body-builder”. (I guess that would have been building tractor/plough/wagon bodies - there were no “personal trainers” in those days!) But Don was unable to hold on to a job. Every few weeks he would have vomiting episodes, making him unfit for work for 2-3 days at a time. These episodes continued after he returned to Australia in 1920.
The help from the army was probably less than ideal. When he was assessed for ongoing support it was considered that his earning capacity was reduced by just one sixth for a period of only six months. So when that six months was up his small pension was reduced. (Before the war he worked as a carpenter for New South Wales Railways for 3 pounds 12 shillings a week.) His war Pension of 10 shillings a fortnight was reduced to 6 shillings and Effie’s was reduced from 5 to 3 shillings. Then in early 1921 his pension was cancelled altogether. Although he still claimed to be suffering attacks he was assessed as not being pathologically affected but perhaps it was “pure neurosis” and his ability to work was now unaffected.
And there the then-contemporary part of the file ends.
There is one much later entry, a newspaper clipping from July 1934, noting Effie’s being granted a decree nisi.
There is probably more truth in the family story than I initially gave it credit for. Don did last appear in the Riverina area. His pension had been cancelled but perhaps he was still carrying an army pay book for identification purposes. Perhaps the rest of the story is true as well - that he committed suicide and the only means of identification was that army record found (on a body? in clothes?).
There would have been something in an army file covering the events but, as Dr Brendan Nelson of the Australian War Memorial says in his email, many paper records were long ago destroyed. It is surprising that no newspaper report has been located, but if no body was found there may not have been much of a story.
Thank you once again to everyone who contributed or simply took an interest in this story. I’m going to again list all those who posted: Jamjar, rosball, majm, Rosinish, cando, judb, Rena, sparret, Ruskie, Pheno, phenolphthalein and brigidmac.
And again, special thanks to JM (“MAJM”) for her expertise and advice and who made a partial breakthrough with her discovery of Donald in West Wyalong.
And finally to Ros who really went above and beyond with her scrutinising of Ancestry’s entire database of coroner’s reports of unknown deaths in New South Wales and her very special visits to photograph Donald’s divorce file and army medical file.
Thank you.
Don, R.I.P.
Cheers, everyone. Have a good Easter.
Peter
