by Marian MacNally
Private Francis Harrup Northey has garnered the sort of attention from my family that other relatives never could, as his real fate was never entirely certain. There were niceties that prevented us talking about him with his immediate family, and the fact that people who lived through the war years and grief did not wish to talk about them – a time that was so very painful.
Those people grew older, died, leaving the younger to freely wonder aloud, wanting to know things what it would have been heartless to try to unlock from the breasts of our elders. There are times to ask questions, and other times when we must wait it out to prevent more pain.
My earliest memory of war and death and Frank comes from a photograph on a wall at my grandparents’ home in Wallace Street, Ivanhoe. The house was a lovely bright weatherboard with an extremely wide hall-way which also seemed extremely long to me, and at the end on the right, there was a picture of a young man, whom I knew to be Granddad’s little brother Frank, who died in the Great War. I knew he was a soldier and not alive, so that was enough to scare me from asking questions. I remember this picture and that big, long hallway, whilst others remember the large memorial death plaque. It all helps to build a picture, and shows that we experience our families through emotion and memory as much as through fact.
But I was always left with sadness that anyone or anything could have taken the brother of my dear, gentle, amusing grandfather Thomas “George” Northey. That niggling about his brother Frank remained.
I finally got my lucky break, impetus or opportunity from my children’s homework, of all things, since school homework has always been a huge bugbear for them and me. For ANZAC Day one year in the mid-2000s, their school, Rosanna Golf Links Primary School in the heart of Banyule, gave each child an old-fashioned, brown cardboard luggage label. Of course this style of label was intended to evoke days long past. In fifty years time there may be an antiquated idea like presenting the kids with old iPhones to send a Tweet on Twitter, and won’t the students look quizzically at their teachers for that antiquated form of communication!
At the school assembly, these labels were displayed like wreaths around the flag pole, telling a simple story that each label stood for a real person. The exercise was also a way of engaging the children with their parents about their relatives and with the ANZAC tradition and spirit.
As for me, in finding out about Frank’s life, I went on fact-finding missions across the internet to learn about him and other forgotten family members. I gradually found that my family has a handful of soldiers. Most were not ANZACs as they served overseas in their native Britain, but Private Francis Harrup Northey was clearly a true ANZAC, and one who had spent formative few years in Heidelberg.
We knew nothing of Frank five years ago, save that he was the young brother of my grandfather, and had been killed in action. That was it.
But with the tenacity of the family historian, I have gradually accumulated snippets and stories from family material, online services and institutional visits, which now give Frank the life story he deserved to have in his family. I began to assemble life stories for Frank’s friends, who had been forgotten on family trees, themselves single young men who did not marry and have children, his fellow ANZACs.
Finding out about Frank was not cheap or time-efficient. I had to visit my elderly great aunt, Win Broadhurst, who was a mere infant when Frank was about to leave for the war effort, and herself lived long ago in the house he knew. By this time she was elderly and in a nursing home a long way away, but had kept some keep-sakes. Some of these were two post-cards from Frank to his mother and to Win’s own mother, his sister Beatrice. Not only were there photographs of Frank, but also a soldier friend, and in reading the post-cards the story was revealed that the other chap was someone whose name and identity we had never known: the fiancé of Frank’s sister Dolly, who had ended her engagement when she was diagnosed with an illness.
Frank’s story was a typical one. He was born in 1892 in Clifton Hill, near Melbourne. His family moved to Heidelberg in the early 1890s, and it is wonderful to know that Frank and his siblings would have seen an even more magnificent view on Heidelberg’s hill than the glorious vista I see every time I travel across the intersection of Bell, Burgundy and Upper Heidelberg roads. He would have seen a village being created in a time of great change. Frank’s own brother-in-law Percy Broadhurst must surely have drawn his attention to the local scenery, as he was quite an artist and went on many outings with his brothers-in-law.
Frank lived for a few of those formative early years in a lovely house “Cleveland”, at 5 Martin Street, Heidelberg, just off what is now Burgundy Street, and his sister Dolly was born there. The house is gone, now part of the huge car park for the Austin and Warringal Hospital complexes. It would have been a fantastic place to explore, with a hill that young lads would not be able to resist climbing for that view.
His young father, just 35, died when Frank was only 6, leaving his mother to raise five children under the age of twelve years old. They relied to some degree on the kind help of an Uncle, and the Freemasons in order to obtain a home in Clifton Hill, to finally settle instead of house-hop in local streets. Frank’s dad Thomas Gideon Northey had worked for David Munro and Company in the heady days of the Boom then the disaster of the Bust. Munro’s is a fabulous story of a man and a company building railways throughout Victoria and supplying rolling stock, even family lore that his dad had something to do with the local rail bridge, but I doubt Frank would have been told much about it as it ended rather badly for both Munro and his dad. It was likely to be embarrassing and humiliating for their mother Edith who most likely wished to make her husband’s memory a positive one.
In the early part of the century, Frank’s family and his cousins, the Jamiesons, often journeyed via the old train routes to camp at King Parrot Creek, and Warburton. His brother George is seen with a rifle in some photos, so perhaps Frank knew how to handle one himself before he enlisted.
He grew into a man of 5′ 7 3 / 4″ in height, weighed 121 1 / 2 lbs, and had blue eyes, brown hair and a dark complexion.
I learned that Frank was rather clever at mathematics, and was training to be a notary or actuary with Colonial Mutual Life, and that he willed £150 to his mother when he enlisted.
He probably was thought to have a good sense of humor, since his uncle gave him a humorous book called “Cobb’s Anatomy” for Christmas in 1915, just after he had enlisted. I noticed this in one of those extraordinary moments when I chanced to look inside the book for an owner or dedication.
Like so many other young men in Melbourne, Frank heard the call. George had a heart murmur so could not enlist – I don’t yet know whether records exist for unsuccessful applications, and ironically this heart ailment has continued down the line.
He enlisted on 13th December 1915, and trained for weeks at the Broadmeadows camp, thence he took his one-way journey overseas in early March 1916 on the HMAT Wiltshire, to places he would never have gone in the course of his normal life. He went to Tel-el-Kabir, Cairo, Alexandria, and to England to visit with family. Then he moved onwards to the fateful fields of France.
We are fortunate that family kept postcards he had sent, and I was able to add them to the national archives. They tell the story of a son and brother trying to settle the worries of his mother and sister, and trying to convince them that he remained so very well. There was also a postcard dated 2 May 1917 that I have not seen, that might have had a more sombre tone as the Battalion began to prepare for battle.
It was not known in later generations that he left a fiancée behind in Royal Parade, Parkville, Melbourne, who wrote in the paper, “NORTHEY- In sad and loving memory of Pte. Frank Northey (23rd [sic] Batt.), who was killed 3rd May, 1917, at Bullecourt (previously reported missing). (Inserted by his loving fiancee, Dorris Osborne.)”
I was so glad that he had the experience of love with Dorris before the war, and in following her story I am also sad that she was left so affected.
Maybe Frank’s postcards to Dorris exist, perhaps some Osborne descendants have an engagement photo somewhere showing the happiness the couple once felt, or an engagement ring might be resting somewhere as I believe Dorris would have treasured these links with Frank. Family historians need that sort of reflection of normal life events and symbolism to weigh against some of the brutal truths we encounter.
Frank’s fiancée Dorris was to be cruelly bereaved again, when her brother, Stanley Raymond Osborne also died, a little over a year after Frank. He had tried to find out what happened to Frank when his Battalion (he was in the 58th and also the 6th) was stationed close by the 22nd Battalion, 10th Reinforcements, 6th Brigade, 2nd Division.
Yet another death in this friendship group concerned Frank’s sister Dolly: her ex-fiance, Pte. Arthur Woodward. Dolly had withdrawn her hand from marriage when she found she had a life-shortening illness. Arthur applied to enlist at the same time as Frank, sailed on the same ship, was in the same Battalion, and was pictured with Frank at a Cairo photographic studio, perhaps both sharing the excitement of experiencing new cultures and the fear of their future. He was wounded at Bullecourt two days after Frank died, and died himself within 3 weeks of Frank, at a hospital in Rouen, France, with his family describing him a week later as “an Australian hero, fighting to save us all…An Australian hero’s noble end.” At least they knew his fate quickly.
I can’t imagine how shattered those left behind from that group would feel, forced to accept a court of inquiry decision instead of really knowing with absolute certainty what became of his mortal remains. It is not surprising that his brother George did not marry until the mature age of 37, choosing to care for those who were left behind, and tend to his mother. She kept Frank’s photograph close to her bosom in an engraved locket which looks like it may have come from his time in the Cairo markets.
I wanted Frank’s life to be more than about the final two years, to know of him before the war, and I am satisfied that I have already learned a reasonable amount. However, as most material left is War-related, I want to understand more about it. I learned that Frank might have been batman for the Colonel. It sounded amusing at first, and learning about what a ‘batman” meant gave much more color to Frank’s activities. A batman was:
“a soldier … assigned to a commissioned officer as a personal servant. Before the advent of motorized transport, an officer’s batman was also in charge of the officer’s “bat-horse” that carried the pack saddle with his officer’s kit during a campaign. The term is derived from the obsolete bat, meaning “pack saddle” (from French bât, from Old French bast, from Late Latin bastum), and man. A batman’s duties often include: acting as a “runner” to convey orders from the officer to subordinates; maintaining the officer’s uniform and personal equipment as a valet; driving the officer’s vehicle, sometimes under combat conditions; acting as the officer’s bodyguard in combat; other miscellaneous tasks the officer does not have time or inclination to do. Batman was usually seen as a desirable position. The soldier was exempted from more onerous duties and often got better rations and other favors from his Officer.”
To comprehend his daily life in the theatre of war, there is a wealth of eye-witness accounts I am able to access – W.E.C. Bean’s Official War Histories of the Second Battle of Bullecourt, the Official War Diaries of the 22nd Battalion, and A.R.L. Wiltshire’s raw and honest diary, plus Captain E. Gorman’s book With the Twenty-Second: A history of the 22nd Battalion, A.I.F. Some of these are available online, some are able to be purchased.
The 22nd Battalion war diaries recorded that the Prince of Wales visited on 18th March 1917, and inspected with Lt General Sir W. Birdwood, although I do not know whether Frank had arrived there by that date. Birdwood’s name rang a bell as we have Birdwood Avenue in Macleod, a suburb in this municipality. I was pleased to research him and to realize that Birdwood had been thus honored.
I imagine the hoopla when there were such dignitaries visiting the front, and maybe the lads “photo bombed” the moving picture footage of the Prince! It was incredible to see that there was movie reel footage of the Prince and the Lt General at the front, once again online.
His “battalion spent most of 1917 bogged in bloody trench warfare from Bullecourt to Broodseinde in Flanders,” and from “3 May to 17 May 1917 [in the] Second Battle of Bullecourt [there were] two weeks of bitter trench fighting which eventually, and at the cost of 2,250 Australian casualties, cleared and held part of the Hindenburg Line.”
I also now know that Frank’s death, on the 3rd May at Bullecourt, like thousands of others there, was considered part of an important military strategy, even ‘though it was also seen as a confused mess by A.R.L. Wiltshire.
Every single member of his family and friends, and those at the battle where he fell, did not know what became of him for a long year. I try to imagine how that uncertainty would feel, in a time of major conflict, with solid but slow mail and cable services between the AIF and citizens back home. Imagine Frank’s mother, having one last postcard sent the day before he died, and the baffling official offices and people she sought for help, more than a year later still seeking news of Frank when she wrote he “was reported wounded and missing 3rd May at Bullecourt, France. Nothing further has been heard of him. If this could be done, you would have the heartfelt thanks of his mother.”
It took a year for the court to rule that Frank had been killed in action on that first day, but there was confusion as his parcel was sent from the local hospital, leading me to wonder whether he was wounded and survived for a short time, and what his last thoughts were.
For my family history, I’ve researched and been to all the family cemeteries and graves possible in Melbourne, including those in the majestic Warringal Cemetery, and seen some of my Scottish elders’ graves through photos.
As it turned out, Frank was mentioned on his sister Dolly’s headstone, at the Coburg Cemetery near Melbourne. This headstone no longer exists, and I understand the effort it would take to go to this cemetery at a time when most people did not drive, and why it would fall into disrepair.
In Frank’s case, however, I think he deserves far more from me than a visit to see his name on a commemorative memorial list at Villers Bretonneux, or the Australian War Memorial. It is not the same as being where he fell, at Bullecourt in France in the second battle on 3rd May 1917. It would be so trivial to let my fear of flying keep me from tracing his brave journey.
In the meantime, I hope that like me, you have given pause to remember ANZACs like Pte. Francis Harrup Northey.
Resources:
Resources of Trove
The Argus [newspaper] Wednesday 30 May 1917 and various other dates
National Archives of Australia service records
WW1 War Diaries for 22nd Battalion
WW1 Red Cross Wounded and Missing
Wikipedia
Ancestry Censuses for Victoria, 1890s-1900s
State Library of New South Wales, A.R.L. Wiltshire diary, 12 April -11 May 1917
With the Twenty-Second: A history of the 22nd Battalion, A.I.F., by Captain E.Gorman, MC
Resources of the Genealogical Society of Victoria
Family photographs and memorabilia.
This story was first published in “Fine Spirit and Pluck: World War One Stories from Banyule, Nillumbik and Whittlesea” published by Yarra Plenty Regional Library, August 2016
