Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Private Walter Henry Mountford (Service Nos:WX38960/W12043) enlisted in the ACMF on 9 September 1940 and served with 13th Infantry Brigade, 44 and 11 Infantry Battalions before transferring to 24 Coy AASC. Private Mountford was in Darwin, NT - 10 March 1943 to 21 July 1944 - and whilst posted there with 24 Coy AASC he transferred to the AIF. He discharged on 24 December 1944. Private Mountford's father, two siblings and a brother-in-law also served in WWII and younger brother Stanley served with the BCOF in Japan (1946 - 1948).

Born in 1922 in Glamorganshire Wales, Wally was the second of eight children of Sidney (Sid Snr) Alfred Mountford (b1901 in Hay, Wales) and Margaret Kathleen Helena Pugh (b1902 in Glamorgan, Wales). Sid (a Farm Hand) and Margaret married in 1920 in Hay, Wales and in 1926 immigrated with their four children to Albany WA on board the Herminius. The family settled in Margaret River at Cowarumup on one of the Group Settlement blocks at Great Hope Valley. The family (like many others) walked off the block and lived in Picton Junction near Bunbury and Collie where Sid was a Labourer and Orchardist. In the early 1950s Sid and Margaret moved to Chidlow where they ran a store before settling in Perth WA.

Wally worked in Collie as a Miner and Labourer on his father's farm before enlisting in the ACMF. In 1945 in Adelaide, South Australia he married Estelle (Ken) Shirley Kenney (b1926 in Norwood, South Australia). The couple settled in Fremantle WA where Wally worked as a Bricklayer. In 1948 he was in the news (Trove) when he and Ken and their two small children squatted in an unfinished Commonwealth-owned home - Wally's application for a War Services home had been pending for three years and he and his family had been evicted from the two rooms they had been renting. In the late 1960s Wally and Estelle separated and in 1972 Wally remarried and lived in Perth where he was a Representative, before settling in Armadale. Wally died in 1996.