Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

David Whittingham was the son of Henry and Eleanora Whittingham. His dad had passed away in 1900 and his mother during 1911. David was not a young man, at 42 years of age when he enlisted, and he was well known as a bank officer with the Union Bank.

A sister noted on his roll of honour form that he done a year’s training at Duntroon Military College.

Another sister, Staff-Nurse Carrie Bowden Whittingham, served as a nurse with the Australian Army Nursing Service and served in England and France from 1915 to 1919.

David joined the 13th Battalion in France just before Christmas 1916. He died during the famous attack on Stormy Trench.

The night that Captain Harry Murray of the 13th won his V.C. was a famous night in the history of the 13th Battalion. Stormy Trench was the objective. It lay between Gueudecourt and Bapaume, and had a commanding view of a wide stretch of the Somme country. It was an important trench to capture and deprive the Germans a view back over the Allied lines. The 15th Battalion captured it briefly on the 2 February, but the Germans counter-attacked so strongly that it was lost. The 13th was then ordered to take and hold it at all costs, and Murray (then Captain) was placed in charge of one of the critical Companies on the right of the line.

Their casualties were heavy, almost fifty men lost their lives, and Whittingham was seen to hit by a piece of shell shrapnel in the German trench.

In his Red Cross wounded and missing file, a mate stated, “He was in B. Coy. I have seen the wooden cross made for his grave; he was buried I think out in the open near Flers. This cross was sent by his sister, who is somewhere in France.

The Kiama Independent reported his death on 28 February 1917.

“PTE. DAVID WHITTINGHAM, we regret to hear the sad news has been communicated to Mrs. A. J. Colley, that her brother Pte. D. Whittingham has been killed in action in France. He entered his military training at camp in Kiama, the old town in which he spent his boyhood days, when his father the late Henry Whittingham, Esq., was manager of the E.S. & A. Bank, and many remain still here, who will regret the passing of an old school mate, in the strength of his manhood, and honour his memory as he gave his great gift for his country, and is numbered amongst its heroic dead. Previous to enlistment he was an esteemed official in the banking service and in private life had proved himself a devoted son to a widowed mother as long as she needed his care. Many friends who held him in high esteem will mourn him as a soldier and a man, and sincerely sympathise with his sisters in their grief for an only brother. Nurse C. B. Whittingham, a sister is also doing work for the Empire, as a member of the nursing staff of the A.I.F and has for some two years been on active service.”