Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

#4711 HANDFORD George Harold                 25th Battalion
 
George Handford was born at Goombungee on 26th March 1897 to parents Samuel and Elizabeth Handford. The family were probably farming in the Mount Darry district and George attended the Mount Darry School. George worked on the family farm and was at one time apprenticed to Samuel Baxter, a blacksmith in Goombungee.
 
George attended the Darling Downs Recruiting Depot in Toowoomba on 21st October 1915. He stated his age as 18 years and six months. Ordinarily, a recruit so young would require written permission from his parents to join the AIF. No such document is included in George’s file. Either the recruiters ignored the requirement or his father accompanied him to the recruiting depot.
 
George made his way to the Chermside Camp where he was placed in a depot battalion. In January 1916, George was allocated to the 12th reinforcements of the 25th Battalion. After travelling by train to Sydney, George and the other 240 reinforcements under the command of two second lieutenants embarked on the “Mooltan” on 12th April 1916. The embarkation roll shows that George had allocated 4/- of his 5/- a day pay to his family.
 
There is a substantial gap in George’s file from embarkation but it likely that the troop ship sailed via Melbourne and Fremantle before crossing to South Africa and on out into the Atlantic. The Australian Transports were all converted passenger steamers which from the beginning of 1916 began to use the longer Atlantic route to avoid U Boats in the Mediterranean and English Channel approaches. The reinforcements probably landed at Plymouth in early June and from there made their way to the 7th Brigade Training Camp at Perham Downs on Salisbury Plain. On 11th September 1916, George embarked on a cross-channel ferry for the overnight trip to Havre on the French Coast. Havre was the site of the large British Training and Transit Camp. Two months later, George was taken on strength by the 25th Battalion at Mametz Camp.
 
While George was making his way from Havre to the front, the 25th was slogging through mud at Flers in an effort to win the high ground in front of Bapaume. After suffering heavy casualties, the Australians withdrew. Recriminations were not slow in coming. Brig Gen Holmes, who was miles from the battlefield, described the efforts of the 7th Brigade as “pretty cheap”. He would eventually have both the commanders of the 25th and 26th Battalions sacked.
 
In an effort to salvage some respectability, Holmes ordered that as soon as reinforcements could be moved up, the brigade would resume the attack. One of the reinforcements was George Handford who walked in to the 25th lines on 11th September. The men of the 25th were exhausted. They had been exposed to the biting cold and mud during the previous week for no substantial gain. To add to the misery, it snowed. The mud in the trenches was freezing cold and thigh deep. No doubt George must have thought he was in hell.
 
The second attack went forward on 14th November, with the same result as before. When the 25th was able to take stock of their losses at a muster parade at Fricourt, there were only 250 men out of a nominal strength of 900. The casualties included those killed, wounded, sick or missing. One of the missing was George Handford. He had been with his battalion three days.
 
In an inexplicable error, George’s mother was informed by telegram that he was “Wounded and Missing.” She wrote to the authorities asking for an explanation as to how a person can be both wounded and missing. Almost two months later, Samuel and Elizabeth Handford received a letter from a British soldier, Lance Corporal Shaw. In the letter, Shaw related how he had been sent out into the former no man’s land to retrieve paybooks and identity discs from the bodies of men who had been killed during the attacks at Flers and which had been lying unburied for more than six weeks. George Handford’s was one of the bodies located. In his pocket he had letters from his parents which provided Shaw with an address to write to. Shaw also stated that he had buried George on the battlefield and marked the grave.
 
Elizabeth received a small parcel of her son’s effects; cards, photos and a brass kit bag handle. A court of inquiry convened on 20th October 1917, almost 12 months after the action at Flers, that George Handford had been killed in action.
 
The location of George’s remains troubled his family. At the end of the war, Sergeant Walter Adkins from Mount Darry, who was married to George’s elder sister, spent some time scouring the Flers battlefield looking for his brother-in-law without success. In 1938, some 20 years after the end of the First World War, the Australian Government constructed the Australian National Memorial at Villers Bretonneux. The memorial was dedicated by the newly crowned King George VI. The memorial records the names of over 10,000 Australian soldiers who lost their lives in France and have no known grave; George Handford among them.