Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Leslie was born in Edinburgh on 13 August 1893. He was my uncle. His father was William George Rainer, a doctor, and his mother was Isabella Dorothy Mooney. They had been married in St Kilda, Victoria on 9 September 1892. Both William and Isabella were Australian born. William died of a morphine overdose in Eidsvold Queensland on 15 November 1906. Isabella and her children Leslie, Iris, William (always known as Billy), Eva and Thomas ("Tommy") fled back to Melbourne. They were very poor and Leslie, as the eldest child, went to work in the forests of Gippsland to help support his mother and family. He would have liked to have become an artist.

When World War I began he enlisted, wrote back to his family about travelling through Egypt, climbing up inside one of the pyramids, and may have been in a ship that sank and was rescued and was at Gallipoli. He died missing in action in Flers, France in November 1916. My grandmother received a long letter from General Birdwood explaining that her son was dead and she should not have any expectations that he had survived. Nevertheless, after World War I, she and my mother (Iris) used to visit hospitals where there were shell-shocked Australian soldiers, hoping that Leslie was among them, having forgotten who he was.