Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

From Simon Deeth ‎Tasmania – The Great War 1914-1918

I have only recently discovered this photo (on the Tasmanian Library website) from The Weekly Courier, 11th July 1918. My maternal grandfather, Staff Sergeant Daniel Kyme, in the centre with the moustache, about to leave for WW1 for the third time.

Daniel was born George Robert Kyme in Victoria in 1879. He got into a spot of bother in about 1903 and moved to Tasmania, added a year to his age and changed his first names. The family story was that he got mixed up in some trade union activism and made himself unpopular in high places. Apparently he said that crossing Bass Strait was the worst experience of his life and he would never get in a boat again.

He was a pastrycook/baker by trade and ran a bakery in Wynyard and at one time was a publican in Waratah. When he enlisted in September 1914 he had been running a pub in Carrick.

He joined the 1st Australian Casualty Clearing Hospital which was formed in Hobart and sailed to Egypt on the Kyarra in December 1914. (This unit featured a Sergeant Kyme and a Sergeant Syme.) The unit arrived on the beach at Gallipoli in the late morning 25th April and set up their hospital at the foot of the hill known as the Sphinx. It was an early version of a M.A.S.H. and was one of the last units to leave in December. However Daniel had already been taken off on 12th November and eventually returned to Sydney via several hospitals.

After a couple of months he returned to the war in Europe but to a different unit, possibly the 3rd Field Ambulance. He contracted influenza in December 1916 and was hospitalised to Southall, West London where I believe he met my grandmother. However he was shipped back to Australia in September 1917 before the relationship developed.

He returned to the war for the third time in July 1918 when this photo was taken and arrived in England at the end of August. He went A.W.O.L. from the Australian camp in Wiltshire in early November and made his way to London to propose to Victoria Clark, my grandmother. She used to say that she didn't really want to say yes, but the poor fellow had gone to such a lot of trouble that she couldn't say no. They were married 18th December 1918 and he returned to Australia with his unit soon after. She followed later in 1919 and arrived in the middle of the great epidemic and spent a while in quarantine.

Daniel eventually secured work as a cook for the Hydro in the Upper Derwent Schemes and installed his family at Hawthorn Lodge, Bushy Park - a bit of a contrast for Vickie from London! Eventually they opened a bakery in North Hobart at 362 Elizabeth Street. Most of it was eventually demolished to make way for Tony Haigh Walk. He died in 1944. In 1950 Victoria returned to London but after a few years she returned to Tasmania (she queued all night to view King George's body lying in state at Westminster Abbey then trained to the ship for the voyage home.)

Daniel was a bit of a rough diamond I think. Most of the many hospitalisations in his record could be attributed to "horizontal skirmishes" well away from the front lines but he answered his country's call and went without hesitation.