Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Francis Dormick Nethery

(1883–1945)

11th Battalion AIF

Before the War

Francis Dormick (Dominic) Nethery was born on 25 March 1883 in the Adelaide suburb of Norwood, South Australia. His mother Nellie (Ellen Maria) Nethery was a 17 year old unmarried girl from the Burra area; his father was unknown.

Francis may not have known his precise birthplace. On several sets of enlistment papers he named first Burra (1915) and then Port Augusta (1916, 1917) as his birthplace. Most likely he was brought up in both towns. His mother’s parents, John James and Ellen Nethery, had lived in the Burra area for some years where John was a building contractor. After John died accidentally in 1878, his widow Ellen moved to Port Augusta where she owned property.

Everything suggests his upbringing was in a house familiar with sadness. His grandmother Ellen had lost her husband John then her 15 year old second daughter within a few months in 1878. In 1882, her eldest daughter Mary Ann died and in 1883 her youngest, unmarried teenager Nellie, gave birth to Francis. In 1993 Nellie, pregnant again, married police constable Norman McBeath Campbell and soon followed him to his posting in the Northern Territory where they lived for some years.

Ellen and John Nethery had married in Bunbury, WA in 1856 before coming to South Australia. In the early 1900s, Ellen returned to Western Australia, to Perth. Francis lived in Perth from around the same time. She ran a green grocery business for a time, and Francis’ occupation on the 1913 electoral roll was ‘fruiterer’.

War Service

Francis signed his enlistment papers on 14 January 1915. He was of dark complexion, with brown eyes and black hair, and 5’6¾” tall (the minimum requirement was 5’6”). His occupation was labourer, his religion Roman Catholic. His next of kin was recorded as Francis Dominic of 3 Shearer St, Perth, relationship mother. It was an error, probably clerical, combining his own names with his grandmother’s address, but it strengthens the argument that she was his adoptive mother.[1]

Nethery was assigned to the 11th Battalion of the 3rd Infantry Brigade. The 11th had been raised in Western Australia shortly after the outbreak of war in August 1914 and the battalion’s first contingent was already in Egypt training. Nethery was assigned to the 3rd Reinforcements. He embarked on HMAT Itonus in Fremantle on 22 February for the three-four week voyage to Egypt. On board already were troops from Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania. Among his fellow Western Australians was Private Albert Facey, later to write A Fortunate Life.

By the time HMAT Itonus reached Alexandria in Egypt, the 11th Battalion was awaiting instructions on Lemnos Island off the Dardanelles Peninsula. Men from the 3rd Reinforcements joined them on 10 April.[2] If Nethery was among those reinforcements (by no means certain), then he may well have been in the landing boats when the men of the 11th Battalion led the first wave of troops onto the beach at Gallipoli in the early hours of 25 April 1915. If not, he was most likely in the additional reinforcements that arrived on 7, 8 or 9 May. What is certain however that by 8 May, the 11th Battalion had suffered severe casualties: 45 men killed, 220 wounded, 188 missing, a total of 453.[3]

What is also certain is that on 31 May, Francis Nethery was sick. He was admitted to the 4th Field Ambulance in the hills above Anzac Cove and then transferred via long boat to a hospital ship out at sea. He had epilepsy, typically manifested in fits and convulsions. There was no reference in his service record to a head wound, a common cause of epilepsy among troops, though he later claimed he had been hit in the head. Even without a head injury, it can be assumed that the terrible fighting and conditions, the sights and the stench of the Gallipoli experience had taken a great toll on him that precipitated convulsions. For example, he may have been in one of the burial parties that worked during the armistice on 24 May to retrieve and bury hundreds and hundreds of decomposing bodies.[4]

Nethery was sufficiently ill to be away from his unit for a month. He rejoined it on 1 July 1915, fortunate in that he avoided being among the numerous Australian casualties at Slit Spur on 28 June.

Three weeks later, on 21 July, Nethery was hospitalised again, this time with diarrhoea. Diarrhoea was rampant in the trenches so Nethery’s hospitalisation suggested his condition was serious. In fact, his hospitalisation on Lemnos marked the beginning of the end of his overseas service. He spent a fortnight in No 2 Australian Stationary Hospital in West Mudros and then for the next five weeks was transferred between various Australian and British hospitals on Lemnos, all of them desperately overstretched and underequipped. His diagnosis changed to gastritis. Finally Nethery was evacuated from Lemnos and sent to England where he was admitted to No 3 London General Hospital in Wandsworth on 2 September 1915.

After over a month in hospital, Nethery was transferred to the Base Depot at Weymouth in Dorset on 7 October. The Depot had been set up in June to accommodate sick and injured troops from the Gallipoli campaign and relieve the pressure on hospitals on Lemnos and in Egypt. Set in a pleasant seaside town, it housed convalescent troops who would be sent back to their units when fit and back to Australia if deemed unfit for active service. Nethery was in the latter group: after several months at Weymouth, he returned to Australia on the hospital ship Suevic suffering from gastritis and debility. Before the ship left, the so-called ‘unfits’ were addressed by Lieutenant General Sir Newton Moore, commander of the Weymouth depot. He assured the ‘war torn Anzacs’ that their ‘magnificent services’ at Gallipoli were appreciated and that they would have a hearty reception on their return to Australia.[5] The Suevic reached Fremantle a year almost to the day of the first Gallipoli landing.

Nethery was admitted to No 8 General Hospital in Fremantle and then discharged from the 11th Battalion on 29 May 1916 as permanently unfit.[6] He had served 14 months, most of them in hospital, convalescence or transit, the other weeks at the Gallipoli front.

Francis Nethery recovered sufficiently to return his fruit stall located outside Perth station’s main entrance. In September he advertised for a ‘smart lad’ for [his] returned soldiers fruit stand’.[7] Two months later, on 6 November he re-enlisted and again went into the training camp at Blackboy Hill, the large facility through which most of WA’s recruits passed.[8] As required he listed his previous service with the 11th Battalion, but declared his discharge was due to rheumatism. His medical report noted one deformed finger on his left hand. His next of kin was Ellen Nethery of Perth West, described as his mother.

Nethery was allocated to 22 Depot at Blackboy Hill as a guard. A third set of attestation documents he signed five months later on 14 April 1917 placed him in 22 Depot (Pioneers), that is, with labouring duties such as woodchopping.

Three weeks later Nethery was arrested by military police and found guilty of drunkenness and obscene language. He was sentenced to 168 hours (24 days) detention from 9 May. A week later, 16 May, he was discharged from the army, his ‘services no longer required.’

There are no later details in Nethery’s service record other than the award of his campaign medals (the 1914-15 Star, the British War Medal and the Victory Medal), and an indication of a Repatriation Department file from September 1926.

After the War

From then on, Nethery’s life went downhill into a spiral of drunkenness, court appearances, fines and imprisonment.[9] His name appeared in the Perth newspapers regularly, once as a pall-bearer at the funeral of a dead soldier (which must have brought back terrible memories)[10] but otherwise for trials and/or imprisonment for being an habitual drunkard and sometimes for theft. In the 1920s he was regularly before the courts, on one occasion for absconding from a Salvation Army Inebriates Home (an action possibly related to the recent death of his grandmother/adoptive mother).[11] His ‘whole trouble’, he told a magistrate in 1921 was due to fits brought on by the war.’[12] In 1926 he was hospitalised with head injuries due to a fall.[13]  He later explained to a magistrate that he had suffered a head wound in the war which resulted in numerous falls; as a result he said he had ‘gone for more rides in an ambulance than anybody in Perth.’[14]

In 1928 he received the first of a number of prison sentences with hard labour for habitual drunkenness.[15] Nethery’s last reported imprisonment was in 1936, when he was sentenced to six months for theft and habitual drunkenness.[16] He was by this point a pensioner, having progressively lost his trades as a fruiterer, labourer, and bootblack.

Francis Nethery died in Perth on 1 June 1945. He was buried as Francis Dominicant Nethery.  in the Roman Catholic section of Karrakatta Cemetery, the same section as Ellen.

He was a soldier who had survived Gallipoli but whose health and life completely unravelled in the years that followed.

(Acknowledgements: Thanks to Sue Scarfe for her genealogical and follow-up research.)  

[1] Unless stated otherwise, details of Nethery’s military service are taken from his Service Record, digitised on the National Archives of Australia website.
[2] Western Mail (WA), 13 January 1938 p9.
[3] John Hurst, Game to the Last: The 11th Australian Infantry Battalion at Gallipoli, Big Sky Publishing, 2nd edition, 2011, p73.
[4] Hurst, Game to the Last, p88-89.
[5] The Journal (Adelaide), 25 April 1916, p2; David Adams, 'Moore, Sir Newton James (1870–1936)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/moore-sir-newton-james-7639/text13355, published first in hardcopy 1986, accessed online 7 April 2017.
[6] Camp Chronicle (WA), 20 April 1916, p6.
[7] West Australian, 5 September 1916, p8.
[8] Nethery. Service Record; Camp Chronicle, 9 November 1916.
[9] A Frank Nethery, a carrier and cabman in Perth had been involved in minor skirmishes with the law before the war for hawking in a prohibited area and creating a disturbance (e.g. West Australian, 13 April 1911, p4). It is not clear if Frank and Francis Dominic were one and the same person.
[10] Daily News (Perth), 20 June 1920, p1.
[11] Western Australian, 28 July 1924, p1.
[12] Daily News (Perth), 4 November 1921, p4.
[13] Western Australian, 19 July 1926, p8.
[14] Daily news, 15 December 1933, p5.
[15] Daily News, 20 April 1928, p2.
[16] West Australian, 21 October 1936, p14.