Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Soon after learning that their older brother Ralph was Missing in Action, Robert and Victor enlisted on almost the same day in July 1915. Robert, a labourer, was 23 years and one month old and named his sister Margaret as next of kin. She was unmarried and living with their aunt Catherine Murray at 158 Cardigan Street, Carlton. He embarked on HMAT Ulysses at the end of October, again within a day or two of Victor. Attached to the 58th Battalion, he was stationed first in Egypt, where in March and April 1916 he spent some time in hospital, and later in England before being transferred to France on the last day of that year. He again spent some time in hospital in 1917 and in January 1918 went to England on furlough. He was court-martialled for returning two weeks late from this leave. The handwritten record is hard to read but it appears that he was again AWL for a period of five months from April to September. The sentence of the ensuing court-martial in October 1918 was 12 months' detention of which 9 months was almost immediately remitted.Robert returned to England in the following February, was demobilised in April and was granted a period of six months leave with pay to work on carriage building with a firm in Westminster. It was during this period, on 31 August 1919, that Robert married Rose Geeson, aged 24, in an Anglican service at the parish church of Bromley S. Leonard (despite having described himself as Roman Catholic on his attestation paper). The army clerk who completed the official form recording the details of the marriage from the original certificate made the inevitable mistake, recording the names of both the bridegroom and his father as "Stobans". In September 1919 Robert was on indefinite leave awaiting a family ship to return to Australia. Eventually he and Rose returned on the Honorata in April 1920.

In 1927 while the family was living at 100 Fenwick Street, North Carlton, their son Victor Bernard then aged seven suffered the loss of a foot when he was run over by a cable tram on the corner of Newry and Rathdowne Street. Despite this disability he became a talented footballer playing for the Melbourne Boys League and was described by the Sporting Globe as "dashing about on his wooden peg and blithely kicking goals". In 1937 that newspaper ran an appeal to raise money for an artificial leg to replace Victor's wooden one. He had stopped growing, it was said, and therefore the time was right. The progress of the appeal for this "limbless" boy, as he was described more than once in the Globe, was regularly reported, the fund fed by private donations but also by major events including a dance at the Palais Royal in the Exhibition Building and a picnic at Warrandyte where the entertainment consisted of two football matches and dancing. By November more than £20 had been raised. Finally in July 1938 came the triumphant headline "Stobaus has his leg". He was "walking without a limp and the new leg seemed to have straightened his carriage. He looked taller." 1,2,3

It was only two years after that that Robert Stobaus died at the early age of 43. Rose lived another 36 years, dying at 82 in 1976. Their son went on to enlist in World War 2, although he possibly never left Australia, and married about that time. After the war he and his wife Annie lived in the Colac area and for a time were the postmaster and telephonist at the hamlet of Cororooke. Later they lived for many years in Reservoir. Victor appears to have lived until 2009 when he would have been 89 years old.

Notes and References:
1 The Argus, 20 July 1928, p. 9
2 The Sporting Globe, 2 June 1937, p. 9
3 The Sporting Globe, 9 July 1938, p. 5

http://www.cchg.asn.au/greatwar.html