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In the early part of last century Frederick Charles Erasmus Wilkinson owned a stone fruit and citrus orchard and vineyard known as “Riverview” at Settler’s Bend, a twenty minute sulky ride across the flats from the Renmark wharf. Soon after the outbreak of war, he entrusted the management of his property to Stuart Bromley and made the trip to Morphettville where he enlisted in the Australian Imperial Forces on 18 August 1914. The first call for volunteers had been for men with military training. Fred had none. But he was nonetheless among the first fifty Renmark men to sign on. He was thirty years old when he set out for Adelaide on September 15.

There is a suggestion that Fred took his horse Paddy with him, intending that he too serve in the AIF Light Horse. But this does seem unlikely. We know that Fred left from Paringa by train with four other volunteers, their fares paid by a local recruiting committee supported by a community fundraising drive. The Paringa railway line freeing settlers from depending on paddle steamers to send their produce to markets had opened less than a year before. The route it took to Adelaide was long and indirect.

Adelaide Station on North Terrace Adelaide was not his journey’s end. Fred likely walked along King William St. to Angus St. to catch what was then a steam-train running on the now Glenelg tramway as far as Morphettville. In 1914 the race course there was an army camp for the assembling of the 10th Infantry Battalion which was being raised in South Australia. Private Wilkinson was assigned to its A Company.

Fred would never make the return journey to Riverview. He sailed with the 10th Battalion for Egypt aboard the HMAT Ascanius on October 20 1914 after just a month of basic training. On the morning of April 25 1915, he was among those Australians who went ashore at Anzac Cove. He was the very first of the contingent of A Company volunteers from Renmark to be killed in action in the Dardanelles. Sadly there would be others.

The 120-strong A Company alone contained fifteen volunteers with ties to Renmark. Four would not survive the Gallipoli campaign. Thomas George William Palmer died at Gallipoli two days after the Gaba Tepe landing. Frank Norman Fisher fell on May 2, a week into the conflict. John Sanderson Turnbull survived for some months but was killed in action in early July. But Wilkinson, aged 31 years, was the first to die. This is his story.

Fruitgrower

It is not clear how Fred came to be a Renmark fruitgrower. He was born on February 28, 1884 in Westbury on Trym, beside the Avon river, near Bristol in the UK. He was educated at Uppingham School in the East Midlands. Quite possibly an unfortunate family history drove him to emigrate and to make a fresh start by the banks of the Murray. Like several other volunteers from the Renmark area, he gave an English relative as his next of kin when enlisting. In Fred’s case it was his uncle, the Reverend. J.H. Wilkinson of Winchester. By 1914 both his parents were dead.

His mother Constance died in Gloucestershire in 1884, shortly after Fred was born, very likely from a complicated childbirth. Fred’s older brother Henry died in 1898, aged sixteen. His school teacher father Erasmus, who had remarried in 1886 and had two further children, died in 1904. He was thus spared the 1914-1918 world war which would take the lives of his two remaining sons. Fred’s younger half-brother, John, died on August 22, 1917, killed in action at Flanders with the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry.

Fred did have a family connection with the settlement which may have been one reason why he initially arrived in Renmark. His uncle, Edmund Everett, had bought 20 acres on the 60 foot channel in 1895, retreated to Britain for several years when times got tough, and then returned in November 1901 with a new young bride, Catherine, only to fall gravely ill and pass away a few months afterward. The widowed Catherine had continued to live in Renmark for a number of years before eventually returning to England.

Fred was already working and living in Renmark when his father died. When Riverview came on the market for £2500 in mid-1907 he had saved enough to purchase it from Messrs Hody and Douglas who had established the property. The following year he reached an agreement with the Renmark Irrigation Trust to operate the Settler’s Bend No.5 pumping station, signing a 25 year lease during the term of which he would pay no rates and have free access to water pumped from the Murray.

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Fred Wilkinson’s body was never recovered. After he was reported as missing in action, the Murray Pioneer and Australian River Record wrote that he “was as good a type of the young English settler as we had among us, gentlemanly, kind and ever ready to help in any good cause” and described him as “the popular owner of Settlers Bend”.

Indeed Fred does seem to have been an active community member. He was elected to a Renmark fruitgrowers’ representative body, the Agricultural Bureau, initially in July 1907. He was a keen horseman and he and his chestnut horse “Paddy” were regular contestants in Gymkhanas held in Renmark. He had been an active member of the Renmark Rifle Club for even longer than the six years he allowed when he enlisted. On occasion Fred had even judged the poultry section of the Renmark show. And of course he had taken over operation of the Settlers Bend irrigation pumps from the cash-strapped RIT in 1907.

When probate was issued (in Britain) following the confirmation of his death, Fred Wilkinson’s net assets were valued at £5867. Modestly wealthy, gentlemanly, from an educated middle-class English family and the owner of Riverview, he would have made a fine catch. But Fred was not married when he died.

In August 1909, after squiring her to the grand ball attended by the Governor and his wife and marking the opening of the Renmark Masonic lodge, Fred had asked Myra Symons to marry him. She was a sporty type and talented violinist from St Peters in Adelaide. Their engagement was formally announced in Adelaide newspapers in September. But a wedding never followed. And Fred never formed an another similar attachment.

Unremembered

In 1915 there was no grieving widow to mourn his loss. Of all his immediate family, only his younger half-sister Mary, born in 1889, survived him. It is unlikely that they knew each other well even although, after settling in Renmark, Fred did make several trips back to Britain. Travelling with his Aunt, Catherine Everett, he had visited England in 1906, returning to the Renmark Wharf on board the Ellen just two days after Christmas. Fred’s last letter, written in Egypt, was to Catherine.

In 1914 Fred had made an extended trip to England before returning to South Australia from London on board the RMS Marmora which docked at Outer Harbour on 23 May. Only a matter of months later, on August 1, England, and with it Australia, declared war on Germany. Fred did not, as a good number of other British emigrants to Australia did, travel back to England to join the British army. Had he still been in Britain he may have volunteered. Instead he quickly installed a manager for Riverview and enlisted in the Australian Imperial Forces. By 1914 he had spent more than a decade in Australia and probably saw himself as as much Australian as British.

But there were no family in Australia to mourn Fred’s passing and keep his memory alive. The Pioneer noted in reporting his death in the Dardanelles that “His relatives are all in England”. He had chosen to make a new life in South Australia away from what remained of his family. It is unlikely that anywhere Fred Wilkinson’s memory lived on after 1915 in a treasured photograph on a fireplace mantel or sitting room wall. With time his memory will have dimmed, even within his circle of friends in Renmark.

Of course Anzacs occupy a special place in Australian history. They are, collectively, well remembered. Fred Wilkinson’s name is inscribed on the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. It appears on the Lone Pine Memorial for the Missing along with the names of the other 3,267 Australians without known graves who died at Gallipoli. He was listed on the honour roll at the Renmark Soldiers Memorial Hall built in 1920 in tribute to those who gave their lives in the 1914-1918 war. But today few who pause to read his name will know his story.

Gallipoli

After leaving Adelaide’s Outer Harbour and then a short stopover in Freemantle, the Ascanius, carrying 65 officers and 1728 enlisted men, set out at 5.00am on November 2 and, the next day, joined an armada of 41 Australian and New Zealand ships ferrying troops to, as it turned out, Egypt and not to England. Conditions for the enlisted men were cramped and, near the equator, stifling. Renmark’s Private A.C. Dunhill wrote home “The deck on which the majority of Remark volunteers are camped has a floor space of about 60 ft x 70 ft”.

Most days there was little to see but the distant shapes of others in the flotilla. But there were two moments of high drama. The Ascanius survived a close encounter with the German warship, the Emden, and then a subsequent nighttime collision with the Shropshire which left a 20 foot gash in its hull. More than a month after leaving the WA coast behind, the 10th Battalion reached Cairo and set up camp at nearby Mena where it was given additional drilling ahead of its dispatch to the Dardanelles. The training was intensive.

When they had the chance, those from Renmark looked out for one another. Vic Odgers, from Renmark but in Egypt with the 3rd Light Horse, dropped by the Mena camp to see the Renmark Infantry boys and reported they were in good spirits. Fred Wilkinson, he wrote home, “may be leaving for England shortly. An uncle of his (Colonel somebody) has practically offered him a commission in an English Yeomanry Regiment.” But as it happened, Fred stayed with the AIF.

When they were given leave, the Australians flooded the markets and tourist attractions, and some the bars and brothels of Cairo, building a reputation for larrikinism. We don’t know how Fred Wilkinson and his mates from Renmark in A Company spent their leave. Their wilder adventures in Cairo’s souks were not something that Australians will have recounted in letters to their families at home.

But many Anzacs did write home from Gallipoli, which is where the 10th Battalion found itself in the early morning of April 25, less than a month after the Battle of Wazir when Australian troops had run amok in Cairo. Egypt and the voyage from Australia were quickly forgotten. Their letters point to the chaos and confusion of the Anzac Cove landing, and to the uncertainty about what actually happened to Fred. Fred Wilkinson was initially reported missing in action. He and A Company had landed with the 3rd Brigade. How he died in the confusion of that first day’s conflict is not clear.

Fred was initially feared to have drowned going ashore at Anzac Cove. Then one of Vic Odger’s early letters suggested that he had been severely wounded and “is supposed to be in hospital somewhere in England.” A later letter surmised “that he may be a prisoner in the hands of the Turks”. Private “Jack” Johnson had enlisted in Wentworth but found his way to the 10th Battalion. He had spent time in Renmark and knew Fred. When he returned to Renmark in 1916 he told the Pioneer how Wilkinson had died. Fred had indeed safely made it ashore. According to Johnson, he was with the group of Australians who, on April 25, had bravely pursued retreating Turks about two miles inland from the beach before they were forced to fall back.

Johnson remembered seeing Wilkinson among the the seventy or so men from different units who gathered together before retreating. Basil Tydeman, Frederick Kaerger and Tom Palmer, all from Renmark, were also amongst those caught behind Turkish lines. They had all withdrawn toward the beach “through broken, scrubby country in which it was very easy for a man to get isolated and cut off by the Turks”. Fred never made it back. And the ground covered that day was “never again occupied”, leaving his fate unknown.

A sorry footnote

Eventually the AIF established a Court of Inquiry in Alexandria to determine what had happened to Fred. Jack Johnson did not give evidence. On day three of the fighting he was struck by “a bullet that passed between the eyes and the brain” and thereafter shipped to England where he spent six months recovering. Suffering permanent hearing loss, he was then repatriated to Australia and, against his will, medically discharged.

The Inquiry was provided with a statement from Private Angus Smith, also from Renmark, saying he knew for a fact that Wilkinson had reached the shore. Although he had not seen him afterwards, he believed Fred “was with a group that got as right forward as Gun Ridge”. In the absence of other reliable information and with Fred’s name missing from prisoner of war lists provided by Turkey, the Court of Inquiry regretfully concluded that he had been killed in action “on some date prior to 13 June 1915.”

The Inquiry was not held until the end of May 1916. Fred’s next of kin were not notified of its finding until August. Initial reports in May 1915 that Fred was missing in action had created havoc for his friend Stuart Bromley whom he had left in charge of Riverview. Stuart was suddenly unable to operate Fred’s banking accounts to pay Riverview’s creditors and employees. Without a formal announcement that he had been killed in action Fred’s affairs could not be wound up.

There are a number of letters filed in Fred Wilkinson’s military record from the Adelaide solicitors of G & J Downer representing his Australian interests, all pleading with the AIF to formally acknowledge Fred’s demise. There was no body. Moreover amidst the chaos and confusion of the first day’s fighting at Gallipoli there were conflicting accounts of Fred’s fate. And the army was reluctant, or simply unable, to confirm his death.

Fred’s military records contain an initial entry made on May 2 1915 of a report from “OC 10th Battn” that he was “Missing” resulting from an action on the Gallipoli Peninsular during “April 25-29th”. The next entry made a week later is “Now Reported Wounded”. A third entry dated 5/6/16 records the determination of a Board of Inquiry that he had been killed sometime between the 25th and 29th of April.

When Fred Wilkinson was finally formally declared to have died, it fell to Frank Downer, the Australian executor of his will, to sell off his horses and farming equipment. Riverview was eventually sold, and Fred’s 25 year control of the No.1 Irrigation Pump at Settlers Bend was passed to a neighbour, Harry Beckington. Probate was finally settled in London on July 9, 1917. Fred’s elderly uncle, Robert Charles Otter, ultimately inherited the more than £5000 realised from the sale of his assets.

There is a final lingering note to Fred’s almost forgotten story. His AIF medals, a memorial plaque and scroll along with the “relevant letters, boxes and paperwork”, all originally sent to the Reverend Wilkinson in Winchester as his next of kin, were sold to an anonymous collector by Bonhams auctioneers (as lot 216) for £2280 on March 23, 2016.