Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

A very tough but very humorous man was Roy Sproule, my grandfather. Prior to WW1 he'd been like most young men in Hobart (and probably everywhere else at the time) and had a succession of menial jobs and regularly got into trouble but his experiences overseas changed him forever giving him leadership and organisational skills and opportunities he may never have had otherwise. His time with the AIF coloured the rest of his life positively.
My great-grandmother, Harriet, Roy's mother, married all three Sproule brothers from my line at various times and Roy found himself in France in the 52nd Battalion as his step-father Ernest fought with the 40th Battalion. Ernest Frank Sproule died in action and is buried in Belgium.
Largely unschooled, Roy's post war working life continued in laboring jobs in Tasmania and Adelaide with Shell and other companies and he was a highly active in the RSL and TPI groups, particularly the TPI in Hobart in latter years. In 1920 he married Verginia (known as Vergie) Margaret Webb and they had three children: Mollie, Patricia, and my father John, known as Jack in the family (he served from 1939 - 1948 in the RAN).
My father remembered a very stern and harsh father but my aunts painted a very different picture of a warm and generous man. My grandmother was a drinker and I remember dad telling my that he'd race home from school and gets some veggies going on the pot so that when Roy walked in from work he got cooking smells in the house. I don't lay any blame at my grandmothers feet as she'd had a pretty tough time of things and who are we to judge?
Grand-dad Roy loved a beer, a smoke, the North Hobart Football Club, and helping his fellow ex-diggers not necessarily in that order. He was noted for having punch ups in pubs with blokes who claimed war service but did not have it, or exaggerated their war service. He was a man's man but had a sense of fairness and decency about him.
I am very proud of my family's war service and very proud to be Roy Sproule's grandson.