Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

My Grandfather Sydney Crummer was one of the first members of AAPC, which is an irony for my because I was a Clerk Admin in RAASC before going to Officer Cadet School. It is a link of types.

Sydney was shown as being married on enlistment and allocated the maximum possible proportion of his pay back to his wife. Except that successive emails from France to Australia and resultant police investigations failed to find existence of the 'wife'. The supposed family of the 'wife' say she never existed. But the father of the vanishing wife died during imprisonment in Brisbane about a decade ago, so the likelihood is that it was a family of 'bad eggs'. Was this a prevalent occurence?

However Sydney subsequently met and married Edith Rose Cox, a pure bred cockney from Bromley by Bow in London. They met, in London, during the war and remained there during Sydney's extended administrative service after the war. They came to Australia in 1921, where they moved into premises in Kelvin Grove in Brisbane. They lived there, close to hallowed Ballymore football grounds, all of their lives until old age took its toll. Sydney became an electrical fitter and his son, my father, became an electrical engineer. He too served, during World War II.

So a humble Queensland goes to war married to one and returns married to another. What a story!