Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

GRUNDON Surtees # 1685A 25th Battalion

Surtees Grundon was born to parents Robert and Sarah Grundon at Greymare Creek, Warwick. The family moved to Wyreema, outside Toowoomba, where Surtees attended school. Robert Grundon died in 1909 and Sarah remarried becoming Sarah Parneman. Surtees worked on the family farm after leaving school before moving to the Colinton District.

Surtees presented himself to a recruiting office at Esk on 2nd June 1915. He was 19 years old and came with a form signed by his mother giving her permission for her son to enlist. Surtees stated his occupation as timber feller and gave his address as Narinda, Brisbane Valley Line. His enlistment papers note that he had a deformed chest but noted that it did not provide any impediment in the opinion of the doctor.

Surtees was placed into a group of reinforcements for the 25th Battalion. He would find a number of men in this unit with similar backgrounds to his own as many of the original 25th battalion men had been recruited from the Darling Downs region.

Two and a half months after enlisting, Surtees and the other 150 men of the 2nd reinforcements of the 25th Battalion took a train to Sydney where they boarded the “Shropshire” on 20th August, bound for Egypt and the training camps at Tel el Kabir. While the reinforcements were at sea, the 25th Battalion which had arrived in Egypt in early August had been landed on Gallipoli. The reinforcements would join the battalion on the Peninsula on 12th October.

By the time of Surtees’ arrival on Gallipoli, the campaign had been scaled back with the realisation that with the resources available to the Expeditionary Force, there was no prospect of a breakthrough. On 13th November, the British War Minister Lord Kitchener, visited the ANZAC beach-head. A week later, the commander of the Dardenelles campaign, General Sir Ian Hamilton, was sacked by Kitchener and the decision was taken to abandon the expedition entirely. In the trenches, men had to endure heavy rain and snow before the 25th Battalion was evacuated to Lemnos on 18th December. By January, the battalion was back in Egypt.

After a period of re-equipping and taking on reinforcements, the 25th sailed from Alexandria on 14th March and landed in Marseilles five days later; the first Australian unit into France. A period of acclimatisation in the “nursery” trenches in the Armentieres sector gave the men their first glimpse of French farm life.

The Battle of the Somme began on 1st July 1916 and things did not go as planned with enormous casualties and limited gains of territory. In order to press on with the battle the British field commander, Douglas Haig, ordered two Australian divisions to proceed south from Armentieres to assembly points around Albert. These divisions were tasked with capturing the highest point on a ridge which crossed the Albert Bapaume Road at Pozieres.
In an attack on the evening of 29th July, Surtees received a bullet wound to the leg while his battalion charged German machine guns above Pozieres.

Surtees was transferred to the 26th General Hospital at Amiens for treatment. While in hospital, it was discovered that he had also contracted gonorrhoea. As a consequence, Surtees was not discharged until 6th September and did not rejoin his unit until two weeks later. The battalion was by that time in rest camp in Belgium after the trials of Pozieres and Mouquet Farm. A short period of time in the front line at Ypres was followed by a relocation back to the Somme. The frontline had hardly progressed since the Australians had left the Somme in September. Winter rains had turned the Somme front into a quagmire. Haig ordered one last effort on the front near Flers just short of Bapaume. The 25th battalion went into action on the 5th November without support from other battalions in the brigade. In the end only one party of 100 men actually made it across no man’s land and into the trench system known as the Maze. Of those 100, 70 were either killed, wounded or missing. The Germans took back the Maze two days later.

One of those 70 men was Surtees Grundon. He was initially reported as wounded and then wounded and missing. A court of enquiry conducted 8 months later determined that Surtees had been killed in action. A final note in his army file records that he was buried near the Butte de Warlencourt. At war’s end, isolated graves such as Surtees’ were consolidated into larger permanent cemeteries. Surtees was reinterred in the Warlencourt Military Cemetery. His mother chose an inscription on his head stone: “Answered the King and country’s call.”

Sarah Parneman signed for her son’s medals; 14/15 Star, Empire Medal and Victory Medal as well as a bronze memorial medallion and a scroll signed by King George V.