Laurance MCKINNON

Laurance MCKINNON Update Details

If you confirm that you want to proceed with the update, this record will be locked for editing by all other users until you have finished. You will have 7 days to complete your changes before they will be automatically submitted.

Do you want to proceed?

MCKINNON, Laurance

Service Number:	141808
Enlisted:	14 December 1943
Last Rank:	Leading Aircraftman
Last Unit:	Not yet discovered
Born:	Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia, 18 November 1925
Home Town:	Broken Hill, Broken Hill Municipality, New South Wales
Schooling:	Broken Hill Technical College, New South Wales, Australia
Occupation:	Despatch Clerk
Memorials:

World War 2 Service

14 Dec 1943:	Involvement 141808
14 Dec 1943:	Enlisted Adelaide
14 Dec 1943:	Enlisted Royal Australian Air Force, Leading Aircraftman, 141808
25 Feb 1946:	Discharged Royal Australian Air Force, Leading Aircraftman

Help us honour Laurance McKinnon's service by contributing information, stories, and images so that they can be preserved for future generations.

Biography contributed by Chris Buckley

Laurance was the eighth of nine children of Donald Archibald McKinnon (born 1881 in Clare, South Australia) and Ada Florence Shore (born 1882 in Stockport, South Australia). Donald and Ada married in 1903 in Broken Hill - an outback mining town in NSW near the South Australian border. They raised their family in Broken Hill, where Donald was an Engine Driver, although they regularly visited South Australia - where their children enlisted for service in WWII.

Laurance was working as a Despatch Clerk in Broken Hill in 1943, and had succesfully completed final exams at Broken Hill Technical College for the two year Fitting and Machining course when he enlisted in the RAAF. Laurance was a Leading Aircraftman/Flight Rigger (Service No:141808) attached to Area Finance Office Adelaide when he was Discharged in February 1946. Sister Lorraine Jean (RAAF, Corporal, Service No:96837) and Brothers Eric Donald (Private, Service No:SX15762) and Colin Malcom (Sapper, Service No:SX8919), and Brothers-in-Law Richard Thomas Toohey (Private, Service No:SX14441) and George Brian McLachlan (RAAF, Leading Aircraftman, Service No:121747) also served in WWII.

When he returned to Broken Hill after Active Service, Laurance worked as a Meter Reader before becoming a Welder in the 1950s. In 1963 Laurance was a Boilermaker when he married Pauline Brooks, a Clerk in Broken Hill. They settled in Broken Hill and by the mid 1970s had moved out to Block Ten Hill (site of the old Zinc and NBHC Mines and site of the current Perilya operation) where Laurance worked as an Engineer.

Virtual
War Memorial
Australia