Francis Harrup NORTHEY

NORTHEY, Francis Harrup

Service Number: 4178
Enlisted: 13 December 1915, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Last Rank: Private
Last Unit: 22nd Infantry Battalion
Born: Fitzroy North, Victoria, 23 January 1892
Home Town: Clifton Hill, Yarra, Victoria
Schooling: Gold Street State School
Occupation: Actuary
Died: Killed in Action, Bullecourt, France, 3 May 1917, aged 25 years
Cemetery: No known grave - "Known Unto God"
No known grave (Memorial Panel 97), Villers-Bretonneux Memorial, Villers-Bretonneux, Picardie, France
Memorials: Australian War Memorial Roll of Honour, Villers-Bretonneux Memorial (Australian National Memorial - France)
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World War 1 Service

13 Dec 1915: Enlisted AIF WW1, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
7 Mar 1916: Involvement AIF WW1, Private, 4178, 22nd Infantry Battalion, --- :embarkation_roll: roll_number: '14' embarkation_place: Melbourne embarkation_ship: HMAT Wiltshire embarkation_ship_number: A18 public_note: ''
7 Mar 1916: Embarked AIF WW1, Private, 4178, 22nd Infantry Battalion, HMAT Wiltshire, Melbourne

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Biography

You might wonder how a man who fell tragically to the sidelines a century ago could have drawn me into his long-stilled story when I was so young. Perhaps when I was too tiny to remember, my grandfather George whispered whilst I was dandled on his knee, ‘Now, if I could trouble you to find out about my brother Frank?’ Or perhaps I caught a wistful expression when Granddad passed by the youthful photograph of his brother in the hallway at Wallace Street, Ivanhoe. Whatever it was, I always had a calling to bring Frank’s story back from the battlefield of Bullecourt, because that emotion I felt had to stand for something important.

The story of Private Francis Harrup Northey is story worth sharing, to salute Frank’s mother Edith, and every single member of his family and friends, and those at the battle where he fell, who did not know what became of him for a long year. I try to imagine how that uncertainty would feel, in a time of major conflict, with solid but slow mail and cable services between the AIF and citizens back home. Imagine Frank’s mother, receiving one last postcard sent the day before he died, and the baffling offices and people from whom she sought help, more than a year later seeking news of Frank when she wrote he ‘was reported wounded and missing 3rd May at Bullecourt, France. Nothing further has been heard of him. If this could be done, you would have the heartfelt thanks of his mother.’

We knew nothing of Frank five years ago, save that he was the young brother of my grandfather, and had been killed in action. But with the tenacity of the family historian, I have gradually accumulated snippets and stories from family material, online services and institutional visits, which now give Frank the life story he deserved to leave for his family. It has also given life stories to other men who were forgotten on family trees, and those who mourned for them.

Frank’s story was a typical one. He was born in 1892 in Clifton Hill, near Melbourne. His father died, aged just 35, when Frank was only six, leaving his mother to raise five children. They relied to some degree on the kind help of an uncle and the Freemasons in order to obtain a home in Clifton Hill, enabling them to finally settle instead of house hop in local streets. Frank’s dad had worked for David Munro and Company in the heady days of the Boom then the Bust. Munro’s is a fabulous story, but I doubt Frank would have been told about as it ended rather badly for both Munro and his dad. It was likely to be embarrassing and humiliating for their mother who most likely wished to make her husband’s memory a positive one.

In the early part of the century, Frank’s family and his cousins the Jamiesons, often journeyed via the old train routes to camp at King Parrot Creek, and Warburton. His brother George carries a rifle in one photo, so perhaps Frank knew how to handle one himself before he enlisted. George had a heart murmur so was turned down.

Frank was training to be a notary or actuary with Colonial Mutual Life, when like so many other young men in Melbourne, he heard the call and enlisted on 13 December 1915. His records show that he was 5 feet 7¾ inches tall, weighed 121½pounds, and had blue eyes, brown hair and a dark complexion. He also had enough knowledge of finance to will £150 to his mother when he enlisted.

He trained for weeks at the Broadmeadows camp, thence took a one-way journey overseas in early March 1916 on the HMAT Wiltshire, to places he would never have gone in the course of his normal life. He went to Tel-el-Kabir, Cairo, Alexandria, and to England to visit with family. Then he moved onwards to the fateful fields of France.

We are fortunate that his family kept the postcards he sent, and I was able to add them to the National Archives. They tell the story of a son and brother trying to settle the worries of his mother and sister, and trying to convince them that he remained very well. Perhaps the unseen postcard dated 2 May 1917 was of a more sombre note.

It was not known in later generations that he left a fiancée behind in Royal Parade, Parkville, Melbourne, who put the following notice in the paper:

NORTHEY- In sad and loving memory of Pte. Frank Northey (23rd [sic] Batt.), who was killed 3rd May, 1917, at Bullecourt (previously reported missing). (Inserted by his loving fiancée , Dorris Osborne.)

I hope more of Frank’s postcards exist, that the engagement photo somewhere shows the happiness he once felt, that even the engagement ring might be resting somewhere. Family historians need that sort of reflection of normal life to weigh against some of the brutal truths we encounter.

Frank’s fiancée Dorris was to be cruelly bereaved again, when her own brother, Stanley Raymond Osborne, also died, a little over a year after Frank. Stanley knew Frank and had tried to find out what happened to him when his Battalion was stationed close by the 22nd Battalion.

Yet another death in this friendship group was that of 4231 Pte. Arthur William Woodward (/explore/people/74368), the ex-fiancé of Frank’s sister Dolly. Dolly had withdrawn from the engagement when she found she had a life-shortening illness. Arthur applied to enlist at the same time as Frank, sailed on the same ship, was in the same Battalion, and was pictured with Frank at a Cairo photographic studio, perhaps both sharing the excitement of experiencing new cultures and the fear of their future. He was wounded at Bullecourt two days after Frank died, and died himself within three weeks of Frank, at a hospital in Rouen, France. His family described him a week later as ‘an Australian hero, fighting to save us all’ and wrote of ‘an Australian hero's noble end.’ At least they knew his fate quickly.

I can’t imagine how shattered those left behind from that group would feel, who were forced to accept the decision of a court of inquiry, instead of knowing with absolute certainty what fate had befallen Frank. It is not surprising that his brother George did not marry until the mature age of 37, choosing to care for those who were left behind, and tend to his mother, who kept Frank’s photograph in her engraved locket.

I want Frank’s life to be more than about the final two years, to know of him before the war, but as most material left is war-related I want to understand more of this. I learned that Frank might have been Batman for the Colonel. Learning about what a ‘batman’ meant gave much more colour to Frank’s activities:

a soldier . . . assigned to a commissioned officer as a personal servant. Before the advent of motorized transport, an officer's batman was also in charge of the officer's ’bat-horse‘ that carried the pack saddle with his officer's kit during a campaign. The term is derived from the obsolete bat, meaning ’pack saddle‘. A batman's duties often include: acting as a ‘runner’ to convey orders from the officer to subordinates; maintaining the officer's uniform and personal equipment as a valet; driving the officer's vehicle, sometimes under combat conditions; acting as the officer's bodyguard in combat; other miscellaneous tasks the officer does not have time or inclination to do.

Batman was usually seen as a desirable position. The soldier was exempted from more onerous duties and often got better rations and other favours from his officer.

To comprehend Frank’s daily life in the theatre of war, there is a wealth of eye-witness accounts I am grateful to be able to access – W.E.C. Bean’s official war histories of the Second Battle of Bullecourt, the official war diaries of the 22nd Battalion, and A.R.L. Wiltshire’s raw and honest diary, plus Captain E. Gorman’s book With the Twenty-Second: A history of the 22nd Battalion, A.I.F.

The 22nd Battalion war diaries recorded that the Prince of Wales visited on 18 March 1917, and inspected with Lt General Sir W. Birdwood, although I do not know whether Frank was there at the time. I imagine the hoopla when there were such dignitaries visiting, and maybe the lads ‘photo bombed’ the moving picture footage of the Prince!

His ‘battalion spent most of 1917 bogged in bloody trench warfare from Bullecourt to Broodseinde in Flanders,’ and from ‘3 May to 17 May 1917 [in the] Second Battle of Bullecourt [there were] two weeks of bitter trench fighting which eventually, and at the cost of 2,250 Australian casualties, cleared and held part of the Hindenburg Line.’

I also now know that Frank’s death, on 3 May at Bullecourt, like thousands of others there, was considered part of an important military strategy, even though it was also seen by A.R.L. Wiltshire as a confused mess.

It took a year for the court to rule that Frank had been killed in action on that first day, but there was confusion as his parcel was sent from the local hospital, leading me to wonder whether he was wounded and survived for a short time, and what his last thoughts were.

One day I intend to travel to where Frank fell, at Bullecourt in the second battle on 3 May 1917, and to the memorial at Villers Bretonneux. He has no memorial here at home in Melbourne, just a mention that has since disintegrated on his sister Dolly’s headstone, at the Coburg Cemetery near Melbourne. In the meantime, his memory is held in the heart of his great niece.

[This story was told in the Genealogical Society of Victoria's magazine Ancestor, in the Volume 32 Issue 5, March edition 2015]

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