Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

PETTY OFFICER FRANK ERNEST POPHAM J/2158 RN/17287 RAN

Frank Popham was born in Lambert England on the 11th of November 1892, the ninth of eleven children born to Edward and Mary Popham. He enlisted in the Royal Navy as a 16 year old boy in 1908 serving on numerous ships until he discharged to shore in February 1922 as a Petty Officer. In 1916 he married Annie.

A month after he discharged from the Royal Navy, Frank and Annie emigrated to Australia on the SS Sophocles arriving in Melbourne in late August 1922. Frank took employment as a Tram Conductor and the family resided in Malvern Victoria. A son, Edward, would be born in 1924 followed by Johanna in 1927.

In 1926 Frank joined the Royal Australian Navy on a five year engagement. He was granted all his seniority from the RN and entered the RAN as a Petty Officer.  Nine months after Johanna was born he posted to the survey sloop HMAS Moresby, which was in the process of surveying the Great Barrier Reef. He would remain on Moresby until April 1929, then posting to the Sydney based Destroyer maintenance ship HMAS Penguin (Ex-HMAS Platypus).  At some stage the marriage to Annie failed, and the couple divorced.  In June 1929 Frank married 26 year old Gwendoline Maraga and the couple lived in Mosman Sydney.

Edward and Johanna would grow up living with their mother. In 1942, Edward joined the Australian Army Militia transferring to the AIF in early 1944. He would serve on active service in Bougainville as a member of an Army Water Transport Company.

Frank Popham would serve in the RAN until 1932 at which time he transferred to the Fleet Reserve. He would do regular periods of reserve work over the next five years, a handy source of extra income in a country emerging from the Great Depression, to supplement his civilian employment as a seaman.

At the outbreak of the Second Word War, Frank was immediately recalled to service posting to HMAS Penguin and then in October 1939, the Armed Merchant Cruiser HMS Kanimbla. Kanimbla was a twin screw motor ship employed on the Australian Coast and although she was initially commissioned as a Royal Navy ship, her crew were almost exclusively Australian. Her Commanding Officer was Frank Getting, a member of the first intake of the Royal Australian Naval College, who would later lose his life on HMAS Canberra at the Battle of Savo Island. In June 1943 she would become HMAS Kanimbla.

In the first half of 1940 Kanimbla operated in far Eastern waters off Hong Kong, Japan and Indochina (Vietnam). Later in the year the ship deployed to Singapore and then to the Indian Ocean undertaking convoy escort duties. In March 1941 the ship was operating off East Africa when Frank suffered heart failure, and on the third of March he was landed to the Addington Military Hospital in Durban, where he passed away the next day.

Petty Officer Frank Ernest Popham is buried in the CWGC plot of the Stellawood Cemetery Durban, South Africa.

NAA A6770, POPHAM F E

RN Service Records Popham, Frank J