Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Private John Frederick Price

He adjusts the brim of a fedora with practiced hands, ensuring the line is perfect for the customer. The store on the right of the ground floor smells of polished wood and expensive wool, a world of hushed tones where John Frederick Price, known to everyone as Jack, is the arbiter of style. Before he was VX28913, Jack was a man of Melbourne’s retail heart, managing the hat department and tailoring section for a major metropolitan firm.

Standing only 170 centimetres, Jack was compact and agile. In 1925, he became a pioneer of a different sort, running onto the Glenferrie Oval as the 27th player to ever wear the brown and gold for the Hawthorn Football Club. His teammates knew him as a "utility player" with high football intelligence, a man who could offset his height with sheer tenacity. He played ten games in that inaugural VFL season before returning to his home suburb to lead the Camberwell side for another four years.

When the second war came, Jack was nearly thirty-nine years old. He was a husband to Emslee and a professional with a settled life in the Edwardian villas of Camberwell. He did not join for youthful adventure; he joined out of a middle-class sense of civic duty and social standing.

In the 2/2nd Pioneer Battalion, Jack became an "anchor" for the younger men of D Company. His maturity and experience in managing people in the retail trade made him a vital figure in the small-unit dynamics of the battalion. They were trained as engineers, specialists with "prodders" for mines and explosives for obstacles, but the mountains of the Levant turned them into frontline infantrymen.

On 27 June 1941, the day after his fortieth birthday, Jack was moving through the Balate Ridge. The limestone underfoot was bleached white and fractured. The fighting was visceral and intimate, hand-to-hand combat among the rocks where technical skills were traded for the bayonet and the grenade.

Jack was killed during the ascent. He has no known grave. While his death was a blow to the morale of D Company, it spared him the prolonged horror of the POW camps on the Burma-Thailand Railway that would later claim 258 of his mates.

Today, Jack Price is remembered on Column 234 of the Alamein Memorial in Egypt and Panel 73 of the Australian War Memorial. He remains a pioneer: a foundational figure for his club, a master of his trade, and a soldier who walked point on the ridges of history.

Lest we forget

Rod Hutchings

Director, Virtual War Memorial Australia

Lest we forget.