Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

# 5654 TURNBULL William Clarence 25th Battalion
 
Will Turnbull was born in Gayndah to parents William and Elizabeth (Lizzie). He attended school in Gayndah and then began a life of rural labouring. His mother reported that he could turn his hand at any kind of work.
 
Will travelled to Brisbane to enlist on 20th January 1916. He stated his age as 23 and named his mother, Lizzie Ryan, as next of kin. It appears that Lizzie had remarried after the death of Will’s father and was at that time living in Murgon. Will was taken into the 11th Depot Battalion at Enoggera at first before being allocated as a reinforcement for the 25th Battalion. Will continued to train at Enoggera until the 170 reinforcements, under the command of two second lieutenants, boarded the “Clan McGillivray” in Brisbane on 7th September 1916.
 
The reinforcements landed in Plymouth UK on 2nd November and proceeded to the 7th Brigade Training Battalion at Rollestone. While in camp on Salisbury Plain, Will went AWL over the Christmas Period from 18th to the 27th December. Upon his return, he was immediately hospitalised at the Fargo Military Hospital with pleurisy. Once discharged from hospital on 31st January 1917, Will faced the consequences of his period of absence. He was confined to camp for 8 days and fined 30 days’ pay.
 
By April, Will’s indiscretions had been forgiven and he was promoted to acting corporal. On 3rd July, Will took a channel ferry to Havre and while in the base depot there was promoted to Lance Corporal. The depot camps at Havre and Etaples were disliked by many of the men who passed through there due to the attitude of the senior NCO’s who were strict disciplinarians. The Australians called Etaples the “bullring”. While still in camp, Will was punished for making “improper remarks in a letter”, and was reduced to private. It is not difficult to guess at the content of his letter.
 
On the 21st August 1917, 19 months since enlisting, Will finally joined the 25th Battalion which was in billets at Renescure near Saint Omer in Northern France. The 25th and the other three battalions that made up the 7th Brigade were in the final days of training before moving up to take part in the Battle of Menin Road. Will was charged with smoking in his billet, contravening fire regulations, and copped another fine of 14 days’ pay.
 
On 17th September, the 25th Battalion moved up to the jump off tapes in front of Nonne Bosschen (Nun’s Wood) along the Menin Road which ran from Ypres to Passchendaele. This was Will’s first taste of action and in spite of the battalion losing 32 men, he came through the ordeal unharmed. The 25th was relieved and went into the rear to prepare for the next step in the battle plan, an assault on Broodseinde Ridge.
 
On the night of 3rd October 1917, the 25th moved out from the ramparts at Ypres to take up position on the jumping off tapes at the bottom of the slope of the Broodseinde Ridge in anticipation of the artillery barrage which would signal the attack. Incredibly, the German infantry was assembling on the reverse slope of the same ridge to launch their own counter attack. When the British and Australian barrage came crashing down, the Australian infantry rose up from where they had been sheltering in shell holes and walked up the slope following the creeping barrage. Through the dust and smoke, the men of the 25th saw a line of German infantry coming toward them. The Australian infantry drove the Germans back into the fall of their artillery until the German troops broke and ran. The 25th’s primary objective during this action was the capture of the village of Zonnebeke, which was stoutly defended. When the battle was over, the 25th was again relieved. The battalion had taken several hundred prisoners, six minenwerfers and eight machine guns but the cost for the Queenslanders was 38 dead, almost 200 wounded and 16 missing. Will Turnbull was one of the missing.
 
Will’s mother, living back in Gayndah by that time, received notification that her son was wounded and missing. She wrote several letters to the authorities asking for any news and also instigated enquiries with the Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Service. A soldier from the same reinforcements as Will, Claude Crawhall, had written a letter stating that Will had been wounded and was then in hospital in England but this claim proved to be false.
 
A notation in Will’s file quotes a burial report of 28th February 1918 that Will was buried near Zonnebeke. A court of inquiry conducted on 18th March 1918 determined that William Turnbull had been killed in action on 4th October 1917.
 
In a bitter twist, a few small personal items belonging to Will were packaged up to be sent to Lizzie but the ship carrying the package, the “S.S. Barunga” was torpedoed off the Scilly Isles with all cargo lost.
 
When teams from the Graves Registration Unit began to scour the battlefields around Passchendaele in 1919, no trace of the grave of William Turnbull could be found. He is instead commemorated on the stone tablets of the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing in Ypres, along with 54,000 British and Dominion Troops who lost their lives in Flanders and have no known grave. To honour their sacrifice the citizens of Ypres have commemorated those men with a ceremony held each evening since 1928 under the arches of the memorial which concludes with the laying of wreathes, the recitation of the Ode and playing of the last post.