Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

I had the distinct pleasure of meeting George Royston Mitchell at the retirement village he was living at twice in 1991. My first visit was just before Anzac Day in 1991. I sat with him for over an hour and he told me about his time serving on Gallipoli with the 12th Battalion AIF. I just sat there listening intently as he recounted his experiences during his 2 months there. My second visit was in July 1991. This visit was spent with Mr Mitchell telling me about his post war experiences and the Great Depression and his employment after the war. I certainly enjoyed my visits with this well spoken and mannered gentleman. I count myself very lucky indeed to have met him personally and have never forgotten my brief time spent in his company. I still have two very special mementos of my visits with him. One is an autograph that he signed for me which included his regimental number, Company, Rank and unit. He included a short note after his autograph which reads Member of the pilgrimage to Turkey 1990. The second mememtoe is a photograph of myself and Mr Mitchell taken in his room with a large framed photograph of Anzac Cove hanging on the wall behind us. I will treasure these 2 items forever and can say with great pride that I once personally knew a South Australian Gallipoli veteran. I was saddened when he passed away just a couple of years later and regret that I did not spend more time with him. He was an extraordinary man and I will always look back on my brief time spent with him with great pride and fond memories. LEST WE FORGET.

As told by Christine Howard from recollections by George "Mitch" Mitchell.

The stories of his experiences, and the stories of his life, his family, the street he lived in, the means and methods of getting through the Depression Years and then, his own two sons away during WWII are rich and varied, and remain alive and vibrant in his writings, and in the memories, particularly, of my brother, my father and me.

Grandpa and Grandma dedicated themselves forever after .. to TB Soldiers coming home, to Angorichina the sheltered workshop, Red Cross, Daw Park Repatriation Hospital, TTP Association, RSL and so many, many more.

I have amazing childhood memories of walking with Grandpa (who walked everywhere – couldn’t drive due to the neck injury) around Prospect taking eggs to the dairy in return for milk, rabbit skins to RM Williams in Percy Street in exchange for shoe leather.

They were great mates and enjoyed long chats, RM in his big leather apron, me propped up on the counter swinging my feet feeling awe inspired . Even in those days Mr RM was a rugged, tough old bloke. Here were a couple of country boys with much in common. In my small young heart I knew I was privileged to be there.

Grandpa and I sat together many hours during the years of our lives, just us, just talking. He was so very eloquent. I loved him with a passion.

In 2000, I visited an old neighbour in College Avenue, who reminded me of a another story that I’d loved hearing. He remembered the three beautiful Mitchell daughters and the times during WWII when wounded servicemen came to Adelaide in the interim before being repatriated to their homes and families around Australia.

As you know, these men would meet at the Cheer Up Hut which was at the back of the railway station. Many people, including Grandma and Grandpa, opened their homes to billet these young men for any length of time.

No arrangements or bookings were required … just turn up.
Word soon got around the Cheer Up Hut that there were three gorgeous brunettes at 28 College Avenue Prospect. Grandma and Grandpa together recalled many occasions when they’d arrive home to greet two or three young men in various pieces of uniform, various body parts bandaged and strapped lolling about the railing on the front porch chatting happily with Maxine.

Just inside the hall, another two or three men sat at the piano playing the hits of the times with Enid (my Mum) … then in the kitchen even more young men having a cuppa with Joanie.

Out the back on the garden seat, with respect for their hosts, the smokers would gather to swap tales … many who found comfort in cuddling a baby bunny from the hutch or a little black bantam, one of ‘Cookie’s’ many broods.

The Mitchell sons, Roy and George, were on active duty in far-off places, Roy somewhere with the RAAF and George stationed somewhere in Egypt.

Memories galore … these barely skim the surface for me, of my Grandpa, the most wonderful man. Affectionately known by his mates as Mitch - or ‘Darkie’ - he was the pace-maker for the Anzac Day marches in 1995 and 1996.

Channel 7’s Mike Smithson and ABC’s John Ovenden both interviewed ‘Mitch’ and both stations would still have file vision. I have a few ‘wild vision’ tapes here.

George brought a couple of pine cones back from the Gallipoli Pilgrimage in 1990. These, I believe, he gave to the RSL. Again, I believe one of these is the tree which Grandpa planted in a ceremony on Remembrance Day (I need to look up the year) at the Shrine of Remembrance on North Terrace.

There was a subsequent planting by Grandpa soon after at Daws Road Repat.

At about 90 or so, Grandpa entered his memories into an exercise book. I typed the transcript of that. I also have many photos and press clippings that may interest you for your project.

Christine Howard May 2014

George Mitchell, although a South Australian, had been posted to the 12th Battalion, which had been drawn largely from Tasmania.

George had enlisted in November 1914 and left Adelaide aboard the ITONUS. After four months entrenched on one side of 'No Man's Land' around the area of ‘Baby’ and The Nek’, he was wounded at Holly Ridge, transferred to the UK on the hospital ship OXFORDSHIRE, and spent six months in Hampstead Military Hospital recovering from shrapnel wounds and infection, and the enduring neck and shoulder incapacitation. George's injuries meant that he was unable to return to the front, and so he was shipped home to Adelaide in 1916.

As I child, I was Grandpa’s captive for the stories he would tell as he sat for hours every day strapped into a huge pink neck brace from ‘The Repat’, turning the occasional Black Cat or Capstan ‘rollie’ in his elegant hands. (These were the only occasions Grandma allowed smoking in the dining room .. but for me it was an aromatic and evocative atmosphere.)

A large photo of Gallipoli Cove hung on the wall above the piano – behind his head as I sat on the floor at his feet, studying his shrapnel wounds, touching the tight shiny pink skin and asking him … ‘tell me about the war, Grandpa’.
He never glorified his memories but, as I grew to an adult, more and more of the actual truth of his daily experiences ripened in my understanding - and visualisation - of these stories he often told.

… but only when asked.

He was wounded during a particular exercise which has been recorded in the history books. George received four hits to his arms and chest.

He would say to me “I knew I had to get back to the trench or I was a goner”. He yelled to the men below to catch his rifle at the moment he received the fifth shot – in his buttock – which knocked him head first where he landed, unconscious, at the trench base.

The men took one look at their mate ‘Darkie’ and gave him up for dead.

Someone tossed a blanket over him. It was a stifling hot day.

Hours later he came to. I remember how he described his momentary confusion. “It was all dark and stifling. I couldn’t breathe. I could hear my mates along the trench. I tossed the blanket off my head and sang out .. ‘Can’t a man get some bloody air around here?’ “

Decked on the craft bearing the wounded toward hospital ships the medics were so busy that all they could do was ask the men where they were shot. A nurse came to Grandpa and he showed her, saying, ‘Here, here, here and here’.

I asked him why he said nothing about the fifth shot and he told me he wasn’t going to tell a pretty girl that the enemy shot him in the bum (plus it indicated he had turned his back on the enemy). He was near death with blood poisoning on arrival in the UK but the quinine and other treatments he’d received for the wounds they were attending helped with the wound they had not been shown.

Related by Christine Howard,
George Mitchell's grand-daughter