Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

https://nominal-rolls.dva.gov.au/veteran?id=620188&c=WW2#R

AE2 and AE2 alongside at Garden Island in Sydney 1914

AE2 at sea travelling at speed on the surface

AE2 in Fitzroy Dock Cockatoo Island Sydney Harbour

Rowan Boys Jack standing Joe seated. Probably taken at Abbassia towards the end of their Provo training (Circa mid-1916)

John Talbot Wright, aged 32, a motor mechanic and former chauffeur, was arrested on 11 September 1920 by Constable Cecil Elliott after a sensational car chase through city streets. Wright had stolen a brand-new luxury car, a Studebaker limousine belonging to Albert Cosman Jones, managing director of a company called Australian Motor Services Limited. Jones told the press that he had parked the car in the street outside his flat in Bayswater Road, Rushcutters Bay. He was in conversation with a friend inside the flat when he heard the car being started. Rushing from the apartment, he found Constable Elliott on point duty nearby. Together they commandeered a passing car and gave chase to the limousine, Constable Elliott on the footboard firing his revolver at intervals. Eventually, just outside the Captain Cook Hotel in Paddington, the pursuing car drew abreast of the stolen car and Elliott jumped across to the footboard of the limousine, threatening to shoot the driver if he did not stop.1 Wright’s photograph shows him wearing a Returned from Active Service badge. When he came before the court on Monday 13 September, his solicitor pleaded in his client’s defence that Wright was a returned soldier who had enlisted in 1915 and been wounded in action and ‘badly buried as a result of a shell burst’, and that he was ‘a complete nervous wreck when he arrived home’. The solicitor had a letter from a medical specialist stating that Wright had a ‘morbid mental bearing’.2 The solicitor did not mention that Wright had enlisted under the assumed name Jack Russell, Russell being his mother’s maiden name. As Jack Russell he had embarked for the front on 30 September 1915 with the 4th Reinforcements of the 17th Battalion on HMAT Argyllshire. His service dossier shows that he saw active service in Egypt and on the Western Front, that he spent quite a bit of time in military detention for various offences, and that he was hospitalised on a number of occasions for mostly unspecified ailments, but it has nothing specific to say about his being wounded in action. In any event, when Wright appeared before the committal court in August neither the magistrate nor the police prosecutor was sympathetic to the solicitor’s shell-shock plea, the prosecutor asking: ‘If everyone came before the court with the excuse of shell-shock where would we be?’3 Constable Elliott’s actions, on the other hand, were much acclaimed. He was himself a returned soldier, only 22 years old and a policeman for just seven months. As one journalist put it: ‘Before Elliott joined the force he was engaged in the most exciting of all chases – for Germans in France’.4 1.The National Advocate (Bathurst), 13 September 1920, p1. 2.Evening News, 13 September 1920, p6. 3.Ibid. 4.The National Advocate, op cit.

The Sun 6 May 1917 p 11 ENLISTED AT FOURTEEN BOY SOLDIER AT "MOOCOW FARM" “Gas Smells Like Fruit” PATROL'S DEVOTION Beside the fire at 8 Pine-street, Manly, there sits a boy of 16, who is gradually recovering from shell-shock contracted on the historic field of Mouquet Farm in France, He enlisted at the age of 14 and a few months, and his name is Cecil Thomas. He Is fair and slight, and serious-looking, and as he talks he stares into the fire, seeing, you hardly dare imagine what ghastly pictures in the glowing coals. He gave his age as 18 at the Town Hall recruiting depot, and as he was fairly tall, the white lie passed undetected. His parents' permission lie filled in himself, writing backhand to disguise his boyish penmanship. They put him into reinforcements;' and after a time spent in Egypt Cecil Thomas had his 15th birthday on a troopship' 'bound for France! "No, no one guessed how young I was," heasoys; "they all took me on as one of themselves, and It- was not until I returned that some of the officers found it out. There was another boy there a month older than me, but I never got a chance of talking with him. He is still in France, I believe." Private Thomas's father left with another battalion soon after the boy enlisted, and he is still fighting in France, but his son, hearing that the elder Thomas's battalion was quartered near his own, searched it out, and on two different occasions was able to have a chat with his father. Of the actual battlefield the boy is yet unable to speak fluently. There are phases of it, which touched upon ever so gently, set his lips trembling with memories — memories to be pushed hastily aside as part of an evil dream that is over. His mother says that a thunderstorm makes him "restless as a kitten," and that for weeks after his return he sat listlessly with his head in his hands, hardly speaking to anyone, and showing interest in nothing about him. THE MOTOR BIKE CURE For two months his anxious little mother hoard not one word from her boy's lips about | war or any of the experiences through' which he had, passed. His one desire, he told her, I was to get out into the country, away from I the noise and clatter of the city. So off she packed him to relatives on the North Coast, and here the thing that made him a boy again was — a motor bike! He laughs softly at the incongruity of seeking quiet and practically living on a snorting, shaking, fussy machine of that kind. But on the bike his mind rode back to normal. Talking of gas, Cecil Thomas gives a surprisingly novel description. "It smells like all the fruit you ever smelt — as if the breeze were blowing oft an orchard. It is so lovely that you could go on snifllng and snifllng it, and all tho time it would be killing you. As soon as the first whiff reaches you, though, you put on your gas helmet. Usually the word is sent along that a gas attack is expected, just the 'same as you get warning of the bombs that you have to put on tear goggles for. They have cayenne and stuff in them that makes your eyes sore for some time. The tear goggles are made of rubber, in sections to lit closely against the eye, and have bits of mica to look through." "The thing that always beat me was how our side got all the information they did. We'd get word seat along that at 9 o'clock the enemy was going to bombard us for five minutes, and sure enough it would be as true as if we had arranged it ourselves. "There was. one. officer: I can't remember his name, who belonged to the Intelligence Department. He had a German uniform and could speak German, so they said, and used to go into the enemy lines for hours at a time. He is in England now with one leg amputated. The Germans put out – papers and a bag in No Man's Land one day, and dared our side to get them. He and another officer took up the challenge. He got the papers, but the other chap was killed. Often the Germans would stick a flag, out and dare us to get it. Once or twice when fellows went out a mine went off as soon as they pulled the flag out of the ground." The boy soldier did not find listening-post duty as dreadful as he has heard others describe it. He pokes the fire and talks quietly ON LISTENING POST "The first night you go out on listening post your hair stands on end at every sound and you see faces in the dark! (That is the fifteen-year-old speaking!) "The second night out you scrag the new chum that goes with you for yelling out when he sees things. You have to stand stock-still and not even breathe louder than you can help! When the flares go up from the German lines any movement from the listening post would mean death, but standing still you look just like one of the stumps that are scattered about in dozens all over the ground at Mouquet Farm." He tells you that at first he used to take a delight in potting these stumps, until he found that it attracted the enemy's attention to his part of the trench and made things too hot for him. Patrol duty, which entails crawling under the enemy's barbed wire entanglements and staying near their trenches In the hope of hearing something, did not appeal to him at all. He was glad when that was over. But the mention of it brings to' his mind a story that fires his imagination and sets a light burning In his quiet eyes. The battalion was to make a raid, the artillery first cutting the enemy's wires. By some miscalculation it was our own wire that was cut, and as the men dashed on, the enemy's entanglements confronted them with certain death. It was then the patrol threw themselves across the wires and made a bridge by which the raiders were able to cross. The raid was successful and the patrol had not given their lives in vain. Cecil Thomas pokes the fire and stares into the coals for a space. When he is 18 ho hopes to go hack and finish up what he began as a fifteen-year-old. He returned to Sydney in December and celebrated his 16th birthday a week later. His mother's eyes have not yet forgotten their anxiety of it year ago, but she laughs us she says; "He was always serious, and even as a baby he took his pleasures seriously. He always used to say that when he grow up he would build me a nice house und then buy a yacht and go sailing round the world. But he did the sailing first instead of last!"

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