Something that intrigues, and slightly frustrates, me on this journey into the story of my great uncle Jack is that we have very little original personal material about him. Being in possession of his wartime logbook, I concede, is more than many people have (and indeed was significant in capturing my interest in the first place), and there are official records available at the National Australian Archives and other places, but beyond a couple of official portraits I have nothing in the way of personal photographs, diaries or correspondence. What is most frustrating is that I know that such material once existed. What has happened to it since is a mystery.
There are a number of sources where correspondence to or from Jack is mentioned. His ‘last letter’, as his brother Edward wrote to Don Smith in July 1944 (A01-344-001), spoke of his “hope of being home for next Xmas and, as he phrased it, in a place where he could count on seeing the sun every day”. A note in his Casualty File reports that a letter to his late mother was discovered amongst his personal effects following his being posted missing, which was forwarded to RAAF Headquarters in Melbourne ‘for appropriate action’ (A04-071-061). There’s also talk in another of Edward’s letters to Don Smith of two letters from “Jack’s English sweetheart’ (which is a story in itself), and the intriguing suggestion that she might have sent some ‘snaps of all the boys [of the crew of B for Baker]’ to Edward (A01-111-001). So there was definitely correspondence that came from England to Australia, either written by Jack or by his mysterious girlfriend. And presumably his relatives in Australia would have replied to those letters – which could account for a bundle of “correspondence and photographs” that was included in the list of personal effects in his Casualty File (A04-071-024).
Unfortunately, somewhere between England and Australia, the bundle (along with a pillowcase) went missing. Its listing is marked with an asterisk on the list in the Casualty File, showing it never arrived at RAAF Central Depositories in Melbourne. And sometime in the ensuing decades, everything else apart from his logbook , a small collection of photographs and two unsent postcards went missing too. What happened to it is unknown. I have vague recollections of being told that a great aunt (one of Jack’s sisters) might have destroyed anything that she could find to do with her late brother in a fit of pique sometime in the 1960s. Or less menacingly, perhaps it was all simply thrown out in a big clean-up, just a bunch of papers found in a file somewhere that surely couldn’t be of any use to anyone any more. Whatever happened, it is clear that what was once a valuable archive (at least for someone like me) has simply disappeared.
I live in hope that one of my long-lost relatives will one day clear out their shed and stumble upon a bundle of ‘old papers’, thus solving a decades-old family mystery. But I suspect the history might have been lost forever.
© 2012 Adam Purcell
Something Very Big 