Leo

February 24, 2012May 22, 2012 ~ Adam Purcell ~ 4 Comments

There are fifteen Commonwealth War Graves in the cemetery belonging to the small village of Hellendoorn, in the east of The Netherlands. My family and I lived in Nijverdal – the next town along – throughout the year 1995 and when we discovered that there was one Australian among the graves we decided to see what we could discover about him.

Flight Lieutenant Leo McAuliffe was a fighter pilot attached to No. 222 Squadron, RAF. He was killed on 17 March 1945, a matter of weeks before that part of the Netherlands was liberated. He was 24 years old and came from Bexley, NSW. While still overseas, we wrote to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to see what they could tell us about Leo. He had been killed in a ‘flying battle’, they said, and another letter to the Air Force after we returned to Australia in 1996 revealed he crashed while leading a section of two aircraft on a patrol and weather reconnaissance mission over enemy occupied territory.

Late last year I decided to obtain copies of Leo’s service record and A705 files from the National Archives of Australia. This was not intended to be as in-depth a study as I am doing on my great uncle Jack and his Lancaster crew. It was just a side-line interest, more for general interest of our family than anything overly complicated. I had vague plans of reading through the files and writing a short ‘interpretation’ of them so I could then bind the whole lot up and give it to Dad for Christmas. Unfortunately the National Archives are experiencing ‘high demand’ for copies at the moment, and the month turnaround that I was expecting turned into two – too late for Christmas. Dad got a packet of liquorice instead.

But I now have the files, and have spent the last couple of weeks reading through them and beginning to write my little story. And guess what? It’s turned out into something far bigger than I was intending it to. I’m not under the deadline of ‘Christmas’, so I have time to delve into the story a little deeper, following leads that I would have otherwise left alone. So questions raised in the NAA files have led to posts on the RAFCommands forum, which in turn led to the discovery that Leo served in Northern France following the invasion… meaning that my friend Joss le Clercq is also interested in Leo’s story and has been in touch.

The account of Leo’s final flight, from his wingman, suggests to me that he simply became disoriented and lost control in thick cloud – more accident than ‘flying battle’. And the story of how a young Dutch woman witnessed the crash and recovered a dog tag but was later killed in an air attack on Nijverdal caused me to contact a friend who volunteers at the small World War II museum that is now in that town. This, in turn, resulted in numerous emails from her contacts at the museum, and much information about the crash and the attack on Nijverdal.

All quite amazing. I’ve spent the last few hours translating those emails from Dutch and using Google Earth to try and pinpoint a crash location. But a line needs to be drawn somewhere. There is a lot of information out there – the tough part is deciding when you have enough, when you can stop researching and start writing. Leo’s story is well on its way to becoming known now. A couple more questions to my new Dutch contacts, and the writing can begin.

Girlfriends: the plot thickens

January 31, 2012May 22, 2012 ~ Adam Purcell

Late last year I had, on behalf of my grandfather, embarked on a search to see if I could find out anything more about Joy Gisby, the woman who was probably Jack Purcell’s girlfriend while he was in England.

Somewhat at a loss for how best to carry out that search, I roped Kerry Tarleton in to assist. Kerry is a distant relation of mine (second cousin twice removed, I believe) who has been working on the family tree. While the name Joy Gisby was unfamiliar to her, she had some immediate results via a contact in the UK. It appears that a woman named Joyce E Gisby was born in West Ham in 1923, and while she has since died her husband is still alive. We do not know if this is even the person we are after, but it’s the closest we have to a lead at the moment and Kerry tells me moves are afoot to see if we can identify her based on the photograph from Jack’s collection. Watch this space.

Meanwhile, I’ve made an interesting find about Nurse MC Sands, of Summer Hill Hospital. As usual, it was a chance discovery. I was transcribing the last few letters from Phil Smith’s collection when I came across one written by Mollie Jansen, Jack’s sister, to Edith Smith (Phil’s mother). In it she writes (my bolding):

“Have you had any word from W/C Brill I have not up to date, am hoping for some, his girl friend had a very nice letter, from him last week, which she sent on to me I thought it strange that I haven’t had a letter too.” (A01-358-002)

Hmmm.

Though the letter is undated, it contains a few clues that I can use to pin it down to late June or early July 1944. Mollie wrote that she had only just found out Mrs Smith’s address. As we know, it was Don Smith (Phil’s father) who first sought out the addresses of the Australian next of kin and who initiated correspondence with them. I have what I suspect is Edward Purcell’s reply to the first letter he received from Don (A01-344-001); it is dated 01JUL44. It is therefore reasonable to guess that Mollie received the Smiths’ address around this time and so her reply, if indeed she had ‘just found out’ the address, was most likely written sometime around then as well. So if this letter was written around the beginning of July 1944, it follows that the letter from Bill Brill to Jack’s girlfriend that Mollie writes about was received by the girlfriend a week or so beforehand.

So why is it so important to know when this letter was written? Jack’s Casualty or Repatriation File at the National Archives of Australia (A04-071, NAA: A705, 166/33/163) includes copies of two almost identical letters from Bill Brill. One is for Edward Purcell, but we already know about him. The other is addressed to one Nurse MC Sands. There is a covering letter from the RAAF that went along with the Brill note. It states that the arrival of this letter from England was the first time that the Air Force had heard of Miss Sands, and offers to forward copies of any further communications concerning Jack to her. Critically, it is dated 17JUN44 – or just before when I suspect Mollie Jansen wrote her letter to Don Smith. Any other letters from Brill would also have been in Jack’s A705 file. As the only two there are addressed to Edward Purcell and Nurse Sands, there is I believe a good chance that Nurse Sands is the ‘girlfriend’ that Mollie was referring to.

So now we probably have two girlfriends – one in England and one in Australia. Kerry is chasing up a Mona Collinette Sands who served in the RAAF briefly in 1942. It appears she then abruptly left the Air Force and what happened subsequently is as yet unclear. Could she have ended up as a nurse at Summer Hill Hospital? We’ll keep searching.

Thanks to Kerry Tarleton for assistance with this research.

Mystery woman

December 8, 2011October 25, 2013 ~ Adam Purcell ~ 3 Comments

Part of the small collection of photos that we have as part of my great uncle Jack’s personal effects is this one, showing a young woman:

This is one of the enduring mysteries of Jack’s story. Her name was Joy Gisby, according to my grandfather who has just begun a mission to find out what happened to her, and he says she was Jack’s English girlfriend. There is certainly some evidence that Jack had a girlfriend while he was overseas. His brother Edward wrote the following to Don Smith in December 1944:

“I have, since last hearing from you, had two letters from Jack’s English sweetheart […]. She is very upset over the final news of the boy, but that, I suppose, is only to be expected. It was to me, however, most comforting to know that his all-too-brief span over there was, at least, very happy.” (A01-111-001)

Unfortunately, Edward made no mention of the girl’s name, which makes it rather difficult to find any more information about who she might have been. All I have to go with in the search for information is my grandfather’s memory of a name he first heard a very long time ago and an otherwise unidentified photo. There is a family story that says Jack was engaged to Joy, and that they were to be married on the Saturday after Jack was shot down. As Jack’s letters disappeared decades ago I have no documentary evidence of this, as tragic as the story sounds. And adding to the intrigue are a number of official letters from the Air Force (that I found in A04-071 Jack’s Casualty/Repatriation File from the National Archives of Australia) addressed to Nurse MC Sands, Renwick Hospital, Liverpool Road, Summer Hill – who Jude Findlay suggested may have been a girlfriend of Jack’s in Australia. Nurse Sands was notified along with Edward Purcell of Jack being posted missing so she was obviously close in some way. She could be a red herring, but where I do not have documentary evidence of Joy Gisby’s name, I do for Nurse Sands.

But nothing ventured, nothing gained and all of that, so I’ve been doing some preliminary searching. It turns out that there are a lot of Gisbys around the world. I found a website called The Gisby Saga, a rather well-written account of one particular branch of the family. There’s a Facebook group (The Worldwide Gisby Empire) . And there are thousands of possible hits on Ancestry.com. I’m not really sure where to go from here. Any ideas gratefully received!

Questions

September 30, 2011May 22, 2012 ~ Adam Purcell

In 2003 Phil Smith, my great uncle’s wartime pilot, passed away. In a way, Phil’s death was a catalyst for me. I’d done some work on the topic when I was very young – indeed this is what led us initially to finding and contacting the old pilot – but I was now old enough that I could start doing some work in my own right. But where to start?

One evening I first used what has become a very useful technique. Sitting at my desk in my little granny flat at my parents’ place in the Southern Highlands of NSW, I pulled out the dusty old photos and documents that I’d found the first time around. I read through the lot, with a notebook and a pencil alongside. I wrote notes as I went.

And most importantly, I also wrote down what I didn’t know. And I wrote down what I thought might be interesting to delve further into.

The resulting list of questions gave me my place to start. But as I answered each one, more questions would arise. So, despite the work I’ve done so far, the list remains as long, if not longer, than it was in 2003. I suppose that is a good thing – it means there will always be more out there, just waiting to be discovered.

I’ve used this technique a few times since – most recently in the search for the family of Eric Hill. By going back through what I already had, I could figure out where I might go next. Knowing where Eric came from, I could contact local history groups in the area – and they found the connection to a living relative.

There is one big question that I would still like to answer:

“What was it like?”

Ultimately this is why I’m studying this story. I never had the opportunity to talk to my great uncle, to find out first-hand what his war was like. I have his logbook and I have a couple of photos, but that’s more or less it. Everything else I know about him has been inferred from other sources: letters from Phil Smith and others, official records, and talking to as many veterans as I can. I can even draw on some of my own experiences: the taxi ride in Just Jane, for example, or flying a Tiger Moth. That’s as close as I can come to experiencing something of the Bomber Command story. To try and answer that never-ending question – what was it like?

Answering that question is, for me, the best way to ensure that airmen like my great uncle Jack and his crew are remembered.

The Thrill of the Chase

September 18, 2011May 22, 2012 ~ Adam Purcell

“I figured there would be a letter from someone, somewhere… I was just about to give up when I turned over a page and found it.”

-Historian Helen Harris, on the search to identify Ned Kelly’s bones

In recent days it’s been confirmed that a set of human bones exhumed from an unmarked mass grave in what used to be Melbourne’s Pentridge Prison belonged to Edward ‘Ned’ Kelly, perhaps the most infamous and celebrated of the Australian bushrangers. One of the great mysteries of the Kelly legend – what actually happened to the body after his execution in 1880 – has been solved, using modern-day technology and a bit of old-fashioned sleuthing.

Which is how a post about a 19^th Century bushranger finds its place on a blog about a WWII bomber crew. There was an excellent article in the weekend newspaper last week that explained exactly how the identification was made and eventually confirmed through DNA matching with one of Kelly’s descendants. But it was the quote that opens this post, from a historian engaged in the search, which caught my eye. Harris was looking for police documents that could challenge contemporary newspaper reports that said Kelly’s body had been dismembered by autopsy, a crucial piece of evidence in determining that a skull long thought to have been Kelly’s was in fact not. Harris had a theory, born out of many years studying Victoria’s early police records, that the Superintendant of the time would have tried to find out the truth or otherwise of the newspaper report in question from the governor of Melbourne Gaol. She looked in the archives and, after a methodical search, found the letter she was looking for.

This is how a good historian works. Start with a mystery, work out where the gaps are in the story and consider where the missing piece of the jigsaw might be. Then go searching for it – and there is nothing quite like the thrill of turning over an old yellowing bit of paper in an ancient file somewhere and finding exactly what you are looking for.

Of course, it takes a long while sometimes to find that elusive document. Harris has, over the course of her career, looked at 400 boxes of old Victorian police documents – and the article says there are still a few hundred left to go. There could be anything in that archive – it takes a dedicated researcher to methodically work through each one, missing nothing, to fully extract all of the details.

Though the volume of documents that I have found in my research into B for Baker and her crew will not go even one twentieth of the way towards filling 400 boxes, I’ve gathered a fair bit now. And I still have a large pile that I’m working through – among them, documents that I copied at the National Archives of Australia well over a year and a half ago. As I work through each page, I sometimes find information that adds another piece to other puzzles I’ve been trying to solve. Finding letters written by one parent to another in one archive, and the replies to those letters in another, I’ve discovered that everything really is connected.

The information is out there, somewhere. Sometimes it’s in front of our very noses, it just hasn’t been properly extracted yet.

This blog post inspired by an article by Mark Chew, A Question of Identity, The Sunday Age Good Weekend Magazine, 03SEP11

Found.

August 11, 2011October 25, 2013 ~ Adam Purcell

B for Baker now has a flight engineer.

This afternoon, I received in the post a slightly fat envelope from England. As I opened it, a dozen or more photographs tumbled out onto my desk. The letter inside was from Steve Butson, to whom I had sent the latest of my speculative letters.

“In answer to your question”, it said, “yes, Kenny Tabor was the Uncle I never knew”.

With that simple phrase, the great relative search was complete.

Steve wrote me a fantastic four-page letter in which he explained a lot about his family. Some of the names were familiar, thanks to Chris Tabor’s careful work on Ancestry.com. Some were new to me. But they were all connected to the buck-toothed young chap who appeared in some of the photographs.

Sgt Kenneth Harold Tabor had an older brother and a sister called Bill and Betty, and a younger brother called Don. He worked at a garage in Westbourne before he joined the Royal Air Force on his eighteenth birthday. Perhaps it was unsurprising, then, that he would train and fly as a flight engineer. Ken was killed when Lancaster LM475 B for Baker failed to return from Lille on 10 May 1944. The youngest member of the crew, he was just nineteen years old.

The crew is complete. I am now in contact with relatives of each of the seven men who were on board B for Baker when it was lost. It’s taken about three years of fairly steady work to reach this point. Now it’s time to find out as much as I can about each one, to give a human face to the story.

And ultimately? The seven men in the crew of B for Baker were drawn together long ago by events well beyond their comprehension or control. These same forces now forever link their seven families. It’s my goal to one day bring all seven together again – for the first time in nearly seven decades.

Like crewing up, once more.

Still looking

August 5, 2011May 22, 2012 ~ Adam Purcell

In recent weeks I’ve stepped up the search for relatives of
the last remaining member of the crew of B for Baker. Sgt Kenneth Harold Tabor was the crew’s Flight Engineer. His service record (which I have just received from the RAF) shows that he was the youngest on the crew, enlisting on his 18^thbirthday. Sadly he was killed before reaching his 20^th.

To this point, the search has been a case of sending letters willy-nilly to Tabors scattered all around the UK, simply because that is their name. I’m up to 12 so far. Many of those I have heard back from have been related to each other. Not all have replied yet but to date I have hit dead ends. As it has turned out, there are many more Tabors around than I previously anticipated and, well, to continue in this direction will take (a) a very long time and (b) lots of money. So a new direction has been needed.

Enter Chris Tabor, the latest to receive one of my speculative letters. He is no relation to Ken, but it happens that he is into family history research, has an Ancestry.com membership and, most importantly, knows how to use it. So he’s been doing some digging for me. Chris has uncovered records showing that Ken had two older siblings – a sister and a brother who appear to have been twins. Both married and had children who would now be in their 60s. I plugged the names that Chris sent me into a useful website called 192.com, and it has come up with postal addresses for a number of people of those names.

Those six people will shortly be sent one of my now legendary speculative letters. Only this time, I’m hoping that the letters are slightly less speculative than they have been in the past. This time there is a document trail that suggests we might be on the right track.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

The Story So Far

July 23, 2011May 12, 2014 ~ Adam Purcell ~ 3 Comments

It occurred to me this week that some people who have been reading this blog might not know the basic background to the story I’m attempting to tell. So this post is a general introduction to The Story So Far.

In broad terms, this blog charts the development of my research into my grandfather’s uncle and his wartime story. W/O Royston William Purcell (known as Jack) was a navigator with 467 Squadron, Royal Australian Air Force. He was shot down and killed on a bombing operation to Lille in France in May 1944. Jack was 22 years old.

There were seven men in Jack’s Lancaster crew. The pilot was Phil Smith, an industrial chemist from Mosman in Sydney. Flight engineer was Ken Tabor from Bournemouth, England. Jack Purcell, of course, was the navigator. He was from Strathfield, NSW, and had been a shop boy with NSW Government Railways. Wireless operator Dale Johnston was a motor mechanic from Dayboro, Queensland. Postal worker Jerry Parker, from Leyland in the UK, was the bomb aimer. Englishman Eric Hill, from Goring in Berkshire, manned the mid-upper turret, and Gilbert Pate, a wool classifier from Kogarah, NSW, was the rear gunner. They ranged in age from 19 to 30. Only one would see the end of the war.

Over Lille that May night in 1944, their Lancaster exploded. Ejected by the force of the blast, Phil Smith parachuted to safety, evaded capture and was sheltered by a French farmer before Allied invasion forces passed his position four months later. His six crewmates were killed in either the blast or the ensuing crash and are now buried in French soil a few miles from the crash site.

The perception of ‘Uncle Jack’ and his place in the collective Purcell family memory has been passed down through the generations, and indeed down different branches of the family tree. I was lucky that it was my father who showed an interest in, and was eventually given, Jack’s logbook and the handful of photographs and documents that goes along with it. When he first showed them to me (I was eight or nine years old at the time), it planted the seed that in recent years has turned into something approaching obsession. I have now gathered a fairly significant body of information about this crew and what they were doing in a Lancaster over Northern France in May 1944. I have traced and contacted the families of ~~six of the~~ all seven men in the crew. I have a worldwide network of research contacts. I have even travelled overseas twice in an effort to chase down leads and visit some of the significant sites associated with Jack’s war. Most importantly, I’ve realised that this story – one of more or less ordinary lads caught up in far from ordinary times and doing far from ordinary things – is well worth telling.
So where to from here?

I’m aiming to write a book about this story over the next few years. There remains much work still to do. At this stage I am focussing on the crew themselves, looking at where they came from, who they were and the very different paths that they took to 467 Squadron – while also continuing the search for the family of Ken Tabor, the one member of the crew remaining outstanding. I’m planning future work to concentrate on training and the journey to an operational squadron for each of these men. Then I’ll look at bomber operations in the first part of 1944 when they were on squadron, particularly emphasising the Lille raid on which the men were lost and its part in the overall context of the war in the lead-up to the Normandy invasion. I’m also hoping to investigate some theories on what actually caused the loss of B for Baker, the Lancaster they were flying.

This is the story so far. Who knows where it will end up!

Searches

July 13, 2011May 22, 2012 ~ Adam Purcell

WordPress gives you access to some interesting tools and statistics about your blog. For example, this blog has clocked up nearly 1,500 total views since I migrated it to the WordPress platform last year. I can see which links people have clicked, both from the blog to get to other places and on other web pages to get here (hello Lancaster Archive Forum!). Most interestingly, though, it also gives me a list showing the search terms that people have used to find me (numbers show how many hits came from each term):

Some are interesting:

dinas dinlle world war (11)
air traffic control tower dinas dinlle north wales (1)
llandwrog caernarfon raf training in the war (1)
llandwrog airfield wartime (2)
avro lancaster outline (2)
gil thew (2)
tail end charlie fradley raf (2)
adam purcell (1)
jack purcell family (1)
lancaster bomber elsham crash site (1)
avro lancaster line drawings (1)
a painting of a lancaster avro in a field (1)
fradley airodrome during the war (1)
lancaster bomber crews 467 (1)
jude findlay and adam purcell (1)

Some probably didn’t quite find what was being searched for:

lancaster jb467 (4)
old rcaf airfields firestation (2)
wartime bomb shelters in scotland (2)
102 squadron pocklington (2)
“102 squadron” (2)
wartime fire service models (1)
canberra bomber navigator station (1)
wartime fire service stations (1)
photos binbrook dispersal apron (1)
air traffic control dinas dinlle (1)
lancaster lm550 (1)
sir arthur harris raf gravestone (1)
roger audis of 9 squadron (1)
very big canvas (1)

Some are just plain strange:

raf bardney ghosts (2)
irish sea paintings (1)
how to canvas something (1)
is the control tower raf bardney haunted (1)
are jack purcells still cool? (1)
repainting jack purcell (1)

But every so often comes one which makes me sit up and take
notice:

ken tabor (2)
” lille raid “+ smith (2)
lm475 purcell (1)
navy veteran dale johnston (1)
don smith 463 squadron (1)
who was eric hill born to (1)
search for dale johnston (1)
charles erskine johnston (1)

It’s this last group that gets me a little excited. Sure, there could be many ‘Dale Johnstons’ and ‘Eric Hills’ in the world. But from these searches, someone is looking for people of that name. Could they be the same ones that I’m looking for?

The lack of any comments or emails suggests maybe not. But I’ll keep hoping. And if you are one of the people who find this blog through a search engine while looking for someone, please leave me a comment. You never know where a connection might be.

Eureka!

June 19, 2011May 22, 2012 ~ Adam Purcell

Janet Hurst has been busy in Goring. She wrote a small article about my search for Eric Hill, and it has just been published in the village newsletter. And guess what?

It worked!

She was contacted by a local lady whose daughter married Eric Hill’s nephew. Janet sent me an email last night to tell me this good news… and half an hour later I received an email that started with this:

Hello Adam,

I am Barry Hill son of Frederick Roland Hill who was the brother of Eric Reginald Hill.

Bingo!

This is the same tactic that I successfully used in the search for relatives of Jerry Parker. I’m extremely grateful to Janet for her hard work over the last couple of weeks.

Barry says that his father died a few years ago but he does have a couple of stories that have been passed down through the family about Eric. Apparently he was something of a dare-devil. Those sorts of things will go a long way towards giving a story to the blurry photos I have of the man.

So Barry Hill makes it six families out of seven of the crew of B for Baker who I am now in touch with. Only flight engineer Ken Tabor remains outstanding. I’ve been working on that one as well recently, but not getting very far with it as yet. But getting this welcome news from Goring is very encouraging and keeps the spark alive.

I’ll keep searching.