… We will never know who this Australian was. Yet he has always been among those we have honored. We know that he was one of the 45,000 Australians who died on the Western Front, one of the 416,000 Australians who volunteered for service in World War I … and one of the 100,000 Australians who have died in wars this century. He is all of them. And he is one of us.

Frank was my mother’s (Annie Crommelin) brother, who, we were told as children, was killed at the war in France. To attest to this there were many photographs of a good looking young man in uniform. In hindsight I realize that my mother was careful to convey nothing to us of the effect this tragedy had on



her or her family. Frank (known to his family as John) was born in 1896 in Grenfell, NSW, the youngest of 10 children of Frederick Crommelin and his wife Margaret, nee Rohen. Frederick was a solicitor in Grenfell in the days when Grenfell was a flourishing town. Their home, known as “Liberty Hall” was more than adequate for a family that size and they were comfortably off without being wealthy. They were well known in the town and district and seemed to have a constant flow of guests. The family, or so family lore would have it, was content, self-sufficient and perhaps even complacent. By the time stories of life at “Liberty Hall” had come down to the next generation myth had perhaps blurred the edges.

John was sent to the Riverview College, North Sydney, his older brothers to St. Stanislaus and his sisters to Loreto Normanhurst, as was usual then, as boarders. After matriculation John returned to Grenfell and became articled to his father. He had just passed his first year Law exam when, on 15th November 1915 he enlisted with the A.F.F. At nineteen years of age his father’s consent was required and given, one imagines with mixed feelings. His older brother, Victor, had already enlisted and was to serve in Gallipoli and Palestine. There is some indication that Victor tried to dissuade John from enlisting.

John embarked in Sydney on the “Osterley” 16th January 1916. He and his contingent arrived at Zeitoun in Egypt where they remained until 10th March presumably in training. From Alexandria they sailed to Marseilles, arriving on 25th March and from there traveled by train to the Somme area.

Service records obtained from the Australian Archives show that from 13th May John was at the Front. Conditions were so horrific and casualty rates so high it might be some consolation in knowing his time there was not to be for long. He was killed at Pozieres on 7th August 1916. From sparse details on the back of a photograph it seems that he and others, while “at rest” in a trench, were killed by an exploding shell. A paternal uncle of ours, in the area at the time, saw the explosion and only later discovered that John was amongst those killed. It was not until the 13th September, about five weeks after John’s death, that his father was handed a telegram by the Catholic priest in Grenfell with the news of John’s death.

His death, tragic as it was, became the forerunner of more loss in the family. His sister Kathleen (Bertie) was to die in childbirth in Rabaul in 1918, and his eldest brother, Arthur, died of appendicitis in 1919. My mother (Annie) never really conveyed to us as children any hint of what must have been a period of enormous sadness in the Crommelin family.

John’s grave is to be found at the “Gordon Dump Cemetery”, Ovillers-la-Boisselle, about three kilometers outside the town of Albert. In the horror of fighting John would not have cared, had he known, that his Crommelin ancestors had lived and thrived as producers of linen in that area, before fleeing, as Huguenots, from Saint Quentin.