It is now just over 100 years ago that William Charles Box, (“Bill Box”), then a 17 year old Londoner decided to leave England and migrate to find his fortune in Australia. His father followed a few years later and they stayed together for a while at a boarding house at Sandgate. His father later returned to England prior to the start of the First War1.
Bill was born in July 1893 in Bermondsey, London, the son of James Alexander Box, the elder, and the younger brother of James Alexander Box, my grandfather. He was therefore my great-uncle. His parents were hotel-keepers who after WWI, in 1922, no doubt at Bill’s urging, themselves migrated to Brisbane where they set up leather goods and shoe manufacturing businesses in Aspley and Chermside2.
In 1915, Bill together with a pal, Stanley Bert Spacey, applied to select land in outback Queensland though what their intentions were, grow crops or run cattle or sheep, we do not know. They chose a property of 1278 acres 20 miles from Tara in the state’s far south-west at a cost of 5/- per acre, a total of £319/12/6. The selection was approved in April 19153 but Bill was never to enjoy his investment. Bill felt the call to arms and on 4 August 1915, he presented at the enlistment station at Toowoomba where he enlisted and was given Regimental No 1389, which must have been a mistake because it was crossed out and 1388 substituted4.
His enlistment papers show that he was then 21 years and 11 months old, single and his occupation is shown as “selector”, an occupation which he was never destined to continue due to the war.
Bill was drafted into the 5th Light Horse Regt, AIF, and became part of the 11th reinforcements5 embarked on 4 October 1915 for Egypt6. No doubt he and all his fellow Light Horsemen must have expected to be sent ashore at Gallipoli but by the time the reinforcements arrived in Egypt all our forces had been withdrawn and were being retrained for service in Europe.
His casualty form has as the first note “2 February 1916, marched out to Serapeum”.7 I am not sure if he was involved in anything like the infamous Death March to Serapeum which took place the following month in March 1916 but it was the height of summer and conditions must have been very severe for troops on such route marches. The notes also show that for the next several months he was afflicted with influenza and debility at various times which no doubt reflected the harsh conditions of camp life in Egypt.
On 16 September 1916, he was transferred to infantry duties in the 15th Battalion which had already, in June 1916, been posted to action in France. On 21 September 1916, Bill embarked with other reinforcements at Alexandria for service in France.
He marched into 4 Training Battalion at Codford to train for fighting in France. The English winter cannot have agreed with him because he suffered further illness and hospitalisation in England before finally embarking for service in France at Folkestone on 3 May 1917.
By then, 15 Battalion had first been involved in trench warfare in Pozieres since August 1916. Bill missed those horrendous actions but from his arrival in France, in May 1917, 15 Battalion was engaged in constant trench warfare. In April 1917, 15 Battalion suffered heavy losses at Bullecourt and then spent the rest of 1917 engaged in Belgium pushing towards the Hindenburg line.
Bill was promoted to Lance corporal on 21 September 1917.
In March and April 1918, 15 Battalion was engaged in holding the German spring offensive and hence was constantly under heavy enemy fire. In July 1918, 15 Battalion was in action in Hamel where Pvt Henry Dalziel won the Battalion’s only Victoria Cross of the War.
Bill was wounded in action on 6 July 1918, suffering a shrapnel wound to the left wrist. On 17 July 1918 he was invalided to England for treatment at AGH Dartford and subsequently transferred to Weymouth. That effectively ended his military service and he was returned to Australia in October 19188. He required ongoing medical treatment for that wound for years after returning to Australia.9
Meantime, Bert Spacey, his partner in the prickly pear selection lease at Tara, had since 191610 been petitioning the Lands Administration to relieve him of the burden of the selection particularly the requirement to clear the land of prickly pear and to carry out other improvements such a building a house. Clearly, he was depending on Bill’s assistance to make the property work and he must have felt that with Bill serving overseas he had no alternative but to seek to forfeit the lease.
According to a letter from Bert Spacey to the Land Agent at Dalby in December 191911, Bill had visited him at Tara in about December 1918 but since then he had not heard from Bill to sign the forms to surrender the selection. Prompted by Bert’s reply, the Lands Administration wrote to the Army in January 1920 enquiring as to Bill’s whereabouts. The reply revealed that Bill was still an inmate at No 27 Australian General Hospital, Rosemount, Brisbane, having treatment for the disability caused by the shrapnel wound.
A Medical Board found that Bill suffered an “antero posterior perforating wound…” and “… division of the ulnar nerve” and that he was unable to “…straighten the 4 & 5th fingers…”12
In the meantime, his Army file records show that in early January 1918 his parents had moved from their former home at 7 Lewisham Road, Greenwich to “The King’s Arms” hotel at Brasted, Kent13.
The last entry on his Army file dated 3 September 1934 just records Bill’s address: “Metingi Plantation, Kavieng, New Guinea”. There is no other information to give any context to why that was recorded at that time as he had been there since at least 1926/714.
On 18 June 1929 Bill executed an agreement with WR Carpenter and Company Ltd of Rabaul (“Carpenters”) which recited that on 1 November 1927, Bill had bought Metingi and Metewolo plantations on New Hanover near Kavieng on New Ireland, former New Guinea territory that was expropriated by the Crown from the former German administration. By this agreement, Carpenters agreed, in exchange for him supplying copra to Carpenters, to extend to him a line of credit “in cash or goods” to the extent of £1500 and he agreed to pay interest on the balance from time to time at 8% pa15. He was required to execute an equitable mortgage in favour of Carpenters over the existing two plantations as well as any other plantation he acquired. In January 1931, he executed a further charging agreement and by that time, his indebtedness to Carpenters had reached £3015/14/11 which in those days was a very considerable sum indeed16.
In the meantime, I assume he had persuaded his parents to migrate to Australia and in 1922 they brought some of their younger children, but not their eldest son, Jim, my grandfather, to settle in Brisbane. They bought a 9 acre property in Gympie Road, Aspley where they built their home and later a house for their son Arthur and a house for their daughter Rose. Their property adjoined that of the three old maids who, for many years, ran the Aspley Hotel on Gympie Road.17
During WWI, Jim, my grandfather, had served in the Kirkee battery, Royal Field Artillery18 in France where, in a number of actions, he was gassed and as result he later contracted TB. After the war, a number of villages in Cambridge along Ermine Street, the old Roman road between London and York took in people for treatment of TB. Sir Pendrill Varrier-Jones, a Welsh doctor, formed a radical plan to set up TB treatment facilities in Papworth Everard, Cambs. He bought Papworth Hall, which included the entire village, where he established an enlightened approach to try to get TB sufferers well in healthy country air with fulltime care for those who needed it and a range of work for those whose health permitted in trades such printing, furniture and leather-goods making. Very ill patients were in hospital beds but those more able were given new homes that were built in the village. Unusually, married men were able to bring their families to live with them in new houses so as to give them every chance for full recovery while keeping their marriages together.
Before the War, my grandfather, Jim, had been a skilled saddler, so his skills were to be put to good use in Papworth and Sir Pendrill appointed him to establish the Papworth leather goods factory which later supplied leather goods to the Royal family and their goods were also sold through a shop that was opened in the main street in Cambridge opposite Woolworths as well as one in London.19 The factory was expanded over the years and later supplied leather goods to the Armed forces during WWII.
In 1926, my grandfather died, leaving my grandmother Jenny with three young girls to care for. Normally, a lady widowed by the death of a TB sufferer was required to leave the village no matter the hardship. An exception was made in my grandmother’s case because not only had my grandfather got the leather goods factory running efficiently, he had engaged and trained my grandmother’s brothers, George, Syd and Ern Charnock, who took over running the factory on my grandfather’s death in 192620.
My grandmother, Jenny Box, suffered ill-health from stomach ulcers for a number of years and in December 1932 she underwent an operation at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge but she died following the operation. It was Christmas time and the three Box girls found themselves as orphans in the middle of the Great Depression.
Six months after being orphaned, in June 1933, the family sent the three young Box girls to live with their paternal grandparents, Jim and Bill’s parents, who had migrated to Brisbane a decade earlier.
Bill could only rarely get away from his plantations in New Hanover and then only for essential medical treatment and to visit the family. My aunt recounts how one day in 1937, a taxi arrived at the Box home in Aspley where the three Box orphans were living with their grandparents, and Bill alighted. He met my aunt, Jane Elizabeth Box – always known as “Doll” – who was by then in her late teens. She had been a baby when Bill first saw her in London at the end of World War I and he also met for the first time her two younger sisters Jean and Gladys (nicknamed “Babe”), my mother. He was saddened by their plight as orphans and he promised to look after them. He periodically transferred amounts of cash to them21 and arranged an allotment from his war pension which was periodically paid to the three young women before and during WWII22.
Bill stayed with his parents at Aspley for several months recuperating from malaria and the hardship of running three plantations in the tropics. No one knew that was to be his last visit to the family and that they would never see him again.
Bill started a correspondence with his nieces sending all letters to Doll, the eldest of the three girls. My aunt has kept a number of letters that Bill wrote to them and you get a sense of the great hardships he endured on his remote plantations: endlessly hard work in the heat of the tropics, crippling bouts of malaria with no medical treatment available, isolation, a pinnace whose engine frequently gave trouble, financial stress because of perpetually low copra prices, and a high cost of living where all goods had to be freighted in by Carpenters or Burns Philp, the two main trading companies that flourished between the Wars. In the letters, he expressed his greatest wish was to get away from the hardship of life in New Hanover and to take the three girls to go and live in Sydney where he proposed to buy a hotel to keep them in an affluent life style that had to that time, eluded them all.
Sadly that was not to be. Despite his wish to return to Australia and to buy a hotel in Sydney, I can only speculate that his responsibilities and the fact that he was probably still heavily indebted to Carpenters denied him the chance to get away from New Hanover and survive.
He must have been one of the first Australians to be captured by the Japanese in their thrust south which took part of their fleet directly to Kavieng. On 4 January 1942, Japanese planes had bombed Rabaul which was the warning of impending doom. Just under three weeks later, on 23 January 1942 before dawn, the Japanese landed at Kavieng and also the same day at Rabaul23.
The only news the family had of Bill after that was replies from the Red Cross Bureau to my aunt’s letters which, even as late as October 1944, were still stating that Bill was a prisoner of war when the reality was that he had been dead at least two years.
During 1942, my aunt had heard from Nellie Simpson, widow of the Rev. Tom Simpson, a missionary at Kavieng who knew Bill very well. Nellie had escaped with her baby daughter Margaret on one of the last ships evacuating civilians in December 1941. Nellie very kindly wrote to my aunt to pass on the news from Bill that he was well and she had also been in touch with other families in Australia about their menfolk who stayed. Her daughter Margaret Henderson has now written two excellent and poignant books about her family’s travails.
The family heard nothing official till 1946 when the Army finally wrote to say that Bill was dead and so the family eventually were told the story that Bill’s name was found on the Japanese list of those who went down on the Montevideo Maru on 1 July 1942.
I was born in 1944 and my late cousin, Brian Tilley, was born in 1945 and by then Bill had been dead for over two years. I know that from time to time my mother and my aunts and other family members wrote to Bill through the Red Cross to advise him of our births and other family events. My aunt still has one letter she had written to Bill which was returned by the Red Cross, which was probably the most ominous indication that something was badly wrong. The whole family was in suspense for some four years before they finally learned of Bill’s fate. I was only very young but one of my earliest memories is of the distress of my mother and her sisters when they found out.
On 1 July 2012, I attended the dedication of the new War Memorial in Canberra to those lost in Rabaul and the islands and on the Montevideo Maru on 1 July 1942. I was surprised that there were so many people there, close relatives and friends of other victims. Up till then, 70 years on, Bill’s death was something that was discussed only in the family: my aunt had long since lost the connection with Nellie Simpson and the few other families she knew. The majority of the families of course came from Victoria where 2/22 Battalion, which provided Lark Force, was raised.
In discussions with the families of other Kavieng and Rabaul victims, I found out that Bill was caught in the Albatross Channel between New Hanover and New Britain by a Jap warship while sailing his vessel in company with four other vessels containing a group of his mates who were together trying to escape the Jap onslaught.
We do not know what he endured from there and we do not know whether he truly was on the Montevideo Maru or whether he had, like some others, been slaughtered out of hand as the Japanese did with so many others including the natives and the Chinese traders who lived there. However, there is some little consolation to know that at least when he was taken, he was with his mates trying to flee the enemy.
It is far too late now, but one can only conjecture how Bill’s life may have been different had he persisted with the selection at Tara when he was finally discharged from No 27 AGH, Rosemount. He cannot have known that the decision he made to abandon his mate Bert Spacey and the Tara selection to go to war and then later select a plantation in New Hanover would lead to his death at the hands of the Japs just over twenty years later.
In my later life, I have been fortunate to have travelled extensively in China and following a marriage there, heard many stories of my then Chinese family under Jap occupation. Subsequent research convinced me that many of the Japanese troops who carried out in Nanking and other areas in China were the same ones who were involved in the occupation of New Hanover and the other islands and who there carried out the many atrocities during WWII that have since come to light.
I particularly want to salute the memory of my late great-uncle Bill because, had it not been for his decision to migrate to Australia just over a century ago now, the Box family would most likely not have established itself in Australia and my brothers and I and our cousins in Australia simply would not have been born.
I hope that with the dedication of the Rabaul and Montevideo Maru Memorial, Bill’s name and those of all the thousand and fifty-two mates who suffered the same awful fate, whether truly on that ship or elsewhere, will always be remembered not just as victims of the Japanese aggressors but simply as true Australian heroes.
Lest we forget.
Bibliography
Australian Imperial Force. Attestation Papers. Military enlistment file. Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 1915. Digitised.
Dept of Lands, Qld. Prickly Pear Selection Lease No 7239, Dalby District. Government Lease of land. Brisbane: Qld State Archives, 1915. Digitised documents.
End notes
1. The writer’s conversations with his aunt, Jane Elizabeth Arkinstall (“Aunt Doll”), over many years.
2. Conversations with Aunt Doll.
3. Lease of Prickly Pear Selection No 7239, Dalby District, Lands Department, held by Qld State Archives.
4. Australian Imperial Force, Attestation Paper, 4 August 1915, held by National Archives of Australia, Canberra.
5. Letter dated 5 December 1916 from Australian Military Forces, 1st Military District, Brisbane to Dept of Public Lands.
6. AIF service and casualty form attached to Army file.
7. AIF casualty form attached to Army file
8. AIF casualty form attached to Army file.
9. Conversations with Aunt Doll.
10. In a letter dated 28 October 1916, SB Spacey wrote to the Lands Commissioner complaining that Bill Box’s having left for overseas service left him without power to effect the improvements required under the PPS lease and asked to be allowed to surrender the lease.
11. Letter dated 9 November 1919 from SB Spacey of Undulla Creek, Tara, to Dept of Public Lands.
12. Findings of the Medical Board on 2 June 1920.
13. AIF change of address of next of kin form.
14. Yours sincerely Tom, Revisited by Margaret L Henderson, 2005 Seaview Press, page 106.
15. Agreement dated 18 June 1929 between WR Carpenter and Company Limited and Bill Box, duplicate original held by the author.
16. Charging Agreement dated 5 January 1931, duplicate original held by the author.
17. Conversations with Aunt Doll.
18. Kirkee Battery photo showing her father, Jim Box, held by Aunt Doll.
19. Conversations with Aunt Doll.
20. Conversations with Aunt Doll.
21. Letter from P Clark to Aunt Doll dated 12 January 1941 advising that he had just arrived from Rabaul and that Bill had left £1200 in the account at the Bank of NSW and that he had made provision for the girls in his will; Letter from Bill to Doll undated but refers to it being “the first letter” and that he had sent Doll “… £15 by radio via his brother, Arthur to arrive by 29 June…”; Letter from Bill to Aunt Doll dated 27 October (no year but possibly not long after his visit in 1937) in which he says he has just sent Doll his “..pension card, and that there should be 26 guineas in the account for them to draw on”; Letter from Bill to Doll undated but heavily censored so likely to be late 1941 in which he says he has sent £5 to Doll for Christmas – probably the letter and also the last money Bill was able to send before being captured.
22. Conversations with Aunt Doll.
23. The Kavieng Massacre by Raden Dunbar, Sally Milner 2007, page 30 et seq.