The Dead Man's Penny

Memorial Tablet - November 1918

Squire nagged and bullied till I went to fight,
(Under Lord Derby's scheme). I died in hell -
(They called it Passchendaele). My wound was slight,
And I was hobbling back; and then a shell
Burst slick upon the duck-boards; so I fell
Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light.

At sermon-time, while Squire is in his pew,
He gives my gilded name a thoughtful stare;
For, though low down upon the list, I'm there;
"In proud and glorious memory" ... that's my due.
Two bleeding years I fought in France, for Squire:
I suffered anguish that he's never guessed.
Once I came home on leave: and then went west ...
What greater glory could a man desire?
 

              - Siegfried Sassoon 

When I was a child, visits to my grandmother’s house were punctuated by a small ritual. I would detach myself from my family and make my way to the living room at the front of the house. The room was seldom used and it had had a stillness about it. In the corner, near the window, stood an octagonal table topped with white lace, and at its centre a potted African violet with its strange, fuzzy leaves.

Next to the plant lay the peculiarity that would draw me to the room. It was a bronze plaque, about the size of a side plate and bearing a depiction of a standing Britannia flanked by her lion. It looked like a giant, pre-decimal penny. She was quiet, though, this Britannia; her trident was held against her right shoulder as she stood with her chin inclined slightly towards her breast. In her outstretched left hand she held a wreath below which, in a neat coffer, Roman capitals spelled out a familiar name. Around the edge of the plaque were the words “He died for freedom and honour”.

“He was an uncle of your grandfather’s”, I was told. “He was killed in the First World War.”

This was the extent of anyone’s knowledge about John Weldon. This isn’t surprising. The new Irish Free State had a profound suspicion of Irishmen who had fought under the British flag and the involvement of a family member in the Crown forces was, and indeed remains, a subject often avoided. This cold, heavy thing bearing the name of a dead Irish soldier, his story unknown and unspoken of, became a source of fascination for me. Against the ticking of the mantle clock in that room, I would pick it up and inspect it, turning it over in my hands. Occasionally, I would bring it to my grandmother’s kitchen and cover it in HP sauce in an effort to clean it. The evidence of my enthusiastic polishing is still apparent in its slightly worn look.

My interest in the dead man’s penny never went away. When, some years ago, the UK National Archives made the index of the British war records searchable online, I decided to see could I find out anything about John. There were two possible matches; of these, one, an Irishman and the most likely candidate, had put forward his father as next of kin and this name didn't match. The other was an Australian infantryman, an ANZAC from New South Wales.

The Australian seemed unlikely to be my relative, but I knew that my grandfather’s family had shared a trait that could bring it within the bounds of possibility. The Weldons were wanderers, a family of seafarers whose trade reflected the unsettled character shared by those with a tinge of salt in their blood, a character which I have inherited. The notion of an Irishman finding himself on the other side of the world and enlisting in the Australian army seemed entirely Weldon-like. My mother shared this view. “I remember my mother talking about him coming home from some place he’d been working." she said.  "Apparently he had a gold nugget in his pocket, wherever he’d got that from…”

In 2002, I visited the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and located the familiar name in the courtyard where the fallen Australians are remembered. At the close of the day, a bugler played the Last Post and, as I stood and listened, I wondered if the gold in John's pocket had come from the fields of Victoria or New South Wales. 

Three years later, I was living and working in London. Nearing ANZAC day, I mentioned to an Australian colleague the possibility that my relative may have been an Australian soldier. “You should check it out online”, he said. “They’ve just made the Australian war records available on the internet”. I accessed the Australian War Graves website that day fully expecting to draw a blank, but in running my search, I felt as if I had performed a tiny alchemy. The dead man’s penny became a memorial again, not just to a half familiar name, but to John Weldon of Clontarf in Dublin, who died fighting for the new nation of Australia in the mud of Passchendaele in September 1917.

As I read the details of his war record, a picture of the final act of that lost life began to emerge. In October 1916, John Weldon, all five feet four inches of him, blue-eyed and with a scar clearly marking the bridge of his nose, walked into a recruiting office in Dubbo, New South Wales and enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force. By way of address, he  wrote simply “C/O Post Office, Forbes, N.S.W.”, his next of kin was his brother Pat, far away on the other side of the World. John had tried to enlist before but had been rebuffed due to poor eyesight. As the fearsome efficiencies of modern warfare began to tear through the young men on the fronts, however, the recruiting sergeants were becoming less picky. He swore his oath and signed his name and less than one year later, John was dead.

Over the next few days, I cross-referenced records of various types. The first real feeling of narrative arrived with the discovery that John wasn’t the only one to enlist at Dubbo that day. There was at least one other, and he was an Irishman.

PJ O’Loughlin was a tall, solid, twenty-eight year old bachelor from Corkscrewhill in Co. Clare, dark haired and with a pale complexion unsuited to the Australian sun. At six feet one inches and thirteen stones, he would have stood head and shoulders above most other men at the time. It's easy to picture the two of them, the diminutive Dubliner and the big Clareman arriving together to join up. Why they did so is impossible to know. Neither was particularly young - John was 34, exactly the same age as I am now – and neither was married. It seems unlikely that that they would have been motivated by any sense of duty to the Empire: John was from a family with close Fenian connections and now, barely six months after the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, he was enlisting to fight for Britain. PJ had grown up in an area that had been decimated by the Great Famine, an event which, at that time, had only recently faded from living memory and to this day elicits strong feelings of resentment. There is no doubt, however, that enlisting would have provided instantaneous employment and a possible route back to Europe and to their families.

Wrestling on board John's ship, the SS Benalla on way to ANZAC landing

What we do know for certain is that they both sailed on the same troop ship, H.M.A.T. Benalla, from Circular Quay in Sydney on the 9th November 1916. They spent Christmas at sea and arrived at Devonport in January. An indication of PJ’s feelings for the situation in which ne now found himself can be gleaned from his service record at this point. He was court-martialed in England on two charges; the first going AWOL for eight days before being apprehended by military police in Waterford, the second, amazingly, “attempting to escape from escort by jumping from train whilst in motion”. Hardly the actions of a man who was joining up to fight for King and Country. In PJ’s case, it seems that he just wanted to go home.

Details are sparse after PJ’s jump for freedom. They would have gone about their basic training and had periods of leave before they were both shipped off to Le Havre. Some months later, they were thrown together again as part of the same group of reinforcements, ending up in August 1917 in the ANZAC camp at Dickebusch in Belgium. When they arrived, the weather was appalling and it stayed that way for weeks. Most will have mental images of soldiers slogging through impossible amounts of mud, the classic visual cliché of the First World War. That was Passchendaele.

In the sodden August and September days that preceded what would come to be known as the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge, the war diaries of their unit show little front line activity. It is likely that they would have spent their days performing ancillary duties or sitting in camp listening to the monstrous bombardment, only half a mile away, that presaged the coming offensive. They may even have been able to watch the clouds of poison gas that were sent drifting toward the German batteries on the afternoon of 17th September.

The war diary for the day after the gas attack is not particularly dramatic. There are no specific references to casualties – only officers were named in the diaries – and in terms of activity there are mentions only of reconnaissance. It was not a particularly noteworthy day. As far as I can tell from my own research there were only two casualties in the unit on that day; one was my grand-uncle, John Weldon from Dublin, the other was PJ O’Loughlin from County Clare.

Of their deaths there are no details. The only clue comes in the page of John’s record which records his last will and testament. This page is a typed transcription of the will, which would have been stored in his paybook and held on his person at all times. There are sections that are clearly missing and the typist has faithfully recorded the fragmentary words. There is a handwritten note explaining that the original copy of the will was “mutilated”.

There are no neat gravestones that mark the spot where the two men lie. Their records do have a burial reference, but enlisted men were often buried where they fell and in the bombardments and churning mud of Passchendaele, their resting places were lost. There is a photograph from the time which will be familiar to many and is dated October 1917, some weeks after my great uncle was killed. It shows five Australian soldiers amid the hellish environment which consumed John and PJ’s graves.

The background shows a grotesque parody of a woodland, the brutalized trees rising thorough the mist, their branches stripped bare and pointing skyward in what looks for all the world like a gesture of dying supplication. Duck boards snake across the mud, dividing the picture like a crack, and along that fracture five Australians walk. They are not marching or hurrying; there is no evidence of intent in their gait; indeed, one of them appears to have stopped to watch the photographer. The image seems the very soul of loneliness and desolation, and yet one can still imagine the consolation and hope that each of these men took in each other’s companionship. One can bring to mind the talk of home or of family, picture the proffered and accepted cigarette and the other countless, continuing, life-affirming necessities of human interaction, their voices marked with the drawl of the former colonies or with the accents of the old countries.

That John and PJ met must be considered a certainty; that they were friends is a matter of conjecture, though the interweaving of the details of that final year of their lives makes that connection a logical one. It seems likely that John and PJ died side by side, fighting for a country that was not their own, the last, tragic scene in an adventure that took them to the far side of the world and back again. To Australians and New Zealanders, the sacrifice of their soldiers, their "diggers", was a bloody coming of age of their nations where all debts to the Empire which created them were paid off in full. John Weldon and PJ O'Loughlin can rightfully claim their place in the grand epic of nationhood, but that tale is one that was created in the years following the war when their story, a simpler and more human one, had run its course. By then, they had already lost the light. It is difficult to know what concept these two Irishmen would have had of the freedom and honour for which, their families were told, they had given their lives.

I have as yet been unable to locate a memorial for PJ. Relatively speaking, John is fortunate, if fortunate is the correct word: in addition to his corner of that quiet courtyard in Canberra where I stood for the Last Post, John is also commemorated on a panel on the Menin Gate in Ypres. And from time to time I wonder if, somewhere beneath a Belgian field, in a spot that shall be forever Ireland, lies a little nugget of Australian gold.

7089 Private John WELDON

3rd Battalion (Infantry) Australian Imperial Force

January 1882 - 18 September 1917