Introduction 1
Introduction ... the council erected an honour roll at the Town Hall listing the names of 608
residents of Canterbury Municipality who served their country. Of these, eightysix paid the supreme sacrifice. Larcombe, FA. Change and Challenge: a History of the Municipality of Canterbury, N.S. W. Canterbury Municipal Council, 1979.
This project was the result of a chance remark by a member of the Canterbury and District Historical Society in 1989: “I wonder what happened to Canterbury's World War I Honour Roll which used to be in the old Town Hall? It hasn’t been sighted for years. I suppose now we will never know who all those people were”. We made investigations, but it seemed that the Honour Roll had indeed vanished. So the Society took up the challenge to reconstruct it from other sources - to find the 608 names that had been listed. Members volunteered to find and transcribe church and school honour boards, to transcribe the names on the suburban war memorials and in the service clubs, and to read through the wartime Council Minutes to gather as many names as we could. When we added them up, we had about four hundred names - not enough. By this time, some of the transcribers had become very enthusiastic about the project, and wanted to take it further. A few families had come forward with service details of fathers and grandfathers; we had some photographs of local men in uniform; schoolchildren were asking for information about the war for school projects - so we decided to look for other sources. Perhaps we should try contemporary newspapers next. All files of Canterbury’s local newspaper, The Alert, had been long since destroyed, so two volunteers began to read their way through the Sydney Morning Herald, the Sydney Mail and the Daily Telegraph, recording names of local people from casualty lists, family announcements and short biographies. Sometimes there would be a photograph, and that would be recorded and copied as well. The list of names and the amount of information about each person began to grow rapidly. Within a short time, we had passed our target of 608 names, and we had not yet gone past the end of 1916 in the newspapers. The original Honour Roll had clearly not recorded every local person who had served in World War I. The aim of the project was broadened, and it became infinitely more interesting. We now aimed at finding as much biographical detail as we could about each person from the Canterbury District who served in World War I. Who were their parents? Where did they live? On which battlefields did they serve? What happened to them? The range of sources checked grew. Sands Directories, Electoral Rolls and Indexes to Births, Deaths and Marriages all provided some of the pieces. C.E.W. Bean’s Official History gave background information about battles and troop movements. Excursions were made to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, where the Embarkation Rolls and Roll of Honour Circulars were checked. The War Memorial’s database of photographs was searched, once it became available on the Internet, as was the Nominal Roll, the Roll of Honour and the Commemorative Roll. Having these files available on the Web made our task so much easier. Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery transcripts were sought and scanned for graves and memorials of Canterbury people buried near the battlefields overseas, and each name on our own list was checked on the CWGC Web site. We have also transcribed relevant information from the War Memorial’s files of letters to the British Red Cross re Australian servicemen.