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PAGE 5
Wednesday, 26 April, 2017
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Unknown hero By Garry Howe Most kids don’t need a heroic act to consider their Dad a hero. Long-time Pakenham publican Dave Purves was robbed of that privilege - as one of many Great War children who grew up never knowing their father. Yet there’s every chance the Dad he never knew could lay genuine claim to being a hero. William Purves was already on the battlefields of Europe as part of the famous Scots Guard when Dave was born in February 1915. William was killed in action by the time his son was three months old, some time around 18 May, 1915. At that time, the Scots Guards were engaged in the Battle of Festubert in the Artois region of France, a significant moment in the history of the regiment. Eighty men in the Guard’s F Company were wiped out in an area known as the Orchard. Legend has it that they accepted their fate and bravely dug in for a fight to the death. They became known as The 80 Immortals. It is not known for sure, but certainly possible, that William was one of those men. What is known for sure is that he did make the supreme sacrifice. William was born in Scotland. He enlisted in the Scots Guards in 1903 when he was 18 and became a reservist after seeing out his required service. He moved to Australia in 1909 and by 1914 was married and living with his wife Maud in the Gippsland farming town of Maffra. He “did the books” at the local sugar beet factory and Maud’s family, the Shankleys, ran the Macalister Hotel, where they also lived. When war broke out in Europe on 4 August 1914, the 31-year-old William reported for mobilisation with the Scots Guards within 10 days, embarking from Melbourne in December on the HMAS Berrima. In a letter written towards the end of the two month voyage and addressed to “my own bonny darling wife Maud”, he is clearly torn between a sense of duty to her and to King and Country. “The morning I left you darling I shall never forget, I knew it would be many a long day before I saw you again,” he wrote. “I was proud of you that morning sweetheart, you bore up bravely, you were a real soldier’s wife.”
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Those 12 other married men had cleared away, but what was the use of doing that? I would have been branded as a coward, and I am not that …
Private William Purves, who was killed in May 1915 in France and may well be one of the Scots Guards’ 80 Immortals. Picture: AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL Below: A letter from Buckingham Palace, signed by King George, acknowledging the sacrifice suffered by Maud Purves in losing her husband William.
WILLIAM PURVES
A young Dave Purves dressed as a page boy for the Queen Carnival in Pakenham in 1920, soon after arriving from Maffra with his mother Maud.
Anzac Day … Lest we forget PAGES 8-9, 11-17, 52-53