“Ted and Tommy”

By Graham Ewen Eagleton

Halt! Who goes there? Three times, with gun in hand, the old home guard fellow demanded an answer. I said I wanted to join the air force. I can remember him saying, Are you sure you want to? I suppose he felt a bit fatherlyyou know: here was another young girl going into that terrible place!

August 1939 and war clouds looming, May Cameron, Tommy, approached the Balloon Station near Birmingham, England, harbouring ideas of becoming an air ace. On the other side of the world in Sydney, Australia, Ted accompanied a workmate to night classes conducted by the Empire Air Training Scheme, half-expecting that if he were accepted into the air force, his previous job would have him typecast for ground crew. In the end, neither Tommy nor Ted got quite what they bargained for. But they did find each other and so took the first steps on another very different adventure.

This is the story of Ted and Tommy, of their formative years, of their coming together in wartime Britain; Ted the Australian flying officer or something of 466 Squadron, and Tommy the Scottish lass in the control tower; and of the struggle they later came to share with fellow ex-servicemen to regain their lives and to raise a family in the changing circumstances of postwar Australia.

This then is hagiographya love storythe story of my parents, Ted and Tommy Eagleton, lest we forget!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Mar 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503503021

Graham Ewen Eagleton

Graham Eagleton is an Australian agronomist and science teacher. After education in the 1960s and ’70s, he headed off to Malaysia as an Australian volunteer abroad. Over the next twenty years, with his wife, Nyet Fah, he worked in far-flung locations in Northwestern Australia, Somalia, China, and Indonesia. Returning to Australia in 1995, he was employed as a high school teacher until retirement in 2007. Ted and Tommy is Graham’s first book.

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Copyright © 2015 by Graham Ewen Eagleton.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Rev. date: 05/30/2015

Xlibris

1-800-455-039

www.Xlibris.com.au

653730

CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgements

1 Hero Worship

2 Erko Boy

3 This Goodly Shoot

4 The Widening Gyre

5 The Clouds Your Chariot

6 Career Moves

7 Operation Gomorrah

8 Temporary, Depending on Outcome

9 Dead Reckoning

10 The Prudent Limits of Endurance

11 Slipped the Surly Bonds

12 New Arrivals

13 Should Auld Acquaintance be Forgot

14 Just As I Am

15 Arise, You Miserable Bastard

16 Living Stones

17 As We That Are Left

18 Afterword

Appendix

Sources

Endnotes

For

Duncan,

Joanne,

James,

Julie,

Thomas,

and Kylie.

For you and yours.

FOREWORD

T his book is a celebration of the lives of Ted and Tommy Eagleton, written by their eldest son, Graham. Clearly, it is the product of the kind of deep recollection that many of us experience at the loss of those in our lives who have shaped the persons we have become.

For Ted and Tommy and for others like me who served in 466 Squadron during the bleak days of 1943–45, such loss became an almost daily happening. Somehow we learned to smother our emotions and to cope. But after the war, the memories would often break out in unexpected ways. Some of us did not welcome such reminders, but for many of us, a healthier response was to come together in regular reunions, which helped put into perspective our wartime experiences.

It was through such encounters in the post-war years as much as through our shared time on the squadron that I came to know Ted and Tommy as close friends. With Ted I shared a particular bond that when I began my second tour with 466, I took over his leadership of A Flight, a responsibility for the lives of others that brought its own particular kind of stress. With Tommy, on the other hand, I shared a common surname (Cameron), a pride in things Scottish, and an appreciation of the dedicated band of WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) members and ground crew, who kept the squadron in the air.

It was with pleasure that I accepted Graham’s invitation to write this foreword for his book and to be given the opportunity to recall the lives of two warm and generous friends-in-arms.

S/Ldr J. H. ‘Jock’ Cameron, DFC, of 466 Squadron

Sydney, 2014

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Personal effects, F/Lt W. E. Eagleton’s.

PREFACE

T ed and Tommy is the story of my parents, of their coming together in the war against Hitler, and of their life in post-war Australia.

At war’s end, the young couple named their firstborn after two who had not lived to see its conclusion: Graeme Etherington, one of my father’s earliest air force mates, and Ewen Cameron, my mother’s elder brother. I guess it was predictable that this son would come to take a more-than-ordinary interest in those who had lost their lives to the war and in the fate of those who, though having survived, were nevertheless shaped and damaged by it.

Some time ago when I shared this notion with a wise old neighbour, she joked, ‘Why, you’re just a walking obelisk, aren’t you!’

So there you have it. Lest we forget!

2.%20Etherington.jpg

Etherington vs Dempsey, ‘The Champ’, New York, 1941

(Argus Newspaper Collection, State Library of Victoria).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to Tricia Lee, Lloyd Griffith, Myra and Xlibris Corporation for the painstaking work and sensitivity they have applied to the task of bringing this book to fruition. What an education they have provided me!

Many others have contributed either directly or indirectly to the making of this book. I acknowledge here in roughly alphabetical order the contributions of all who come to mind. Please do not feel overlooked if you do not find your name among the list; human memory is a frail thing. More importantly, do not feel put upon if you do unexpectedly find your name here; I mean you no disrespect. To each of you, named or unnamed, my grateful thanks:

Alan Franklin of the Manx Museum

Alexandra Torrens and Kat Southwell of the Australian War Memorial

Alan and Rana Munns

Alan Richardson

Allison Campbell (née Cameron)

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Brenda Wardle

Brian Cook and an anonymous reviewer from the Manuscript Appraisal Agency

Bruce and Helen Fraser

Bruce Ralston of the Auckland War Memorial Museum

Caroline Robertson (née Cameron)

Chai Nyet Fah

Choy Yik Yun

Chris Lodovice of the Author Learning Center

Clare Norton of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

Danny Houseas, Elaine Maliki, and Sharon Drenth of Ku-ring-gai Council

David and Deidre Groundwater

Don Eagleton

Dudley Hannaford

Duncan MacDiarmid

Friends of 466/462 Squadron—Andy Lidgard, Bob Whitson, Dorothy Pettman, Jane Cowan, John Dann, Geoff Friend, Geoff Moss, Ross Pearson and Tiana Adair

Hardys Bay Community Church

Harry Miller

Howard Spier and Kay Preston of the UK Association of Jewish Refugees

Hugh Smith

Jack and Shirley Battishall

Janice van de Velde from the State Library of Victoria

Jacquie Priest

Jean Jackson

Jock Cameron, John McManus, and Keith Campbell of 466 Squadron

John Kennedy (deceased), formerly of the University of New South Wales

Kathy Reith of the Ku-ring-gai Historical Society

Kylie Eagleton

Lerryn Mutton

National Archive of Australia

National Library of Australia

New South Wales Registry of Births, Deaths, and Marriages

Nicole Watier of the Library and Archives of Canada

Lois Cook of the Fellowship of First Fleeters

Peter Back

Peter Gulliver of the RAF 51 Squadron History Society

Peter Hoare

Roger Kershaw of the National Archives of the United Kingdom

Ross Eagleton

State Library of New South Wales

Syd Johnson

Lloyd Griffith and Tricia Lee of Xlibris Corporation

Tsoi Mun Heng

Vernon Wildy

Woy Woy Public Library.

Time crawled into the beat of the pulse.

The self lost its sense of the passage of time.

It remained spellbound in the ‘now’;

before and after ceased to exist.

Jorg Friedrich, Der Brand (The Fire), p. 441

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Ted and Tommy Eagleton, Braes of Rannoch Church, August 1945.

1

Hero Worship

Once they stood,

Tall in my childhood as the school, the steeple.

How can I judge without ingratitude?

James McAuley, ‘Because’

T his is a love story, yes, but it is also a story of hero worship. It is a story that could just as well have been told by my two brothers, Donald and Ross, for Ted and Tommy were their heroes as much as they were mine. This then is a family’s story.

* * *

Before me is a photograph of Ted and Tommy as newly wedded husband and wife—the dashing young airman and his radiant bride outside the doorway of the Braes of Rannoch Church in Perthshire, Scotland.

Harry Miller recalls that day, 23 August 1945, immediately following V-J Day, when as a wide-eyed five-year-old he was witness to the occasion.

That wedding at that time, for many of us, symbolised the end of a very hard and difficult war, in which Ted and many of his comrades had come through and many had not. It was a symbol of peace and prosperity.¹

One year later, on 30 July 1946, in Crown Street Hospital, Sydney, Ted and Tommy’s first baby was born—Graham Ewen Eagleton. The given names of their baby commemorated two of my parents’ comrades-in-arms who, indeed, had not made it through: Flying Officer Evelyn Graeme Ivor Etherington, my father’s wartime friend who died in an accident as a fighter pilot with 452 Squadron in Darwin, Northern Australia, on 20 November 1944;² and Corporal John Ewen Cameron of the Lovat Scouts, my mother’s eldest brother, who was shot while in a jeep crossing the River Chienti, Italy, alongside Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir ‘Popski’ Peniakoff on 21 June 1944.³

For at least a decade after the war, Ted and Tommy relived and rebreathed their wartime experiences. Ted took up employment in the developing civilian airline industry in his hometown—Sydney, Australia. However, his most important connections during that time were not with workmates or neighbours. His closest friends remained his wartime mates; they were closer than brothers. They played tennis together, swam together, celebrated Hogmanay together, and raised families together.

Despite the support of friends, Tommy became homesick. In 1951 she took my brother Donald and me for twelve months to Rannoch to meet her own mother and family. Dad, during that lonely year, was sustained by the fellowship of his mates. Each Wednesday, religiously, they would meet together at one or other of their favourite pubs or eating houses. ‘Meeting the boys’ was an unchallengeable institution that remained in place, despite interruptions, for at least twenty years.

What defined this mateship was hard to say. Mostly it related to a particular set of experiences shared during the early years of the war when they were brought together in relatively brief encounters during air force training. This included stints in Bradfield Park, Narromine, Halifax in Canada, New York City, and a memorable few months in the Middle East. My father’s story that he was one of fifty airmen sent out to the Middle East by a mistake of wartime communication—‘airscrews’ misinterpreted as ‘aircrews’—was always a good attention-grabber, ‘line shoot’ in the jargon. But whatever the truth may have been, the links that first bound the boys together were moulded in the ironic doldrums of their camps in Egypt and Sudan rather than in the infernos over Ruhr. Those came later.

Their mateship was akin to love. Although it was largely a male affair, it was not exclusively so. Only after the war did it come to have family connections. It was not a misogynous institution but was, in its very nature, chauvinistic—tied to a particular time and place, a sharply defined age group, an identifiable ethnicity, and a distinctly Australian flavour. Even so, their mateship cut across the differences of class, religion, education, and the pre-war occupations of its members.

* * *

It seems to me now that my father’s father may not have experienced mateship in quite the same way as his son. He had done most of his maturing between the wars and was spared the front line. I suspect, though I have no real evidence, that my great-grandparents, who raised their seven kids in a backblock in the Dungog region of New South Wales, would have had a surer understanding of the particular attractions of mateship that long after their passing so much absorbed their grandson. It was the township folk of Dungog and Clarence Town rather than his boyhood suburb of Erskineville in Sydney who, at the end of the war, held a rousing welcome home for my father and some of his fellow ex-servicemen.

The truth is that for those who grew up around its fringes, mateship was sometimes a two-edged sword. It was only in the latter years of my parents’ lives that I came to understand the particular way in which it had impacted our mother and to fully recognise the courage and underlying joie de vivre of her personality.

* * *

Our mother was a person of clear views and would stick her chin out for those views in a way her husband was sometimes more reluctant to do. The most revealing example of this was in the twin television interviews of Ted and Tommy that were carried out for archival purposes late in their lives.³ In her responses, Tommy proffered notions that had begun to sound distinctly old-fashioned by the time of this interview in the mid 1980s—notions such as chivalry and innocence (code word for ‘chasteness’). When questioned about the morality of the war effort itself, she hovered around the concept of a ‘just war’ and its horrendous implications. She upheld the natural response to fight in self-defence and in support of the persecuted but hesitated in elevating this into an ordained principle.

In the years immediately prior to the onset of World War II, a friendship with a young Jewish émigré from Austria who had come to live on the farm next door to their cottage in Rannoch had strongly influenced my mother’s attitude and that of her family towards the impending Nazi threat.⁴ In the weeks after war was declared on Sunday, 3 September 1939, Tommy and her two brothers, Ewen and Don, said goodbye to their mother and headed off to join the war effort.

* * *

In Australia, our father’s reactions to the outbreak of war were probably both less visceral and less cerebral. I do not recall Dad ever spelling out why it was that in 1940 he and a workmate, Arthur Andrews, began part-time pre-enlistment training at night school in Newington College, Sydney, prior to being formally called up into the air force as part of the Empire Air Training Scheme in March 1941. I suspect that it was less out of overwhelming conviction and more because it was the ‘dutiful thing to do’ and an opportunity for adventure.

As he recounted many years later, ‘Little did I realise in 1941 that I was to spend the next five Christmas days away from home, three at sea and two in England. Yes, even though I was in the RAAF, I travelled on some nine ships, during which there were two breakdowns at sea and one collision with another vessel. Altogether, I was involved in three collisions [during those years away]: one at sea, one in a car, and one in the air.’⁵

* * *

As a small boy, I heard these snippets from my parents’ wartime years, soaking up the bonhomie of my father and his pals, and stood solemnly, flag in hand, with my brothers and friends in front of Dymocks Bookstore on Anzac Days in Sydney. I grew up, like most of my generation, with a larger-than-life view of what our parents had achieved. We loved them and were proud of them—with a passion. It was only later, with the stirrings of adolescence and the bewilderment of the Vietnam years, that we came to view these achievements through more dispassionate lenses.

This is the story of their lives seen through those less partial lenses.

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Ted and Tommy Eagleton, Braes of Rannoch Church, August 1995.

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Primary School, Marrickville, 1920s; Eddie Eagleton, top centre.

2

Erko Boy

Awake then O my Soul true wisdom learn

Nor till to-morrow the great work adjourn.

William Henry Fishburn’s headstone inscription

W illiam Edmund Eagleton was born on 6 February 1917, the first son of Madeline (née Fishburn) and Edward. To his immediate family and childhood friends, he was always known as Eddie, but to the outside world in later years, he came to manhood as Ted. ⁶

At the time of Eddie’s birth, Ed and Madeline (Lena) Eagleton lived at 192 View Street Annandale, an inner suburb of Sydney. They ran a small mixed-grocery business in nearby Johnson Street at the same time that Ed worked in timber yards around the district. Ed had come down from the country in 1912, having begun working life as a sawyer and occasional blacksmith’s help around Clarence Town in the lower Hunter Region and Hillgrove on the northern tablelands of New South Wales. He had come to the city with good references and continued in that line of work to the satisfaction of his various employers—Saxton & Binns in Pyrmont, Union Box & Packing Company in Johnston St., Annandale, and the Waterloo Case Company—until at least 1924.⁷

Nevertheless, Edward Eagleton’s letters of reference and upright persona hid a secret: in 1905, at the age of twenty, he had been convicted and sent to Goulburn Gaol for fifteen months’ hard labour after having been caught rustling cattle by the local constabulary in the area of Clarence Town.⁸ This sobering experience was to have a significant impact on the way he carried himself in later years and on the way he brought up his sons.

Towards the end of his own life, Eddie recalled how, at the age of four, he often rode beside his father, Ed, high on a horse and buggy as it plied the streets of Annandale. However, it seems that the family’s involvement in the grocery business was not overly rewarding. So when Eddie was about five, the family shifted from the Annandale grocery across the Parramatta Road to a corner house on Edgeware Avenue, Enmore, rented from George Fishburn.

It is not precisely clear whether this was Madeline’s own father or another George (possibly her brother) in the family. It is on record that at the time of Madeline’s birth in 1884, her father had been a bootmaker resident in Smith Street, Marrickville.⁹ But by the time Eddie was born to Lena, her father must have accumulated some modest wealth.

Also living nearby during Eddie’s childhood were two of Lena’s sisters, Mary and Ida. Aunt Mary was married to a Scotsman, Jim Russell, who was manager of the Australian Home Journal, a subsidiary of John Sands Pty Ltd and a company of standing in the corporate life of Sydney. So with the advice and support of George Fishburn and Jim Russell, Ed put the grocery venture behind him and left the timber industry to take up permanent employment in the printing works of the Australian Home Journal. Soon after, when Eddie was about nine years old, Ed and Lena moved for the final time into a house at 15 Pleasant Avenue, Erskineville, registered in the name of Lena’s mother, Ellen (née McMahon) Fishburn,¹⁰ which later came to be their own. It is likely that this shift was prompted by the birth of their second son, (Cecil) Bruce, on 18 March 1926.

* * *

At the time the Eagletons moved there in the 1920s, Erskineville had a close connection to the Eveleigh locomotive works. Pleasant Avenue, despite its neat rows of box trees and terrace houses, belied its name, being overshadowed by a three-storied shoe factory at its head and flanked by railway lines to the east and by narrow back lanes to the west.

For a brief time, Eddie entered the primary school at Erskineville Public School. This was not his first encounter with schooling, for with the moving about that the family had undergone, Eddie had by this time already experienced brief periods in at least two educational establishments: the public school in Marrickville and St Pius School in Edgeware Road.

* * *

There is a revealing comparison to be made between two photographs taken in Eddie’s early school years: one, a class photo taken at infant school and the other a staged portrait taken probably on the day of his confirmation into the Catholic Church at seven or eight years of age. The first depicts a rather surly, assertive-looking urchin amidst a ragtag gathering of fellow classmates, one who is clearly not over-welcoming of this photo shoot opportunity. In the second photograph, the assertiveness remains, but this time, we see a lad at home in the situation and, despite his young age, presenting a confident, even debonair, image to the world.

In later years, Ted talked about the early bumper-scavenging phase of his life in Erskineville, of the family’s annual holiday sojourns beside the surfing beach in Manly, and of how he came to value the Catholic upbringing his parents had provided him.

Ted recalled that there ‘was always a lively discussion at home about the relative merits of public versus the Catholic school system’. While Ed had been brought up in a relatively lowbrow Anglican household in the country, Lena had a Catholic background, her own mother, Ellen, having come out from Ireland. Despite the fact that their son’s convent schooling cost sixpence a week, not an insignificant factor at the time, after only a few weeks at Erskineville Public School, Eddie was sent first to St Mary’s School in Erskineville and then to St Joseph’s in Newtown.

When Eddie graduated from St Joseph’s at about the end of 1929, he gained entry into the Christian Brothers High School at Lewisham and was followed several years later by his brother, Bruce. There is little doubt that the three years of high school spent in Lewisham—an education which came as a significant financial burden to his parents—were the makings of Ted. He enjoyed sports, especially cricket. Donald Bradman, whom he saw batting at the Sydney Cricket Ground,