Jan: Blighted by the war

WILLIAM ARTHUR GARDINER

My grandfather Arthur joined the 18th Reinforcements as a volunteer in 1916 at the age of 20.

He was a skilled horseman and was in the Otago Mounted Rifles. He was in Egypt for initial training and then at Sling Camp on the Salisbury Plains in England. He saw action in France and Belgium in 1917-18, but was hospitalized at Etaples Training Camp in France suffering probably from shell shock. 

At the end of the war he was sent to Cologne to be part of the Army of Occupation in 1919. When he got home he was ill and was unable to keep food down — a result of being gassed.

Twenty-five years after the war he was diagnosed with severe depression related directly to his war experiences and triggered by the Second World War. At this time he was chairman of the local Patriotic Society and had to farewell the next generation of men, including his own sons, to fight overseas. 

He was sent to Seacliff Hospital where, like Janet Frame, he was given electro-therapy shock treatment. His health was blighted by the war, and he died at the age of sixty-eight.