Jenny: a governess in Georgia, a headmaster, and two soldiers

My Great Aunt Ethel (maternal side of my family) was born in Strabane, Northern Ireland, before moving to Galway at the age of 7. 

She spoke Russian, and was working as a midwife and governess in Russia during the Russian revolution in Georgia. She returned to Russia before her aristocratic employers were murdered.

Her fiance was killed in WW1 and as there was a man shortage, she never married. She later worked in India, South Africa and Belgium and lived to 101 years. 

Her brother, Henry Cox, was the eldest of 12 children, 8 of whom survived to adulthood.  Henry gained a triple first at Trinity College Dublin and supported his widowed mother and siblings through grammar school, becoming headmaster of Arundle School. Later, in WW2, he was a lecturer for the RAF. 

Ethel's other brother, Arthur, died in WW1.

Edwin Cossey (paternal side) was in a Scottish Army regiment in WW1. He met his future wife while training in Scotland. He married Janet after the war and moved to India to work for the American Cynamid Company.

Edwin died at work in his office, with the secretary wondering why he had stopped dictating.

~ Jenny Cossey

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.

Annie: The Battle of Messines — pillars of fire

My maternal great uncle Charles Joseph Ardern (1878-1920) aka Charles Harding was a Private in the 1st Battalion Auckland Infantry Regiment, Army number 15897.

He was stationed on the Western Front from 1916. His division moved to Flanders in February 1917, and he later took part in the capture of the Messines Ridge, Belgium.

The Battle of Messines was launched on 7 June 1917 with the detonation of 19 underground mines underneath the German lines.

There was stillness and silence for an hour preceding the attack …t hen the ground rocked and the air was filled with the sounds of the deafening explosion — the loudest man-made explosion to that point, as the sky lit up with towering pillars of fire.

The village of Messines was captured successfully by the New Zealanders, but they later suffered heavily from German bombardment, with more than 700 killed.

During the operation, Charles was in the frontline and was struck by a German 77mm field gun known as a whizz bang. He would have heard the terrifying whizz noise of a travelling shell before the bang of the gun itself, and had virtually no warning as the shell fired travelled faster than the speed of sound. He suffered serious wounds in several places.

With his shrapnel-shattered arm and leg, he was stretchered to the field hospital, and transferred eventually to General Hospital, Walton on Thames. He was discharged as no longer fit for war service due to wounds received in action, and returned to New Zealand on the H.S. Marama in August 1917.

Back in New Zealand, he struggled to adjust, and took some time to rehabilitate. On March 3 1920, while working at a Public Works camp near Paeroa, Charles drowned in the Waihou River. Although the inquest found no evidence to show how he got into the water, it was thought that his war wounds may have contributed to his death.

~ Annie Christie

Photo: Advanced dressing station in German Second Lines during the Battle of Messines, Belgium, by Henry Armytage Sanders 

www.natlib.govt.nz/records/22324292

reference 1/2 - 012773-G, Royal NZ RSA official negs WW1

Sally: Plight of a Jewish prisoner of war in Siberia

My maternal grandfather Ernst Gerson (Opa), a German Jew living in Hamburg, was called up to fight for Germany in WWI. 

In October 1916 he received three shots through his legs and was taken prisoner of war by the Russians near the river Stochod in Volhynia during an unsuccessful gas attack. 

He was then sent to work in a gold mine in Siberia. After a few months of trying to work in appalling conditions, with inadequate clothing and no pay, Opa and some of the other prisoners realised they had to get away from the mine before winter set in or they would die. 

Opa wrote letters to the Swedish Consul begging for help to get the men out of the mine. When the mine managers found out about this they arrested Opa and took him away to be punished. 

By this time Russia was in a state of complete chaos as the Red and White Armies engaged in civil war after the 1917 Revolution. 

Eventually Opa escaped and made his way back to Germany on foot and by horse and cart and train. He endured constant deprivation, extreme hunger and cold, typhus and constant danger but after 2 years he eventually arrived back home in Germany where his fiancée, my grandmother Barbara, was waiting for him. Of course, later when Hitler came to power, the fact that Opa had fought for Germany counted for nothing and he and his family were forced to flee Germany.

~ Sally Rawnsley

Miranda: Shooting down a Zeppelin in the dark

My great uncle joined Royal Flying Corps in 1915. 

Alfred de Bathe Brandon 1883–1974

In a letter to his mother he described a night attack on a Zeppelin over England. He wrote of the heavy cloud cover and of being unsure of his position in the dark, finding the Zeppelin again, firing, seeing the strafing on the canopy. 

He describes several attacks. 

At the time there was debate about whether he had hit the Zeppelin and for some time afterwards, the anti-aircraft artillery was given the credit for bringing it down. 

In the same scrapbook is a letter from the German commander of the Zeppelin, written about a year later, acknowledging my uncle's part in taking down the airship.

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One of my great uncles died in Palestine in 1917, killed in the battle of Ayun Kara. 

He joined the Wellington Mounted Rifles Regiment at the start of the war, fought at Gallipoli, was hospitalised then returned to his regiment in Egypt in 1916. 

He became skilled with machine guns and taught others. His carrier for the Hotchkiss machine gun reduced galling on the horses and the design was used by the whole squadron. Arthur led a successful cavalry charge and though twice injured, continued to encourage his men until he was killed.

Hermione Ruth Herrick, 3rd from left.

Arthur’s younger sister, Great Aunt Ruth, had been studying piano in Dresden and Vienna before the war. She returned to England to work as secretary to the head of the Nursing Division at Walton-on-Thames. 

There was talk of a friendship with a German man that was interrupted when war broke out. Aunt Ruth never married and went on to found the Women’s Royal New Zealand Naval Service in World War II.

~ Miranda Parress

Meg: Intrepid great-aunt, tragic great-uncle

Great-Aunt Ria
Ria, 1891–1976, was my great-aunt on my father Chip's Murray side: an old English-Irish family. Ria's father was the black sheep of the family, a wild boy who came out to New Zealand.

Ria went to live in the UK in 1912, staying with various relatives. During the war she served with the Red Cross in Serbia.

That's all the information I have about Great-Aunt Ria, and I would love to have known more.

Great-Uncle Walter
Three brothers came out to New Zealand from Yorkshire: Isaac Stephenson (my grandfather, Rona's father), Luther, and Walter. In Rona's words: "Walter lived in Auckland, served in the first world war, was badly gassed and became mentally unstable. He finally committed suicide by hanging."

After the war, Walter had a son Ian who was really strange. I met him once. I wonder whether the gas that poisoned Walter had an effect on the child?

~ Meg Bailey

Jen: a keen man

A keen man 

My Grandfather Kenneth Mair Holdaway was born in Masterton in 1890 — the last of 10 children. 

He was a teacher when the first world war broke out and tried to apply for service but was disqualified because of an old injury to his leg from a kick by a horse that left him with a limp. He was rather accident prone throughout his life. 

However, he tried again in 1916 and this time his perserverance paid off. He was accepted by the army and was soon on a troopship for England as a Lance Corporal engaged in clerical work with the 30th Reinforcements. 

Going by the accounts of my father, he 'enjoyed' three years in Torquay, Devonshire before coming back to New Zealand. 

Instead of returning to teaching he made the decision to help his now elderly parents farm their land near Hamilton. Within two years had married my Grandmother and was well on the way to his final role of a Baptist minister.

 ~ Jennifer Holdaway