Acting Sergeant William Oscar MacDougall, NX66806, 2/12 FA

Story submitted by his daughter, Anne Coutts, written for the Last Post Ceremony Canberra 2019

Bill was a gentle and kindly soul. He grew up in the 20s Depression when things were tight for families and young people left school early to search for jobs. At one stage he helped sell fruit and vegetables on a cart, but he could not bring himself to pass off damaged produce, and spent much of the proceeds on feeding the horse. He worked mostly as a labourer for tradesmen and learnt their skills.

Bill, with his parents and four siblings, lived in a small old weatherboard house in Drummoyne, Sydney. In times when he was out of work he tried to make life easier for his mother. He widened the kitchen window to give her more light, concreted the beaten earth floor of the lean-to that housed the copper and tub, and extended a path to the outside toilet. He carried sand and rocks for this by the bucket load from the harbour at the foot of the street.

At last an opportunity came for work at Callan Park, Sydney’s main mental hospital. Bill sat the Public Service exam and began his training as a hospital attendant. The hospital was dependent on men to nurse their patients. Although this training was never recognised as equivalent to general training, it was thorough and extended over three years. Bill gained a reputation for being able to calm the most unsettled patients.

By the time he qualified he was happily married to his Nan and had a little daughter, Anne.

On his days off he took on painting and decorating or concreting jobs as they were saving to buy their own home. He often took Anne along with him and she sat happily in his workman’s bucket, while at home Nan sewed baby’s clothes to sell to the shops.

In his poetry Bill expresses grief over man’s inhumanity to man. The outbreak of war deeply troubled him as he could not contemplate killing another man. When in September 1940 Japan signed a pact with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and sent troops into French Indochina, Bill and Nan discussed whether he should enlist. Bill did not want to wait until they sent troops here. He enlisted in January 1941. It was only on the condition he served in his nursing capacity that he was released from the hospital. He was sent to Cowra to join the 2/12 Field Ambulance 8th Division, where he could use his nursing skills without having to bear arms.

In July that year Bill’s son Jim was born. As he grew Nan would take him to the photo of Bill she kept on the mantelpiece, point and say “Daddy”. Soon he would smile and say back to her “Dadden”. Jim was to carry that image of his father in his mind.

The unit went by train to Adelaide then was transported by truck over very rough roads to Alice Springs and Darwin. They were there for two years. Those years were tough. Conditions were primitive and the food situation grim. At one point they were fed rice three times a day for nine months. They made roads by cutting down trees and concreting over them with cement using a hand cement mixer. Bill wrote home that when the US army arrived with good food and equipment they did in two weeks what had taken our men six months.

It is unclear from Bill’s war records whether his unit, or he, was directly involved in this heavy work. Six months after his enlistment he was appointed “specialist T Group III Nursing Orderly (Special)”. We presume T Group meant Training or Territory. Within 18 months of enlisting he was promoted Acting Corporal, by August 1942 Acting Sergeant and this was confirmed by December 1942. Bill’s skills were clearly recognised and valued.

On 19 February 1942 Bill was on duty in Bagot Hospital where he had been trained as theatre nurse by the doctor in charge. When they heard planes overhead they thought they were from our own air force. But when the bombing began they realised it was the Japs, and quickly secured the patients under their beds. They then looked outside and were able to see the faces of pilots as they flew over the hospital. One fired his machine gun. He did not hit the hospital, but bullets went through the walls of the hut where the staff ate, and one ricocheted into a mug on a table.

Casualties poured into the hospital. They operated for 19 hours on 92 patients (though he said the official raid count was 64). Bill told Nan the floor of the theatre was slippery with blood but they did not have time to mop up.

After the first raid the unit was moved out of town to an unspecified but presumably safer location where the operating theatre was a tent. Bill, being handy as he was with tools, built a room for the theatre. His  diary  records  the theatre functioning by 10th March 1942.

Bill was to be sent on a ship to Ambon but the Colonel said he could not lose one of his best trained men. He used Bill to train men who did not have any nursing training. Bill recalled lecturing to the blackboard at first but soon built up confidence and enjoyed the interaction with the men. In his many letters home he expressed to Nan the need to impart confidence to their children.

Home leave came at last, and it was home to the house they had bought and renovated. Bill saw his son Jim, by then 18 months old, for the first time. Predictably, Bill worked around the yard, put up side fences, made a swing, and laid paths. Jim followed his every move and imitated him, coughing when he coughed, yawning when he yawned. Jim carries the vestige of a smiling father laying a brick path at that time. Anne carries more distinct memories, such as tiptoeing into the bathroom where Bill was shaving, being discovered and having  her  nose  dabbed  with shaving cream, amid roars of laughter. There was more fun, but also of being smacked when she did something wrong and subsequently sitting with him on the swing, both of them, crying. Such memories bring tears each time they are recalled and the sense of loss does not lessen with the years.

Bill’s next time home was the last. The unit was at camp in Pymble but they were given three weeks leave. Here was a brief time at home for Bill to be husband and father. Nan wrote that she could not sleep that first night, frightened she would wake up and find he was not there.

Then the unit was set up in Corrimal near Wollongong. Bill had to stay at the camp but he arranged for Nan and the children to board with Mrs Harris, a generous widow who, in addition to her own children, took in Private Thomas McCaskie, also with the unit, his wife Helen and their baby as well. Anne remembers, when her father visited in the evenings, that they all gathered round the piano and sang what she now knows as the Sankey hymns. Nan later wrote that she could never hear ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ without breaking up.

Bill had a day off each week in the three months they were there. He worked in Mrs Harris’ garden and he buried the night soil as the dry toilet was not coping with eleven people in the house.

When Nan saw the men had changed from khaki to jungle greens she knew they would soon be moving. And all too soon the camp broke. On the last family visit to the tent, Anne remembers Jim sitting on their father’s knee drinking from his mug of tea. Nan writes of the clinging embraces and sad waves goodbye.

That was on Monday 10 May 1943. Nan, Anne and Jim with Helen McCaskie and baby left the Harris’ home, caught a train to Sydney and cab home, hoping the boys would get back there that night. They didn’t, and the next day Helen had word from Tom that she should go home to Wagga as they would not be home for a long time.

The following Monday Nan left Jim with her neighbour and took Anne to start school. On her return she received a telegram saying Bill was “missing believed drowned”. The horror, the shock of it, cannot be described. Nan went to Bill’s parents’ home with the news. His mother, who had a special place in her heart for this son, was totally overcome. One of his sisters went to the corner phone and rang Garden Island where their father worked to ask him to come home. They all sat by the radio to hear the lunchtime news – that the hospital ship Centaur, on an errand of mercy to evacuate sick and wounded from New Guinea, was steaming north from Sydney when it was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and sank off Stradbroke Island at 4.10 am on 14 May. Some men had been picked up on Saturday at 4pm. The family realised that was where Bill was ‘missing’. Nan couldn’t accept the fact that he was dead. She kept hoping that the sub would have picked up prisoners and she wrote off to the Red Cross just in case. She could not believe that God would create such a wonderful love and let this happen, so she prayed fervently. It took all her willpower to get up each morning to attend to Anne and Jim.

At some stage there was a gap between the service and widow’s pensions. Anne remembers that they lived on bread and milk for a week. With the help of an occasional egg from a neighbour Nan found ways to prepare such limited items into meals.

Three months passed and then another telegram arrived announcing Bill was “missing, presumed dead”. Nan writes that it was the end of the world for her. Anne remembers hearing her mother calling out in the night “God, God what have you done to me!” Anne would run to her mother but be sent back to bed. Nan was inconsolable.

Anne was told what had happened by the girl next door. She remembers running to her mother, crying, and her mother denying, but child as she was, she realised it was true. She would sit with her mother as she sewed at night listening to the short-wave radio in the hope of news that he had been discovered on an island or in a prisoner of war camp. All Nan’s letters to the Red Cross came back with advice that no prisoners had been picked up.

Nan wrote that she did not want to live. However she knew she had no option but to work to pay off the mortgage. If anything happened to her, she reasoned, Anne and Jim would have a roof over their heads, and Legacy could put someone in to look after them.

When it was established  that  Jim  was hearing impaired, Nan had an additional reason to live to help him live as normal a life as possible.

Legacy was an enormous help to them. Anne and Jim attended classes, designed to build confidence, held first in the Ironworkers building in lower George St and then in Castlereagh St, Sydney. They helped with holidays the family otherwise would not have had.

A cruel rumour circulated, that the Centaur carried arms and ammunition, so the Japanese sub was justified in its action. The government denials were not convincing.

At the outset we said that Bill was a gentle and kindly soul. We can add that he had a sense of humour and of fun, a phenomenal capacity for hard work and a faith that went beyond denominational boundaries. In one of his poems he writes:

….there are very few who will say l am willing to help the other, call him brother, give and cheer all I can.          Their cry is peace, peace for all…..

 

To Bill’s legacy Nan added her own Scottish brand of endurance. She eventually came to terms with life, ran a clothing factory, remarried, saw Anne and Jim through their tertiary studies, studied shorthand and topped the state in exams, became a teacher, a devoted grandmother, a committed voluntary worker with children who had learning difficulties, and was awarded the OAM for her services. Nan died of lymphoma aged 86 in 2000. Sadly the award came in posthumously.

Anne and Jim are enormously proud of both their parents. They shared an extraordinary love, had high ideals and lived by them.

Nan asked for her ashes to be cast into the sea over the Centaur site. Anne and Jim went out in a small plane to drop them. Later they found out that the area that was thought to be the site at that time was wrong. This was an upsetting end to an already tragic story.

Of immense comfort now is the fact that the Centaur, found through the skill and perseverance of ‘shipwreck hunter’ David Mearns and his team, now rests in a trough on the edge of Australia’s continental shelf. There were no arms or ammunition on board. 

Centaur rests secure and at peace.