Submitted by his granddaughter, Lee Mowbray
William Thomas Geaghan was born in 1904 in Grahamstown, near Adelong NSW. He was the middle child of William James Geaghan and Ellen Geaghan, nee Ballard.
William’s father was an active sportsman and a gold miner, and came from a large Irish family who had settled in the Gundagai area years earlier. When William was just seven years old, his father passed away after a long illness caused by chronic inhalation of quartz dust – an occupational hazard for many on the goldfields in those days. This left Ellen, a grieving widow and sole provider responsible for William, his elder sister Emeline 9, and younger sister Elizabeth, 5. For some time afterwards, the goodwill of family and friends from Adelong and Grahamstown supported the family, until Ellen was on her feet and able to open a small grocery and fruit shop.
In 1919 at the age of 14, William began work as a Telegraph Messenger at the Gundagai Post Office, where he is recorded as earning £72 per year. In 1920 his mother Ellen and his two sisters moved to Sydney while William stayed on in the Gundagai area. He left his work at the Post Office, and began working on the New South Wales Railways training as a Fireman, initially working on the Gundagai line. Regular visits were made to Sydney to his mother and sisters, and it was around this time he met his future wife Eileen Mary Pigram who was also from Gundagai, but was living in Sydney at the time. (I suspect that Eileen may have been lodging with William’s mother Ellen – although there’s no way of finding this out for certain). The couple married in early 1929.
On their marriage William gave Eileen a Singer treadle sewing machine which she kept all her life.
Working on the railways was not without incident, and William was involved in a serious derailment at Coolamon that must have given his young bride great cause for worry. During an overnight shift at around 3am, William’s fully laden goods train struck the catch points on a down grade and was wrecked. With the engine overturned, William and his driver were trapped for a short while under the coal of the upset coal tender. Eight trucks carrying wheat and chaff were piled up behind them and the risk of fire must have been great, yet both men escaped only shaken and a little concussed, but without serious injury.
William was a First Class Fireman when he enlisted in 1940. Hard railway work had been made even harder by frequent relocation according to the dictates of the railway. They moved from Lewisham in Sydney, to Narrandera, to Junee, and later to Kyogle in only a short number of years in their early married life.
Along the way their three children William James (known as Billie), Chester Francis and Lorraine Margaret were born. Tragically, while living in Narrandera in 1936, William’s second son Chester became ill with tonsillitis, which rapidly developed into septicaemia and he passed away aged only three years.
William was amongst a group of railway employees keen to seek exemption from their essential services duties so they could enlist in the armed forces. He enlisted at Kyogle on 10 June 1940.
He spent some time with the 9th Battalion at Rutherford before transferring to the 4th Battalion at Tamworth. Then he was taken on strength with the AAMC in Sydney on 9 October 1940, and transferred to the 2/12th Field Ambulance at its inception on 22 November 1940.
The 2/12th was founded at Sydney Showground with three companies comprising 12 officers and 250 soldiers and had the capacity to provide medical support at brigade-level including battlefield casualty collection and initial wound treatment. Most of its members came from rural NSW. William trained as a Specialist Group III nursing orderly.
Two months later, they were deployed to Cowra in support of the 23 Australian Infantry Brigade. Then they entrained in stages over the four weeks from 12 March 1941, to Katherine in the Northern Territory passing through the outskirts of Melbourne and Adelaide, then on to Terowie where they camped for eight days covered with red dust. At Alice Springs, they were held up for 24 hours as the Fink River was in flood. From Alice Springs they went by road to Darwin, an arduous journey on the unsealed road at the end of wet season.
For almost a year they were camped near the Darwin RAAF base at Winnellie, where they commenced training for tropical warfare. Besides providing clinical medical support to 23rd Brigade, the soldiers of the unit undertook much of the physical construction of the fixed hospital medical facilities in the bush at both Katherine and Winnellie, building five small hospitals. The rural origins of most of its members and their background of bush carpentry, improvisation and resourcefulness then came to the fore. It was recorded that the medics took their places with hammers and nails, bailing wire, saws and “concrete mixers” (largely shovels), assisting sappers of the Royal Australian Engineers and infantry soldiers of pioneer assault units
— to the extent that the 2/12th Field Ambulance was referred to humorously as the “2/12th Pioneers”.
While William was in Darwin, Eileen took Billie and Lorraine to Gundagai where Eileen’s own family still lived. Later, in April 1943, they moved to Corrimal to be near William.
William’s unit was now deemed ready for tropical conditions and moved back to Sydney. On 11 May 1943, led by their Commanding Officer, Lt-Col. Leslie McDonald Outridge, the 2/12th Field Ambulance marched onto the wharf at No. 1 Darling Harbour to embark on the Centaur.
They were camped at Winnellie during the numerous Japanese bombing attacks on Darwin. Alan Dickson says in his memoirs: “When the Japs flew over our camp just above the trees we could have had a pot shot at them, but we weren’t allowed to. They used to wave to us.”
William’s military records show that he had been on leave but returned on the first day of the bombing. Since Darwin was so isolated in those days no one knows where or how he spent his leave.
The unit remained in Darwin for the rest of 1942 and began the long journey back to NSW in January 1943. They were trucked via Mt Isa to Townsville and thence by train to Sydney where they camped at St Ives Showground. They were given about five days leave, then moved to Corrimal.
They spent about three months at Corrimal, hence the strong connection to the Illawarra where an annual Centaur Commemoration Service is now held at Dapto.
The 2/12th Field Ambulance was a particularly unfortunate unit. Following the beginning of the Pacific War, 50 members were each attached to Gull Force and Sparrow Force and sent to defend the islands of Ambon and Timor respectively. All of the members of the 2/12th serving with Gull Force were captured or killed by the Japanese on 1 February 1942, with many dying as prisoners of war on Ambon or Hainan. Those serving with Sparrow Force were also captured.
Of the 193 2/12th FA personnel who went on Centaur only 20 survived. William was not one of them.
Billie was twelve when his father died, and my mother, Lorraine, six. She was only three when William enlisted, and has very little, if any, recollections of him. Bill died almost forty years ago.
Our grandmother, Eileen, remarried in 1950 another former 2/12th Field Ambulanceman – Harvey Cowling from Grafton who wasn’t posted to the Centaur but became a POW on Ambon. She rarely spoke of William. I think the tragedy was still too raw for her, although she did always tell me that he had perished on the Centaur. Unfortunately I was too young to understand the significance of it then. But it explains why there are no family stories and so few family photos.
