World War Two in Box Hill
My earliest memory as a little child growing up in the war years in Box Hill, my home town in Victoria, was that on my bedroom window there was a thick black blind which every night had to be pulled down tightly covering the window so no light could get out.
Every house in Box Hill had its black out blinds. The street lights were all disconnected so that the entire township was pitch black except for one light at each major corner which used to be shaded so that a little circle of light shone at the foot of the lamp post.On all of our lamp posts were signs such as “Buy War Bonds”. How proud we were in our street, which only had four houses in it, and when all four of us had made some special contribution to the war effort, the sign went up on the lamp post outside our home proclaiming “This Is A War Savings Street”.
The cars used to travel with black metal shades over their headlights with a slit in the centre. The metal stuck out like a verandah over the little oblong of light that was allowed out to show the way. On the back of my father’s car, a big old European car called a “Continental La Salle” was fitted in 1941 with a gas producer. It burnt charcoal and produced gas sufficient to enable the car to run. I think my father started it with petrol and then switched over to the gas producer which had to be lit and stoked and made ready some half an hour before a person wanted to drive the car. Years after the war, the gas producer was still in the backyard of our home. Twenty years later it was still serving a purpose as an incinerator in our backyard.
In 1940, a year or so after I was born, the war was not making much of an impact in Box Hill. Box Hill won the Herald’s 1940 best garden suburb contest. The city council debated a proposal to enact a bylaw prohibiting children from playing in the streets. This led to the formation of a citizens lobby entitled the “Box Hill Citizens’ League For The Defence Of Child Liberty”. The Citizens’ League fought against the bylaw furiously and called upon the Australian Council for Civil Liberties and the Playgrounds Association of Victoria to help win the battle. People were drafted, petitions circulated, resistance attacked, and eventually a great victory was won. The biggest war in 1942 was over whether children should be forbidden to play in the streets.
However, there were some ominous signs. On the corner of Station Street and Main Street outside our cake shop the council had provided a wooden frame which was filled with empty sacks with a little roof over it. These sacks had only to be filled with sand when they could be made into a good barricade along the shopping footpath. At our schools and at the churches deep trenches were dug so the children could be quickly placed into the air raid shelters. A few years later when I went to school we were given exercises of hiding in the air raid shelters. I remember the mounds of clay on either side and the deep trench which every winter was half full of water. If the Japanese air force had ever attacked Box Hill in winter, most of us children would have drowned in the air raid shelters. In the centre of the plantations up Whitehorse Road, a number of men and women worked on high frames from which hung camouflage netting which they made carefully knotting thick twine every couple of inches and attaching khaki coloured pieces of rag.
Our local paper “The Box Hill Reporter” wrote up articles encouraging men to join the Box Hill and Camberwell 24th Battalion or to join the Australian Defence League and National Emergency Service. All men and young men in Box Hill were required to be registered and numbered.
At my parents bakery and cake shop, we started making large numbers of fruit cakes, round fruit cakes that fitted into special “Willow” cake tins. They were sealed in the tin, often with a little card of greeting and best wishes to one of the boys on the front. My mother would sew them into hessian bags. People would buy these and sew on cloth labels with the name, rank and number of some soldier on the other side of the world. Everybody was grumbling about ration cards which had to be used to buy almost anything from Rinso to hot water bottles. At Tait’s Corner Stores there was a big poster where the shop window normally had plaster models dressed in the new season’s outfit. The poster simply read:
“Wear Last Year’s Frocks and Be Proud of It” Lady Blamey.
I was too young to remember any recruiting of people into the forces, but I was told later that the Mayor, Councillor Gawler, urged all young men to join up promising them nothing but “a good deal of discomfort, anxiety, and impaired health”. He said “I am not going to say in so many words, ‘It is your duty to go’, because I do not believe any man has a right to say to that to another without knowing all the circumstances, but I am going to say however, ‘That every man must think the matter out and decide where his duty lies, quite apart from his comfort and inclinations’”.
What changed in the attitude in Box Hill was the entry of Japan into the war at Pearl Harbour and the sudden appearance in our paper “The Box Hill Reporter” of lists of boys from Box Hill who were killed or injured in the war effort.
Particularly, at the time of the Kokoda Trail. There were many young men from Box Hill there. Many streets had a family anxious about what was happening in New Guinea. The news was slow in coming. The boy who delivered telegrams on his red bike was a messenger of despair.
People met every night in the RSL rotunda outside the Town Hall in the centre of the plantation of Whitehorse Road. It was an unusual eight sided brick building that had been designed to look like an army field tent from World War I. In the rotunda young boys met as the Australian Air League. Here a Spitfire for Britain Fund was organised and from here every night came out 170 wardens to patrol the streets and to make sure the black out blinds were in place.
On top of the Box Hill Town Hall was a huge siren that could be heard all over the city and which was occasionally give an practise blast. During the day time, ladies met in the rotunda and knitted khaki balaclavas and khaki socks. One of my vivid memories as a child was watching the ladies chatting away while they knitted, all one colour khaki. During the war special approval was given to ladies who desired to knit in church to do so during the sermon, so long as they only used one colour wool: khaki.
There were some special afternoons in the Rialto Theatre for people who went for community singing. I remember being in a lucky seat and winning a silver pencil from the radio announcer who was the compere, Dick Cranbourne. Later on he served radio station 3DB for many years. During each community singing session recruiting films were screened in the theatre. Another radio announcer from 3DB, Eric Pearce, would give us an up date on the war effort.
At the corner of Whitehorse Road and Station Street stood our war memorial. He was a white soldier standing high on a column with slouch hat and Australian army uniform on, bowing his head respectfully over his rifle. On the column beneath him were the names of the men and boys from Box Hill who had died in World War I. I often read the list of names mostly of families I knew. In our shire during World War I, one in every twelve people in the entire population of our community enlisted and of these, one in every six were killed. One per cent of our community died overseas during the war and their names were forever on that column. But this did not include the scores who were maimed and wounded and around the city as I grew up were old men with one leg or one arm who had lost the other fighting for our country. There were always fresh flowers on the memorial in those days.
After a short time the victory of the Coral Sea Battle brought a great deal of relief to our people. Box Hill felt that the danger of invasion from the Japanese was now past. In gratitude and relief the Box Hill City Council passed a motion of appreciation to the United States of America and decided unanimously to purchase an American flag which hangs to this day in the Box Hill Town Hall.
When victory in Europe was declared and later victory in the Pacific, our town celebrated with the nation. I remember my father, being full of absolute glee and beer over the victory, driving me in the car with the gas producer on the back, into the heart of Melbourne to the Herald office where tens of thousands of people gathered outside the newspaper office waiting for the next edition to come out proclaiming “Peace”. The singing and dancing that occurred in Flinders Street when the paper was published, lives in our memory.
It was ten years or more after the war that outside the front doors of the Box Hill Town Hall, in the centre of the green lawns, a beautiful memorial was established in memory of the Box Hill boys who died on the Kokoda Trail. On the top of the memorial was a bronze statue about 18 inches high of two Australian soldiers battling through the muddy terrain, one helping his wounded comrade. I stopped and stared at that statue dressed in my school uniform on many a night as I walked back towards our cake shop. One of the men from our bakery had died on the Kokoda Trail. I don’t remember him for I was too young when he was sent off to the war. But Eric Vial, one of Box Hill’s champion push bike riders went to war and died somewhere on the Kokoda Trail. There were 80,000 other Australians killed in World War II, but every time I passed that monument I thought of our Eric who shared the common nickname with me of “Mick”. It reminded me that those dead Australians were once very alive young men from our city. That family became important to me because years later Eric’s brother, Joseph, married my widowed mother. That bronze soldier was very real to me, he must have looked just like Eric. I thought of him as Eric.
Forty five years have gone since the days when he died, but I often think of him and of one of the young men from our bakery who also went off to war. For you see I have my grandfather’s desk which was used by my father in the office at the bakery. For 25 years it has been the centre of my own study and writing. It is a rosewood desk, worn now from three generations of our family who have written, studied and typed on it. It is a two pedestal desk with eight drawers down the sides and one drawer across the centre. It has an inlaid leather top which is now marked and worn. Inside the centre drawer there is a piece of faded paper stuck to the side the drawer, its edges torn but the black ink still clear. It mentions the name of one of our baker boys and his address:
“Driver G.L. Beauchamp, No. 13160, 1st Victorian Australian Armoured Motor Transport Company, Australian Army Service Corps. 30th March, 1940.”
I don’t know whatever happened to Driver G.L. Beauchamp, but if he is alive today he would probably be surprised to realize that when he left as a young fellow from the streets of Box Hill, there was growing up in the bakery another young fellow who would one day inherit the desk, and think of him from time to time as the centre drawer was opened.
I think of him now, just as I did 40 years ago when the war was finished, and I thought of those boys from Box Hill who didn’t come back as I walked home up Bank Street, along the railway line to the top of the hill and to No.5 Miller Street, Box Hill, a great city which was only a village, where the adults were kind and the children grew up responsibly.
GORDON MOYES
