The Catholic Leader - 22 April

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The Catholic Leader, April 22, 2018
Anzac Day
By Emilie Ng
MATTRESS maker Private Frank
Percy Hanlon was waiting in the
trenches for his call of duty on a
railway line when a mortar shell ex-
ploded near him and another soldier.
Fellow soldiers wrote eyewitness reports
confirming the “rather slim and rather quiet”
20-year-old was killed “instantaneously” on
April 23, 1917, around 800 metres away from
Bullecourt, France, where days later emerged
one of the bloodiest battles the Australian army
had endured.
Private Hanlon had only turned 20 three months
earlier, enlisting in the army when he was only 19.
Private Victor Harry Carby was in the burial
party, and made a cross for his mate near where
Private Hanlon had died.
Within weeks that site was destroyed, as the
battle between the Australians and British Army
against the Germans that killed thousands of men
left nothing in the ground behind.
Though his body was never found again, he was
honoured at the Villers-Bretonneux Memorial.
Fr Edward Sarsfield Barry, a Catholic chaplain
to Australian soldiers and the first priest at Our
Lady of Victories Church, a war memorial in
Bowen Hills, notified one of Private Hanlon’s
nieces about the tragic death.
Almost one hundred years later, The Gap pa-
rishioner Tom Vanderbyl jumped on the Internet
and discovered letters pinpointing the precise
location where his great-uncle, Private FP Hanlon,
had died.
“We got a fair bit of stuff from the web;
there’s a great access to great materials now and
resources online,” Mr Vanderbyl said.
“If you know the name of the person you’re
connected to and you list it in the search, there’s a
lot of websites and resources available to you.
“That’s all we really did, once we became inter-
ested, we just started to research online.”
Among the official documents detailing Private
Hanlon’s deployment, which began in Egypt and
ended in Bullecourt, were letters from his “friends
in the trenches” who reported where and how he
died.
After contacting the National Archives of
Australia in Canberra, Mr Vanderbyl learnt the
digitised documents accessible online were just
the tip of the iceberg.
“There was a mud map attached to one of these
letters, drawn by one of his comrades, and it
Internet reunites
lost soldier with
descendants
nearly 100 years
after his death
Online discovery awakens Anzac spirit
shows exactly where it was,” Mr Vanderbyl said.
The mud map was not available online, but
Mr Vanderbyl obtained a hardcopy of it from the
Archives.
“I took that mud map and took up a Google
Maps of the whole area,” he said.
“He was basically blown up next to an old
railway line, and this no longer exists, but when
you look at Google Maps you can still see the
location of a railway line just by the trees and
different colours.
“So I was sort of measuring it out on the
Google maps, based on the information that’s in
these documents, and we were able to pin-point
just about where it happened.”
But it wasn’t enough to see the site on the
computer – Mr Vanderbyl decided to tack on a
side trip to Bullecourt during a family vacation
to Europe.
“When we were going on a trip to Europe to
visit family and friends … we thought we’d take
a side trip to go to the place where Frank Percy
Hanlon was killed just to get a sense of it,” he
said.
“You go to Anzac Day parades and Anzac
Day commemorations but we never actually con-
nected more directly than that.
“We were interested to do that, to go and see if
we can find out and visit where it was.”
In December 2015, the Vanderbyl family
drove within metres of the site that took the life
of his great-uncle 100 years ago this year.
The thick mud – which Mr Vanderbyl said ran
three metres deep – kept the family from stand-
ing on the actual site of Private Hanlon’s death.
“Not traversable even by a car like that,” Mr
Vanderbyl said, pointing to a photo of his family
in the car just metres from the special site.
“That’s as close as we could get because of
Anzac remembrance: Tom and Saskia Vanderbyl and their three sons Oliver (then 15), Jeremy (then 11), Ben (then 17) outside the Villers-Breton-
neux Memorial in 2015. The family travelled to northern France to locate the site where Mr Vanderbyl’s great-uncle was killed in Bullecourt during
the First World War. Photo: Tom Vanderbyl
Family moment: In December
2015, the Vanderbyl family
drove within metres of the
site where Tom Vanderbyl’s
great-uncle 100 years ago this
year. The thick mud kept the
family from standing on the
actual site of Private Hanlon’s
death. The site is the top left
of the photo.
Heavy casualties: Troops billeted in a sunken road near Bullecourt on May 19, 1917
that mud (which) you hear about it in Anzac
stories.
“We stopped both this side and on the other
side, we stopped there and we were about to get
out and walk; we were approached by a local
farmer, he told us that was a not a good idea.”
The Vanderbyl’s oldest son, Ben, was 17 at
the time, just two years younger than when his
great-great uncle enlisted in the First World
War.
“Imagine being out here doing this?” Mr
Vanderbyl said.
“His mother, Sarah Hanlon, who must have
been my great-grandmother, she never really got
over his death.
“There was a letter, of which the first page is
online, the rest must be in the files in Canberra,
where you get the sense she hadn’t got over it
years later.
“You can see the anguish come through in her
letters back and forth with the war office, trying
to get more information.
“Obviously, he had the world in front of him.”
While in Bullecourt, Mr Vanderbyl said he
could sense the appreciation the French of that
town had for the Australians.
“They still have a special place for Austral-
ians,” Mr Vanderbyl said.
“You just feel how much appreciation there
is for the Anzac’s effort and the importance the
Australians had at the time in terms of their
action.”