Thomas Charles Poole

Thomas Charles Poole was born about 1897 at Coolongolook, on the Manning River — the last of William and Frances Poole’s children, born after the family had left Dalmorton behind for good. No birth record for him has yet been found.

He first surfaces in the record on 10 June 1915, enlisting at Liverpool, NSW, as Private 2462, 7th Reinforcements, 1st Battalion, AIF — eighteen years and five months old, a cabinet maker by trade, his next of kin given as his mother, "Frances Poole, 44 Young Street, Annandale" — the same Annandale address his brother Joel John was living at when he vanished two years earlier.⁴ He embarked from Sydney on the Orsova on 14 July 1915, and joined his battalion at Gallipoli on 4 November 1915, in the campaign’s final weeks; he was evacuated with the rest of the force, disembarking in Egypt on 1 January 1916. In the reorganisation of the AIF that followed, he was transferred to the newly raised 53rd Battalion at Tel-el-Kebir in February 1916, then, the following month, into the 14th Machine Gun Company, attached to the 14th Brigade. He landed in France on 25 June 1916 — three weeks before the 14th Brigade’s catastrophic baptism of fire at Fromelles on 19–20 July, the single bloodiest night in Australian military history. No casualty report places him among the wounded or killed there, and a final medical board on his discharge recorded "Disability: Nil," so he seems to have come through it and the two years of Western Front service that followed unharmed, at least in body. He was hospitalised with mumps at Camiers in early 1918, took leave in London around the Armistice, and finally sailed for home on the Kildonan Castle in March 1919, disembarking at Sydney on 9 May and discharged on 2 July 1919 — holder, by then, of the 1914–15 Star, the British War Medal and the Victory Medal.⁴ See his AIF service record ›

Back in Sydney he took up bricklaying, and on 2 December 1922, aged 24, he married Adeline Maude Odgers, a 22-year-old from Sunny Corner, at St Peter’s Church, Berwood. The marriage register already records his father as "Frederick Poole (dec’d)," while his mother, Frances Cadden, carries no such mark — matching exactly what is known of William Frederick Poole (dead by about 1900) and Frances Helen Cadden (who lived on until 1928). One of the witnesses at the wedding was "F. Poole" — very likely one of his brothers.¹

Adeline Maude did not live long. Born in 1900 at Sunny Corner, the daughter of James and Mary A. Odgers, she died on 26 January 1928 at Burwood — the same district in which she and Thomas had married six years before — aged only twenty-seven. She was buried at Rookwood Cemetery, section 9, row 31, under a headstone inscribed simply "my wife," with "Addie," evidently her family’s name for her, added to the footstone.⁶ Thomas remained a widower for a decade.

On 6 August 1938, at St James’, Croydon, he married again, to Beryl Edna Amos, a 31-year-old from Chatsworth; the register once more names his parents, this time both "Frederick Poole (dec’d)" and "Frances Cadden (dec’d)." He remained a bricklayer — the 1930 electoral roll finds him at 40 Highway Avenue, Ashfield⁵, and by 1946 he and Beryl were together at 11 Bridge Street, he still bricklaying and she keeping house⁷ — before the couple settled, by 1971, at Ridge Street, Cabramatta, where Thomas Charles Poole died on 5 June 1971, aged seventy-three.²

It is his own death notice that puts his place in this family beyond doubt. The Sydney Morning Herald described him as "dearly beloved husband of Beryl, loved father of Colin (deceased), adored stepfather and father-in-law of Betty and Frank, Keith and Elva, June and Harold, Bobby and Alice, fond grandfather and great-grandfather of their children" — and, decisively, "fond brother of Frederick (deceased) and Daisy (Mrs Batchelor, Port Macquarie)." Frederick and Daisy are William and Frances Poole’s other two children of those names: no birth certificate could make the connection more certain than his own family did, naming him as theirs at his death.³ See the death notice ›