A reference to the Yass Soldiers Memorial Hall Honour Rolls recently made in a Letter to the Editor by Robert Richardson AO AFC AVM RAAF Retd implied that only those who ENLISTED (the writer’s emphasis) from this district are listed. ‘Enlisted from this district’ is a matter of broad interpretation.
Local historian Mary Yeo started a Great War honour roll in 1915 and the Yass Courier spasmodically added names. The task was taken over by a special committee so that the names of those who served would be in place for the official opening of the Soldiers Memorial Hall in March 1923 and the public were asked to submit the names to be commemorated.
The following details were required – Full Christian names, year and place of residence at enlistment (There was no specification that the nominated person had to enlist from this district), rank and decoration, if any, date of death in the case of fallen soldiers and name of unit. While the committee took ‘the greatest pains in the matter of enrolling all names it is certain that despite all care that is being exercised some names will be overlooked and it therefore rests with the general public to see that every man is put on that should be there’. The committee decided who should be included but were ensuring that they were not responsible for omissions and errors.
By 31 August 1922 there were 495 names, including 95 deceased, gathered from an area roughly covering the Municipality of Yass and Goodradigbee Shire and some corrections were made to names. However, research in later years revealed discrepancies in the spelling of surnames and incorrect initials. Some inclusions were men who were not born here, were not living here at the time of enlistment and did not enlist in Yass but attended school or worked in the district for a short time. There are instances of men who were living and working in the area when they enlisted who are not recorded on the honour roll and others who enlisted under assumed names.
The compilation of the WW2 Honour Roll proved equally problematic. With good intent the Yass Soldiers Club took responsibility for recording the nominated service personnel. Next of kin or friends were asked to submit names. Some errors that occurred in the initial lists published in the Yass Tribune Courier do not seem to have been corrected and have been engraved in perpetuity. One of the longest serving Australian prisoners of war in WW2 was Lieutenant Eileen Mary Callaghan MID, a nursing sister at Yass Hospital, who was captured at Rabaul in early 1942. Her name is shown on the Honour Roll as ‘J Callaghan’. Another example is Greek-born Antonios Anacnostou, he is recorded as ‘A Anagnoston’.
Records of some 1,500 plus Yass district WW2 personnel who were born or living in the district at the time of enlistment or enlisted at Yass were extracted from the Department of Veterans Affairs online Nominal Roll. When compared with the approximate 800 names on the honour roll at the Soldiers Memorial Hall there are only about 600 names that can be immediately identified. The rest will require lengthy research.
Procrastination over the erection of the Sudan (1885) and Boer War (1899-1902) honour rolls surfaced from time to time but were not erected until the WW2 honour rolls were installed in the 1950s. The difficulties of compiling accurate honour rolls are not unique to Yass and the same can be said of memorials elsewhere that were compiled in a time before computers and access to digitised records relied on the public’s memory and a selection process to finalise who should be commemorated.
Cheryl Mongan
Yass & District Historical Society Inc
