Place in Family

MY BELOVED FIRST BORN

LIEUTENANT JACK KEITH CURWEN-WALKER

Jack Keith Curwen-Walker was the eldest of John and Lucy Curwen-Walker's seven children. John Curwen-Walker died in 1905 and the children went to live with their father's mother and his sisters. A letter from their mother, in Curwen-Walker's service file, explains that, after her husband's death, "circumstances necessitated my little sons (sic) living with his grandmother & Aunts who supervised his education until the age of 17 years when he began to care for himself".
Curwen-Walker was a keen sportsman and something of a speed merchant. He represented the State of Victoria in ice hockey and was a member of the team that won the first inter-state Goodall Cup in 1910. In 1914 he broke the Australian motor-cycling speed record over one hundred miles when he cut 47 minutes off the previous record, which had only been set three weeks earlier. Curwen-Walker, riding "an Indian machine", averaged 56 mph over the course.
The American 'Indian Motor Cycle Company', was at this time the largest manufacturer of motor cycles in the world. Such was Curwen-Walker's enthusiasm for the machines that just before the war he took up an agency for the company.
In October 1916, he joined the Australian Flying Corps, giving one of his aunts, Miss Isabella Curwen-Walker as his next-of-kin. Qualifying as a pilot in September 1917 - delayed by having to recover from a crash - he joined No. 2 Squadron in Palestine in January 1918.
On the morning of 3 May 1918, soon after taking off from the airfield, Curwen-Walker's plane was seen to spin and crash. It was thought that through inexperience he had tried to climb too quickly. Both he and his observer, Corporal Jensen were killed.
Initially it was his aunt, Isabella, as his next-of-kin, who was informed of his death, but it was his mother who eventually chose his inscription.

SECOND SON OF A. BONAR LAW

LIEUTENANT CHARLES JOHN LAW

"Lieutenant Charles Law, second son of the Right Hon. A. Bonar Law, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was previously reported wounded and missing, is now believed to have died of wounds on April 19. Lieutenant Law, who was 20 years of age, held a commission in the King's Own Scottish Borderers. On April 26 it was reported from Germany through Holland that he had been "captured by the Turks in the recent fighting in Palestine. ... Mr Bonar Law's indisposition, to which reference was made in the House of Commons yesterday, is due to the strain of overwork during the past few weeks, coupled with anxiety regarding the fate of his son."
Dundee Evening Telegraph
8 June 1917

"Mr Bonar Law's Son, a tribute from 'one who knew him':
He was the embodiment of all that is best in Public School life. He played all the games with enthusiasm and he loved the open air. He was modest, affectionate, and full of the joy of life. He was intensely popular with his brother officers, and, as I know from letters which have been received, he was beloved by the men he led. His death marks the breaking of yet another lamp which, having shone so brightly over the home, was surely destined to shed its radiance far afield."
The Times
8 June 1917

"Mr Bonar Law's Son
Mr. Bonar Law has received official confirmation from the Vatican of the fact that his second son, Lieutenant C.J.Law, King's Own Scottish Borderers, is a prisoner with the Turks. A Reuter message from Rome adds that the Vatican has ascertained that Lieutenant Law is being well treated, and that there appears to be no cause whatever for apprehension in regard to him."
The Times
14 June 1917

Cruelly, the Vatican was wrong. The telegram it received had omitted the vital word 'not'. Lieutenant Law was NOT a prisoner of the Turks. And even more cruelly, three months later, Mr Bonar Law's eldest son, Captain James Kidston Law RFC, was killed when his plane was shot down in France. His body was never identified and he is commemorated on the Arras Flying Services Memorial.
Bonar Law chose a brief, factual inscription for his son Charles' headstone, giving his address as 10 Downing Street. This means that he signed for it sometime between 23 October 1922 and 22 May 1923, the dates of his extremely short premiership.

MY FIRST PRIDE
MY FIRST JOY
MY BRAVE SOLDIER BOY

PRIVATE HEREWARD WILLIAM RAY

Hereward Ray was his mother's eldest child - 'her first pride, her first joy'. He was also 'her brave soldier boy'. I can't help hearing the words of a popular, American anti-war song, written in 1915, in her description of her son. And if this echo is intentional then she's rebuking the song-writers, not agreeing with them. This is the chorus of the song:

I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier,
I brought him up to be my pride and joy.
Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder,
To shoot some other mother's darling boy?
Let nations arbitrate their future troubles,
It's time to lay the sword and gun away.
There'd be no war today,
If mothers all would say,
"I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier."

To his mother, Hereward Ray was not only her pride and joy but a brave soldier too. The Ray family was committed to the war. There was no conscription in Australia but Hereward Ray's stepfather and brother both served in it, as did his mother's brother, Hector Archibald Maclean, who was killed in action aged 47, and two of his cousins. One cousin was killed and the other, invalided home, died of his wounds in Australia.

Hereward Ray enlisted in March 1915 and served with the 22nd Australian Infantry, which embarked from Australia in May. It went to Gallipoli where it remained until the evacuation that December. Then it moved to France and took part in the Battle of the Somme at Pozieres. Early in 1917 it went to Flanders. Ray was killed in the trenches on 18 September 1917. A witness related how he and Sergeant Kelly had both died of head injuries having been hit by a shell at Jabber Trench, Westhoek".

DEARLY LOVED YOUNGEST SON OF
WILLIAM JOHN & MARY AINSLEY
OF 1, ST JOHN'S GROVE, LEEDS
YORKS

PRIVATE DONALD AINSLEY

Donald Ainsley, was a clothiers assistant in Leeds, as was his father, although at the time of the 1911 census the father is recorded as 'not working'. Donald was killed on 25 September 1916 in the Battle of Morval, the attempt to secure the ruined villages of Morval and Lesboeufs.

DICKON
3RD SON OF RICHARD ROSS
RUTHERFORD, ROXBURGH, SCOTLAND

SECOND LIEUTENANT RICHARD (DICKON) ROSS

Dickon Ross was the third of Richard and Emily Ross's five sons. James, the eldest, a Scottish rugby international who played for the London Scottish and the Barbarians, was killed on 1 November 1914. Dickon was killed on 25 September 1916 and Thomas, fatally wounded on 4 November 1918, died on the 13th, two days after the Armistice.
Their father, Richard Ross, farmed over 1,000 acres around Maxton in Roxburghshire. However, father had died in 1908 and Emily Ross moved from Rutherford Farmhouse, Maxton to Sherborne in Dorset. Nevertheless, she thought of Maxton as her sons' home and although James had no grave and is commemorated on the Menin Gate, both Dickon and his brother Thomas's inscriptions reference Rutherford, the place where they were born.

ONLY SON
R.I.P.

PRIVATE MICHAEL THOMAS MAHER

According to a file in the Australian Red Cross Society Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau, Private Maher was a stretcher bearer killed during the German attack on Villers Bretonneux. Four witnesses recalled that, whilst engaged in carrying wounded from the fighting to the Regimental Aid Post, he was hit in the temple and chest by a shell and killed outright. One witness mentioned that 'Mick' was "a very obliging chap, well thought of by his mates". In civilian life Michael Thomas Maher was a farmer, grazier, from Bethundra in New South Wales who had enlisted on 1 February 1916.