About this record

This letter to the editor of The Argus newspaper in August 1915 was written by Isabella Fothergill, mother of First World War serviceman Jack Fothergill. Two months earlier, the Department of Defence had informed Isabella that her son was missing, but she was dissatisfied with a lack of further information from the department. Through The Argus, Isabella appealed to returned soldiers who may have known his fate.

Educational value

• The death of 60,000 Australians during the First World War meant that scarcely a family in Australia was untouched by loss. Yet, for many, the sadness was delayed or unresolved, because many soldiers were recorded as missing, rather than confirmed dead. Not knowing the fate or burial place of relatives caused great distress and lasting grief. Even in to the 1920s, many clung to the slim hope that perhaps a mistake had been made and that their relative might still be alive but unable to find their way home.
• Private Jack Fothergill, 26, was wounded on the day of the Gallipoli landing, 25 April 1915, and never seen again. In June 1915, it was reported unofficially that he had been admitted to hospital in Egypt, but inquiries by the Department of Defence found no trace of him. Unhappy with the slow response from the department, Mrs Isabella Fothergill campaigned for further information about her son, appealing to her local Member of Parliament and through the press.
• Isabella wrote to The Argus newspaper on 12 August 1915, asking for returned soldiers who may have known Jack to come forward. In response, a transport corps driver claimed that he and Jack had been in the same ward in the 15th General Hospital, Alexandria.
• Eventually, in April 1916, a court of inquiry found that Jack Fothergill had been killed in action. A week later, Isabella, who had not yet received news of the finding, wrote to the Department of Defence. She said she thought it was a ‘downright shame’ that mothers who were bringing up sons to be ‘slaughtered down’ could not be told what became of them.
• Each Anzac Day for 30 years, Jack’s parents placed different and deeply moving poems in newspaper ‘In Memoriam’ notices. The first in 1916 read: ‘Far and oft our thoughts do wander/To a grave so far away/Where our boy gave his life/So noble and brave’.
• Jack Fothergill’s name is on the Lone Pine Memorial at Gallipoli.