“Granddad taught at Whanganui Collegiate for 40 years, was nicknamed ‘Holy Mac’, and took charge of school cadets there during the first war.
“He applied to go overseas in 1916 but the army turned him down – on age grounds”, Tom says.
Frank’s family didn’t have the same luck in World War II.
Daughters Joan and Mary, who attended Whanganui Girls College, found themselves stranded in England in 1940. Mary got work as a teacher there and Joan, a trained nurse, worked in RAF hospitals until 1945.
Son Hugh, who’d been educated at St George’s prep school and Whanganui Collegiate joined the NZ Army in 1940 and served in artillery regiments in North Africa and Italy.
“Each week he wrote home to his parents, who lived in Liverpool Street, and provided personal opinions on frontline life and the progress of the war, yet he only mentioned a fraction of it in the post-war years.”
Family connections with Whanganui continued after 1945. Joan married Doug Smellie who served with an RNZAF bomber squadron and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) after the war. Doug retrained as a teacher afterwards and in the 1960s was deputy principal at Whanganui High School.
Tom says that locating the letters and other memorabilia was a stroke of luck.
“It was always somewhere amongst family property and there was every chance it could have been thrown out. Because it was hidden from view and saved, it was possible to write “Wartime Secrets” – a book with new insights about the war”, Tom says.
■ Send orders to mcgrathtom0@gmail.com or lynn@writeshillpress.co.nz
