Generations of Service
From Memory to Honour
For over twenty years, I’ve been exploring the military service that runs through my family’s history. It all began when I was much younger, listening to my great-aunt Maggie as she gently opened a faded shoebox filled with postcards and photographs. I remember thinking that these items represented connections; each one held a significance beyond its physical weight. Every discovery since, buried in archives or unearthed in the back of a drawer, reminds me of the sacrifices that shape our family’s legacy.
It’s one thing to see a name and a service number, another to imagine my great-grandfather Charles Cripps standing in line in Northampton, Western Australia, determined to do his bit in a world at war, and one that was so far from home. He sailed on the RMS Mongolia, a man of sixty-one claiming to be forty-five, intent on joining the 11th Battalion, 12th Reinforcement, and landing in Egypt in 1915. Those facts are in the records, but the person comes alive for me as I read his letters, handle his medals—the 1914-15 Star, the British War Medal, and the Victory Medal—reminders of his courage.
Sometimes, the stories carry unexpected weight. The simple military identity tag of Private Thomas Richard Cripps held its own story: not just a disc worn around his neck in the trenches, but proof he existed, loved, and was mourned when he fell during the Battle of the Somme. Or the stacks of letters from the battlefield, voices from the past with ink smudged by rain and nerves. In those words, I hear strength, longing, and the stubborn hope that tomorrow would be kinder.
It’s not all distant history. I’ve traced other lines. Like my brother-in-laws, James ‘Jim’ MacKay, twenty and adventure-struck, swept up by the outbreak of the Korean War, or Angus, holding the line with the 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment in Vietnam. These stories that span across oceans and generations, remind me that service never happens in isolation: it spreads forward and around them, touching wives who waited, mothers who worried, and children who grew up without father’s, tracing their medals and photographs with small fingers.
My search continues: for cousins and comrades, for postcards and paybooks, for lost photographs and the memories. Every time a new piece surfaces, like the precious keepsakes passed down from Aunt Maggie to her granddaughter Gail, and then to me, now in the safe hands of a cousins military family, I’m reminded that this work matters. Not just for my family, but for anyone who has ever wondered where they come from, and whose courage they carry with them.
So here’s my invitation. If you’re reading this, you are part of the story. Maybe you have a relic, a letter, or just a family rumour. Each bit helps keep the memory alive, turns dry facts into real people, and make certain that service, in all its forms, is never forgotten.