Harold Roy Baldock

A Nineteen-Year-Old Turns Twenty-One

Harold presented himself for his medical examination at the Board of Health Recruiting Depot, Sydney, on 7 January 1916 and was passed “fit for active service” — five foot six, eight stone seven, a mole on the front of his neck, blue eyes, brown hair, Church of England. He was formally attested on Monday, 24 January 1916, at Casula, and taken on strength as No. 4975, 13th Reinforcements, 19th Battalion.⁴ On the form he gave his age as twenty-one years and one month; by his own birth registration he was not yet nineteen. Under A.I.F. rules a man of eighteen could enlist only with a parent’s written consent, while a man who declared himself twenty-one needed no one’s permission at all — no consent from Jessie appears anywhere in his file. Whether she knew of the two added years before he sailed, this branch cannot say.

He embarked at Sydney on 5 July 1916 aboard H.M.A.T. Ajana, disembarked at Plymouth on 31 August, and crossed to France that October. His first winter in the line was one of illness as much as combat — a bout of trench foot sent him to hospital at Rouen in December — and by February 1917 he was well enough to be attached to the 5th Australian Light Trench Mortar Battery, a hazardous posting serving the Stokes mortars close behind the infantry.⁵

What His Mates Saw

On 3 May 1917 the Australian 2nd Division attacked the Hindenburg Line defences at Bullecourt — one of the costliest single actions the A.I.F. fought on the Western Front. Harold was reported missing that day. Independent of Base Records, the Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau gathered statements from three of his mates, all agreeing on what had happened. Sergeant J. A. Corbett saw him “killed at Bullecourt on 3rd May… whilst on fatigue duty somewhere between the lines. His head was blown off by a shell and death was instantaneous.” Private E. Douglas, of the same platoon, placed him on the same fatigue party, “carrying out ammunition after the attack,” in which “Pte. Currie was killed by the same shell.” Private W. Search, writing in January 1918, gave the time — “about 4 o’clock in the morning of the 3rd” — and a description: “height about 5 feet 6 in, age about 20, slight build and fair complexion.”⁶

For some months a kinder rumour competed with that testimony. In October 1917 a mate, Private R. D. G. Marjoram, wrote home that “Roy Baldock is now a Prisoner of War in Germany” — news that reached the Red Cross by way of his own sister in Sydney, though not, it seems, Jessie herself. The Bureau chased the story for two years, even ruling out confusion with another, genuinely repatriated Private Baldock, before formally closing the file in October 1919: “No trace in Germany.”⁶ Base Records, meanwhile, had already certified the death on 13 March 1918, the finding of a Court of Enquiry held the previous December⁵ — and Jessie, all this while, was writing letters of her own, growing steadily less patient with an office that had so little to tell her.⁷

Medals, a Scroll, and a Plaque

No personal effects were ever recovered; Harold had left no will, and Base Records told Jessie in 1918 that none were now likely to be found. What did eventually come, over the five years that followed, was the machinery of official remembrance: a British War Medal and Victory Medal, posted to her in May 1922 (he had embarked too late for the 1914–15 Star); a Memorial Scroll that November; and, in December, the bronze Memorial Plaque, No. 340305 — the “dead man’s penny.” Jessie signed a receipt for each, in the same plain hand she had used for every letter since 1917. When Base Records queried, in 1922, whether Harold’s father was still living and so entitled to the medals ahead of his mother, William Stanley answered for himself: “I am the late soldier’s Father and anything coming from the Military Department would be pleased for his mother to receive same.”⁸

Harold has no known grave. He is commemorated by name on the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux, and listed in the Sydney Anzac Memorial’s own Roll of Honour — “4975 Baldock, H.R., Pte., 19th Battn., K. in A., 3/5/17.” No photograph of him is known to survive.⁹

Questions Not Yet Resolved

Whether the family in Sydney ever learned of the prisoner-of-war rumour. Private Marjoram’s letter naming Roy Baldock as a prisoner in Germany went to his own sister, and from her to the Red Cross — not, as far as these records show, to Jessie directly. Whether word of it ever reached her, and what it did to a mother already six months into not knowing her son’s fate, is not recorded.

Whether Jessie knew of the two added years. Harold gave his age as twenty-one, not nineteen, and no parental consent appears in his file. Whether his mother knew of it before he sailed, or only pieced it together afterward — if she ever did — cannot be recovered from these records.

The exact date of Winifred’s death in 1897. Only the year is fixed by the death registration (12841/1897); whether she died before or after her brother Harold’s birth on 6 April that year is not established.