William Thomas Cadden

Four years with the medical corps

William enlisted at Perth on 9 March 1915, twenty-seven and a single civil servant, naming his father at 29 Oswald Street, Victoria Park, as next of kin. He was a tall man for his day — five feet ten and a half, fair-haired and blue-eyed — and from the first he was posted not to the infantry but to the Army Medical Corps’ Hospital and Convalescent Home, as a sergeant.³ He sailed for Egypt at the end of May, caught dengue fever at Alexandria that October, and was made staff sergeant at No. 2 Australian Auxiliary Hospital, Heliopolis, on 1 February 1916.³⁴

In March 1916 he moved to a Sanitary Section — the unglamorous units that kept the army’s camps, water and latrines free of disease — and in May he sailed for England with it. He spent most of 1917 with the AIF’s depots in England, crossed to France on the last day of the year, and served through 1918 with the 3rd Australian Sanitary Section. In the closing weeks of the war he was a temporary Warrant Officer Class I with the 5th Field Ambulance; on leave in England, he missed the Armistice at the front by two days.⁴

He came home in 1919 among the long-serving ‘1915 men’, on the nursing staff of the Kildonian Castle, landing at Fremantle on 27 April and taking his discharge at Perth on 4 July. His conduct sheet was blank, and he was entitled to the 1914–15 Star, British War Medal and Victory Medal.⁴⁵

Pneumonia

At six in the evening on 2 December 1916, then a staff sergeant at AIF Headquarters in London, William was taken ill with a violent headache, a stabbing pain down his right side and a cough that brought up bright blood. Next day he was admitted to the Military Hospital, Endell Street — the London hospital famous for being run and staffed entirely by women doctors.⁶

His case notes and charts survive in full. The fever peaked near 104°F on the fifth and sixth of December, his pulse ran up to 122 and his breathing to forty a minute; the laboratory found pneumococci in his sputum. The treatment was the only one there was before antibiotics — aspirin, brandy, an ammonia expectorant, a strychnine tonic and linseed poultices to the painful side. The fever broke on the seventh day, the right lung cleared by Christmas, and on 5 January the doctor recommended sick furlough: ‘He has had severe attack of pneumonia, needs 10 days convalescence.’⁶

In Victoria Park his parents had a cable from Base Records dated 13 December: ‘Regret reported son Staff Sergeant William T. Cadden admitted Military Hospital Endell Street London 3rd December pneumonia.’ By then the worst was over. His younger brother Jack, in France, would not be so lucky with the same illness two years later.⁶

Marriage, and a separation

On his return he applied, in December 1921, for a war pension — most likely for the after-effects of the pneumonia — and the Repatriation Department sent to Melbourne for his service record to assess it; the outcome is not on file.⁵ He had married Alice Lillian Watts at Perth in September of that year.⁷ In 1925 they were living at 198 Walcott Street, Mount Lawley, William a clerk and Alice at home with their first child; a second followed about 1928.⁷⁸ By 1936 he was with the Main Roads Department.⁹

It was not a happy marriage. After one separation in August 1931 they parted for good in January 1932, William paying Alice £2 10s a week under a deed. When she took him to the Perth Police Court in April 1941 for more — ‘I have to feed those children and I’m not getting sufficient to do so’ — the children were sixteen and twelve, she had kept herself by dressmaking for fifteen and a half of her twenty married years, and William was a captain in the Garrison Battalion, having gone into uniform again in October 1939; he had been ‘wearing three pips’ for a fortnight. The bench held her entitled to £4 7s 6d a week.¹⁰

‘There was smoke, but definitely no fire’

In 1946 William petitioned for divorce on the ground that he and Alice had lived apart for more than five years. Alice defended, alleging misconduct with an unknown woman seen walking with him on the beach at Bunbury in February 1942, and with a Claremont schoolteacher, Mavis Elizabeth Fowler. William and Miss Fowler both said they had been close friends since 1937 and nothing more. ‘We have many common interests,’ he told the court, ‘and we would have married if I’d been free.’ Mr Justice Walker found no grounds to infer misconduct and granted the decree, on condition that William kept up the existing maintenance and paid Alice’s costs.¹¹

William died at Perth on 14 March 1968, aged eighty, and was buried at Karrakatta.¹² The names of his two children have not yet been traced.