Joel John Poole

Joel John Poole was born in 1886, his birth registered in the Glen Innes district.¹ As a young man he became a Sydney tram conductor — the same trade as his elder brother William Francis — appointed on 21 March 1912, only to resign or be dismissed again within six months, in the week ending 31 August 1912.² By 1913 he had gone back to conducting trams and was living at 44 Young Street, Annandale, the address confirmed by that year's electoral roll.³

He vanished from that same Annandale address on 29 April 1913. A fortnight later the New South Wales Police Gazette's "Missing Friends" column described him: twenty-six years old, six feet tall, medium build, medium complexion, brown hair, clean-shaven, dressed in a dark navy blue suit and black hard hat — "a tram conductor."⁴ He was never traced.

The best account of what became of him came forty-one years later, from his own brother. In a letter headed "Lost Brother," published in Truth (Brisbane) on 11 July 1954, "W. Poole" of Currumbin, Queensland — almost certainly William Francis Poole, the only one of the surviving Poole brothers known to have settled in Queensland (see his own page, above) — wrote that he was hoping to find a brother he had not seen for twenty-five years: "His name was Joel John Poole, and he enlisted in a Queensland battalion during World War I under the name Jack Smith, so that my mother would not know he had gone to the war." Joel had come home once after the war, to the family's house at Mascot, Sydney, but had then dropped out of contact again, apparently around 1929; the letter, in 1954, still hoped he might be found alive.⁵

A National Archives service record answers that hope, at least in part — and very probably identifies him. Among the many hundreds of "John Smith"s who served in the AIF, one stands out: a Private John Smith, regimental number 2738, attested on 11 January 1916, giving his birthplace as Glen Innes, New South Wales — Joel's own registered birth district — and his age as 29 years 7 months, which places his birth in the middle of 1886, exactly the year of Joel's own birth registration. His description matches too: six feet three-quarters of an inch tall, brown hair, blue eyes — against the missing man's recorded six feet and brown hair.⁶ Most tellingly, his next of kin is recorded as his mother, "Pohl, F." — no Smith family of that name has been found, and "Pohl" reads as a very plausible mishearing or mistranscription of "Poole," with the initial matching Frances, Joel's own mother's name precisely.⁶ This is a strong circumstantial case, not a proven one: "Pohl" could in principle be a genuine, unconnected Rockhampton family name, and no document has yet been found that states outright "John Smith was Joel Poole."

Whoever he was, this John Smith enlisted at Rockhampton, Queensland, and trained partly at the 11th Depot Battalion in New South Wales and partly at Lytton Camp, near Brisbane, before being taken on strength of the 52nd Battalion — a unit recruited jointly from Queensland and Western Australia, and so, loosely, "a Queensland battalion" in exactly the sense the 1954 letter used.⁶ He embarked from Sydney aboard the transport Caronia on 7 October 1916, reached France via England in early 1917, and served through bouts of rheumatism and enteritis before suffering severe burns to his right leg in April 1918, which put him through a long chain of English hospitals and left him with a persistent leg ulcer for the rest of his service.⁶ He returned to Australia per the transport Sardinia, disembarking at Melbourne on 27 December 1918, and was discharged for medical unfitness on 17 February 1919 — through the 2nd Military District, that is, Sydney, exactly matching the letter's account of his coming home to the family at Mascot after the war.⁶ A further note on the file, dated November 1940 and originating from the Repatriation Commission's Brisbane office, shows this John Smith was still alive and pursuing some form of ex-service claim a quarter-century after he first vanished — and, if this is indeed Joel, back in Queensland again by then, just as his brother's later letter would suggest.⁶ No trace of him — under either name — has yet been found after 1940.