After noticing quite a few friends blogging it up, I've decided "To hell with anonymity, I'm joining in."
Who knows how this blog will take shape but for now, let's get started.
Today's offering? An amazing photo I found while going through boxes and boxes of family photographs. It's a photo of my great grandfather's. There's a long and complicated history, he was an interesting man, but when I was a kid pretty much all I knew was, "Oh, that's great grandpa's picture on the mantel with the Queen." Turns out he was a well respected soldier who climbed the ranks to Lieutenant Colonel, Brigadier, a bunch of other titles I don't understand and eventually was knighted in 1970, 16 years before my birth.
This photo was taken around 1942-1943 in the "Middle East" according to the scrawl on the back of the image.
Although I never met him, I have fond feelings towards Sir Thomas. I know how important he was to my Dad. After finding this photo I've trawled the internet to get a taste for the kind of man he was. Apparently he left school at 12 1/2 to take care of his ailing mother and five siblings when his father struggled to provide for them in 1912. In 1927 he founded Angas Engineering and would ride his bicycle to the factory in the middle of the night to check on the case hardening of the automotive parts. He was a "fair but firm" father of five apparently and was also a teetotaler who never swore.
A few years after this photograph was taken, Thomas liberated the town of Sarawak from Japanese occupation on Sept 11th, 1945, receiving Major-General Yamamura's sword as a symbol of the final surrender of several thousand Japanese soldiers. That same day he freed 2,000 soldiers, men, women and children from the Batu Lintang Prisoner of War camp.
He stayed at a palace called Astana in Sarawak, built in 1870 by the White Rajah, Charles Brooke. Several years after Thomas' return to Australia, he built his own family home just outside of Adelaide based on Astana's architecture. Unfortunately after his death in 1988, his five sons sold the property.
I have memories of my father driving out to the coast and parking out the front of the property, long after it had been sold and telling me about the school holidays he spent there with his grandparents and cousins. He always relished an opportunity to get away from his mother's cooking. Over the years my father would joke that if he won the lottery he'd knock on the door and offer to give the owners whatever amount of cash they wanted then and there to buy it back. I'd always planned to become rich so I could buy it for him but I suppose it's not important now.
