Son followed dad to war

ORCHARDIST Alfred Cahill was 30 when he joined the Australian Imperial Force in May 1916.

The son of farmers John and Eliza Cahill, he was born at Buckland but the family later moved to the Tasman Peninsula.

Alfred established a fruit growing property at Oakwood, near Sorell, where he and wife Helen raised their daughter Joyce and son Clyde.

On enlisting with the 22nd reinforcements for the 40th Battalion he gave his home address as 385 Liverpool St, Hobart.

After training at Claremont, Alfred embarked for Europe aboard the Ballarat, which left Hobart at the start of August 1916 and arrived at Plymouth, England, at the end of September.

He was posted to a training battalion but within a month he was sick in hospital with influenza. Once fully recovered, further training took place over the next months until he was admitted to the Wareham Military Hospital suffering pneumonia, followed by another bout of the flu.

A week after recovering from his illnesses, Alfred was finally posted to France a year after arriving in England.

He fought in the attack on Broadside Ridge in Belgium on October 13, 1917 and was listed as missing in action.

A board of inquiry in May 1918 determined that he had been killed in action. Alfred is one of 15 men commemorated on the Soldiers’ Memorial Avenue who died in that attack.

Back at home, after more than six months of not knowing her husband’s fate, Helen began the process of applying for a war pension.

When World War II broke out, son Clyde enlisted in the RAAF and became a navigator in a bomber squadron in Europe. His plane was shot down over Germany in March 1943.

Until her death, Clyde’s sister Joyce remembered her father and her brother by placing two bouquets of flowers on tree #338 on the Soldiers’ Memorial Avenue every Anzac Day.

Private Alfred Robert Cahill has no known grave but is commemorated on the Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial in Belgium, as on local monuments including the Hobart Town Hall honour board.

Alfred Cahill