Muriel remembers the dad she adored
A Timaru woman whose father escaped death after being shot in the face at the Battle of Passchendaele has spoken of her adoration of her father and how she was named after his experience fighting in the Great War.
Muriel Pelvin (nee Shadbolt), 96, said her father Private Albert Francis Shadbolt, who was known as Bill, was one of three brothers who fought on the Western front in World War I.
During the Battle of Passchendaele, Shadbolt escaped death after he was hit in the face by a copper bullet fired by a German soldier.
The copper bullet, which was meant to have been banned from use had gone through her father’s cheek ‘‘knocked out two of his double teeth, came out behind his ear and went out the back of his tin hat’’, Muriel Pelvin said.
‘‘If it had been any more this way [centre] it could have been different,’’ she said.
After the wound had healed, all you could see was a small scratch on his cheek, she said.
There was little doubt, he was lucky to have survived, and in a nod to the experience – Shadbolt decided to name his daughter after the trench he lived in.
‘‘They didn’t call them trenches, they called them ‘ dug outs’ in those days, and the trench that he was in was called the ‘ Muriel dug out’, and that’s how I got my name.’’
Muriel was not sure when exactly her father had been injured, but knew he had been sent to hospital in England, before returning to New Zealand following the war, where he farmed in Akaroa.
The family farmed in the Grehan Valley, in Akaroa. Shadbolt was the sole milk supplier for the town.
‘‘Seventeen years never had a day off.’’
The eldest of three children, pelvin said she often helped her and he father on farm, working on fences and delivering milk, before moving to Timaru in the 1960s.
‘‘He didn’t talk about it [the war] very much until I got a bit older . . . and now I see how much he did tell me, what the trenches were like with decaying bodies and dead horses lying around and mud up to their bellies, it must have been disgusting.’’
On Sunday, at the South Canterbury World War I Commemorative Service to mark 100 years since the Battle of Passchendaele, Muriel unveiled a plaque in honour of all those who fought in the battle.
‘‘I suppose it’s the fact that I’m doing it for dad who I adored.’’
said her father died of liver cancer in 1951 at the age of 64.