A life well lived
WHEN packing our late parents’ home, boxes of photo albums and documents were bundled up, clearly too important to throw out but we didn’t quite know what was there. And so they sat, boxed and waiting, a job for a rainy day.
Fast forward three years and the COVID shutdown time finally led me to those boxes.
Hiding among carefully labelled family paraphernalia was a clear plastic folder, bulging with handwritten paper, bearing Mum’s handwritten “PLEASE RETAIN” boldly on the front.
How right she was.
Within this folder, I came to learn about Sydney Herbert Worth, a name I never heard my parents mention but whom I soon discovered was not only integral to my father’s history but also an intelligent, thoughtful and loving character.
In copperplate script were pages and pages of Syd’s beautifully written, heartfelt letters sent to his mother during his World War I service.
Always fluent, never a crossingout and with perfect spelling, Syd’s letters not only give a deeply personal account of his experiences and contemplations about his own fate, but also occasional commentary on the bigger world picture.
Sydney Herbert Worth, Service No.983, volunteered and enlisted on March 27, 1915, at the age of 25 years, 9 months, serving in the First AIF 23rd Battalion, “C” Company. This humble but clearly competent “warehouseman” rose rapidly through the ranks, being appointed lance corporal only six weeks after enlistment and then sergeant in early 1916.
War history records the 23rd Battalion being sent to Egypt for training before deployment to the Gallipoli campaign in September, 1915, where it remained until evacuation in December. It then withdrew back to Egypt and reorganised before being transferred to the Western Front in March, 1916.
In mid-July, the battalion was transferred to the Somme, where it subsequently took part in the brutal Pozières and Mouquet Farm battles, during which more than 11,000 casualties were suffered — almost 90 per cent of the battalion’s number.
All this is entirely consistent with the course of Syd Worth’s letters, as soldiers were not allowed to reveal any specific locations in their correspondence home. In his early letters, his address is simply given as “at sea”, blue-stamped with “A.I.F. PASSED CENSOR”. Later locations were simply recorded as “in the trenches, somewhere in France”.
While we don’t have all Syd’s 41 letters home, reading through his remarkable, descriptive, heartfelt correspondence — so long kept but now rediscovered — gives one a glimpse of a humble and humorous man thrust into an impossible situation, one soldier’s story.
To do justice to Syd Worth’s story, this article is part one of two.
Syd’s letters begin with “My Very Dear Mother” and sign off with “Your loving Boy, Syd” or
“With a love that only a son can give”.
Sailing from Melbourne on May 8 via Albany for destinations unknown — although hoping it would be England — Syd wrote his letters on his knee sitting on the rolling ship’s floor, commenting “I tell you, this is no picnic excursion”!
En-route north to parts as then unrevealed, he described the sea as “Reckitts Blue” in colour and wrote of the increasingly oppressive, “absolutely stifling” heat, especially down below in his 16-inch hammock space.
He did name Columbo (that apparently passed the censor) and the experience of transporting a fellow soldier to hospital for an appendectomy. For a young man who had never left Victoria, his short immersion into this vibrant but confronting city left him enthralled, overwhelmed and confronted — a huge culture shock for a lad from the colonies!
Days later, he describes standing to attention for the burial at sea of two soldiers who had “caught a chill”:
“To the strains of the Last Post, his body slipped beneath the waves, enshrouded in the Union Jack ... if this is to be our lot, let it be in the fighting lines and not on this mysterious, vast and lonely ocean.”
But not wanting to make his mother miserable when reading about this experience, Syd continued: “I always look on the bright side, rather thinking of that great day of homecoming.”
Syd Worth lived in hope.