Four went to war. Only one came home.
Of four brothers, only one survived
MORE than a century ago, the four Kemp brothers set off from their home in Toowoomba for the battlefields of the Middle East and the Western Front.
One by one they were cut down. It took a mother’s plea to ensure the last son, James Kemp, returned home safe. Yet the pain runs deep.
One hundred years on from the end of World War I, James’ daughter Valmai Adams still grows emotional at the thought of what her family went through.
THE thought of all that her family endured because of the First World War still brings Valmai Adams to tears.
Mrs Adams’ father James, along with his brothers Alexander (Alex), Jack (John) and William all fought in the First World War.
Only James returned home, saved from the battlefields of France by a request to the army from his heartbroken mother.
Alexander, 19, was the first of the Kemp brothers to be killed, shot in the head at Gallipoli in September 1915.
Two months later, Jack Kemp was also shot at Gallipoli. He recovered, but on August 5, 1916, he was killed in France, aged 21.
The battlefields of France also claimed William Kemp less than a year later.
National Archives records give a glimpse into their mother’s anguish.
On June 5, 1917, the boys’ mother Susan Kemp wrote to the officer in charge of base records in Melbourne inquiring after her sons’ personal items.
“Dear sir. I received (a) parcel from you with my son’s belongings, they all belong to my son that was killed first. Pte J Kemp is my second son to be killed and he had carried his brother’s belongings with him, so there would be Pte J Kemp’s things still to come,” she wrote.
“If you hear anything about them I would be so pleased to get them, I have just had word of my third son being killed in action. Thanking you. I remain yours faithfully.”
Following a request from his mother, James was discharged six weeks before the war ended.
He got a job as a warder at what was then called the Toowoomba Lunatic Asylum, later renamed Baillie Henderson Hospital in 1968.
Susan Kemp died in 1931. “They said she died of a broken heart, because who wouldn’t,” Mrs Adams said.
James never spoke about the war to Val, but in the Kemp family, Anzac Day was observed every year.
“Each Anzac Day dad used to take us down for five o’clock to Margaret St, and we’d get blown from Margaret St to the Range by the westerlies,” Mrs Adams remembered.
“Mum always knitted me a skirt or a jumper or a dress so that I could wear it for Anzac Day because that was always the first day of winter.”
A century on from the end of World War I, Mrs Adams won’t be attending the Remembrance Day service at the Mother’s Memorial.
Instead, she will head out to the cemetery where her father is buried, and lay flowers on his grave.