Loss of sons a blow for generations
Losing one child would be too much.
But for the Knight family, the impact of losing three sons — Herbert, George and Douglas — would reverberate down through the generations.
Growing up, Alan Gibson said the tragic tale of his great-great-uncles who all died during World War I was always spoken about around the family dinner table.
“My grandfather was a real tough hill country farmer and the only time I ever saw him get emotional was when he talked about his uncles,” said Gibson, a photographer for the “The sense of loss and grief had Herbert made a fatal decision. Despite carrying ammunition to the front lines all day, he volunteered to help bury a mule carcass near Cape Helles and was shot through the heart by a Turkish sniper. The former prefect at Wanganui Collegiate School and star rugby player and boxer was 20.
George had to write to his mum to inform her of “the greatest sorrow that has ever happened in our family”.
He said he’d marked Herbert’s grave under an olive tree with a named cross and planted flowers.
Ellen saw the casualty list before a massive impact on our family down through the generations.”
The heartbreaking story is documented in a treasure trove of family letters and documents held in Alexander Turnbull Library.
A “book of letters” was collected and compiled by the cousin of Gibson’s grandfather, and the family’s self-appointed genealogist Nancy Croad.
The remarkable archive has helped New Zealand Post release its George’s letter arrived. Later, she replied: “I prayed so hard that you might both come back to me, but it is part of God’s great plan and we must bear it but it is a hard task bearing to be the mother of soldiers.”
She wrote to her beloved son George every few days, downplaying her own fears, passing on snippets of family life and trying to keep his spirits up.
The light-hearted George had scares — surviving shoulder and chest wounds, illnesses, a septic finger — after being in some of the heaviest trench warfare on the Western Front.
On October 4, 1917, George wrote home: “I am liable to be called up to go to the front line to help in the big attack. I have been looking forward to this for ever so long. As for coming through safely, it is in someone else’s hands and I’ll do my share.”
But on New Zealand’s darkest day, October 12, 1917, his luck ran out. Leading his men over the top, up Bellevue Spur, towards the small village of Passchendaele, the 23-year-old commemorative 1917 The Darkest Hour stamps and coins series along with a book following the story of Ellen Knight.
“The family is delighted that their sacrifice is being recognised — not just George at Passchendaele but all three brothers. It was a huge price to pay for any family,” Gibson said.
His own children are well aware of the family’s tragic past and attend dawn services every Anzac Day.
And in 1999, his grandfather made the pilgrimage to Gallipoli “after living and breathing the story” his whole life, to pay tribute to Herbert Knight who was shot dead by a sniper at Cape Helles on May company commander encountered impenetrable German barbed-wire defences that the artillery barrage had failed to nullify.
George was cut down by a burst of machine-gun fire only feet from the enemy positions.
His body was never recovered. His military service record states: “Many of these men were buried by stretcher bearers where they fell, to right and left of road beyond Waterloo Farm across Ravebeek and up towards crossroads.”
A Wanganui Collegiate obituary paid tribute to “a soldier and a gentleman” who was trusted and loved by his men.
He was one of 846 New Zealanders killed at Passchendaele that day. The total number of casualties, wounded, dead and missing, topped 2700.
The day after George’s death, before the family was informed, Ellen’s shy, serious eldest son William Douglas, known as Douglas, sailed from Wellington, having been excused from the farm. 8, 1915.
Unfortunately, the tour group he was on ran out of time, and although was with metres of Herbert’s grave, he never got to see it.
Alan Gibson visited the grave a few years later and paid his respects to Herbert on behalf of his family.
He also laid a poppy at the grave two years ago when he covered the 100-year commemorations of Gallipoli for the
Even a century on, Gibson wonders how the family ever coped after losing three boys in three years.
“It beggars belief how you would go on.”
The letter he wrote to Ellen earlier that day arrived after she heard the news [of his death]. She never opened it.
On September 1, 1918, Douglas was killed during the Bancourt Ridge offensive, felled by a shell while returning with an arm wound to bring back a wounded corporal. The letter he wrote to Ellen earlier that day arrived after she heard the news. She never opened it.
Another son, Ken, who turned 18 in 1917, was never called up, and took over Douglas’ farm.
But daughter Margarette was struck by rheumatoid arthritis in 1918, and her mother became her carer.
Ellen’s marriage was a strained, distant one, and Herbert died in 1937.
Even World War II didn’t spare Ellen more heartbreak. Her youngest child, Maurice, died of malaria aged 36 while training troops in India in 1944. Margarette and Francis also died before their mother.
With her eyesight failing, she moved in with daughter Dorothy in Gisborne, aged 87, then to a Whakatane nursing home.
When Ellen died aged 93, her family found a shoebox full of letters.