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More than a century after an Australian soldier wrote a letter to his mother as he sailed to war and his death, it has been discovered in a bottle washed up on a remote beach.
Private Malcolm Alexander Neville’s light-hearted note, penned on 15 August 1916, was found on Wharton beach, near Esperance, about 750km south-east of Perth.
“Having a real good time,” the letter pulled from inside a glass Schweppes bottle said.
“Food is real good so far, with the exception of one meal, which we buried at sea.”
Neville, who was killed in action in France in April 1917, aged 28, had departed Adelaide aboard a troopship three days earlier.
“The dear old (HMAT) Ballarat is heaving and rolling, but we are as happy as Larry,” he wrote of the ship, which was later torpedoed and sank in April 1917.
“Your loving son Malcolm ... Somewhere at sea.”
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Handwritten in pencil on paper and rolled inside the bottle with a cork in the top, Neville also asked “the person finding this bottle” to send its contents to his mother in his tiny home town of Wilkawatt in South Australia.
Esperance woman Debra Brown’s family found the bottle while collecting rubbish on the picturesque beach, saying it was likely exposed when severe winter storms washed away dunes.
“We believe it’s been buried because it’s so well preserved,” she says.
“If it had lived in the ocean for 109 years, it would have sunk to the bottom. The cork would have disintegrated.”
The bottle had a small amount of water in it and Brown pulled the cork out and placed the bottle on a windowsill to dry out.
“You could see that it had a message inside,” she says. “We thought, no way would you be able to read it.”
The family used surgical tweezers to reach inside the bottle and gently pull Neville’s 109-year-old, two-page letter out.
Excited by the rare find, Brown searched for and found Neville on the Australian War Memorial’s website.
“Because he didn’t come home and he never married, had children, there was not a lot of other things going on the internet about him,” she says.
The amateur sleuth also searched for references to the private’s mother in Wilkawatt and found his great nephew, Herbie Neville, in Alice Springs, telephoning him to share news of the bottle.
“Since then, all of his cousins and sisters and everyone have been in touch with me, and they’re very excited about the whole find,” she says.
The Australian War Memorial curator, Bryce Abraham, says Pte Neville was 157cm (five feet two inches) and determined to serve his country during world war two.
“He’s quite an interesting man who made multiple attempts to enlist, wasn’t allowed to enlist at first because he was too short and had vision problems, then persevered, and sadly, only spent two months on the Western Front before he was killed,” he says.
The former farmer initially enlisted on April Fool’s Day 1916 and was medically discharged weeks later as unfit, but that didn’t stop him from doing his patriotic duty.
“He seems to have garnered some sympathy from a captain who wrote in support of him so the Australian Service Corps would take him on,” Abraham says.
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The private didn’t stay in the logistics unit for long, though, and was soon back in the infantry.
“We know he wore spectacles, so it’s possible he got better ones and they were happy for him to be infantry,” Abraham says.
“Not every man was necessarily as determined. He was keen to do his bit and really wanted to enlist and to make a contribution.”
After a six-week voyage aboard the HMAT Ballarat, Neville disembarked in the UK in September 1916.
He was sent to France in December before joining the 48th Australian Infantry Battalion in February 1917.
“He was with the battalion for only two months before, sadly, he was killed in action on the first day of the Battle of Bullecourt on the 11th of April 1917,” Abraham says.
“It was quite a horrific battle and a disastrous failure, and close to half of his battalion became casualties.”
Neville was buried in a London cemetery and is one of four members of his broader family killed in the first world war.
The bottle Neville’s letter was found in also had a letter from another soldier, Private William Kirk Harley, who later returned from the war and reportedly married his childhood sweetheart.
“Harley’s letter took a few more days to dry out before I thought that I could pull it out, and hence it was more damaged and it came out in bits,” Brown says.
“He must have been a bit bored and he said: ‘if you find this bottle, I hope you’re in as good spirits as we are at the moment’.”
Brown posted the note to his granddaughter and will also post Neville’s letter to his family.
The bottle with letters inside is the fourth known to have been found along the coastline between Adelaide and Perth after soldiers sailing to Europe in 1916 threw them overboard.
Abraham says soldiers were often bored and wrote letters and diaries to pass the time at sea.
They were also well aware of the “realities of war” following the failed Gallipoli campaign, and soldiers such as Neville and Harley knew what potentially awaited them, he says.
“They knew it wasn’t going to be a great adventure like had been portrayed at the outbreak of the war.”
