By Dominique Tassell
James Edwin Knight was born in Yangan just east of Warwick on 26 December 1895, living there until 1915 when he volunteered for service in France.
He would go on to serve in both World War I and World War II.
James, known as Jim, spoke of his experience serving his country to various sources before his death on 26 December 1985.
In a novel collating a group of soldier’s experiences, James remembered some of his close escapes:
“It’s the most awful place in history, the Menin Road. There wasn’t anything good about any of it, except perhaps the tot of rum. We always had a drink of rum, especially in the wintertime. It was called S.R.D., some of the wags reckoned it meant ‘Some of us Reach our Destination’, but it was overproof rum, and if you drank too much of it, it would kill you.
Our quartermaster-sergeant had a Colgate shaving stick container which he cut down to about half size. That was the issue of rum he gave us, which wasn’t very much, but it was very strong rum, and I tell you, it would give a bit of a kick. Of course, we didn’t get much to eat. We got a loaf of bread to thirteen men, a spoonful of margarine each, a spoonful of jam and half an orange. We also had a fair amount of Anzac wafers. They were hard biscuits you couldn’t break with a sledgehammer. We used to pound them up to make porridge, that wasn’t too bad. We were at one place when we were relieved by the Durham Light Infantry, they were going up along the dugouts and said: ‘Ah chum, can we have some of those biscuits you’ve got there?’ We said they could take the whole lot if they wanted them. We couldn’t eat them. But these boys tore into them as if they had never had a feed in their lives. They reckoned they were lovely. The bully beef was quite good though. Some brands were better than others. There was one brand that was exceptionally good. It had three gold stars on the tin and came from the Argentine, Fray Bentos. Another thing a man would nearly kill for was a tin of MacConachie’s rations, which was made up in Scotland. Tinned fish and stuff like that, beautiful it was, I can tell you. You’d nearly kill a bloke to get a tin of that, it was the best thing they ever introduced. But Fray Bentos was the best bully beef, and Davis, packed in Chicago, had been sabotaged by enemy agents. They put tiny fish hooks in the meat, so when you swallowed it, you would have to go to hospital. Quite a few men went down with that. But I got quite a taste for Fray Bentos, it was full of jelly.”
James married English girl Emily Louise Govey, a bootmaker by profession, in 1919.
Upon returning to Australia, the couple settled in Allora for a year.
Their family grew to include three daughters named Phyllis, Doreen, and Violet, and two sons named Edwin and James.
The family moved to Coominya in April 1921 where they grew grapes.
On 18 May 1923, James accepted a transfer north to the small soldier settlement at Yarraman near Nanango.
The family returned to the Darling Downs in 1925, before moving sometime between 1928 and 1932 to Granville, now an eastern suburb of Maryborough.
James enlisted again when World War II broke out, alongside his son Edwin Herbert Knight.
Emily died at Granville on 17 May 1964, and all five children are now deceased also.
Just before his death, Jim summed up the meaning of the Great War as he saw it. He said: “Oh well, I think death’s inevitable, but I don’t want to meet him just yet. I’m having a good kick out of life so far. But what I think about war is all we went through was a futile waste of lives and money, and the Second World War was the same. We achieved nothing, and I can’t see what’s the use of wars at all. It’s just a futile loss of men killed at Gallipoli and France and Vietnam. What advantage has it given us? None. We are just worse off than we were before with atomic bombs just threatening us every minute. It’s futile trying to beat them.”
James’ awards for service in WWI include the 1914/1915 Star, the British War Medal, and the Victory Medal.
James’ story became known to locals when Peter Taylor stumbled across the Victory Medal at the bottom of the Bunya Mountains.
The medal reads “The Great War For Civilisation 1914-1919”.
It is expected that the medal will be reunited with James’ descendants later this month, with Phyllis’ son Alan Skerritt and Violet’s son Graham Ambrey now located.
