Heredity

A single sheet of lined notepaper fluttered out of a folder early this morning, and must have been torn from a notebook long ago—perhaps the sign of larger plans that never came to fruition. It is inscribed on both sides in the fluid cursive of my late grandmother, Helen Borthwick, and headed “Is there anything in Heredity?”

On the 10th November /53, at the Veterinary School Grounds at Parkville, Melbourne, Ronald M. Borthwick, grazier of Sale, Victoria, demonstrated a revolutionary stock cradle, which could have considerable influence on foot rot control in Australia. Over a hundred years ago, his great-uncle J. J. M. Borthwick, who pioneered Tarong Station, Southern Queensland (the subject of several par[agraph]s Bulletin Feb /52) was one of the first men to ship wool from Queensland, as borne out by the records in the Brisbane Museum. Their family, who have played a prominent part in stock breeding in the Border country of Scotland since the seventeenth century, according to family papers, also produced some noted soldiers, the best known of whom, Major-General William Borthwick, was Wellington’s General of Artillery. Ronald Borthwick, the youngest son of the late Colonel Borthwick, who settled in Gippsland in the 80’s, was one of three brothers who served with the 8th Aus. Light Horse A.I.F. One son was killed at Gallipoli [Keith], another lost an arm in Palestine [Lex], while a fourth brother, a permanent soldier in the British Army, died at Aden in 1908 [John Malcolm]. All eligible descendants served in World War Two.

I think that stock cradle invented by Uncle Ron must have been revolutionary in the sense of rotational, rather than epoch-making, though part of me definitely hopes I am wrong about that. Foremost among the eligible descendants, my grandmother must have been thinking with pride of Uncle David and Aunt Anne, Mum’s elder siblings; she and Uncle John were too young to serve. I must track down those stray paragraphs in the Bulletin, which is evidently yet to be digitized by the excellent National Library of Australia in Canberra.

Lieutenant Keith A. Borthwick, 8 L.H.R., A.I.F.

CHARGE TO CERTAIN DEATH.

AUSTRALIAN LIGHT HORSE’S SUPERB DEED.

IMPASSABLE FIRE ZONE.

LINE AFTER LINE SHOT DOWN, BUT NO CHECK.

The charge of the First and Third Australian Light Horse Brigades (on foot) in Gallipoli on August 7th [1915] was one of the most superbly devoted deeds it is possible to conceive. The object was to hold the Turks at Anzac where they were, while a landing was being made elsewhere, and this object was attained—at cost of the life of nearly every man who took part in the charge. The story here given is told by Captain C. E. W. Bean, official Press representative with the Australians in the Dardanelles.

Before daybreak the attacking parties filed into the trenches from which they were to make the rush. They were in their shirts, with their sleeves rolled up and the brown forearm muscles showing. Their knees were bare and sunburnt. Each man carried his full kit, with 200 rounds of ammunition. Water-bottles were full; they carried food for a day or two. Each man had stowed carefully into his pack such little mementoes as he especially prized—a fragment of Turkish shell, some Turkish coins bought off a prisoner, a home letter and a photograph or two. They were saying goodbye to their own trenches—that night they would sleep in the scrub.

The attack on the left-hand side of the apex was to be made by the 8th Light Horse, with the 10th Light Horse following. Four lines would start of a hundred and fifty each, the first and second lines being from the 8th Light Horse—that is, Victorians—and the third and fourth lines being 10th. Light Horse—Western Australians. The first line was to carry, among other things, two scaling ladders made for the occasion. The fourth line would carry picks, shovels, and a dozen sorts of engineering supplies, but it was to fight like the others if necessary.

THE BOMBARDMENT.

In order to help the men to get out of the trench like a flash, pegs had been driven into the side of the trench and the footholds cut. As the moment for the charge came near the first line got its foothold on these, and the second stood in the trench behind it ready to give it a leg up. And then at four o’clock to the moment the bombardment by our guns began. For half an hour the slope in front of our trenches was an inferno, and then the uproar ceased as suddenly as it had begun—ceased as if cut off short by the stroke of a knife. And that same instant the Light Horse attack was launched.

The men were standing there in the trench without the least sign of excitement hitching up their packs, getting a firm foothold below the parapet. The colonel of the 8th, Lieut.-Col. A. H. White, insisted on leading his regiment. Ten minutes before the start he walked into the brigade office and held out his hand to the brigade-major. “Good-bye, Antill!” he said. A couple of minutes later he was at his place on the parapet with his men.

AN APPALLING FIRE.

Colonel White stood by the parapet with his watch in his hand. He and two other officers [one of whom was Keith Borthwick] had carefully set and compared their watches, and the three now stood under the parapet at three points in the line watching the second hand fidget its way round. “Three minutes to go,” said the Colonel. Then simply, “Go!”

They were over the parapet like a flash, the colonel among them, the officers in line with the men. I shall never forget that moment. I was passing not very far away when that tremendous fusillade broke out. It rose from a fierce crackle into a roar in which you could distinguish neither rifle nor machine-gun, but just one continuous roaring tempest. One could not help an involuntary shiver—God help anyone that was out in that tornado. But one knew very well that men were out in it—the time put the meaning of it beyond all possible doubt. Exactly 4.30—the Light Horse were making their charge. There were no British rifles in all that fire—it was the greeting of the Turkish rifles and machine-guns as the Light Horse cleared the Australian parapet.

NONE WILL EVER KNOW.

One knew that nobody could live in it. Many fell back into the trench wounded before they had cleared even the parapet. Others wounded just outside managed to crawl back and tumble in before they were hit a second and third time and killed as they certainly would be if they remained lying out there. Practically all those that were wounded were hit in this way on our own parapet. Colonel White managed to run eight or ten yards before he was killed. The scaling ladders are lying out there about the same distance out. Exactly two minutes after the first line had cleared the parapet the second one jumped out without the slightest hesitation and followed them.

No one knows how it happened. And probably no one will ever know. But some either of that first line or of the second line managed to get into the extreme right hand corner of the enemy’s trench. They carried with them a small flag to put up in the enemy’s trench if they captured it, and the appearance of this flag was to be the signal for a party of Royal Welsh Fusiliers to attack up the gully to the right. Two men were put in the head of one of our foremost saps with periscopes to watch for the first sign of this flag in the enemy’s trench. By this time a French “75”—a gun captured by the Turks from the Serbians in the Balkan war—was pouring her shell at the rate of about one in ten seconds to the neck. Machine-guns, far too many to count by their noise, were whipping up the dust, and it was next to impossible to distinguish anything in the haze. But in the extreme south-eastern corner of the Turkish trench there did appear just for two minutes the small flag which our men had taken.

THE FLAG.

No one ever saw them get there. No one will ever know who they were or how they did it. Only for those two minutes the flag fluttered up behind the parapet, and then someone unseen tore it down.

In the meantime, ten minutes after the second line, the third line had gone over the parapet as straight and as quick as the others. The attack was then stopped, and, fortunately, was stopped in time to prevent a small part of this third line reaching the fire zone. There was one point where our trenches were under the cover of the slope, and the men had to crawl out some ten yards or so before they put up their heads into the torrent of lead. A dozen or so were stopped here before they made their rush.

It was all over within a quarter of an hour. Except for the wild fire which burst out again at intervals there was not a movement in front of the trenches—only the scrub and the tumbled khaki here and there. All day long the brilliant sun of a perfect sky poured down upon them from a cloudless sky. That night after dark one or two maimed figures appeared over our parapet and tumbled home into the trench. They were men who had fallen wounded into some corner where there was a scrap of cover and had waited for this chance to get back. One of them came from below the parapet of the Turkish trench on the right. He had lain there all day, too close to the Turks to see him without exposing themselves. There was another wounded Australian near him. After dark they heard the Turks come out over the parapet of their trench searching for the bodies of the men there for papers and diaries, so they arranged to make as fast as they could for our trenches. The man who arrived back was shot through the ankle. His mate never came.

But from that man we know all that will probably ever be known of what those Light Horse men found facing them as they ran through the dust haze. The nearer trenches were crammed with troops. The bayonets of the front row of Turks could be seen just over the parapet—and behind them were appeared to be two rows of Turks standing waist-high above the parapet emptying their rifles as fast as they could fire them.

VALUE OF THE CHARGE.

There is no question that the charge of the Light Horse pinned down to that position during its continuance and for hours afterwards every available Turkish soldier within call. Our own machine-guns were able to get in some good work among those crowded Turks, and those who know say that their losses must have been an ample set-off to our own.

So ended the attack of the two Light Horse Brigades. The one man who came back from the parapet of the Turkish trenches on the Neck reported that the Turks there had their packs on and were in full marching order—evidently part of a battalion that had been hurried up from the reserves or else which was being hurried off to reinforce further north when this attack in the centre delayed it. The Australian Light Horse in the richest and fullest manner achieved the object for which their help had become necessary at a critical period of a great movement.

And as for the boys—the single-minded loyal Australian country lads—who left their trenches in the grey light of that morning with all their simple treasures on their backs to bivouac in the scrub that evening—the shades of evening found them lying in the scrub with God’s wide sky above them. The green arbutus and the holly of the Peninsula not unlike their native bush will some day claim this Neck in those wild ranges for its own. But the place will always be sacred as the scene of two very brave deeds, the first—let us not forget it—the desperate attack made by the Turks across that same Neck in the dawn of June 30th, and, secondly, of a deed of self-sacrificing bravery which has never been surpassed in military history—the charge of the Australian Light Horse into certain death at the call of their comrades’ need during a crisis in the greatest battle that has ever been fought on Turkish soil.

—C. E. W. Bean, The Daily Graphic, Monday, October 4, 1915.

In the circumstances it is something of a miracle that Bean’s extraordinarily affecting account of this horrific episode passed the military censor, and hardly surprising also that emphasis was laid so heavily on the larger usefulness of the operation. However, in keeping with the general mismanagement of the entire Gallipoli campaign, the British naval bombardment and landings which the Australians were supposed to make possible by this diversionary assault never happened, and, orders being orders, they were permitted simply to go ahead regardless.

Without question the Australians all knew they were certain to die, and the few survivors reported that, like Colonel White, many men in the first and second lines exchanged handshakes and said goodbye to each other in the minutes prior to the launch of the attack. Those who have been to the Nek say that the area of no-man’s-land between the allied and Turkish trenches is not much bigger than a suburban quarter-acre block.

It is hard to know how public opinion at home or, indeed, in Britain would have reacted if the truth had been made known, even if Bean had absorbed and reported it accurately, but this bleak pattern of human sacrifice piled upon human sacrifice ground on and on until the very end of the war.

As First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill devised the Gallipoli campaign, and took responsibility for its failure by resigning from his post in the cabinet. It was the right thing to do, but although the memory of Gallipoli haunted him for the rest of his life, unfortunately it did not extinguish Churchill’s fundamental belief in the tactical potential of “the soft underbelly” of Europe.

Granny in London, 1912-14

The highlight of the Pearsons’ extended visit to England, commencing towards the end of 1912, was when Lady Reid, the wife of the Australian High Commissioner, Sir George H. Reid, sometime fourth prime minister, 1904–05, presented Great-Grandmother Sophie Pearson to the King and Queen at an evening court at Buckingham Palace, and Mrs. Pearson in turn presented her daughters. (Great-Grandfather Pearson represented the Province of Gippsland in the upper house of the Victorian Parliament, and was a member of the powerful Joint Committee on Defence. Here is the exquisite photograph that was taken by Speaight Limited, Photographers & Portrait Painters at 157 New Bond Street (No. 42645B), to commemorate this, the apex of Granny’s “coming-out” year.

Granny’s diary for 1914 has survived, and it is obvious that the family extracted every moment of excitement from the London season. Apart from separate skiing holidays at Pontresina and Klosters, a visit to Menton where on February 4, 1914, she flew in an amphibious aircraft or “hydroplane,” to say nothing of country excursions throughout England, and to Scotland and Wales, Granny’s days were largely spent cycling, or playing tennis or golf, or attending point-to-point meetings, or riding in Hyde Park, or watching the aeroplanes at Farnborough, going to the reviews at Spithead and Aldershot, and the Duke and Duchess of Connaught’s bazaar at Bagshot Park, near Windsor. She attended the regatta at Henley, the Richmond Horse Show, Royal Ascot, polo matches, and celebrity golfing and tennis tournaments. She went to innumerable dances, had her photograph taken, and went shopping almost every day. She had lunch with her brother and sister at the Trocadero. They went to the Army and Navy rugby and cricket matches. In May Week she went with friends to the Trinity and Jesus balls at Cambridge, and in June she saw the Prince of Wales buy a cake at Stewart’s.

Above all, it is the incessant West End theater-going, sometimes at the height of the season every single night, that stands out from her brief diary entries. It must have been heaven.

In January at the Royalty Granny saw The Pursuit of Pamela, by Chester Bailey Fernaid, which she thought was “just ripping,” and Gladys Cooper in the title role “sweet.” The following month she saw Marie Tempest in Cosmo Gordon Lennox’s adaptation of Mme. Fred de Grésac and Francois de Croisset’s The Marriage of Kitty at the Playhouse (gowns by Maison Howard and Lucile, Ltd.), and at the Comedy Ethel Irving in a revival of C. Haddon Chambers’s The Tyranny of Tears.

The next month was much busier. At the Apollo she saw Charles Hawtrey’s production of W. H. Post’s new play Never Say Die; Gerald Du Maurier and Lady Tree in Diplomacy at Wyndham’s; Gladys B. Unger’s long-running adaptation of The Marriage Market, starring Sári Petráss, who made her nightly entrance on a donkey called Jenny (gowns by Maison Agnes and Miss Fisher); Richard Pryce’s adaptation of the 1910 Arnold Bennett novel Helen With the High Hand at the Vaudeville, and, finally, at the Haymarket, Arthur Wimperis’s musical Within the Law.

In April Granny went to A Year In an Hour at the Victoria Palace; The Brass Bottle (“a farcical fantastic play in four acts by F. Anstey”), and Within the Law a second time, which she noted enthusiastically was “just a ripping play, the best in London.” At the end of the month she saw the revue Hullo, Tango! at the Hippodrome, starring Frank Carter, Isabell d’Armond, Teddie Gerard, Morris Harvey, Shirley Kellogg, Gerald Kirby, Ethel Levey, Violet Loraine, Eric Roper, and Harry Tate, and featuring the sensational new hit numbers “Get Out and Get Under!” and “Love Me While the Lovin’ Is Good.” Intriguingly, she went back to see it again less than a fortnight later.

In May Granny saw My Lady’s Dress by Edward Knoblauch at the Royalty (gowns by Michée Zac) and Arcademy (this latter twice in the space of four days), then Potash and Perlmutter, the new American play by Montague Glass and Charles H. Klein at the Queen’s, which she thought “jolly clever.”

Then came The Land of Promise by Somerset Maugham (“rather disappointing”). This comparatively rare adverse reaction was probably due to the play’s outrageously condescending plot. According to The Times critic, dripping with sarcasm, “Londoners who dine at restaurants, dance the Tango (or its successor of the moment), and spend their evenings at crowded At Homes, or in theatres, music-halls, or picture-palaces, like to read stories or to look at plays about the rolling prairies and the free, open-air life of Manitoba. It is one of the amusements of town.” I doubt if this went down at all well with any self-respecting East Gippslander or Hermitage Old Girl, almost certainly alert to snobbisme misdirected at well-connected visitors from distant colonies.

After this came a revue entitled The Passing Show at the Palace (twice in the same week: “a most ripping affair” and “just topping,” despite The Times’ critic’s opinion that it required “a little compression”), and a recital by Dame Clara Butt, who had in 1907 with her husband, the baritone Kennerly Rumford, actually stayed with the Pearsons at Kilmany Park when they performed in Sale on their sensational Australian and New Zealand tour. Then at the Lyric came Mam’selle Tralala (subtitled Oh! Be Careful, designed entirely by Baruch & Co.) (“most awfully good”); a Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club matinee benefit at the Queen’s for the National Institute for the Blind entitled Was It the Lobster? (“awfully clever”), and, on June 29, Bernard Shaw’s “new play” Pygmalion at His Majesty’s, starring Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Mrs. Patrick Campbell in the role of Eliza Doolittle.

July was busier still: Granny saw Jack Hulbert in his own adaptation of The Cinema Star by Georg Okonkowski and Julius Freund at the Shaftesbury (twice), with music by Jean Gilbert, who also composed Mam’selle Tralala. According to The Times newspaper, The Cinema Star had “a very distinctive plot. Owing to a lightning strike of electricians, a handsome film actor is imprisoned for some hours in a hotel lift with the charming daughter of a millionaire who aspires to abolish all cinema theatres.”

Granny went back to see Mam’selle Tralala again (actually two more times); Mr. Thurston’s new play, Driven, at the Haymarket, starring C. Aubrey Smith and Alexandra Howell; Charles Marlowe’s When Knights Were Bold at the Apollo, starring James Welch, C. F. Lloyd, Isla Glynn, and Queenie Thomas; the Russian ballets: almost certainly Stravinsky and Fokine’s Petrouchka or The Fire Bird at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane; Eliza Comes To Stay, H. V. Esmond’s “bizarre comedy” at the Vaudeville, which according to The Times was “preceded by a welcome revival of that hilarious satire on nursing homes, The Rest Cure, by G. E. Jennings,” and, finally, “Mr. Arnold Bennett’s delightful fantasy” The Great Adventure at the Kingsway.

She also went to “the movies,” only once it seems, and to revivals of Hugh Morton and Gustave Kerker’s The Belle of New York at the Lyceum (gowns by Thelma), and, towards the end of July, as the drums of war began to beat faster and harder, the patriotic Flag Lieutenant at the Haymarket, starring Jack Hobbs, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and Helen Haye in the role of Mrs. Gough-Bogle.

It is hardly surprising that in the midst of this busy social season—she went to dinners, suppers, or dances after the theater most nights (and I fervently hope that she danced the thrillingly fashionable Argentine tango)—Granny fell in love.

The name of this new young man was Campbell Russell, the younger son of Mr. and Mrs. C. W. Russell of Melbourne. Mr. Russell was general manager of the Union Bank of Australia, an old Anglo-Australian bank which eventually in 1951 merged with the Bank of Australasia to form the ANZ Bank.

Campbell was a submarine officer in the Royal Navy, and the brother of Granny’s school-friend Adye Russell (Waller). The two families knew each other in Melbourne, when for six months in 1905 the Pearsons lived in a big house called Woodside in Hawthorn, while Kilmany Park was being rebuilt. And at the end of 1912 they renewed their acquaintance when the Pearsons, Mrs. Russell and her children sailed from Melbourne to London aboard the same ship. Mr. Russell followed after his retirement in the middle of 1916.

We have seen that in 1912 in Sale and Melbourne, Granny spent quite a bit of time golfing, dancing, and socializing with Keith Borthwick, her future husband’s comparatively glamorous older brother, whom she had known since early childhood, and it may have been a deliberate stratagem on their parents’ part that Granny and Aunt Mim should spend as much time as possible abroad, mixing with eligible young Australians in England. Lieutenant Keith A. Borthwick (q.v.) was killed in the first line at the horrific Battle of the Nek at Gallipoli in 1915.

In any event this new friendship must have been blossoming by January 1914, when Granny first mentions going to the theater with Adye and Mrs. Russell, almost as soon as possible after returning from France and Switzerland. Campbell was a handsome sportsman. Granny went to watch him play for the Royal Navy against the Army in the rugby match at Twickenham (“Twickers”). The Navy lost, 14–26, but, she noted, “it was very exciting.” The friendship must have taken a new and serious turn by May 1914, because at the end of the month we read:

Did flowers, went into town, etc. Campbell came [to visit Mr. and Mrs. Pearson]. After lunch we played tennis, quite good fun. Dance in the evening, just splendid, I did so enjoy it, fine night so we were able to go out-side [!]. Jenny Brooke also staying here. I’m quite quite sure now [her italics].

Campbell had evidently sought Mr. Pearson’s permission to propose, and must have secured it. The young people were engaged, apparently unofficially, perhaps due to the growing threat of war.

Just before the Pearsons’ departure for Australia in December 1914, Granny went with Campbell to a Royal Navy ball in Portsmouth. Campbell had something to do with arranging the catering, and in old age she recalled that he asked her if she thought she could get through a whole magnum of champagne! “It was the first and only time I tasted cold plovers’ eggs for supper.” A little later, Granny went aboard Campbell’s submarine depot ship, the 5,750-ton second-class light cruiser H.M.S. Arrogant, to watch the King review the Fleet at Spithead, and, after the declaration of war only two weeks later, she and her mother “went down to Dover for the day to say goodbye to Campbell,” who was about to set sail on the Channel station.

It was an awful day, rained hard. We sat in a hotel most of the time, had tea on the Arrogant, it was just an awful day for rain, came back after dinner. Poor old boy!

Charles Arthur Campbell Russell joined the Royal Navy on January 15, 1913, and volunteered as a submariner. Service aboard submarines has always been voluntary, and subject to strict regulation of height and weight, and exhaustive training. Some tension existed within the admiralty arising from the old-fashioned view that submarine warfare was somehow underhand and “ungentlemanly.” However, it was also true that submariners swiftly came to see themselves, and were gradually accepted as the élite shock troops of the senior service, and its futuristic technocrats.

Campbell was at first assigned to the 1,070-ton torpedo gunboat and submarine depot vessel H.M.S. Hazard, but was soon transferred to the Arrogant. He was commissioned sub-lieutenant on October 6, 1914, and after submarine officer training, on January 15, 1915, he was promoted lieutenant. He won the gold medal awarded periodically “to the cadet who during his period of training exhibited the most gentlemanlike bearing and good influence among the cadets.”

He seems to have served on submarines in the enormously hazardous Channel and North Sea stations throughout the war, successively attached to the light cruisers Forth (1916) and Bonaventure (1917), when on March 5 he assumed his first submarine command. On April 18, 1918, he assumed the command of H.M.S. G–7, working in conjunction with the special torpedo vessel H.M.S. Vulcan, based at Blyth in Northumberland. G-class submarines were specifically intended to fight German U-boats in the North Sea. It is not known how or when G–7 was sunk, or in what circumstances, but the last communication was received from her on October 23, 1918, when she was on patrol, and on November 1, just ten days before the Armistice was signed, she was reported long overdue and, as a result, her commanding officer, Lieutenant C. A. C. Russell, and his thirty other officers and crew declared lost in action. Their bodies were never recovered.

Charles Arthur Campbell Russell is listed on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial, and there is a small monument to his memory in St. George’s church, Croydon, in South London, which was placed there by his grieving parents, “late of Melbourne, Australia,” who, according to the death notice in the Argus on Saturday, November 16, 1918, were by then residing at Falkland House, Kensington.

It is not yet clear why Campbell Russell broke his engagement to Granny. She left us no clues at all.

William and Helen Borthwick at Raeshaw

William and Helen Borthwick, my grandparents, at Raeshaw, Fulham, near Sale, East Gippsland, c. 1924.

William Arthur Borthwick (1894–1953) was the fourth son and sixth child of William Borthwick and Ada Maud Mary, the eldest of the eight daughters of Edward Connor Bell and Katherine Anne Wallen.

William senior, my great-grandfather, migrated from Scotland in 1869, aged 19, after his father, Alexander Hay Borthwick, refused to buy him a commission in the Indian Army, in which two of his uncles had served with some distinction.

He may have been prompted to go to Australia by the fact that his father’s brother, Uncle John James Malcolm Borthwick, preceded him, and created in about 1850 the Tarong station atop the Blackbutt Range in the South Burnett region of southern Queensland, approximately sixty miles due west of Caloundra, and was one of the first men to ship wool from Brisbane.

On reaching Melbourne he joined the National Bank of Australasia Limited, and became the youngest man ever appointed manager of a branch, in this case at Maffra. Thence he was eventually transferred to Sale, where the family settled permanently.

My grandfather’s eldest brother, the namesake of their grandfather, Alexander Hay Borthwick, or Uncle Lex, as he was known, served in the A. I.F., lost an arm in Palestine, married Eva Sage of Mildura (a nurse whom he met whilst recuperating), and settled on the land not far from Cowarr in East Gippsland.

The second brother, 1st Lieutenant Keith Borthwick of the 8th (Victorian) Regiment of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade, fell on August 7, 1915, in the first wave in the famous Battle of the Nek at Gallipoli, one of the most famous but costly moments in Australian history. Because he was an officer, the name of Lt. Keith Borthwick, and his occupation (grazier), appear in one of the most haunting footnotes of Bean’s official history. The hundreds of ordinary diggers who died were, of course, not listed.

The third brother, John Malcolm, had much earlier chosen to pursue a career as a professional officer in the British Army, but evidently committed suicide at Aden in 1908, aged 20.

He had two younger sisters, Aunt Jean and Aunt Kath (Kathleen), a talented viola player in what Uncle John used to describe mischievously as “Ziggy Zelman’s Follies,” but which was, in fact, the budding Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, whose first concert took place on December 11, 1906, under the baton of Maestro Alberto Zelman.

Neither Aunt Kath nor Aunt Jean (q.v.) ever married. As a dedicated volunteer, Aunt Jean transcribed by hand entire books in Braille. She and Aunt Kath lived together, first with their mother, known affectionately as “Da,” in Adelaide Street, Armadale, and then in a modest ground floor flat in Myamyn Street, a few doors down from Granny.

My grandfather, William, came after Aunt Kath, and, finally, the baby brother, Ronald Murray Borthwick, who also served in the A. I.F., and eventually married Aunt Meryl, the daughter of Dr. Hagenauer of Sale.

On November 10, 1953, at the Veterinary School grounds at Parkville, Uncle Ron demonstrated a revolutionary stock cradle, which was thought to have considerable influence in the treatment and control of foot rot.

According to an engaging memoir she wrote in the early 1970s, Granny knew the Borthwick family when they were all growing up together in and around Sale. She recalled Aunt Kath coming as Red Riding Hood to a big fancy-dress dance in the drawing room at Kilmany, and, later, in 1912, Granny’s coming out year, going to dances in Melbourne and golfing tournaments in Traralgon with Lex and Keith Borthwick.

The war was as costly for the Borthwick family as it was for scores of others. My grandfather volunteered for active duty, but was prevented from serving due to a heart condition brought on by having contracted rheumatic fever as a child.

In the end he lost two brothers, who, if they had survived might conceivably have been more suitable husbands for my grandmother, such is the vague sense one gets from a close reading of the relevant portion of Granny’s memoir, which was written long after William died of a heart attack at Berwick in 1953.