Digitised@SLQ: Joseph Cecil Thompson collection

Studio portrait of Joseph Cecil Thompson, 1916-1918, 29506/9

State Library has recently digitised and transcribed the collection of Joseph Cecil Thompson, a young farrier from Childers who served at Gallipoli and on the Western Front. The collection includes a diary, paybook, postcards and letters, photographs, and a wonderful Besson cornet, presented to Thompson in 1919 after the War.

Cecil was just 22 years old when war broke out. With three years’ experience with the Wide Bay Infantry Regiment already under his belt, he enlisted immediately at Maryborough, and travelled down to Enoggera training camp in Brisbane as a new member of 9^th Battalion.

Studio portrait of Joseph Cecil Thompson. 29506/7

Although shoeing horses was his usual occupation, Cecil was a capable young man of diverse interests, and his particular talent was music. Bound for Egypt on the H.M.A.T. Omrah on 24th September 1914, Cecil embarked as a cornet player with the 9^th Battalion Band.

9th Battalion Band in training. 29506/21

With his comrades he participated in the landing at Gallipoli on 25th April 1915 and his small diary records the events of that historic day.

Thompson's diary, recording the Gallipoli landing. 29506/1

In combat situations, bandsmen are traditionally deployed as stretcher bearers, and Cecil soon found himself promoted to Corporal, then Lance Sergeant, leading a team of stretcher bearers through the hillside trenches and dugouts of the Peninsula. For Cecil, comradeship and teamwork were important, and saw him through the grim reality of his duties. Collecting men from the battlefield exposed him to horrific injuries on a daily basis, but photographs he took in Gallipoli and Egypt depict comrades in the trenches, and intimate scenes of camp life.

In the trenches at Gallipoli. 29506/27

Having survived several months of front line action, a bout of typhoid in August 1915 meant evacuation to Egypt, and he re-joined his unit on Lemnos just before the withdrawal of troops from the Dardanelles.

Stretcher bearers at Anzac. 11/10/15. 29506/31

In France and Belgium Cecil continued as both stretcher bearer and bandsman, surviving gas attacks and several bloody actions as he and the men in his charge performed the difficult, dangerous and often fatal task of retrieving the wounded from the muddy battlefields of the Western Front.

9th Battalion Band, in France 30/3/1917. 29506/18

After a long war, Cecil was granted extended leave in December 1918 – 75 days “special 1914 leave” for those who had served through the first year of the conflict. He returned to Australia on the Sardinia in June 1919, and in 1921 applied for and was granted a 340 acre selection in Isis.

Sergeant Joseph Cecil Thompson is one of 25 Queenslanders included in the Distant Lines: Queensland voices of the First World War exhibition currently on at State Library of Queensland until 15 November 2015. His cornet, presented to him as Bandmaster of 9th Battalion band in 1919, will be on display in the Talbot Family Treasures Wall, Level 4, in 2016.

Robyn Hamilton – QANZAC100 Content Curator, State Library of Queensland