WWI Stories – Robert Leslie Lawless
Glenthompson
Martin Croker shares the story of his great uncle, Bob Lawless.
As children, every holiday was spent at my Grandma’s place at Koroit, in the Western Districts of Victoria. Throughout the 1960s and most of the 70s happy family Christmases and long, hot summer days were spent in and around the old wooden cottage set among the potato fields that were still being farmed by our Uncle Pat. The cottage was built in the early 1900s and was a stone’s throw from the rim of the Tower Hill Crater Lake, an extinct volcano. The cottage was sparsely decorated, but one photo had pride of place in the lounge room – a large, framed photo of a young man in military uniform standing proudly and smiling. “That’s Grandma’s brother, Uncle Bob”, we were told. “He died in the First World War. He was at Gallipoli. He came home sick but went back and was killed in France”.
Robert Leslie “Bob” Lawless was born in Glenthompson in 1890. He was the fifth of twelve children and the oldest son of Robert Lawless and Alice, nee Houghton.
Bob enlisted on 18 August 1914 at Ballarat into the 8th Battalion, the “Ballarat City Battalion”, and was given service number 103. He embarked aboard the HMAT Benalla on 19 October and after a brief stop in Albany, Western Australia arrived in Egypt on 2 December where they undertook further training.
He took part in the ANZAC landing on 25 April as part of the second wave and ten days later the 2nd battle of Krithia.
After Krithia, he was admitted to hospital with tonsillitis but re-joined the Battalion at Gallipoli in June. Bob remained at Gallipoli for the remainder of the campaign and on 18 December he was transferred from Gallipoli with enteric fever and then invalided back to Australia. While convalescing in Australia, Bob married Ivy Gladstone Anderson.
He returned to active service with the 21st Reinforcements and departed Melbourne on 2 October 1916 on-board the Nestor. He re-joined the battalion in France in February 1917.
Sadly, on 22 April 1917 he was killed in action near Lagincourt, in France. Bob was tragically killed by a wayward grenade thrown from his own side during a battle and his body was not recovered.
His name appears on the Villers-Bretonneux Memorial which commemorates soldiers who fell in France and whose graves are not known.
