Locket reunites lost Digger

Saturday - 14 June 2008 - Australian

WHEN Eric Chinner went off to World War I, he left his fiancee Gladys Dunn something to remember him by.

A locket - no bigger than a thumbnail, containing his photo and initials - was to become the lasting memento of the man with whom she had planned to share her life, but whom she lost when he was killed in the bloody battle of Fromelles in 1916.

In her own way, Gladys also became one of the Great War's victims. She never married, forever betrothed to the memory of the dashing young soldier who went away and didn't come back.

Now, the circle has been completed with the discovery of the mass grave in France believed to contain Lieutenant Chinner's remains and those of up to 170 Diggers who died with him at Fromelles, but whose fate remained a mystery.

When Dunn's family saw a photograph of Chinner in The Australian, and learned of his family in Melbourne, they realised they could provide another piece of the jigsaw: the locket Gladys had cherished for all those long, lonely years.

To her dying day in 1985 she could not bring herself to refer to Chinner by name, such was the enduring pain of his loss. He remained her "Laddie".

"She never talked about him," Gladys's niece Sue Leask said. "She was always very sad. She would never open up about it."

Gladys gave the Leasks the locket when she moved into a nursing home three years before her death, at the age of 90. All they knew was his name, and that he'd died during the war.

"I'd often look at the photo and wonder," Ms Leask said. "It's been a puzzle to us, because she was such a private person she wouldn't talk about it."

After seeing the photo of Chinner published in The Australian two weeks ago, two days after skeletal remains were found at Pheasant Wood, the Leasks realised it was the same man inside the locket. Yesterday, archeologists unearthed new evidence of the soldiers lying beneath the French earth.

The Leasks contacted John Guest, Chinner's great-nephew in Melbourne, and told him of their family's connection. "It's quite sweet, quite touching," Mr Guest said. "There was a great shortage of men after that horrible war ... so Gladys Dunn always kept this locket."

Mr Guest's brother Andrew happened to be in Adelaide on business when the Leasks revealed the locket's existence. He went to meet them, and took home the little locket and photographs of Gladys and Chinner.

"It's just extraordinary," Andrew Guest said. "Ninety-two years after my ancestor Eric Chinner gave this locket to his fiancee, it has found its way back to the hands of John and myself, to Eric Chinner's descendants. It's just staggering."

For Sue Leask, many of the questions about Aunt Gladys's wartime love have been answered, and she welcomes the locket's return to his family. "I feel it's a closure, they're almost together again now," she said.

The details of how the couple met remain a mystery, but a few theories are possible.

Gladys lived in Broken Hill until 1935, while Chinner was from Peterborough (then called Petersburg), a railway town roughly halfway between Adelaide and Broken Hill.

He might have come to Broken Hill on business - she worked for the Commonwealth Bank, and he also worked for a bank.

The Guest family believes Chinner's remains lie in the mass grave at Pheasant Wood.

Two small brass-coloured buttons featuring a lion and a unicorn from British army uniforms, as well as a well-preserved British-made matchbox, were yesterday found at the grave site where about 170 Australian and 300 British soldiers are believed to have been buried.

Former prime minister John Howard, whose father and grandfather fought in World War I, visited the excavation site this week and spoke to the archeologists who have found the remains of at least 30 people.

The Australian, British and French governments will wait for a report from the archeological team before deciding whether the remains should be dug up and reburied, and the spot marked by a memorial.