Lyall Howard - World War I

World War I

During World War I, Lyall Howard was known as a proud patriot. On 16 January 1916, at age 19, he signed up to the Australian Imperial Force. As soldier number 802, he was assigned to the 3rd Pioneer Battalion, earning a wage of eight shillings per day. Records show he had attempted to sign up on a previous occasion, but was rejected because his height of 157 cm was deemed too short. Private Lyall Howard left Port Melbourne aboard the HMAT Wandilla on 6 June 1916, and was shipped to the Western Front. He was assigned to work on the roads and bridges leading into the village of Cléry, France.

In the book, The Great War, author Les Carlyon details the experiences of Lyall Howard on the front line, captured by the handwritten notes in Lyall's war diary. The entries were always brief: "Shoved in old barn", "Inoculated again", "First day in trenches". One laconic entry underscored the horrors the soldiers faced: "Will wounded and dies". Will was Lyall's best friend.

Meanwhile, Lyall's father, Walter Howard, enlisted as a private in the 55th Battalion of the 5th Division and was also transferred to the battlefields of Europe. Walter's battalion was moving in for an attack on Péronne. In an extraordinary situation of chance during the mass movement of troops near Cléry, the father and son's paths crossed. Against the odds, Lyall and Walter met on the eve of the Battle of Mont St. Quentin in what has been described as a one-in-a-million handshake in the battle zone.

An entry in Lyall Howard's diary, dated 30 August 1918, simply reads: "Met dad at Cléry."

Lyall's son, the 25th Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard recounts: "There's just this pithy or laconic entry in the diary. It's just so Australian - 'Met dad at Clery'. They didn't verbalise their experience in the way men do now. It's one of the big changes in Aussie blokes. I think it's a good thing. They don't bottle it all up, but they did in those days."

In battle, Lyall Howard was wounded by a mustard gas attack in Passchendaele and spent 10 weeks in hospital. The gassing caused chronic bronchitis and skin rashes which would continue to plague him after the war.

When World War I ended, Lyall returned to the Clarence River region in Northern New South Wales and worked as a fitter and turner for the Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR). The onset of the Great Depression brought hard economic times, and Lyall was retrenched.

In 1925, he married an office worker, Mona Kell. Lyall and Mona Howard moved into a comfortable Californian-style bungalow at 25 William Street, Earlwood, a working class suburb of Sydney. Their first son, Walter (junior), was born in 1926, followed by Stanley (1930), Robert (1936), and the youngest, John Howard in 1939.