‘I wasn’t full of rum at the time, for I’ve never had a drink in my life, though I did work in a brewery for eight years.’
Jack Axford VC
LIKE NED SEARLE, Jack Axford sailed back to Australia on 1914 Leave in November 1918, arriving on Australian soil that December. Returning by train to Kalgoolie on 23 December, Jack was met by his family, the mayor and a large crowd, but he could not be induced to make a speech.
Discharged from the AIF on 6 February 1919, and keen to forget the war, Jack went back to his old labouring job at the Boulder Brewery. But he was ambitious for qualifications, and hearing that he was eligible to train as a fitter and turner under the Vocational Training Act, he quit the brewery job and was hired as an apprentice at the Kalgoorlie Foundry. Only after he had started work there did Jack discover that he was too old to be an apprentice, by one week. Despite public protests on his behalf, the government would not make an exception for him and Jack was discharged, becoming unemployed through no fault of his own.
‘I had a crook spin on the eastern goldfields immediately after the war,’ he later remarked about this episode. Unable to find work there, Axford moved to Perth. All he wanted was ‘a home of his own, to live a peaceful life, and rear a family’, he later told a reporter, and he did everything he could to avoid the limelight as one of only sixty-four Australians awarded the Victoria Cross during World War One.288
Western Australia was then run by the conservative Nationalist Party. Jack, meanwhile, leaned left in politics, and in 1921 was put on trial for participating in a Perth labour movement march and singing ‘The Red Flag’, a march charged down by mounted police. Jack was arrested while trying to help a woman who’d been knocked over by a police horse. Convicted, he was let off by the magistrate with a caution after a public outcry in his favour. Subsequently staying away from politics, Jack found a job as a clerk with Massey Harris Pty Limited.
The socialist Labor Party returned to power in WA in 1924, and when a state government position as a commissionaire, or doorman, came up with the Mines Department in Perth in 1926, Jack applied, government jobs then being considered jobs for life. Jack won the post, subsequently working his way up to a clerical position in the department’s records office. For recreation, Jack, ever the gambler, would go to the horse races at weekends, in his own words, ‘trying to pick winners’. Generally, he kept his own company, shying away from ex-service organisations, but he did accept the occasional invitation to dine and march in Anzac Day and St Patrick’s Day parades with other Australian VCs.289
Having fallen in love with Perth shop assistant Lily Foster, Jack’s secure new government job gave him the courage to pop the question, and the couple was married at St Mary’s Cathedral on 27 November 1926. They would have two sons and three daughters. Jack’s Victoria Cross no doubt helped him gain the post of appointments clerk to Minister for Mines John ‘Happy Jack’ Scaddan in 1932. Scaddan, by then a Nationalist Party member, had been a young Labor Party premier of the state during the war. Now, everyone wanting an appointment with the minister had to apply to Jack Axford VC. With Labor regaining power in 1933, Axford went on to hold this post for close to a decade.
In the years leading up to World War Two, Jack joined the army reserve, and in June 1941, with two younger brothers serving overseas, forty-seven-year-old Jack went to the enlistment office and signed up. ‘“Jack” Axford, VC of 1918, Is Back Again in Khaki,’ the local press proudly announced.290 Made a sergeant, Jack was posted to the army records office in Perth. In September 1945, he turned up in court in uniform and smiling at the magistrate, in support of his fifteen-year-old son Norman, who was fined for riding his bicycle ‘no hands’.
After being discharged from the army in 1947, Jack returned to the Mines Department’s records office. In 1950, Perth reporter Arthur Bennett interviewed him, but had little luck when attempting to pump Jack for details of the Battle of Hamel exploit that had earned him his VC. ‘It was just an incident in a fight,’ said Jack dismissively. But then he smiled, as he added, ‘And I wasn’t full of rum at the time, for I’ve never had a drink in my life, though I did work in a brewery for eight years.’291
Four years later, Jack grabbed national headlines and broad public sympathy by turning down an invitation to meet Queen Elizabeth II when she visited Perth, after the powers-that-be refused to extend the invitation to his wife. Jack did accept an invitation when the British Government threw its lavish 1956 celebrations to mark the Victoria Cross centenary. He joined Harry Dalziel and other Australian VC holders, and their wives, when they sailed to England for the event.
In 1981, three months after wife Ivy died, Jack again journeyed to England, this time for a reunion of the Victoria Cross and George Cross Association. On 11 October that year, eighty-seven-year-old Jack Axford suffered a heart attack between Dubai and Hong Kong whilst aboard an aircraft returning from the London gathering, and died. His body was cremated in WA with full military honours. Four years later, Jack’s family donated his VC and other war medals to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.