Caroline Gilbert sent three of her sons to war. None of them returned to her.

Robert died from multiple wounds in France. ‘I was quite near the lad when a shell exploded,’ the battalion chaplain wrote. ‘Both legs were shattered and I carried him to the dressing station.’

‘Had the boy lived he would have been maimed,’ Father Devine explained, and of course all the officers and men offered their sympathy. Devine clutched for the words that might lessen ‘a great sorrow’. Your son was ‘very brave’, he said. He was ‘quite cheerful’ as he bled to death, ‘and told me to write to his mother’.

‘Excuse this scribble,’ the letter ended, ‘as I can scarcely hold a pen at present. Anyhow there is little more to add . . .  he died a soldier’s death.’1

Father William Devine MC wrote many such letters – hoping ‘some gallant lie’ might blunt the pain a little.2

News of Charlie’s death came to Caroline next, in a cablegram. Charlie had served in the 10th Light Horse at Anzac, survived the slaughter at the Nek and was killed in southern Palestine. He was shot through the head near Beersheba.

Albert’s death was probably the hardest to deal with. Her youngest son was ‘blown to pieces’ in Belgium. His comrades ‘gathered up different parts of him’ and buried what they could in the mud. She was told that one day, perhaps after the war, someone might find his final resting place.3 So she wrote one letter after another to the authorities:

I have waited for years hoping that I would receive the photo of my third beloved son’s grave, but it has never come. No 3924. Private Albert Henry Gilbert, 28th Battalion who was killed in action Oct 4th, 1917. The Graves Committee promised to send me a photo of his grave. Dear Sir, I will be most sincerely grateful to you if you can obtain any information.4

No such information ever came. Private Gilbert’s name is carved on the Menin Gate amongst the legion of the missing.

Never able to visit her sons’ graves, Mrs Gilbert raised her own memorial: a photograph on a mantelpiece, a letter folded in a Bible, the treasured ‘personal effects’ eventually shipped home to her.

On the fifth anniversary of the declaration of war, she attended the dedication of Perth’s Avenue of Honour. Two rows of royal oak trees were planted in the bushlands of Kings Park, all raised from seeds sent from Windsor Castle. Although she was old and partly deaf, Mrs Gilbert heard something in the speeches, muffled by a downpour of rain. These ‘sons of Empire’, it was said, ‘gave their lives in the cause of justice, freedom, and right’. Their names have become ‘immortal’. But Mrs Gilbert knew better than most the cost of that war. ‘I have given my three sons for the Empire,’ she wrote in 1918, ‘and have no more to send.’5

I have given all my three sons and have no more to send: Mrs Gilbert’s boys stare back out to eternity from the pages of a Perth newspaper. For a time it seemed Charlie (far left) might have come home to her. He was invalided back to Australia after being shot in the left lung at Gallipoli. Within a year he had returned overseas and would die in the desert in Palestine. Source Australia’s Fighting Son’s of Empire: Portraits and Biographies of Australians in the Great War (Sydney: Palmer and Ashworth, 1920) courtesy Doreen Scarlet.

Their names immortal: Three plaques side by side in Kings Park Avenue of Honour record a family’s sacrifice. Courtesy Phillip Marshall.

Caroline Gilbert would mourn her sons for the rest of her life. The plaques on those trees in Kings Park are still a place of pilgrimage for her family. To this day, Caroline’s granddaughter Ivy visits them with her own grandchildren, keen to keep the memory of those young men alive. In doing so, she retraces the steps of the grandmother before her.

Ivy herself was born on Anzac Day the year the Great War ended, and due to the solemn nature the day has always held for the family, has never celebrated her birthday. Caroline’s great-great-granddaughter Doreen explains:

Aunty Ivy remembers going often with her grandmother to Kings park to place flowers on her uncles’ memorials. Caroline held the flowers and wee Ivy held the jam tins of water . . . Aunty Ivy did not meet any of her uncles but . . . grew to love them . . . listening to stories . . . of these lovely young men.

A hundred years after the death of those ‘lovely young men’ their loss is still felt by their family. The same is true for other families the world over.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READINGS: This story draws on the service dossiers of Albert, Charles and Robert Gilbert NAA: B2455 GILBERT ALBERT HENRY; NAA: B2455 GILBERT CHARLES; NAA: B2455 GILBERT R W; and Charles’ Red Cross Wounded and Missing files AWM 1DRL/0428; and contemporary newspaper reports. The authors would also like to gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Doreen Scarlett for providing us with a number of compelling family stories about Caroline Gilbert.

1 RC Devine to Caroline Gilbert, undated, in NAA: B2455, GILBERT RW.

2 We owe the phrase ‘some gallant lie’ to Siegfried Sassoon’s poem ‘The Hero’, Collected Poems, (London: Faber & Faber, 1961).

3 Red Cross Wounded and Missing files, IDRL/0428 Private Albert Henry Gilbert.

4 Caroline Gilbert to Officer in Charge, Base Records, 10 February 1922 in NAA B2455, GILBERT ALBERT HENRY.

5 Western Mail, 7 August 1919; Caroline Gilbert to Officer in Charge, Base Records, 1 March 1918 in NAA: B2455, GILBERT ALBERT HENRY.