SAPPER DENNIS DARCY

5972 – 3rd Tunnelling Company

The Darcy Brothers of Franklin, Tasmania.

The Darcy brothers were the grandsons of the Martin Darcy and Mary Ann O’Connor, the sons of William Darcy and Mary Ann Woolley, and my grandfather’s cousins. They were all single, and ranged in age from 20 to 29 when they joined up. Like their grandfather and father before them, they were big, strong men, but that counted for nought in the trenches, and only one survived—that was Arthur, who fought at Passchendaele and was gassed in France, but returned. Dennis, who was trained as a sapper, lasted only a couple of months on the front line before being medically discharged and died soon after returning to Tasmania. Martin was killed in the Battle of Messines in July 1917.

#5972 Sapper Dennis Darcy 3rd Tunnelling Coy

Denis Darcy, a labourer who had been in the militia for three years, enlisted on 4 September 1916, a couple of weeks before his 29th birthday, although he gave his age as 26. Standing 5 feet 9½ inches tall (176.5 cm), he weighed 154 lbs (70 kg) and had a 41-inch/104-cm chest. His eyes were hazel, his complexion dark and his hair brown. On his enlistment form the doctors flagged a growth on his left cheek. Before he left Tasmania, he made a will leaving everything to his parents (11065/1916), William and Mary Ann Darcy, of Franklin Tasmania.

Dennis began training with the sappers at Seymour in Victoria on 29 September 1916, and embarked for England from Melbourne on HMAT Ulysses 25 October with his cousin Jack Oakford. He was sent to France on 21 January 1917, and was assigned to the 3rd Tunnelling Coy on 6 February. The company was allotted the chalk area in the Lens coalfield and carried out tunnelling and dug-out work in the sectors around Loos, Lens and Givenchy, with headquarters at Neux la Mines. But Dennis was only underground for two months before he was struck in the face by a piece of timber and evacuated to Middlesex War Hospital at Napsbury for treatment. There the growth on his face was diagnosed as an angioma—a benign growth consisting of small blood vessels that can bleed profusely if breached. While in England Dennis forfeited a day’s pay for failing to salute an officer of HM Forces in The Strand at 3.30 pm on 10 October 1917.

The angioma led to Dennis’s evacuation to Australia on 24 Jan 1918, and he was discharged on medical grounds on 9 April with a one-quarter disability. Because his condition was not due to war service but had been aggravated by it, he was awarded a pension of 15 shillings per fortnight from 10 April. He did not collect it for long, as he died on 28 June 1918 from burns received after falling asleep with a cigarette in his hand in the Franklin Hotel.

Ulysses Voyage

516 Tunnellers Reinforcements departed Melbourne, Victoria on 25 October 1916 at 1.30 pm aboard the transport HMAT A38 Ulysses, Dennis Darcy among them. The Australian coastline disappeared from view on 30 October, and the ship reached Durban at 11.30 am on 13 November, Cape Town at 7 am on the 19th and Freetown in Sierra Leone on 29th. As it was not safe to proceed further, their departure was delayed until 14 December. But after 65 days at sea, Ulysses arrived in England on 28 December and docked at Plymouth, where the troops disembarked at 1.30 pm and boarded trains for Tidworth.

5798 Sapper George Oxman, later of the 3rd Australian Tunnelling Company, recorded the voyage in his Diary:

Dec 5. It took 1½ hours to take 1000 men ashore for the afternoon. We have to pay 6d (sixpence) each for the loan of the punts. We were fastened with ropes with one punt to the other coming back, the rope broke and we were drifting out pretty quick but the tug boat soon had us back again. Not too clean of a place. The women stand in a stream and wet their clothes they are washing and place them on a flat stone and then belt into them with a flat piece of wood like a bat.

Dec 9. Had to get some coal and fresh water. The officers went ashore to buy some fruit to sell to us they wouldn’t let us buy off the natives so when they came back with the fruit—none of us would buy it off them.

Dec 13. 29 Big boats in here now.

Dec 14. Left for England with four other transport auxiliary cruiser escorting us.

Dec 25. On the sea between Gibraltar and England it has been very foggy. We had roast pork for Christmas dinner and some baked scones. They were as hard as rock.

Dec 26. Very foggy torpedo boats came to escort us in the rest of the way. Got our kit bags out of the holds.

Dec 28. We had nothing to eat from 7.30 am to 3.30 pm. We had to buy some cakes during the last week on the boat. We held the Dead March on a roast they gave us (250 of us) for our dinner. We marched up to the top deck with it, all the rest of the men were watching us and laughing. We got roared up a bit after it but we didn’t care.

Got on the train at 4 pm. Got to Perham Downs camp at 11 pm. Nothing to eat from the military until 8 or 9 the next morning. Then we had two tablespoons of boiled salmon and spuds and a mug of tea. Mud from 1–6 inches deep.

#181 Private Arthur Henry Darcy 40th Bn A Coy

Arthur Darcy enlisted on 26 February 1916, in the 40th Battalion of the 3rd Division, which consisted entirely of Tasmanians. He went AWOL while training at Claremont and spent 14 days in the brig, before embarking for England on HMAT Berrima on 1 July 1916. A 20-year-old labourer, he stood 5 feet 10 inches (178 cm) tall, weighed 150 lbs or 68 kg and had a dark complexion, grey eyes and brown hair.

The Tasmanian reinforcements arrived in England on 23rd August, trained at Lark Hill and left for Northern France on 22 November 1916. The 40th spent 1917 in trench warfare in Flanders, taking part in the successful battle of Messines in June and the battle for Broodseinde Ridge in October. This was followed by Poelcappelle and Passchendaele.

In the extraordinarily bloody fight for Passchendaele, 248 members of the Tasmanian 40th battalion were killed, wounded or gassed. And all for nought, as the captured ground was retaken by the Germans without resistance five months later during the Battle of Lys.

The battalion spent much of 1918 engaged in trench warfare in the Somme Valley, and in April that year Arthur was transferred to the 3rd Australian Machine Gun Company. A machine gun crew consisted of 12 men: the gunner and his mate would fire and reload, while the others brought up more boxes of belted ammunition, 250 rounds to a box. A machine gun battery, which consisted of four guns spread out along the defended trench line about 100 metres apart, could stop a wave of attacking infantry in its tracks. But because they were highly visible, machine gunners tended to draw enemy fire, which made it a dangerous job.

Badly gassed in May 1918, Arthur was evacuated from Villers-Bretonneux at the end of June. In August and September his battalion helped drive the Germans back to the Hindenburg Line. Arthur returned to Australia on the Wiltshire on 18 August 1919 and fronted a medical committee, which classified him as one-third disabled because of shortness of breath and eye damage from the gas attack.

#5172 Private Martin Darcy 36th Bn 9th Machine Gun Coy

Martin Darcy, a 24-year-old labourer, enlisted on 4 March 1916. He stood 5 feet 9 inches or 175 cm, weighed 150 lbs/68 kg, and with a chest measurement of 36 inches or 91 cm. He had a fair complexion, grey eyes and brown hair. On 18 April at Cootamundra Training Camp, he was assigned to the 13th reinforcement to the 19th Battalion, and embarked for England from Sydney on HMAT Ajana on 5 July.

After training in England, Martin was transferred into the 36th Battalion, called “Carmichael’s Thousand” after Ambrose Carmichael, the New South Wales Minister for Public Information who had recruited most of its personnel from rifle clubs. The 36th moved into the trenches of the Western Front on 4 December, just in time for the onset of the terrible winter of 1916–17. On 30 December Martin was hospitalised for scabies.

The 36th fought its first major battle at Messines in Belgium. On 7 June 1917, the day the battle began, Martin was transferred to 9th Machine Gun Company Coy. The dice were loaded against gunners, and sure enough, he sustained a gunshot wound in the right side the very next day. After being patched up in hospital, he returned to the front line on 20 June, only to be killed in action on 15 July, a month shy of his 26th birthday. Martin Darcy is buried in Kandahar Farm Cemetery Plot II, row A grave 7, Neuve-Eglise, Belgium. In all, the 9th Brigade sustained huge losses at Messines—34 officers and 1631 other ranks. The 9th MGC itself lost 3 officers and 17 other ranks.

Submitted by Susan Geason. The Darcy brothers were her grandfather’s cousins. Other sappers in her extended family include Pat Lahey (#7470 3rd Tunnelling Coy; and Pat Cashman (#3634A) and John Joseph Oakford (#6032) of the 1st Tunnelling Coy.

ADDENDUM:

[ – profile updated January 2014]