VALE
David Leslie King (VX37484)
David passed away at Bethlehem Hospital, South Caulfield, on Saturday 25 January 2014, aged 93 years. His funeral service was conducted by Father Peter Wilson at the Wilson Chapel, Springvale Cemetery, on 6 February. Peter delivered the eulogy, John Lack spoke on behalf of the Association, and Hugh Gordon, President of the Oakleigh-Carnegie RSL sub-branch, conducted the RSL service. The Association was represented by Lindsay Garner, Doug Ogden, and John and Sue Lack.
The Eulogy
Peter Wilson cited duty, decency, reliability, honour, dignity, and respect as qualities that David not only held in high esteem but practised every day during his time on earth. He was a hard-working and considerate man who could never resist the opportunity to support and help his family or friends, given half the chance. He saw a lot in his lifetime, including a world ravaged by war. David and his brother answered the call of their country: his brother lost his life, and David became a prisoner of war. He believed that Australia was the best country in the world, and was proud serving it.
David was born in 1920 in Subiaco, Perth, Western Australia, the second eldest of four children (Robert, David, Arthur, and Mavis) of Victorian-born Leslie and Western Australian-born Mary. David moved to Melbourne as a child, and lived in the South Yarra/Prahran area, before moving to Chadstone where he and his family lived for the past 45 years. David was devoted to his family: his daughter Beverley (from an earlier marriage), his wife Marge and their five sons Leslie, Peter, Wayne, David and Terry. He worked two jobs in order to support his family: a milkman by night and a taxi driver by day.
David never asked much from life: he was always an active and contented man. An early riser, he loved his house and working on it, and got most pleasure from tinkering in his garden. A Norfolk pine that now stands almost 20 metres tall in David’s backyard was brought home on the back seat of his reliable Ford Falcon (KEV127), which served him and his family well for many years. He was a devoted Collingwood supporter, and would often feed the magpies that came to his back door, he said, for a feed and a chat. He had a fantastic memory and could recall the smallest but significant details of his life with great clarity and then magically weave them into his story.
David was a well-liked and well-respected man, someone you could trust and rely on, someone who enjoyed his Tattslotto or a bet on the horses, someone who would always be there if needed. I’m sure he counted himself lucky to have such a caring and loving family to help nurse and care for him as his condition deteriorated, and I’m also sure he gained a great deal of comfort from knowing they were there for him, as he had been in the past for them. Despite his worsening illness, he never grumbled or complained about his obvious discomfort. This is a rare virtue.
Tribute to David King
delivered by John Lack on 6 February 2014
David King was born in Subiaco, Perth, Western Australia on 11 June 1920. The family came to Melbourne and David went to school wherever his family happened to be living in the Depression years – Abbotsford, Richmond, East Melbourne, Kensington, and (finally) Windsor. He left school in 1934, aged 14. His first job was weeding the fairways of Albert Park golf club, and in 1939 he was working at Macpherson’s nut and bolt factory in Richmond. He had joined the militia, but on the outbreak of war his intention of enlisting for overseas service was interrupted by hospitalisation after a car accident. Hence he missed enlisting with his mates for the Middle East: ‘So I joined the AIF to catch up with my older brother Robert, who’d already joined.’
David enlisted at Royal Park on 15 July 1940, just a fortnight after his brother Robert - older by two years - enlisted at Caulfield. They were soon in the same training battalions at Mt Martha and Bonegilla. David (VX37484) and Bob (VX40646) joined the 2/29th Bn AIF on 29 November 1940, and sailed with their Battalion for Malaya in July 1941. The Eighth Division AIF in Malaya would consist of only three Brigades (the fourth being scattered across the islands to Australia’s north), and they were sent to Malaya with the thought that they might be replaced by British-Indian troops and sent to the Middle East where Australians were engaged in the ‘real’ war. But, of course, Japan launched a series of lightning attacks on the British, Dutch and American colonies and territories in December 1941. In less than four weeks the IJA sent the British-Indian forces reeling southwards, towards Johore, the southernmost state of the Malayan Federated States. Only in the second week of January 1942 was the Battalion sent into battle.
David, a private, and a driver attached to C Company, and Robert, a corporal also in C Company, became part of the fierce fighting after the battalion (less one of its five companies) was sent to ‘mop up’ a force of 200 Japanese who had crossed the Muar River. Instead of 200 of the enemy they faced several regiments of the crack Imperial Japanese Guard division. Outnumbered, outgunned and eventually surrounded, the 2/29th had to fight a desperate battle for survival, a battle that saw almost half of the Battalion killed in action (including its Commanding Officer on the first day, and his 2IC on the second), wounded, or missing in the surrounding swamps as it split up into groups and attempted to break free. David as a driver was trucking men and supplies through enemy infiltrated jungle and rubber plantations, and once the order came –‘every man for himself’ – he drove to Yong Peng. The remnant of the Battalion fought its way eastwards to join up with the 2/19th. When Battalion HQs later put the story together, Robert was reported missing, then reported believed wounded, and finally recorded as last seen between Bakri and Parit Sulong during a bayonet charge on 20 January, one of several charges mounted against Japanese machine guns in an attempt to break through on the Muar–Bakri road. In one of these astonishing bayonet charges, the Australians advanced singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’.
At Yong Peng, David was asking various men as they drifted into Yong Peng ‘Have you seen my brother?’ Eventually one told him how Robert had died. I’m not sure when the King family learnt of Robert’s fate. They may have been notified in 1942 simply that he was ‘missing’. Only in 1946 was his widow issued with a death certificate. David survived Muar and Bakri to rejoin his Battalion on Singapore Island. Here they were shelled and bombed continuously for days. He was one of those shocked by the British surrender on 15 February.
The Australians marched off to Changi prison camp. David was part of working parties on Singapore Island, including the Great World, a former amusement park near the Singapore docks. His closest mates were ‘Big Steve’ Lawson, Gordon (‘The Mouse’) Cowling (from Diggers Rest), and Peter (‘Goldy’) Goulden. David, ‘Big Steve’ and ‘The Mouse’ were put to work repairing trucks for export to Japan. After he deliberately bogged one truck, David was sent to labour on the docks. And then in 1943 he became part of F Force, sent to Thailand to build a section of the Burma-Thailand railway. He survived nine months on the railway, Battalion records indicating that he suffered multiple bouts of severe malaria, and also leg ulcers, but through good fortune or an iron constitution or both, none of the shocking diseases that carried men off in their thousands. David came down to Bangkok by rail, and was shipped to Singapore. He was thankful to have escaped the fate of those mates sent off to work in mines and factories in Japan, which meant running the gauntlet of American submarines. When the war ended he was at River Valley camp, marching out each day to the Tanglin hill area to dig tunnels that POWs suspected were intended as their graves in the event of an Allied invasion of Malaya.
David returned home with a large contingent of his Battalion on the Esperance Bay, arriving in Melbourne by rail from Sydney in October 1945. His mother and brother Arthur were waiting for him How much had his family heard of him in those four years? And how much had the King family heard of Robert? Probably very little, with communication by means of a few post cards sporadic, and months out of date when they arrived home. Homecoming, affected with the sadness of Robert’s death, was brightened for David by seeing his daughter Beverley for the first time in more than four years: the three-month old baby grown into a toddler.
When David agreed in 2011 to be interviewed for the Battalion’s records, and when I spoke to him in 2012 at his home, and again just weeks before his death, David always talked about the positive things of his war experience: the mateship, the comradeship. Somehow, after some of the worst experiences of loss, and enslavement and mistreatment, David remained unembittered. A gentle and lovely man, proud of his Battalion, loyal to the Association, mindful of the mates who had gone before, and above all proud of his long marriage to Marge, his six children, and his grandchildren.
The Battalion family – of veterans and their families – salutes you David for your example of courage in the adversity of battle, captivity, and illness, and for upholding the highest standards of the AIF, in war and in peace. May you rest in peace.