Vale
George Albert (‘Chips’) Garner (VX22487)
George Garner passed away peacefully on 24 December 2013 at BUPA Caulfield, surrounded by his family. His funeral service was held on 6 January 2014 at the Port Melbourne Uniting Church that George and Mary Garner had attended as a couple.
The Association was well represented at this service, and afterwards at Altona Memorial Park crematorium.
Eulogy by Lindsay Garner (extracts)
Welcome everybody and thank you for coming here today to help celebrate the life of my father George Garner. [Thanks followed for the staff at BUPA Windsor and Caulfield, and especially to George’s daughter Heather, who was with her father almost every day when he was in care.]
George Albert Garner was born to Claude and Lena in Carlton in May 1921, the first of five children, his sisters Jean and Beverley and his brothers Jacky and Brian. The Garners were a Fitzroy working-class family, for Poppy and his brothers were all waterside workers. Lena died when Dad was very young, and he and Jean and Jacky were sent to live at the Melbourne Orphanage at Brighton. After a hard time there, the kids went home when Poppy married Mim (Mary), and Brian and Beverley were born. Life ruled by Grandmother in a small house in Fitzroy was tough. One of Dad’s jobs was to clean the kitchen floor, and if he missed a spot he would get his head banged against the old gas stove. The Depression hit the family hard but they battled on, Dad selling newspapers to help out. He often told me of his childhood adventures, of the day he and his mate pinched a bottle of beer from the brewery cart and turned up at school pretty happy! He got into big trouble – for not taking the beer home to share with the men! Another head bang against the oven. Another time when he drank the cream from the top of a bottle of milk brought more head/oven action. I used to joke with Dad that this constant head banging explained quite a bit.
He liked school and regularly told Heather and me how he was great at mental arithmetic and spelling, often winning the competitions. He sat next to Alan Ruthven, who went on to play with Dad’s beloved Fitzroy and won a Brownlow. ‘Susso’ lunches provided at school were jam sandwiches, while the young Ruthven whose family owned a hotel would come to school with ham or cheese sandwiches. Ruthven loved jam, so Dad traded his lunch with his mate. Only to help out!
Growing up in poor and tough Fitzroy, Dad had to learn to use his fists, and did often, looking after his sister Jean and his younger brother Jacky. In his early teens and with jobs hard to find, Dad took up boxing. One of his proudest moments was his first fight at the old West Melbourne Stadium, when he wore an old Fitzroy jumper and a maroon dressing gown into the ring. His record as a fighter was impeccable: he was never knocked down and he lost only one fight and this was (according to Dad) a very highly disputed referee’s decision. Dad counted it as a win. He was selected by the Sporting Globe as the “boy of the week” a few times, and was well on the way to a titled career when the world went to war. Dad like many others wanted to enlist and did so, against the advice of his trainer Poppa Johnson, who actually cried when Dad signed up. After a lot of argument with his father, Dad put his age up a year and enlisted in the AIF.
Dad was sent to Bathurst and joined the 2/29th infantry battalion. Until the day he died he was so proud of the 2/29th and the men he served with. Dad earned the name ‘Chips’, which stuck with him, after he came back to camp one evening with enough chips to feed the whole 2/29th. He woke just about all of them offering a feed! Having read his service record, I can say his career in the army was quite colourful. He did enjoy the odd day off, with or without permission. Dad told me they were wrong with the records! We will hear more of Dad’s army history from John Lack of the 2/29th Association later.
Upon his return to Australia Dad did a course in house painting at Brighton Tech, and had a go at tent boxing with the famous Sharman Troupe. He had one problem here. He would not take a dive. When he stepped into the ring it was to win. He wanted to keep his unbeaten record alive.
Dad loved music and dancing, and one night at the Trocadero (where the Arts Centre now is) he met a Port Melbourne girl with flaming red hair. Mary Huglin. He married her in 1951, and their wonderful dates included Test and Shield cricket, stock car racing at Tracey’s Speedway (Maribyrnong), bike racing at the Northcote Velodrome, and watching Fitzroy play football. Dad always had a Plan B: if Fitzroy were not playing they could go see Port Melbourne. They also went to Lee Gordon shows at the Stadium and saw many greats of Rock ‘n Roll (including Bill Haley and Johnny Ray).
After a short stint in Parkdale they moved to Port Melbourne, where Dad fitted in perfectly. His working-class, waterside worker and Fitzroy background was not all that different from Port. His father-in-law, Snowy, became his best mate. They made the Railway Club Hotel their headquarters and the Chevron Hotel for many years was their second office. Dad, Grandpa, and a group including Joe Garbutt and Charles Rattray spent many hours together.
Mum and Dad’s children were the highlight. No father was prouder and would do more for his kids than Dad. He supported and spoilt me and Heather, although that did slow when his next two lifetime highlights, Tristan and Eliza, were born. I can still see him riding his bike home from his hard, dirty job as a metal polisher and, without even putting the bike away, playing cricket with me at our Princes Street cricket patch. Or kick to kick out the front in the footy season.
He was a people person. He loved to party, and many Saturday nights Dad and a few mates would come home after a day at the office down the road. Out came the records, and the singing, dancing and partying began. Elvis’s Teddy Bear was always on the playlist. And fish and chips. Every Saturday night, around Bay Street he would go and back he would come with a parcel of fish and chips, potato cakes, chicken rolls, and a sav in batter!
Dad was not just an immediate family man but loved all his extended family. He told me of his brother’s letters he received in Japan, and what they meant to him. He bragged about how good looking his sister Jean was. His son-in-law Donald, Uncle George, Uncle Ted, and Auntie Heather were close to him, and all of his nephews and nieces were special.
Living my life with Dad was wonderful. He had many major loves: Fitzroy and Port Melbourne football clubs. Being guest of honour at the President’s luncheon at Fitzroy on his 70th birthday, meeting the team before the game and in the rooms afterward, was a highlight. Among many great sportsmen, he had seen Hayden Bunton and Donald Bradman. He loved his battalion, the 2/29th and the men of the battalion. His closest and most loved mates were from here. He loved Port Melbourne, the city and its people. The Borough became his home, the people his family. He could not have been happier living anywhere else in the world.
George Albert Garner, father and grandfather, family man, friend to all, lived his life – not an easy life, but he treated it as such – as he fought as a boxer. He took each round as it came, gave back as much as he took, at the end of the round went back to his corner, sucked in a few bigguns, splashed a bit of water on his face, and went back to the middle for the next round – ready to take whatever was thrown his way.
Well, Dad, you won all the rounds, you won all the fights. You are an absolute champion. We will miss you. But we will all be so glad we knew you and had you as part of our lives.
A tribute to George Albert Garner [VX22487]
delivered by John Lack on 6 January 2014
George Garner had his 19th birthday on 31 May 1940. Five days later, upping his age by a year, he enlisted at Melbourne Town Hall for overseas service. The 5th of June was the final day of the evacuation of the British army at Dunkirk, and just two weeks later France surrendered. George had responded promptly at this moment of crisis for the Empire and for Australia.
At Caulfield training camp, George was assigned to 4 AGH at Puckapunyal, where he was a cook, before being sent back to Caulfield, then to the 5th Training Battalion at Shepparton, and finally in November to the 2/29th Battalion at Bonegilla, D Company.
He went AWL after Boxing Day, lost seven days pay and was fined £3.10.0. In April 1941 he got seven days for using insubordinate language. In May he was fined 10/- for disobeying camp orders, £3.10s for being AWL for six days in June, and 15s for two days AWL late in the month. He was, it seems, something of a rebel. George knew his mind, and readily spoke it.
The Battalion embarked for Singapore at the end of July, and George sacrificed a further 15s for failing to obey standing orders. In the weeks after arriving on 15 August 1941, he was fined for failing to appear at parade, and later given 21 days detention for ‘Conduct to the prejudice of good order etc.’ He re-joined his unit on the 22 September.
Known as ‘Chips’ Garner to his army mates, George forged friendships that were to last a lifetime. Some of those lifetimes were cruelly short; others lasted for decades.
He must have lost many mates on the Muar Road to Bakri in Johore, southern Malaya, on 17 January 1942, when his battalion first went into battle and experienced terrible casualties against overwhelming odds. There followed the desperate jungle retreat to Singapore, and the battle for Singapore Island itself. So heavy were the Battalion’s casualties, KIA, wounded and missing, that it was reinforced with 500 new men, many of whom had arrived on the Island, barely trained, just weeks before.
Here, in the battle for Singapore, on the 15 August, the very day of the British surrender, ‘Chips’ suffered a gunshot wound to the right arm, right leg, and head. Just four days earlier he had lost his closest mate, Private Lindsay Ward, to shrapnel wounds. George would recall Lindsay as a very, very young man – literally, as one of those who ‘shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old’, whom ‘age shall not weary . . , nor the years condemn’. George would remember many mates, but particularly this mate, vowing that when he had a son, he would be named Lindsay.
‘Chips’ never talked much about the war, but rather about the friendships forged during his 1697 days of service, 150 in Australia, and 1547 overseas.
He was in Changi POW camp until 15 May 1943 when he became one of 20 of the 2/29th Battalion, 300 Australian and 600 British POWs, men recovering from war injuries, enforced labour and meagre rations, who were packed aboard a decrepit Japanese cargo vessel for Japan. They escaped submarine attack to be landed on Kyushu on 7 June for entrainment to the Kobe/Osaka area. Here, usually brutally treated, miserably fed, and suffering bitterly cold winters, they worked for some 26 months in factories and warehouses, and on the wharves and railways. ‘Chips’ was here, not far from Hiroshima, when the war ended in August 1945. He was back home in October.
It was during his time in Japan, I guess, that ‘Chips’ made great friends with George Tite, also of the 2/29th, a friendship that lasted almost 70 years, extended after the war to their families. This deep friendship reminds us that the experience and memory of war was not only, or even mainly, about suffering and sadness, but about fellowship. Like so many former POWs, ‘Chips’ Garner spoke little (outside the fraternity of veterans) about war and captivity. But his children Lindsay and Heather learned a lot about the men, ‘Dad’s mates, his brothers,’ as Lindsay put it when he proposed the toast to the Battalion in 2012. When Lindsay was old enough he was taken to the Battalion Reunion, where he got to meet men like ‘Rocky’ Horne, Paddy O’Toole, Jack Haig, Frank West, Frank Nankervis, Dr Victor Brand, Bob Christie and George Tite. The extended Garner family now enjoys friendships forged at these reunions, especially those with Robert and Russell Tite, their wives, children, and grandchildren.
Bob Christie, at the grand age of 96, and his wife Berris, are unable to be with us today, but this week I sat with Bob and yarned about the Battalion family and especially about George. ‘Chips’ he said, was the Battalion’s boxer, and he fondly recalled his contribution to the entertainment that followed the unveiling in 1942 of the Singapore memorials to those who had died in the Malayan campaign. Lindsay, who loved seeing them together, remarked that their friendship was the longest of all his Dad’s friendships, spanning 73 years.
For the family of the Battalion, the passing of George ‘Chips’ Garner is a very significant moment. For George not only attended the Reunion luncheon every year, but was part of the Anzac Day march, on his walker in 2011, and in his chair in 2012. 2013 was the first year that the 2/29th Battalion was not led by a veteran in Melbourne on Anzac Day. We missed George, but understood that it had just become too much for him. But Heather and Lindsay were able to bring him to our inaugural Spring picnic last October, and his eyes lit up when we sang with gusto the Battalion marching song.
George ‘Chips’ Garner, we of the Association salute you. We will always remember you.
