4th Light Horse Regiment

Memorial Association

1506 Trooper Fred McPherson

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Pictures & Stories

Picnic Point Footy Club.  Fred is 3rd from left in second back row. His brother-in-law, Harry Smith is at the extreme left of that row.

At the Pound, Fred holding the head of Waler “Old Dick”.  Daughter Colleen, holding her young sister Betty, with her brother Keith and sister Pat plus several neighbourhood kids.

Fred McPherson in this mounted group photo is second from right

The Federal Member for Gippsland, Darren Chester, presenting Fred’s Civilian Service Medal to Fred’s daughter, Colleen Robinson.

This overview of Fred’s WW1 service history and life after the war has been provided by one of our 4thLHRMA members, his son-in-law Peter Robinson.

“He was registered as Fred on his 1895 birth certificate but his enlistment papers say Frederick, and that name stayed on all his service paperwork.  I have compiled his full life story and it is very detailed so this is a précis.

Fred was born in May 1895 at Stawell.  Family circumstances, in 1902, led to him being taken into care by the Presbyterian & Scots Church Neglected Children’s Aid Society at just 6½ years old. The society fostered him out for the following eight years with a brother and sister by the name of Baker on their farm at Glenhope. He attended school and helped generally with farm work all the time with that family but at age 15, presumably at the end of his schooling, he was transferred to J.D. Scott’s “Delvine Park” estate at Fernbank in East Gippsland. At 18, his time under the care of the church ended but he stayed on at Fernbank until his enlistment on 16 Jul 1915.  

Following recruit training at Broadmeadows he was allocated to the 11th Reinforcements for the 4th LH Regiment and arrived in Egypt in November 1915. The unit War Diaries show the 4th patrolling and skirmishing around the Suez Canal until the push into Sinai and Gaza started. He was not involved with the famous charge into Beersheba as he had been transferred a month earlier, on 22 Sep, to the 3rd LH Field Ambulance as a Driver. Two months later he was transferred again, this time to the Camel Field Ambulance, which, in August 1918, became the 5th Light Horse Field Ambulance.  He remained with that unit until the war’s end.  

Fred escaped injury but was badly affected by, at different times, mumps, diarrhoea, colitis and malaria. He returned to Australia in July 1919 and was discharged at Broadmeadows in October that year. He was awarded the 1914/15 Star, the British War Medal and the Victory Medal.

Following discharge, he returned to Fernbank for a couple of years before striking out on his own. He applied for, and was granted, a Soldier Settlement block at Hillside near Bairnsdale in August 1921 but, like so many others, was unable to make a go of it, eventually relinquishing the holding in 1928. In the interim, in 1926, he had met and married a local girl, Myrtle Victoria Smith.  Eleven children followed, the youngest arriving in 1949. Ten reached maturity and went on to create families of their own.  One child sadly died in infancy from whooping cough.

He played Aussie Rules with local teams from, firstly, Lindenow South, and later, Picnic Point, featuring in premiership photos of both. (Picnic Point is a locality within the Bairnsdale township).

The family struggled in the early days of the Great Depression but from his time farming with the Bakers and J.D. Scott, Fred had become a skilled and versatile rural worker and after giving up the block, turned his hand to shearing, droving, rabbit trapping, fencing, ploughing and whatever work was available, to sustain wife and family.

He had a stroke of luck when appointed Bairnsdale Shire Pound Keeper in 1936. The Pound in those days was well out of town but came with a rent-free house for the incumbent and sufficient land for growing vegetables and raising the occasional poddy calf or lamb. The actual workload of managing the pound was not particularly difficult and Myrtle took care of that which allowed Fred to continue his outside work. This supplemented their income (his salary as Pound Keeper was just £12 ($24) per annum!) sufficiently for the McPhersons to live a relatively comfortable life.

He did not re-enlist for active service in WWII but was involved in the 1942 construction of the Bairnsdale aerodrome as a member of the Civil Construction Corps. The work of this organisation was not officially recognised until many years later and the Civilian Service Medal was not gazetted until 1994! That award was accepted on his behalf in 2009 by Colleen Robinson, his oldest surviving child.

Sadly, he suffered a severe heart attack in 1949 and remained an invalid until passing away in 1953.

Fred came home with a large collection of photos taken during his time away but as happened so often, most were not annotated. However, Neville Gibbons, curator of the Light Horse Museum at Sale was able to identify a number of them in general terms but most are still unidentified. The collection is now in the possession of his youngest grandson.”