Remembering Jock Henderson

John William Henderson, known as Jock, enlisted at nineteen. His younger brother Charles followed at eighteen. When war broke out, Jock and his best mate Percy Holloway were away shearing in Wagga Wagga; the news sent them on a bicycle ride back to Broadmeadows in Victoria, where they both signed up with the 4th Light Horse Regiment.

They were not larger-than-life heroes. They were country boys from the farm at Weatherboard, and their letters are full of home: what crops had gone in, which of their horses had won at the local shows, the rainfall, the neighbours, and any word of the other district lads serving overseas. Those questions are sprinkled throughout everything they wrote. Thoughts of home, again and again, replacing thoughts of warfare.

You can even hear their different temperaments. Charlie was organised and careful. He numbered his letters and checked the numbering with his mother, so she’d know if one had gone missing in transit. Jock was an enthusiastic 4th Light Horse trooper, proud of his Regiment, his horse, his kit, his equipment, and forever concerned for his mates from Learmonth who were with him in ‘C’ Squadron, the friends from home who faced the trenches of Gallipoli alongside him.

What made this collection so unusual is that it is almost complete. With the letters as my starting point (the dates, the locations, the letterheads), I could trace the war service of both brothers, then test it against their official records. The letters gave the official history a human shape; the records gave the letters their proof.

That trail took Jock a long way. He sailed in 1914 aboard the HMAT Wiltshire with the First Convoy. One of the accounts that moved me most belongs to that voyage: the regiment’s commanding officer, Major Leslie Maygar, a Boer War veteran who knew exactly what lay ahead, urging the young troopers up on deck to see the Southern Cross, just in case it was the last time they’d see it. On that same crossing, they witnessed HMAS Sydney run the German cruiser SMS Emden aground at North Keeling Island.

Then came Gallipoli, where Jock fought dismounted for five gruelling months before nephritis and enteric fever invalided him to hospital in Malta and on to six months’ convalescence in England. He was present at the very first ANZAC Day march in London. He trained with the British cavalry, served a spell as an officer’s batman, and by late 1916 was back where he wanted to be, with the Light Horse in France, through one of the worst winters there in decades.

Being a Light Horseman on the Western Front was a busy and dangerous life: riding and scouting well ahead of the frontline. By 1918, Jock had transferred to the 12th Field Artillery Brigade, first as a Driver, then as a Gunner, and was present at Dernancourt, Amiens, and the decisive Hindenburg Outpost Line battles. His letters stop abruptly around July 1918. Knowing what I now know, that silence makes sense: it was the moment of General Monash’s great push, the Hundred Days Offensive, that would finally end the war.

The most human moments are the quiet ones. Jock and Charlie were, it turned out, at some of the same battles, Messines among them, yet wouldn’t have known it until they were both safely home. Men Jock had trained with at Broadmeadows in 1914 would surface years later in ‘Blighty’ or in France; they sought each other out, checked casualty lists in camps and hospitals, and asked around for old pals. Those fragile links to home mattered enormously: for their sanity, their sense of self, and for making sense of why the whole world seemed to be at war.

There was kindness in their caution, too. When news or rumour reached them that a mate had been killed, they often held it back, not wanting to be the bearer of terrible news to families at home, then later having to explain to their mother why they’d said nothing, just in case it wasn’t true.

A few moments genuinely stopped me. The August 1915 letters, written hastily in the trenches, show Jock’s careful copperplate suddenly shaky and unclear, the messages short and complaining, his nervous tension on the page, exactly as you’d expect of anyone in that situation. And then, in lighter moments, the family traits I recognised: turns of phrase, a way of describing things, that I knew from Hendersons born generations later.

One letter still makes me smile. Writing home from London in May 1916, Jock weighed the great cities of the world against his own town and found them wanting: “They have not a street in London or Edinburgh that can come up to Sturt St.” In 2019, when Ballarat’s Sturt Street Gardens were under threat from a proposed bike path, I used his words in a letter to the Ballarat Courier. The wisdom of a young trooper in 1916 was, I thought, worth taking note of today.

He was resourceful, too. Having met his mother’s Fraser relatives in Aberdeen in 1916 and again in 1917, he worked out that parcels routed through Scotland reached him weeks earlier than mail sent direct from Australia. A small thing, but I’m still in touch with those same Scottish cousins today, by email and Facebook, in 2026.

To hold these fragile, hundred-year-old things, the postcards and the photographs, was a gift. Jock’s own WW1 medal set is still missing, despite my asking across the extended family, which makes the surviving mementos all the more precious. Among the items in my care are the large canvas “Welcome Home to Our Boys” banner, left with me by the Chapman family of Ballarat, and Jock’s 1967 Gallipoli Medallion, which had been waiting silently in Canberra for decades for a Henderson to claim it.

Through my research, I also found the General Sir Harry Chauvel Memorial Foundation. It began with the 2014 First Convoy Memorial at Princes Pier and the 4th Light Horse Pilgrimage held each February at the Shrine of Remembrance. At a Shrine event, I met the Foundation’s then-President, Lt. Col. (Rtd.) Graeme Smith, who, by coincidence, lived just a few streets from me. He read all four folders of Jock’s letters and research, and afterwards invited me to become a Foundation Ambassador. It’s an honour, all the more so now that I understand what commanders like Monash and Chauvel carried: their determination that, from mid-1917, Australians would no longer be treated as expendable ‘cannon fodder’.

The tragedy is that the war didn’t truly end when they came home. Jock died in 1929, Charlie in 1931, part of a broader loss that took four Henderson brothers to tuberculosis. My grandfather Peter, the youngest and longest-lived, rarely spoke of any of it.

I understand the silence now. Why would you expose the people you love to the noise, the mud, the blood and despair? The ill health and the bad dreams were hints enough; families learned not to ask. It was only when the old Troopers gathered in their Regimental Associations that the talk turned to the battlefields, the mateship, and the friends whose names they repeated and remembered, over and over, as a balm for their regrets.

That is exactly why these letters matter. So much of the war was a game of chance: survival depended on the decisions of others, on which unit you were assigned to, which job you drew, and where you happened to be on a given day. For those young men, life was precious and measured in seconds. To me, the ordinary soldier’s world is of equal importance to the official histories, a chance to know, and to remember, what the men in the ‘other ranks’ went through when the world went mad.

Jock was neither especially heroic nor decorated. He was an honest man who volunteered, did his best, and made it home. He often ended his letters with a simple request: to be remembered. More than a hundred years on, through these letters and the stories they carry, I hope that wish has finally been fulfilled.