Shep's Place Family Tree

At school, he gained all As in his Intermediate Certificate. He also excelled in sport. In 1933, he was the NSW Combined High School shot put champion, holding the record for several years, training at home, at first using half a brick. When he moved to Victoria, he was the under 16 high jump champion, again practicing on home made equipment. He also played 2nd grade football for Canterbury High School and first grade Australian Rules for Melbourne High.

Jim left school after the Intermediate Certificate, encouraged by his father to follow him in the bank. In 1937, at the age of 16, he joined the Commercial Bank of Australia. He was sent to the Gosford branch of the bank, living in a boarding house next to the golf course, on the edge of the town. In 1940, he volunteered for the Air Force, but it was not until 1941, when he was working in Canberra, that he was called up. Jim began his initial training as a pilot in Tamworth in 1941, at the age of 20. He was next sent to Canada for training, before finally going to Britain in 1942, where more training followed.

Jim was assigned to the 453 Squadron, the third Australia Spitfire squadron to be formed. Their commanding officer commented on the new recruits "My Australians are a particularly promising bunch. The special battle training and formation flying that they are undergoing will make all the difference when they meet the Huns."

In a letter home, reprinted in the bank's newsletter, he offers a wry description of his training. "At present I am at another squadron doing a course on gunnery. The ground staff here is amazing. I am used to staggering in and out of a plane by myself, but here, as soon as one starts to walk out to the plane, about three 'Erks' start running towards it, and by the time the lordly pilot has arrived they have everything in the cockpit ready. One of them assists me with my parachute, another helps to strap me in, closes the door, takes a final look around the cockpit, and then jumps down off the wing and the engine is started."

Jim flew 160 operational trips over Europe, but returning from Antwerp to England, his plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire, bursting into flames. Others in the squadron saw a ball of black smoke and assumed his plane had exploded in mid-air. However, he managed to land outside Dunkirk, and although wounded, escaped to a French farmhouse, which was quickly surrounded by the Germans. He spent the next 6 months in Dunkirk, until exchanged for German prisoners of war held by the British, 2 months before the war ended. Brussels sprouts were the daily diet at every meal, and after the war, he refused to have them in the house. In the camp, he was the second British officer in charge. He made an underground wireless, translated books from French to English and learnt German.

For six months, he was believed to be dead, until he managed to get a letter to England through the Red Cross. His friends wrote letters of condolence to his family in Australia. In England, a family friend Molly Dunkels kept making inquiries until word finally came through that he was alive. He was exchanged for a German prisoner in March 1946 and returned to his squadron. After the war, Jim remained in Paris for six months, his language skills learned at school and increased in the in the camp in France used in interpreting at the Australian Exhibition organised by the Australian government to promote Australia and the opportunities for emigration.

On his return to Australia, Jim married Louise Merle Gillon, the daughter of James Gillon, a shopkeeper on 8.3.1946 at Swansea Presbyterian Church. The reception was held at Lake Munmorah. He returned to his position in the bank in Gosford, building a 2-bedroom brick house at 98 Hill Street, next to a citrus orchard. He studied Accountancy and Banking at night, qualifying in both. In 1956, he left the bank to establish his own accountancy practice in Mann St, Gosford, continuing to operate there for 30 years. In 1968, the family moved to Albany St, Gosford, overlooking the Brisbane Waters. Jim was a foundation member of the Gosford branch of the RSL club and its first treasurer. He was also the foundation secretary and later Director of the Central Coast Cooperative Housing Society and a Director of Leisure Living, which built retirement homes for the RSL. His wife died on 22.4.1984, interred at Palmdale, Ourimbah.

My father Jim Ferguson died early in the morning on Tuesday 30 June. We chatted together as usual on Sunday morning but on Sunday afternoon I received a call to say he had been taken to hospital. We came up to see him and he was tired but otherwise as normal. On Monday night the hospital called to say he had developed pneumonia and his oxygen levels had fallen. We drove up but by the time we got there he had improved. He knew however that he might die, had told the doctors he did not want intervention and wanted to make sure I understood this. Otherwise we chatted as usual He asked Michael about his rugby game at the weekend and the symbols on his jacket and thanked Alex for getting him a drink.
I believed he would still get better and after sitting with him until 1 am went back to his house to try and catch some sleep. When I rang the hospital at 7 the next morning, the nurses said he had a stable night. Fifteen minutes later they rang to say he had passed away peacefully. My father faced the likelihood of death with calmness, acceptance and his characteristic dry sense of humour. He died as he would have wished, having been independent all his life, with an active mind and with dignity. I understand this and am grateful for it, but still miss him greatly. It should not be a shock when a person dies at the age of 88, but it was.
My father was born on 9 January 1921 in Rupanyap, a small town in Victoria where his father was manager of the Commercial Bank. He was the youngest in the family and had three older sisters. Jean lives in Albury and Ila in Hawthorn. His other sister Gwen who lived in Newcastle died several years ago. My father was very close to his sisters.
As my grandfather was a bank manager, the family moved often as my father grew up. From Rupanyap they moved to Nhill, another small Victorian town, then to Hawthorn in Melbourne, where my grandfather was on the committee of the Hawthorn AFL. This started my father’s lifelong interest in the fortunes of Hawthorn teams.
His family moved to Sydney, back to Melbourne again then to Newcastle, where they lived in Merewether in a house overlooking several beaches. My father said he could look out the windows to see which beach had the best surf.
He left school at the age of 16 to join the Commercial Bank of Australia, as his father had done before him. He started work in Gosford and lived in a boarding house next to the golf course and in those days, on the outskirts of the town. It was a time that Gosford was much smaller and he said that when he walked down the main street, everyone knew each other.
He enlisted in the air force in 1941 and trained first in Tamworth and then in Canada. He was assigned to the 453 spitfire squadron and was stationed in various parts of Britain, including Cornwall Suffolk and the Orkneys. Later in the war, as victory came closer, the squadron was stationed in liberated areas of France.
My father flew more than 160 operational trips over Europe. In 1944 he was returning from Antwerp on a routine flight when he was shot down. He corrected me when I thought his plane had crashed, it had not, he had landed it successfully despite it being in flames and despite his injuries. He was justifiably proud of this. For years, he used a piece of glass from the cockpit as a paper weight in his office. It was presented to him by one of the prison guards who found it in a field.
After his plane crashed, he ran off to hide in a French farmhouse. However, he said it was not very hard for the German search party to identify him when he was sitting around the farmhouse table still with his singed pants on. He was taken to a prison in Dunkirk where he kept a diary to help pass the time. His diaries detailed the very meagre rations in the prison, which was mainly watery soup. My father wrote out lists of things he planned to do when he was released, headed by eat lots of chocolate. He said that the guards did not eat very much better than the prisoners and in my father’s log book is a photo and farewell message from two of the guards. He held no bitterness towards the Germans, who he saw as caught up in war as he was.
In his log book he wrote “shot down in flames by 20 m flak at Dunkirk, Burns on right leg, abrasions to forehead. POW from 29 September 44 to 15 April 45. Too bloody long.�
He was exchanged for a German prisoner not long before the war ended. My father told me while he was of course delighted, the German prisoner he was exchanged for looked very glum and glared at him for being the reason he was sent back.
In 2006, Temora Aviation Museum acquired one of the few operational spitfires still in existence from New Zealand. It had been flown by pilots 453 squadron and the museum invited my father and the other members of his squadron down to see it. My father knew it was likely to be the last time he would see his friends and we went with him to drive him down. It was a wonderful weekend, with ten of the 15 surviving members of the squadron and their families attending. The talk was not so much of the sadness and horror of war, but mostly of funny memories. In England, if you bought a car, you were allowed a full tank of petrol without rations so the squadron bought a car and they sold it to each other to keep the tank full. Rusty Leith, who had written to my grandfather when my father was missing, had flown the plane at Temora. However, many of the others as my father did had crashed their planes and they joked about this, belying the courage and horror involved.
I understood from the weekend why those friendships had been so strong and why they meant so much to my father. Rusty Leith, Fred Cowpe and Don Andrews have all sent their condolences today, age and distance preventing them from coming in person and Don has written on behalf of the squadron. The 453 squadron are represented today by the next generation through Mary Clemesha, daughter of Bob Clemesha and Alan Taylor, the son of Cam Taylor.
My father spoke fluent French and was asked to stay Paris for six months after the war ended to help at an Australian exhibition set up by the Australian government to promote Australia. He returned to Australia and his position with the bank in 1946. My parents were married and built a house in Hill Street, Gosford. He studied at night and qualified as an accountant. He also worked on race nights at the greyhound track, accurately computing pay outs in the days before there were calculators to help. He always had a quick and accurate mind for numbers.
In 1956, he left the bank and set up his own accountancy practice in Gosford. he sold the business in 1986, not long after my mother had died, but continued to work from an office at home, including auditing the books of a number of community organisations on a voluntary basis. He was also a successful investor in the share market both for himself and his sister Ila and we had a lot of interesting conversations about the economic situation and world affairs in general. As a child of the depression, my father believed in the economical use of resources and the need to preserve the environment and was a keen shopper for specials. He kept pizza specials on hand for visits from his grandchildren.
He adjusted to the modern age and was a keen acquirer of gadgets, but baulked at our offers to help him get a computer installed. When Michael patiently tried to explain living without a computer was like living in the Stone Age, he proudly took on the title of Stone Age grandfather. He was an excellent shopper for birthday cards and more recent ones to Michael had stone age themes.
I rang my father once to thank him for being a low maintenance parent. It was at a time when several of my friends were trying to balance their lives with helping aged parents. My father corrected me, he was not a low maintenance parent; he was a no maintenance parent. Indeed he was right. He asked nothing of us other than that we postpone any planned visit that conflicted with the Swans or Hawthorn being on TV and he gave us much support.
I did ask him sometimes after a bad loss whether he might have been better off seeing his grandchildren after all but it was only rarely that the loss was bad enough for him to agree. He lived for the AFL season in winter and when I asked him what he planned to do in summer, he pointed out there were tapes of previous matches.
Apart from AFL, he read widely including a fondness inherited by my sister, Alex and myself for detective stories. Part of the last conversation I had with him was on the various actors who played Miss Marple and why he disagreed with Alex’s views about who portrayed her best. Alex will remember my father for his “witty sense of humour and as an avid reader. The last time I looked at the books on the table by his armchair he was working his way through a book entitled Islamic Ethics and something by Mark Twain. We shared a love of Agatha Christie, Dad's Army and The Monty Python. We'll all miss him at Christmas.�
My father was adroit at working out cryptic crosswords, although he said that he got older, his mind was not working as well as it used to because he couldn’t always get it all out. I tried to explain to him I had trouble getting out even one clue but this did not stop him ringing me a few weeks back when he was down to the last clue left to see if I had any ideas on what it might be.
My father was lucky that he had good neighbours who kept an eye on him and were always willing to offer a friendly hand. Ray Rushby visited him almost every day and they became great friends. They enjoyed friendly banter and had a similar sense of humour. Ray was a contact for vital call for my father and went down on more than one occasion when my father’s vital call went off. Once when Ray had gone to help him, as the ambulance arrived to take my father to hospital, my father called out to Ray “I’ll be counting the whisky bottles when I get back.� I cannot ever express to Ray how grateful we are to him for his support to my father, as it helped him to stay in his own home when we were too far away to be able to help him as often as we wished.
The other very important person in my father’s life was Lesley Mitchell, who helped him in the house for 18 years and also shared my father’s sense of humour.
For my children, my father was an important figure in their lives. He cooked dinner at Christmas and we went up every year. When they were small, he hid M&Ms for them to find before they left. Last time Alex visited, he asked whether he still needed to keep this up as he was running out of hiding places and she is now 19. She replied somewhat indignantly “yes�. My father was very methodical and birthdays were listed on the calendar, which is why one year he was the only one to remember Vandy’s birthday – Vandy had forgotten himself as indeed had all of us. Alex also wanted me to mention how he used to take out his false teeth when they were very young and pretend to be a monster.
I have planned today’s ceremony as my father would have wished, with simplicity. The one exception is that we have put together photos of his life, which I suspect he may have taken exception to. It took hours to find them, he hated having his photo taken and I think that there are at least 30 years of his life when he was not photographed at all. I have to thank two people for the fact that there are any recent photos, my daughter Alex who specialised in sneaking photos when he wasn’t looking and his sister Ila, who unable to visit us, enjoyed getting photos and was the reason I was able to coerce him into an annual family photo. She doesn’t want a photo, he would always say. “Why don’t we ring and check with her� was my answer to which he had no reply.
My father was a person of great courage and great integrity. I am lucky that he lived to the age that he did and that we were able to share so much in recent years. He will continue to be an inspiration to me in his methodical approach to life, his positive outlook and of course, his sense of humour. To quote Alex again “he was one of the nicest and most selfless and accepting people in the world. There aren't many like him and that's true.�
My father was very close to his sister Ila who has sent a message to be read out today
I have asked my cousin Deidre O’Sullivan to read it on her Ila’s behalf
“From the time Jim was a little boy we were great pals. When he went off to war as a spitfire pilot, this was a terrible time for all his family. Then we were told that his plane had been shot down in flames over Germany and there was little chance he had survived. At war’s end we found Jim, he had survived and had been held as a prisoner of war for all that time. Seeing him again when he returned home was wonderful beyond belief. The contact and warmth of our friendship picked up again and we have remained good pals all these years with constant phone calls and contacts. Now again my great pal and brother has gone from my life and I will miss him very much. Goodbye Jim I will remember you always. Till we meet again forever your loving sister Ila.�