The National Emergency Services (NES) was established at the beginning of World War II in 1939 to ‘help protect, educate and provide aid on the home front.’ NSW Ambulance and St John’s Ambulance were engaged to provide first-aid training such as that undertaken by Nancy Irene Wallbank (1910–1981) of Dudley a suburb of Newcastle, NSW. […]
Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering Company was in operation for 282 years and in that time they gathered some powerful clientele. Namely, the British Royal Navy and Royal Australian Navy (RAN). This is the plan for an Oberon-class submarine that the company would go on to build for the RAN in 1967, the HMAS Onslow. The […]
Holbrook’s unlikely association with submariners began in 1915 when the town was named after British submarine commander, Lieutenant Norman Holbrook (1888-1976). In 1992, after repeated visits from their namesake, the town officially awarded ‘Freedom of Entry to the Shire’ to personnel of the Royal Australian Navy Submarine Squadron. A few years later, in recognition of […]
One imagines the clacking of the typewriter may have been particularly urgent on the 20th of September, 1915. Just a month earlier it had been reported that Lt. Norman Holbrook (1888-1976), the first naval recipient of the Victoria Cross in WWI, had been wounded. The details were vague but Shire Clerk John Taylor must have […]
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