Australians at War Film Archive Alan Loxton - Transcript of interview Date of interview: 1st December 2003 http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/700 Tape 1 00:46 Thanks very much for taking part. Well I think it’s important. Yeah I’m glad you do. You’re somebody we very much want to talk to and we’re glad you made the time for us. To begin with, as I said, 01:00 we just want to get a point by point summary of your life and service career. So maybe you could tell us in no real detail, but tell us about where you grew up in your family. Yes. Well my father served in the First World War as a doctor. He came home in - towards the end of 1918. Mother was ill - he got compassionate leave to come home. And then he bought a practice, a medical practice run down in Enmore. 01:30 Edgeworth Road, Enmore which is near Newtown of course. I was born in 1920. And so, after a while I went to a little pre-school I suppose you’d call it these days, run by Kathleen Thomson. She was very good and I was very lucky. But eventually I found my way to Newington Prep School. 02:00 Newington College. And I spent oh, a good seven years there, which was useful, very useful. I was very young for that period. Too young really. And eventually found my way into the main prep school where I did reasonably well academically. 02:30 Father become dissatisfied with what was happening. There was a change of headmaster. And eventually, on the change of headmaster he moved me out to Scots, Bellevue Hill which was a fair way away. But it wasn’t a bad move for me except it meant a lot of travelling. I finished up the last five years at school as a boarder at Scots. Where did you join up? 03:00 Sydney. Victoria Barracks. Yeah, so nothing unremarkable about that one. Saturday morning, a group of us who were SUR [Sydney University Regiment] university regiment people made our way by invitation, to the parade ground at the barracks. And we were 03:30 interviewed then told to go away and then come back again when we were invited. The invitation was slow coming but we…the four of us got fed up and decided we’d go up and grasp the nettle and by Thursday we decided, Wednesday night actually, we said blow this, this is too slow for us. 04:00 So we paraded ourselves out to where we knew the 22nd Brigade was training its young junior officers, as junior leaders and we talked ourselves into the mess, and Brigadier Taylor who’s face you can see on one of those books, he apparently liked the look of us. We had a good 04:30 pedigree in the SUR no doubt about that, that was very useful training. So we were then invited to join the 18th, what became the 18th Battalion. It formed on the 28th or 29th July, I think, and there was troops marched down from Tamworth, came down by train and I remember 05:00 the morning. Cold winter’s morning at Wallgrove, with country blokes coming off the train, must have been about 6 o’clock before we met them. I think they wondered what they’d got in me. I wondered what the heck I’d got in them. I never…SUR students, university students are rather different from the average bloke that works on the road in 05:30 the country, as you can understand. A very good learning curve. A very quick learning curve but it was one we went through. No, I think we got on top of it. I think we got on top of each other, which was the more important part of it. We’ll come back and talk about what you learnt in training. From here came you take us through where you trained and then where you were to serve as well. What in the SUR? In the 06:00 18th from there on. What happened to you after you joined the 18th Battalion. Oh yes. What … Just take us through the places you went and we’ll come back and talk about it all in detail later. Places we went? What in the 18th Battalion. Firstly where you trained and then where you were sent to serve. Oh right, we trained in the SUR at Wallgrove. 06:30 No sorry, I beg your pardon. We didn’t go to Wallgrove in the SUR. We trained at Narromine. The Menangle race course, we used to do 7 days during the May vacation at university then 07:00 back again in the September. So we had 14 days a year and we had the hide to think we were fully trained. I remember thinking why do we want a 90 day camp. But we went through and it was good. When war broke out just shortly after 07:30 that we were in camp at Menangle race course. That was a very good camp, that was a very good idea. And I will remember the time we spent in camp on that race course including a period when we did a 70 day, no 7 day exercise on Bulli Pass. Did I say 7 days? It was probably about 5. 08:00 5 days on Bulli Pass. And that was good training. Try to manoeuvre a water cart full of water down Bulli Pass is something to be beholden. The water surges in the tank and you’ve got 5 or 6 men on ropes on either wheel and you need to be fairly, need to have 08:30 fairly strong gang of blokes doing that. And I always remember that, and I go down Bulli Pass and I think, gee here’s this corner. This is where the darn thing nearly got away from us. But it didn’t and then about one o’clock in the morning on the 5th or the 6th day we broke camp and came back to Menangle. 09:00 We route marched and I’ll never forget the marching experience in the very early hours of whatever it was. September. And dog tired, terribly tired. We’d been out for 5 days and we were picked up by the SUR Pipes and Drums which is 09:30 a very well known pipe band. And I’ve never forgotten that. That was a splendid experience. Pipes are magnificent to march to, particularly when you’re tired. You sort of pick your feet one after the other and put them down, apparently in the right place. But no, that was good. So anyhow we broke camp there in March and eventually the 10:00 camp came to an end, and we finished that camp. Went back to the office to work. I was an article law clerk. At that stage the Battle of Britain was very truly on so we, everybody, all my friends and that sort of thing were joining up. So there was no point in hanging 10:30 around. All the decent blokes around the place, in my opinion, were enlisting. And I thought I’ve got flat feet and I thought, oh God this is no good they’re not going to take me. And I was very upset about it, so anyhow I decided to give it a go. And I gave it a go and I defeated the doctors and they 11:00 enlisted me, they took me in, which was great. I was very proud of myself. What sort of tests did they give you when you went into join up? Tests? Medical examination. Oh not much, not much. I think, I don’t know what they go through now but I’m all right. My health is good. 11:30 Has been all my 80 years. That’s, you know, no I was good. My father was a doctor and he brought me up as a doctor should bring his sons up. How was the AIF [Australian Imperial Force] different to what you experienced in the SUR? Oh dreadfully differently but otherwise it wasn’t much different. No it was, the troops 12:00 were a different make up. And I was very proud of it actually. I thought they were a great team of men. They were country people and I learnt a lot of respect for the country man in the 18th Battalion. They were a fine unit. You mentioned it was a steep learning curve - what do you mean by that? That was, 12:30 what, in relation to being on top of my reaction to, quite frankly an odd looking group of men, who’d I’d never seen before in my life en masse. But I had to realise that these were my mates for the next x number of years. And they were too, they were good mates. The word mate is very important and we learnt that 13:00 very quickly. If you look at any POW [prisoner of war] writings you’ll find that there’s a constant use of that word “mate”. And it’s not artificial it’s genuine. Particularly when you get to Sandakan and read the Sandakan writings. Sandakan (UNCLEAR) go again. Sandakan writings are …No we 13:30 I can’t say I’m not too proud to have been a member of that group.