THOMAS HENRY LELLO
14 October 1898 - 1 September 1959
Based on information from the Internet (his military record), from his deceased sister, and from his nieces and grandson. Compiled by his niece, youngest daughter of Nell.
Tom was the first son of Thomas Henry Lello (Harry) and his wife Elizabeth (Bessie, née Johnston). He was the third to carry the name, but not the last.
Tom was born in Beaconsfield, West Tamar, Tasmania, a couple of years before his father, who was working at the gold mine, moved to Queenstown on the west coast. Tom, his mother and baby sister Nell stayed behind in Beaconsfield until the house Harry was building in Queenstown was ready.
Nell told a story about Tom getting her to help him chop up worms in the garden in Queenstown when she was three. Her job was to hold the worms on the block. He missed, and she ran inside with the severed tip of her middle-right finger dangling from a sliver of skin. Her young mother, full of common sense, washed it and bound it tightly with a clean rag bandage. It grew back, if a little lopsided.
Like his closest sister Nell, Tom went at first to the school in the centre of Queenstown, then to the newer South Queenstown school. After finishing his schooling, he began an apprenticeship in the locomotive workshops of the Mt Lyell company, working there for 3½ years. He responded to the recruitment campaign for the Australian Imperial Force, signing up at Ross on the 13th November 1915. His service number was 5129, Private Lello, a rank he held until his discharge in 1917.
He had already spent three years as a cadet, and was by then 18 years 1 month, 5 ft 8 in tall, weighing 9 stone 5 lbs. His records give the detail: chest measurement 33 to 35.5 in, complexion ‘fair’, eyes ‘brown’. His religion was ‘C of E’. After initial training he was posted on 10th March 1916 to the 16th Reinforcement 12th Battalion at Claremont, and embarked 29th March 1916, heading for the 52nd Battalion. On the 27th September he was sent to his Unit in France at Etaples.
On 24th November, while ‘in the field’, he absented himself from a working party, but before he could complete his punishment was found to be sick with Trench Foot and hospitalised on 2nd December. He returned to his unit on 28th January 1917, taking up duties again on 3rd February.
His regiment was moved to the battle front in the Ypres sector in Belgium. There, on 10th June, in the Battle of Messines (7th - 12th June), he sustained injuries to his left hand and left leg. Tom was hospitalised to Colchester in Britain, then to the 3rd Auxiliary Hospital in Dartford on the 4th July. From there he was sent to the depot at Weymouth to await embarkation. It is hard to believe that his Lello grandparents, Thomas Henry and Eleanora, who were living at the The Laurels, Gravel Hill in Ludlow (Shropshire), did not visit him in hospital. After all, their own unmarried son George, Tom’s uncle, was also fighting in the war in the New Zealand Rifle Brigade. (George was killed in action late in 1918, at the age of 48.)
On 3rd July 1917 Tom was awarded the Military Medal, one of over eighty awarded to men in his regiment. On 14th August he was gazetted for his ‘conspicuous services’.
On the 25th August 1917, Tom returned to Australia on the Benalla. He arrived 24th October and was finally discharged on 14th December. An incapacity pension cut in from 23rd December 1917 at the rate of 15 shillings per fortnight, subsequently backdated one week.
Although Tom would never talk about his war experiences, and declined to join the Returned Soldier’s League of Australia, family records refer to a message from Major General G Sinclaire Macfadgan, Commander of the 4th Australian Division, congratulating Pte 5129 T. H. Lello on his coolness and courage at the Battle of Messines. A ‘congratulatory card’ was posted to his barracks in Melbourne on 4th March 1918. He applied to have his Victory Medal send to Burnie Post Office 24th May 1924, while his British War Service Medal was sent to Queenstown and signed for on 22nd October.
Tom married Thirza Edith May Hyland at Elliot on 29th April 1922. They had just one son, Dennis, born in 1926.
For a time Tom worked on the North Coast Railway, living in Burnie, but eventually set up an electrical business and is thought to have been importing radios. One of the investors in the business was Betty Aitkenhead. When Tom’s marriage failed, and Betty’s too, they moved to Melbourne in 1947 or 1948.
Tom had other troubles: in the Police Gazette for Tasmania, January 4th 1929, a notice reported that his 'motor-garage, suite Spring-street, Burnie, was unlawfully entered between 11 p.m. On 19th and 7 a.m. on 20th ultimo, and the sum of £5 in silver coin stolen therefrom: not identifiable. Entrance effected by duplicate key.' Presumably he was quick to change the lock.
He and Betty both shared a desire to work hard, invest their money in business and make more of themselves. They had joint interests in, and ran, two boarding houses, first in St Kilda, then
later in Armidale. In Melbourne, Tom owned a motor garage in Werribee in about 1951, and later Straightway Motors in Nepean Highway. It is still, as at May 2005, running at 1240 Nepean Highway, Cheltenham, under the name given to it by Tom.
He also later owned a large house sub-divided into several small flats in Irving Street, Malvern, and another in Greeves Street, St Kilda, sold to pay death duties (although intended to fund his grandson’s training as a doctor). Betty owned a house in Winter Street in Malvern, from at least 1956, and maybe a couple of years before. This is where they both lived. Irving St was close by.
At St Kilda, Tom also ran a fast-food outlet. During this time, his niece Francie moved to Melbourne and lived under his roof for a while, helping in the boarding house, and serving hamburgers in the food bar. After his father died, Tom’s mother Bessie also spent time with him in Melbourne, flying over from Hobart at least once.
His niece Mary Simon, née Ellison, daughter of Tom’s sister Edie, went to stay with them there on a visit. She and a girlfriend had a mainland holiday when they were seventeen in 1952 or so, but after two weeks in Sydney (where they spent all their money), left for Melbourne. Mary said Tom and Betty were ‘absolutely lovely’ to them. Tom took them to Luna Park (the big fun-fair park in Melbourne) and ‘made them go on all the rides’. Tom was ‘rather handsome and quite jovial’.
This is an interesting additional slant on Tom’s nature, to set alongside an observation by a grandson that he seemed slightly scary (as older men can seem to children), and one from a niece that he was money-conscious and too keen on hard work, and a man to ‘watch’. His sister Nell complained that his war experiences had changed his nature, and that he was ‘never the same again.’
In later life, Tom spent periods of time in the warmer, moister, climate of Brisbane on medical advice to help with his breathing difficulties. It is thought he only had one lung, the consequence of poisoning by chlorine gas in the trenches at Messines. (Mustard gas was only used after Tom had left the battle front.)
One of his grandsons remembers visiting him in the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital in Melbourne on at least two occasions in the year or two before he died. He had been admitted for short periods, again, because of breathing problems, whether asthma or emphysema. Tom himself attributed this to his exposure to poison gas during the First World War.
Tom’s son Dennis and his wife, warned that Tom was very ill, went to Brisbane for two weeks with their young twins (Allan and John) in 1959. Thomas Henry died at the Repatriation Hospital for war veterans while they were there. Dennis was the only person to attend his father’s funeral – it was not the custom in Australia at the time for women to attend funerals. Tom’s body was returned to Melbourne, where he was cremated at Springvale.
Tom’s son Dennis married Betty’s daughter Olive, presenting Tom with four grandsons. Another grandson was born after Tom’s death.
There are, as at May 2005, nine great-grandchildren. Tom’s wife Thirza lived on until 1993, dying at Hervey Bay in Queensland.