Letters from my Grandfather

When My Mum died, I was given an old cardboard box full of my grandfather's stuff.  I used to call him Granf.

Henry Peter (he always preferred to call himself Peter) was born in 1892, the seventh child of Danish sea captain, Christen Lauritz Rasmussen, and Irishwoman Anne Murray. Their ninth child, Valdemar had died of measles at 14 months old. Christen had to make the child’s coffin himself and bury his own baby son on the property. Granf’s younger brother Francis became a Marist Priest and a Doctor of Divinity, who taught at the Marist Seminary at Greenmeadows, Hastings for many years.

The Rasmussen family farmed stock in Little Wanganui, near Karamea on the South Island’s West Coast. Later they moved to Lyell - now an overgrown wasteland in the Buller Gorge, where they ran a public house and general store. The pub was one of eighty or so along the West Coast after the gold rush days of the 1800s. Today, there’s not one standing.

Peter attended St. Patrick’s College, Wellington as a boarder and excelled in Latin and English, no doubt stimulating his life-long love of poetry and languages. Interrupting a law degree half way through, he joined the Canterbury Mounted Rifles in 1913, leaving from Westport to fight in World War 1. His beloved horses were unsuited to the conditions at Gallipoli and were destroyed. He then joined the Wellington Battalion.

After surviving trench warfare, Peter was one of only 70 survivors of the 760 soldiers who on 8th August 1915, gained and then attempted to hold the hill of Chunuk Bair, which overlooked the crucial Dardanelles strait. They could have turned the tide of World War II, but British reinforcements arrived too late, and Chunuk Bair was lost after only two days.

After the withdrawal he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps and after a total of five hours of flight training, crashed his open cockpit biplane, incurring serious facial and shoulder injuries. A convalescence of eight weeks in Malta saw him back to his station in Suez where he got straight back into flying, doing bombing raids and reconnaissance missions over Egypt, Turkey and Mesopotamia. Bombing was pretty hit or miss. You found the target, flew in low and released the bomb rack underneath the plane by pulling a cord. One raid not far from Jerusalem nearly ended in disaster when he crashed a plane with a full rack of bombs still on board. Luckily they didn’t detonate.

After the war, he continued his military career in England and then India, being lured by his lifelong love of Kipling’s poetry. Spending five years in the Indian Army Service Corps, he finally returned to Westport to see his parents into retirement and nurse his mother. There he met Annie Isobel Brown, the daughter of a Geordie coalmine owner and his New Zealand born Irish wife. Ironically Granf had taught Annie Isobel when he was a 17 year-old trainee teacher and she an eight year-old pupil. They married in 1928.