LEADING SEAMAN JOHN (JACK) NICHOLAS DALTON 2259 RAN
Jack Dalton was born in Essendon Victoria in February 1897 and joined HMAS Tingara as a Boy 2ndClass in October 1912. He was advanced to Boy 1st Class in August 1913 before posting to the Light Cruiser HMAS Sydney in October of that year. He was advanced to Ordinary Seaman 2nd Class on his 17thBirthday. His brother Able Seaman Martin Joseph Dalton 7339 had been in the ANF and the RAN before deserting in 1913. Martin later joined the AIF under his real name serving in a Light Trench Mortar unit. Martin passed in Sandford Victoria in 1958 so is quite possibly interred in the Sandford Cemetery (A secondary Challenge).
On 1 July 1914 Jack also deserted, however it appears that he took advantage of an amnesty granted to deserters after the outbreak of war and he turned himself into HMAS Cerberus on the 17th of August. In February 1915 he joined HMAS Una and a month later the former hydrographic sloop HMAS Fantome, where he was advanced to Ordinary Seaman 1st class in February 1915. He would remain on Fantome until December 1915 at which time he posted to the old Protected Cruiser HMAS Psyche which had been reactivated for service on the Eastern Seaboard of Australia.
Jack was advanced to Able Seaman in January 1917 and in October he was posted to Cerberus again almost certainly for his passage to the Adriatic to join the Torpedo Boat Destroyer (TBD) HMAS Parramatta in March 1918. Over the next two years he would serve on Parramatta and her sister TBDs, HMAS Torrens and Swan. He was advanced to Leading Seaman in 1920. The last fourteen months of his naval service would be spent in turn on the Destroyer HMAS ANZAC, the sloop HMAS Marguerite, and the Heavy Cruiser HMAS Australia, he received a free discharge as a special request from the RAN in April 1921.
In 1927 Jack married Cecily Pitts in Melbourne. Tragically they would lose two infant sons, one in 1927 and a second in 1929 and then Cecily would pass after giving birth to a daughter in 1930. He moved to Warrnambool, where he managed the Hotel Victoria. Here he would meet and later marry Elizabeth Wingham, a widow five years his senior. The couple eventually moved to Healesville and after Elizabeth passed in 1957, Jack married Mary Phillips, a local Healesville woman.
Jack Dalton passed away in Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital on the 6th of January 1978. He is buried in the Healesville Cemetery with his third wife Mary who passed in 2000.
Their gravestone is black with gold writing with an engraved cross to the left of Jack and Mary's name.
