BOY SEAMAN ARTHUR ALBERT MOSELEY 2247 RAN
Arthur Moseley was born in Wellington New Zealand on the 28th of December 1896. He was the second son of Harold and Alice Moseley. Harold was born in England and had emigrated to New Zealand where he had married Arthur’s mother Alice.
In 1998 Harold and Alice divorced and after Harold was tried for causing Bodily harm and sentenced to nine months hard labour, he moved to Australia taking his sons with him.
Arthur and his brother Clifford Cook Moseley were sent to live with their father’s brother Clifford Moseley in Bowraville on the Mid-North Coast. At the time Albert enlisted in the RAN on the 1st of October 1912 as a Boy Seaman 2nd Class, his father had just remarried to a Bowraville woman Alma Sullivan.
When Albert joined the navy at age 15, he was just five feet two tall (1.6m) tall. He was in the second group of boys to join the RAN’s boy training ship HMAS Tingira, closely following the first intake in June 1912. The Tingira was the former clipper ship Sobraon which had been purchased by the Federal Government for use as a training ship. It was moored in Rose Bay Sydney.
Albert would live and work on Tingira for just over twelve months before posting to the Battle Cruiser HMAS Australia in October 1913. He was promoted to Boy 1st Class on the 20th of July 1913. Tragically in late 1913, when the Australia was operating in South Australian waters, Arthur badly broke his left leg in a fall onboard the ship at sea. After treatment at sea, he was retained onboard until the ship reached Hobart in January 1914 when he was landed to Hobart Hospital where his leg was amputated. After treatment he was discharged to shore “Invalided” on the 16th of June 1914, without a pension or even a wooden leg.
Arthur’s father fought for years with the Federal Government to grant his son a pension and he had to purchase a wooden leg for Arthur himself. The only concession the government ever made was belatedly grant, on “compassionate grounds”, 25 Pounds toward the cost of the first leg, and in the 1960s a couple of pounds to pay for repairs. Arthur eventually got employment as a labourer at Cockatoo Dockyard in Sydney during the war years, a hard job for a man who was slight in stature with a disability.
The RAN had simply discarded him to return to his family home in Dulwich Hill, with the attitude that as a minor it was his parent’s responsibility to look after him.
His brother Clifford Cook Moseley joined the AIF in February 1915 as a Trooper in the 6th Light Horse. He was wounded on Gallipoli and after treatment in Malta and the UK would return to the Middle East where he would be injured again in a fall from a horse in 1918. Post War Clifford became a grazier at Point Lookout near Ebor west of Dorigo and became the first ranger at what is now the Guy Fawkes National Park. In WW2 Clifford would serve as a Lieutenant in the Militia, however he would pass away in 1949 at the relatively young age of 58.
Arthur also returned to the Nambucca Valley where he worked a variety of jobs, including as a postman riding a horse between Bowraville and the New England Plateaux, delivering mail to remote properties. No mean feat for a one-legged man.
In the 1930s Arthur returned to Sydney and he utilised the skills he had learnt on Tingira working as a rigger and for decades as a machinist making tents for Smith & Copeland Pty Ltd. He worked until his 70th birthday before retiring to the Nambucca Valley living in a house owned by a cousin. Another Cousin, Joye Thorne, for whom I am indebted to for giving me access to Arthur and his father’s letters, remembers him fondly for his love of horse racing, billiards and HMAS Tingira.
Arthur never married and eventually, when unable to care for himself, he moved into Autumn Lodge Nursing Home in Macksville where he passed away on the 26th of June 1990, aged 93. His Tombstone in the Nambucca Heads Cemetery proudly records that he was Tingira Boy #52.
