Anzac medal mystery tale has a happy ending for Frank Perrin

IN a tale worthy of a Hollywood movie, a World War I medallion last seen in the 1930s has been returned to its Melbourne owners on the eve of the Anzac centenary.

Wheelers Hill resident Frank Perrin's grandfather Frederick Edgar Williams died in WWI and a plaque honouring him was found in a paddock in Gippsland decades later. Frank is a resident at the Weary Dunlop Retirement Village. Picture: Steve Tanner

A WORLD War I medallion last seen in the 1930s has been returned to its owners on the eve of the Anzac centenary.

The plaque, unearthed in a Gippsland paddock, was originally given to the widow of Australian soldier Frederick Edgar Williams, who died in France shortly before the end of the war.

Frederick was a battlefield runner in the 16th Australian Infantry Battalion, delivering messages on the battlefield via bicycle.

Wheelers Hill man Frank Perrin, 83, never got to meet his grandfather and his widowed grandmother was silent on the matter.

“Our family was pretty close, but even when I was little we didn’t talk about grandfather much,” Mr Perrin said.

“I knew he was in the war, but it was never discussed. I wish it had been.”

Mr Perrin knew his grandfather only by a framed photograph of a young man in uniform on his grandmother’s wall, two service medals and a bronze memorial plaque or medallion.

The medallion reads “Frederick Edgar Williams: He died for freedom and honour”.

About 12cm wide, it depicts Brittania holding a trident and an oak wreath, standing beside a lion. It was one of more than one million medallions issued to the next-of-kin of British and Empire service personnel who died in WWI and is commonly known as a “dead man’s penny”.

“My grandmother used to give it to me to play with when I was about five or six,” Mr Perrin said.

Mr Perrin said he was overseas when his grandmother died, and he assumed the memorabilia had passed into his mother’s possession. But when his mother died years later, there was no trace of the artefacts.

Mr Perrin never expected to see the medallion again.

Then, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, a woman rang to say she had found a brass plaque with his grandfather’s name on it.

Frank Perrin at Ballarat’s Avenue of Honour with the WWI medallion honouring his grandfather Frederick Edgar Williams.

Mr Perrin said he was astounded to get the phone call, and even more amazed to be holding the plaque in his hands again in December for the first time in years.

“If only it could talk, it could tell us where it’s been,” Mr Perrin said.

It was Mirboo North woman Bernice Snell, mother of Opals player Belinda Snell, who cracked the mystery of the brass medallion with the help of her daughter-in-law and co-detective Yvonne.

Yvonne’s mother, Wilma Mackay, stumbled across the medallion nearly two decades ago when she was mowing grass in a paddock on their Poowong dairy farm.

“There’s a little bit of a bank about 1.5 foot high that I mow with a hand mower, and it just happened to nick something hard and I thought, ‘what’s that?’,” Mrs Mackay said.

“It glinted a bit in the sun, so I got the garden shovel and dug it up and there was the plaque.”

Mrs Mackay said the couple had lived at the farm for over four decades and she had mowed the lawn countless times.

After a few attempts to track down the soldier’s relatives, including a trip to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, the medallion was tucked away and forgotten about until last year.

With the Anzac centenary looming, the medallion came up in conversation between Mrs Mackay and the Snells, leading to Mrs Snell and her daughter-in-law poring through census records, electoral rolls and WWI enlistment forms.

The detective duo started with their mystery soldier, Frederick Williams, and worked their way down the family tree until they tracked down Mr Perrin’s half-brother in Queensland, who directed them to Frank.

Mrs Snell said it remained unclear how the plaque ended up buried on a Gippsland dairy farm.

“Nobody knows how it got there, perhaps it came in a load of soil, but we can’t know for sure,” Mrs Snell said.

Mrs Mackay said she was “tickled pink” to have been able to reunite the medallion with the soldier’s grandson before the Anzac centenary.

Meanwhile, the pieces of the puzzle continued to fall into place for the Perrin family. Mr Perrin’s daughter Alex Rasmussen, who lives in Ballarat, discovered her great-grandfather not only grew up in her hometown but a tree was planted in his name on Ballarat’s Avenue of Honour.

Mr Perrin visited the tree on Boxing Day last year.

His son, Lloyd, plans to take a vial of soil from beneath the tree to scatter on his grandfather’s grave in France later this year, and bring a vial of French soil back to Ballarat.

Mr Perrin said as a young boy he used to go to Anzac Day marches with his grandmother and then later with his own children but let the tradition slip in recent years.

This year, he plans to attend a service at the Weary Dunlop Retirement Village in Wheelers Hill.

“It’s very emotional because it’s been so long,” Mr Perrin said.

“I’ve thought about my grandfather this year more than any other year.”