HMAS Sydney’s Unknown Sailor is finally named as Thomas Welsby Clark
They called him the Unknown Sailor when his remains washed up after the sinking of HMAS Sydney. Now he has a name.
He was a strapping young accountant from Brisbane who had served in the army before finding a berth as an able seaman on HMAS Sydney, the pride of the navy. How the nation grieved when the warship was ambushed and sunk by a German raider on that black day exactly 80 years ago, with the loss of all 645 hands.
They called him the Unknown Sailor and his desiccated remains, which washed up on Christmas Island 11 weeks after the disaster, were all that was ever found of the ship’s gallant company who died to the last man.
Much like the fate of the Sydney itself, his life was a mystery.
On Friday, he is being given back his name. He has a face, a family, a story that can at last be told to close the circle on Australia’s worst maritime disaster.
The Unknown Sailor is Thomas Welsby Clark and he was 21, tall and fair, with the world at his feet. He had transferred to the Sydney barely four months before its fateful run-in with the disguised enemy gunship Kormoran on November 19, 1941 in a lonely reach of the Indian Ocean, 200km west of Steep Point, Western Australia.
Clark would have had options. His paternal grandfather, James Clark, was an orphan who lifted himself out of poverty to become one of Queensland’s richest men. Young Thomas’s education and social standing meant he could have easily gone for officer’s rank. Instead, as the war clouds gathered in March 1939, he enlisted in the Militia – forerunner to today’s Army Reserve – as a humble private with the Queensland Cameron Highlanders. His older brothers, Arthur and James, also joined up.
But the sea was where his heart lay. Clark was discharged from the Militia on August 23, 1940, and immediately entered the Naval Reserve. At the prestigious Slade School in Warwick, west of Brisbane, he had been a keen and useful competitive swimmer. Yachting was another passion. After working on the family properties and oyster leases in Brisbane – his father was a prominent grazier while mother Marion Welsby descended from Scottish immigrants who arrived in Victoria in the early 1850s for the gold rush – Clark had gone into accounting.
His attention to detail soon recommended him for specialist training at the anti-submarine warfare training school, HMAS Rushcutter, in Sydney where he qualified as a submarine detector.
He was promoted from ordinary seaman to acting able seaman on July 15, 1941, before completing a course at HMAS Cerebus, the Royal Australian Navy’s premier training depot.
He joined HMAS Sydney in August 1941 after the sleek, powerfully gunned light cruiser completed an action-packed deployment with the British Mediterranean fleet, where it sank two Italian warships while barely suffering a scratch. Sydney was considered a lucky ship, the first in the RAN to be equipped with ASDIC, an acoustic device to hunt submarines. In all likelihood, Clark’s battle station would have been at or near the ASDIC repeater off the bridge.
The Sydney’s luck well and truly ran out when it encountered the Kormoran, masquerading as a Dutch-flagged freighter. At 5pm on November 19, the Australian warship approached to within 1300m of the disguised German raider – point blank range. The crew was at general quarters, with Sydney’s six-inch batteries and secondary guns trained on the Kormoran, according to the German account.
The carnage would have been terrible when the Kormoran suddenly unmasked and opened up. More than 1000 shells are estimated to have struck the Sydney. The cruiser’s bridge and control tower were raked, likely killing many of the ship’s officers. Captain Joseph Burnett, who was blamed by a 2009 commission of inquiry for foolishly bringing his ship into such lethal proximity to the German guns, could have done little to avert the tragedy had he lived through the opening salvos.
But the Sydney went down fighting, inflicting what turned out to be fatal damage to the Kormoran, before disappearing into the night, ablaze from bow to stern.
Glenys MacDonald, the amateur sleuth who has spent more than two decades unravelling the mystery of the Unknown Sailor, said Clark was probably blown overboard in the frenzied exchange of gunfire.
Somehow, the young man ended up in a canvas Carley float. By the time this drifted into Christmas Island harbour on February 6, 1942, his blue navy-issue overalls had been bleached white by the tropical sun. The dried-out corpse was found in a kneeling position, suggesting, according to Ms MacDonald, that Clark had been lifted into the raft by someone else. If he was alive at that point, he could not have survived long – a hunk of shrapnel had pierced his skull.
A second, empty raft now displayed at the Australian War Memorial and a lifejacket were all that was found of the Sydney, along with the Unknown Sailor, until the wreck was discovered in 2008 about 20km southeast of that of the Kormoran.
The heavily damaged German ship had been scuttled by the crew, who mostly survived.
Chief of Navy Michael Noonan, who also has a personal investment in this story, agrees that Sydney probably exploded catastrophically when flames engulfed its magazines, almost certainly killing those still alive. “I think the end was quite sudden,” he told The Australian.
Clark’s unidentified remains were buried on Christmas Island before the Australian garrison was evacuated and the Japanese occupied the remote outpost, 2600km northwest of Perth. They trashed the local record registries and the gravesite was lost.
Then by chance, a former local named Brian O’Shannassy handed Ms MacDonald a photo of the Unknown Sailor’s resting place he had taken in the 1950s. She swung into action, convincing the navy to mount a renewed search for the grave, bringing Vice Admiral Noonan, then more modestly ranked, into the hunt.
On November 19, 2008 – the 67th anniversary of the sinking – the still-unidentified remains were reinterred at the Commonwealth War Graves cemetery in Geraldton, WA, with full naval honours.
But who was the Unknown Sailor? Ms MacDonald, 73, didn’t give up the search for an answer, and nor did Admiral Noonan.
“I thought we owed that to all those men who died on the Sydney,” the tenacious woman said.
The leaps and bounds made in DNA identification technology were brought into play by the Navy’s Sea Power Centre for research and the Australian Federal Police’s famed forensics teams. Bit by bit, the pool of possible matches was whittled down.
It helped that Clark had been on the tall side for the time, standing at about 180cm, and possessed a mouthful of gold fillings. The limited dental records of the crew were pulled. But the breakthrough came when lab workers managed to extract mitochondrial DNA from his teeth. Other samples collected in 2006 from the body, tested and retested over the years as techniques improved, uncovered both mitochondrial DNA passed from mother to child and the Y chromosome passed from father to son. Two direct living relatives of Clark were identified, allowing Admiral Noonan to break the news to the family last week that he was the Unknown Sailor.
At a graveside ceremony in Geraldton on Friday a new plaque will be unveiled etched with his name, laying to rest eight decades of uncertainty and heartache.
“It’s such a very tragic story of service and fortitude in the face of adversity,” the navy boss said.
“And … certainly as far as the navy is concerned, we are just so pleased to be able to identify this sailor and give him back to his family.”
Ms MacDonald will be on hand as well on Friday, grateful that this last chapter of the HMAS Sydney story can be closed.
“This has been a big part of my life,” she said quietly.
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