Driver Archibald Johnstone (back, left), 10th Field Artillery Brigade

Photo taken 22 May 1919

Archibald Johnstone, pictured back left, lived with his parents in George Street, Queens Park. He was a bugler and is one of The Soldiers of Barrack Street. At just 16, he is one of the youngest lads in the Collection, enlisting with his parents’ permission in June 1916.

Assigned to the 38th Battery of the 10th Field Artillery Brigade as a driver, he went to Melbourne for further training and from there to England in February 1917. He reached the front in June, still aged only 17.

He served throughout the rest of the war with the Field Artillery - safely, but not unscathed. In February 1919, three months after the war ended, he was admitted to hospital with debility, often a euphemism for shell shock, and returned to Western Australia on 3 May aged 19. This photo was taken 19 days later.

Archibald’s mother, Laura, is seated in front of Archibald. She is dressed in the unrelieved black of widowhood, for Archibald’s father William had died in April 1918. Laura was a well known comic actress and dancer under her maiden name Laura South, and was the daughter of another famous Australian stage actress, Fanny Wiseman.

Seated front right is Laura’s oldest daughter, Archibald’s older sister, Esther (21), known as Essie. Behind her is the first of her three husbands, Bill O’Reilly (38). Bill had enlisted in WWI in March 1915 and served as a driver in the 5th Divisional Train. He returned to Australia in February 1919. Four days later, his wife, Maud, had him in divorce court.

Despite Essie having promised herself to her sweetheart, John Flowers who was still away at war, Bill and Essie, who was expecting, were quietly married at Mundijong on 22 May 1919. This is their wedding photo.

However Bill’s divorce from his first wife Maud was not yet final, and Bill and Essie were both charged with bigamy! Essie pleaded ignorance and though the judge doubted that was the case, she escaped formal punishment. After three months of indifferent treatment from Bill, she divorced him in September 1919… with Maud O’Reilly testifying on her behalf!

Bill was then arrested in Yarloop on the bigamy charge in November and, pleading guilty, was sentenced to three months, which he served in Fremantle prison.

In 1922 Essie’s wartime sweetheart, John Flowers, forgave her her fickle heart and they finally married and all was well.

…until 1926 when, according to the headlines in Truth, 24 April, “Then She Ran Off with Jimmy Hale, the Vaudeville Man (She Did Not Love Flowers).”

Of Archibald, in 1938, then aged 38, he married Edna Tanner (26). They lived at Fremantle and Archibald worked variously as a general labourer and furnace man. He died in 1977, aged 77, Edna having predeceased him in 1960.