Vernon Clinch Nelson was born in 1936, the youngest child of Broomehill sheep farmer William Alfred Nelson and his wife Victoria Imelda nee Clinch. They’d married in 1924 and had four older children: Gerald, Bill, Colin, and Beth.
Vernon missed each of his older brothers as they left for school at Katanning, and then joined the RAAF during the Second World War. Eventually Vernon and Beth were the only children still at home on the farm.
Beth told us he was always a happy, delightfully cheeky lad, but after she left for schooling in Albany, Vernon was a bit lonely so, in January 1948, aged 12, his mother sent him off for a good religious education with the Marist Brothers at St Ildephonsus College (SIC), in New Norcia. This is the earliest of Newman College’s antecedent schools, and a long 400km north of the Nelson's Broomehill farm.
Vernon arrived at New Norcia with a new pair of leather school shoes; he wasn't used to wearing them as, being a farm boy, he was usually in bare feet.
He settled well into Sixth Class, was noted as being one of its keenest students and, as the 1948 yearbook reports, “within a month he had won, by his cheery way and winsome smile, a host of friends”.
On 19 March 1948, just six weeks after he’d arrived, a massive, late summer thunderstorm rolled towards the college’s tall brick walls. Vernon and quite a few other boys were sent up to close the windows of the four dormitories, on the middle and top floors. There were seven windows in Vernon's dormitory, on the top floor.
Half an hour later he was found on the ground, near the corner of the building on a gravel path, with a compound fracture of the thigh, internal injuries and what turned out to be a fatal compound fracture of the skull.
Our Brother Noel Hickey had studied at SIC from 1937-1941 and, in 1948, had come back to the School where he was teaching and in charge of a dormitory. He remembers the shockwaves which rippled through the College at the time, and told us that Father Isidore Ruiz, a Benedictine priest, came to give Vernon the last rites. They carefully carried him up the steep stairs and laid his body out on a bed in an upper room surrounded with candles. The Brothers, one by one including Noel, then sat in shifts with him until the time came to gently carry him down again, so he could be taken to Moora, 50km away, for inquest.
The inquest, which concluded in April, determined Vernon's death was accidental, and that there was no blame attached to anyone. He was alone in the dormitory and half the windows were closed. It’s thought, in order to reach out to the latch on the next large open window, he had stood on a bed or cupboard and, in the shoes he was still getting used to wearing, lost his footing and slipped out the window he was trying to close. The inquest recommended safety bars be fitted to these windows so it never happened again.
The tragedy was reported in the 1948 yearbook:
"Friday, 19th - It is our painful duty to record the death by accident of Vernon Nelson, a pupil who came this year. Those of us who knew his perpetual smile, that spelt nothing but friendliness, feel sure that he has reached his home in Heaven. We extend our deepest sympathy to his relatives.”
His sister Beth, who turns 90 later this year, told us she’d had to go home from school to look after the farm while her parents went on their sad journey to New Norcia. There, their youngest son was carried through a guard of honour formed by his friends and classmates, before being laid to rest in New Norcia Cemetery. She remembers they didn’t speak much about it once they came home; their grief was too raw.
Despite Vernon’s fall being just over 73 years ago, he has never been forgotten. In raising her own family, Beth named her younger son Vernon, in memory of her beautiful, cheeky younger brother.
Further, SIC Old Boy Peter McEvoy (1945-1949), vividly remembers Vernon, his little moon face, his lovely sunny nature and his boyish shenanigans. His voice shook with emotion as he told us he had been one of Vernon’s pallbearers and, like Brother Noel, visits his grave on every trip to New Norcia.
He asked that we let Vernon's family know "he was such a lovely, *lovely* boy, and he has never been forgotten by this nearly 89-year-old Old Boy.”
Nor will we forget him, now.
