WHEN Caramut’s Gloria Dickson lines up with hundreds of other descendants of World War I soldiers today in Melbourne she’ll be proudly honouring her father’s memory.
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Hubert Leo Campbell survived the Great War virtually unscathed and later enlisted for World War II, but missed action because of illness.
Replicas of his five medals will be worn by Mrs Dickson in her first-ever Anzac Day march.
Her sole surviving sibling — Mary Keogh of Hamilton — will be watching the parade on television at home, not far from where their father lived and worked.
The sisters believe it could be the first time the medal set has been worn by a family member in a commemorative march.
“We have a deep sense of pride in our dad,” they told The Standard.
Mr Campbell, known as Leo, enlisted at the age of 25 and embarked from Victoria pier in September, 1916, among reinforcements for the 58th Battalion which had suffered heavy casualties in France only a few months earlier.
After training in the Middle East he was sent to Europe joining hostilities at Bullecourt, Ypres, Villers-Bretonneux and other significant battle grounds.
Mr Campbell suffered shellshock and non-life-threatening illnesses, but no serious wounds. He finished his service with the rank of lance corporal.
From the battlefields he went to England where he met 19-year-old Irish woman Annie O’Neill, 10 years his junior.
They married three months later in Cleator Moor before sailing to Australia where they lived for a time in Hamilton.
Opportunity came to take up a soldier’s settlement block at nearby Bochara where they ran a dairy farm and had seven children.
The Campbells left the farm in 1950 for Warrnambool where Leo obtained a job as handyman at St Joseph’s Catholic Church before becoming a nightwatchman.
He died in 1975 only 18 months after his wife.
