HE CALLS her Marples and she refers to him affectionately as Sherlock. He is a determined, quiet cop with a forensic background, while she is a chatty grandmother with degrees in social research and 30 years of genealogy experience. They live vastly different lives on opposite sides of the continent, but West Australian Sandra Playle and Victorian Tim Lycett are united by one, singular passion: to give identities to the men buried in the shadow of Fromelles‘ tiny Pheasant Wood.
These men, even boys, died in France on July 19 to 20, 1916, in what the Australian War Memorial calls Australia’s ”worst 24 hours”. In a battle intended in part as a diversion to the Battle of the Somme, 80 kilometres to the south, Australians saw their first action on the Western Front: 5533 were killed, wounded or captured.
Playle and Lycett have spent two years hunched over their computers, slogging through papers and microfiche, trudging through rural cemeteries and poring over photos of headstones in a bid to build family trees for the 191 men whose bodies are believed to be those buried in eight German-dug mass graves in a field below the Fromelles church.
They believe they have the paperwork to prove that another four men are probably buried in those pits but have yet to be added to the official working list.
Read the full article in the Brisbane Times.
