Time to remember and forget
BY DI SNEDDON
There is a photo on Jo Graham’s sideboard that many would walk past.
While doing a story about her involvement with Ourcare Services Inc. (see page 13) the image of her grandfather and the iconic Egyptian pyramids could not be overlooked.
John McGrogan volunteered for World War 1 in 1914. He spent five years on the battlefield and when the war was over it took nine months for him to get a bed on a boat to come home.
He started in the war field as a gunner, suffered shell shock and moved onto the field of ordinance.
When he came home, he never spoke about his experience. He never joined the RSL, never took part in the annual Anzac Day March and never applied for any government handout that he was entitled to.
The only evidence that he was on the front was the images his daughter, Jo, came across later in his life.
John suffered curvature of the spine from birth and Jo knows he volunteered and believes the situation must have been quite desperate for her dad to be accepted to sign up.
The images of the Egyptian pyramids, the photo of her father as a young cadet at Singleton Army Base are images she treasures about a period in her father’s life that she knows very little about.
As we all know there are things if life that sometimes you cannot talk about.
On Remembrance Day, the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we think of those who made the ultimate sacrifice and people like Mr McGrogan who witnessed and experienced such terrible atrocities and for what? To make life for his daughter, Jo Graham, and so many others across this wonderful country of ours the freedom and safety we enjoy.
Lest We Forget.