Veteran Of Two World Wars Missed The Action

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday November 12, 2008

Gerry Carman

SYD LUCAS

1900 - 2008

SYD LUCAS was so willing to go to war that he enlisted for both world wars. Fortune or fate, however, kept him out of the action.

Lucas was in the last batch to be conscripted into the British Army in August 1918 but the Armistice of November 11 ended the war before he could be sent to fight in France.

His death at 108 leaves only one survivor in Australia of anyone who enlisted for World War I: Claude Choules, 107, a Briton who lives in Perth. The other British veterans are Henry Allingham, 112, Harry Patch, 110, and Bill Stone, 108.

Lucas, who lived in Rosebud, Victoria, for the past 40 years, went into a nursing home only nine months ago. He had lived alone in his own home after his wife, Winifred, died 25 years ago.

He had home-help and his dinner was provided but he prepared his own breakfast, cleaned his home, pottered in the garden and liked two whiskies straight every night. His legs and eyes gave out towards the end but his mind remained bright.

Born in Leicester, Sydney Lucas joined the Sherwood Foresters in August 1918, at 17. After the Armistice was signed, he was sent home.

In 1928, he joined his wife Winifred and daughter Sylvia, who had left earlier for Australia. They settled in Coburg, where his son Howard was born.

Lucas's first job was putting a corrugated iron roof on the old Spencer Street station. It was a matter of amusement to him that the first day on the job he didn't know whether to place the first sheet in the vertical or horizontal plane.

He then worked in a garage, although he never drove on the road and never owned a car. He liked walking.

Lucas enlisted in the Australian Army in 1940 and was posted to the 2/1st Machine Gun Battalion. Shipped to Egypt, he had his gall bladder and appendix removed in Palestine and was sent back to Australia as a guard of Italian and German prisoners of war on the Queen Mary.

He said in 2005: "They reckoned I was not fit enough, so they brought me home. I was never in any fighting but it wasn't my fault. I feel like I went into the war for nothing . . . I might as well have stayed home." On his return, he worked at the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation at Fishermans Bend before returning to plumbing.

Howard Lucas said his father was very contented with his life and "wanted to go at the end . . . he said, 'I'm no use to anybody, I've had enough.' "

His sister Nellie lived to 103 and brother Frank to 99.

A funeral service will be held today, before his ashes are scattered on Rosebud beach, where the ashes of his wife were scattered 25 years ago.

Syd Lucas is survived by his octogenarian children, daughter Sylvia Clark and son Howard, two granddaughters and two great-grandsons.

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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