Conduit Allen

Allen was born in Ballarat in 1918. Sadly he never knew his father Harry who died when Allen was only 18 months old. Harry Conduit was a gold miner and died from pneumonia as a result of working in a wet mine.
Allen’s mother Ruby took her young family to Ararat for nine years and then to Castlemaine where she died at the age of 35 in 1935. Allen was 17, homeless, unskilled and without work, and he joined the hundreds of young country men flocking to Melbourne in search of work in those difficult post Depression days.
Allen was fortunate to have a friend who introduced him to Rev. Nicholls at St Mark’s Church in Fitzroy. Rev. Nicholls – with the assistance of several Melbourne businessmen and politicians (includling Sir George Knox) – was setting up a Boys’ Home in Lysterfield to accommodate orphaned English and Irish lads. Allen was young, fit and eager to work, and Rev. Nicholls appointed him as the foreman of the farm under the managers, Mr and Mrs Knipe.

To Lysterfield
The Boys’ Home was established on the old ‘Sweet Hills’ property formerly owned by one of Lysterfield’s best known residents, Gus Powell. The property was located south of the present large Spanish style home at the junction of Wellington and Lysterfield Roads.
Gus Powell’s old home became the manager’s residence and one of Allen’s first jobs was to dismantle the old sheds including the stall of Mosstrooper, Gus Powell’s famous racehorse. He also cut down and trimmed a number of trees to make poles to carry the electricity connection to the property. Meanwhile, contractors were constructing the two dormitories, each of which were to accommodate 12 boys. A few months later Mr and Mrs Wraith took over as managers and an English couple, Mr and Mrs Jackson, were appointed as cook
and housekeeper.

The Farm
The Home was established as a working dairy farm with a herd of good quality milkers. Allen taught the boys how to milk, separate cream and make butter. He also helped train them in the many tasks necessary on a farm: fencing, caring for the animals (which included pigs, sheep and poultry), vegetable and fruit production, the harvesting of maize and grass hay, chaff cutting etc.
The boys were all about 14 years of age which was the school leaving age in those days so there was no provision made for them to continue their education. However, they could all read and write and sent letters home to family and friends.
They rose early to milk before breakfast and had rest periods during the day before doing the evening milking. They didn’t play games very much but enjoyed listening to the wireless and they all looked forward to the trip by truck to the pictures in Dandenong on Tuesday nights. The only other diversion for them was when they went to neighbouring farms to help. One of those farms was owned by Mark Foy, a Melbourne wholesale fruit and vegetable merchant, and Allen became a good friend of one of his sons, Frank. Allen cannot remember the the boys receiving any pocket money; he himself was paid 35 shillings a week.
The food was good, the boys were fairly treated and generally they got on well together. Their behaviour, as a result, was good with the exception of one Irish lad who was a bit of a trouble maker (and who, some years later, was deported back to Ireland).

Snakes and Other ‘Wild’ Animals
There were many black snakes and copperheads on the property and Allen had a close brush with one that slithered between his legs as he was running past the house one day. There were two wells and the snakes could often be seen in summer lying along boards just above water level in the wells.
With so many boys paying attention to them, many of the young farm animals became pets and, of course, later grew to become real nuisances. A case in point was a bull calf who became too boisterous as he grew bigger. One day he charged at Allen who had to jump for his life over a fence. Another spoilt animal was a pet lamb that grew into a bossy sheep. One day Reverend and Mrs Nicholls were visiting and were told that the sheep had to go. Mrs Nicholls protested saying that they must keep such a lovely animal. However, no sooner had she turned her back when the sheep charged and butted her, sending her flying. Mrs Nicholls immediately changed her opinion of ‘that lovely animal’.

War Approaches
Allen enjoyed going to the dances at the Lysterfield Hall. Many years later after returning safely from the war he was presented with a travelling rug at the Hall at a special function to welcome back the local diggers.
Frank Foy owned an old Morris car that had had its body knocked off in an accident. He bolted an old rocking chair to the chassis for the driver’s seat while passengers made do with a couple of boards placed across the open chassis. In this way they travelled to dances at places like Berwick, Upwey and Belgrave.
Allen and Frank joined the militia and travelled into the city once a week for training with the 4th Division Signals at Albert Park. When war broke out in September 1939 they were called up but Allen was rejected because he was slightly deaf in one ear. However, in the following year the army accepted his enlistment and Allen was drafted into the 2/23 Infantry Battalion, a unit that was destined to record an outstanding service history over the following years in the Middle East and the Pacific.

Rats of Tobruk
After his enlistment in the 2nd AIF in early 1940, Allen was posted to Seymour where he trained with a signals unit. Later he was sent to Albury to be part of the newly formed 2/23rd Battalion – ‘Albury’s Own’ as it became known. The battalion embarked aboard the Strathmore in November 1940 and sailed to Palestine where they became part of the 9th Division. After further training they were sent to North Africa where the German Desert Corps under Field Marshal Rommel had taken over from the Italians. The allied forces were pushed back from Benghazi to Tobruk where they formed the garrison that held out the Germans for seven months and in so doing earned themselves the title of the ‘Rats of Tobruk’. “They pounded us every day,” Allen recalls, “but we got used to it in the end.”
The 2/23rd troops occupied the Italian concrete fortifications and used the captured Italian field guns to shoot back at them. They didn’t just lie low in the fortifications. Patrols went out regularly into the surrounding desert at night and often came back with “a heap of Italian prisoners”.
The garrison of about 35,000 troops was supplied every night by a small fleet of old Australian destroyers that left Alexandria in Egypt at sunset and raced to Tobruk Harbour under cover of darkness. The rations supplied under these circumstances were very basic, mainly tinned bully beef and dry biscuits. Morale was good among the troops and there were plenty of examples of Aussie humour. One Allen recalls was a signpost pointing back to Australia showing ‘12,000 miles to Griffiths Tea’.
Despite the bombings they found time for swimming at the beach and playing cricket and football and were entertained by concert parties. One extraordinary event Allen recalls was the discovery that one of the soldiers in the battalion was only fourteen years old. He had joined up with his father who was also a member of the 2/23rd.
Their commanding officer was a Melbourne architect Bernard Evans, who later became the Lord Mayor of Melbourne.
After seven months they were relieved by South African troops and Allen recalls sailing out of Alexandria aboard the fastest destroyer in the British navy; it could race along at 45 knots!

The Battle of El Alamein
They were able to regroup for a few months in Palestine and Syria before being sent back to the Western Desert to prepare for a major battle. They trained intensively for weeks and knew something big was coming up when visited by Field Marshal Montgomery and the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.
When the campaign was finally launched Allen was in the thick of it when 2,000 guns opened fire. The ground and the air were vibrating. Harry received his only wound throughout the entire war during that battle. While operating the radio aboard a Bren gun carrier a tracer bullet grazed the top of one of his fingers. He recalls with a laugh that the wound only needed to be dressed with a band aid. However, he had many other close escapes. One day Stukas, German dive-bombers, attacked the battalion HQ. Allen didn’t have time to reach the trenches and lay flat on the ground with huge craters blown out all around him. Another dav he was checking telephone lines on an old motorbike when Italian artillery opened fire, sending him racing back to the safety of his lines. He had a close shave too while out at night about six miles into the desert repairing equipment in an underground listening post. When he crawled out of the hole he found that his patrol had gone but he reached base safely by hurrying in the dark while running the telephone line through his hand all the way as a guide.

Pacific Service
After the victory at EI Alamein the troops embarked from Suez aboard the New Amsterdam bound for home. It wasn’t long, however, before they regrouped for jungle training in North Queensland and then headed off to fight the Japanese. They first fought at Milne Bay and then were part of the sea-borne landing at Lae. Four Japanese planes bombed Allen’s landing craft and thirty men were killed. Allen and the other survivors had to crawl over the bodies of their dead mates to make it ashore. Allen survived further landings at Finschhafen, Morotai and Tarakan before peace was declared. He finished the war with the rank of sergeant and was one of only sixty original members of the battalion that survived all its campaigns.

Married to Jean
Because of his expertise in telephony, Allen soon found a job after the war with the PMG and later with the British Automatic Telephone Company for whom he was on call to maintain and repair traffic signals throughout Melbourne. In 1949 he met Jean and they were married twelve months later. Their marriage of 51 years has given them four sons and eight grandchildren of whom they are immensely proud.
Interviewed by Bryan Power