A blood-red bougainvillea umbrellas the place where an injustice has hidden in plain sight for over a century. Fat fingers is probably to blame. I told a version of this story on West Bremer Radio.

Harold Franklin Laidlaw was a family friend of an Ipswich ghost, he and his brothers are commemorated at his mother’s church, one brother is even memorialised at their school, a nephew was the federal minister for finance, but Harold has been aggrieved in his own hometown for over one hundred years and it needs to be corrected.

Harold was born in Brisbane, Queensland, in 1887 the third of eleven siblings. The children all attended Hemmant state school. The boys then went to The Southport School where they were among the very early pupils.

Harold’s father was a merchant at Wynnum where he died in 1910 leaving his wife and eleven children as young as seven-years-old, and an estate valued at £11,000 – that’s more than nine million dollars in today’s money. The family then moved to a home called “Dunaross” on Heidelberg Street in East Brisbane. This is the same house in which Queensland’s first Australian-born governor would later grow-up.

After his father died in 1910, one of Harold’s brothers was killed in a car accident at Birkdale in 1912, and another died in 1915.

Harold by then had established himself as a farmer at Laidley in the Lockyer Valley, enjoying social events there, and was a leading member of the rifle club.

He was then the oldest of three brothers who enlisted together in May 1916 for the First World War. Harold, Henry, and Arthur. They were all members of the 52nd Battalion in the same platoon and went to war on the same ship.

Once in France, Harold was badly wounded in an attack on the Hindenburg Line in April 1917 when he was riddled with bullets. He was in hospital in England when the youngest of the brothers twenty-year-old Arthur was killed by a machine gun in the battle of Messines in June, and the other brother Henry was shot in the jaw in the same battle the very next day.

Back home in Australia, Harold’s youngest sister married and had a son Eric Robinson who later became the federal finance minister in the Fraser government.

Harold himself married and in the 1930s entertained Brisbane society, and hosted guests at their holiday home on the Esplanade at Southport. At one stage they put on a luncheon at Brisbane’s Rowe’s Café in honour of close friend Claude Lightoller. Rowe’s was a really upmarket establishment that was the cultural icon of the time. Claude was the son of Ipswich doctor Harry Lightoller, and the brother of Ipswich-born Minnie who today is the ghost of Dovercourt at Toowong.

All three of the Laidlaw brothers who went to war are today commemorated in their mother’s Mowbray Town Presbyterian Church in East Brisbane. The church was built on land donated by Ipswich’s Elizabeth Mowbray formerly Macalister.

The youngest Arthur is also commemorated on the Menin Gate Memorial at Ypres in Belgium, and on the honour board at The Southport School.

Meanwhile, Harold is remembered on the Laidley War Memorial Gates (see picture at top of the page) – well sort of anyway. You see, the name on the gate is not Harold’s initials of H.F. Laidlaw but instead H.C. Laidlaw in error.

It’s been that way for over a century and is probably the result of a wayward typist and the letter C being right below F in a typewriters keyboard.

I’ve contacted the Laidley Returned & Services League (RSL) Sub Branch and they are keen to help to get it fixed. But there are some difficult questions to be answered including how to change engraved marble, who pays for it, and presumably the gates are heritage-listed so that needs to be navigated.

When I visited the memorial, it was bathed poignantly in the flowers of a blood-red bougainvillea. It may appear to be a minor error, but it’s an important one that should be corrected to properly honour Harold and his family.

I’ve successfully had honour boards corrected at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, and at the Chatby War Memorial Cemetery in Alexandria, Egypt, so hopefully Laidley won’t be too hard.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO A VERSION OF THIS STORY TOLD LIVE ON RADIO.

Photo credits:
Laidley War Memorial Gates – Harold Peacock 2023.
Three brothers Arthur Bridgeman, Henry Hunter, and Harold Franklin Laidlaw – Australian War Memorial P09438.001.
Old Mowbray Presbyterian Church honour board – Harold Peacock 2023 20231130_154504.
Laidley War Memorial Gates erroneous inscription – Harold Peacock 2023.