Messages in a Bottle From WWI Soldiers Arrive After More Than a Century
- Editor OGN Daily
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
Two Australian soldiers slipped the letters into a bottle, sealed the cap, and dropped it overboard from a ship in the Pacific Ocean during World War I.
The letters in the bottle were written by two Army privates, Malcolm Neville and William Harley, and dated 15 August 1916. At the time, Neville was 27 and Harley was 37. They were on board the ship HMAT A70 Ballarat and were leaving Adelaide on a mission to reinforce Australia’s 48th Infantry Battalion. Sadly, neither of them survived the conflict but, 109 years later their surviving relatives have been overjoyed to be connected back with them both.
Serendipitously, Peter Brown and his daughter Felicity found the Schweppes-brand bottle resting just above the waterline at Wharton Beach on the south coast of Western Australia. If they had not stumbled upon the bottle so soon after it washed up on the beach, experts say that the sun would have bleached the letters and made them illegible.
Neville’s letter from “somewhere at sea” requested that the finder send its contents to his mother in South Australia. “We’re having a real good time, food is real good so far, with the exception of one meal which we buried at sea…The ship is heaving and rolling, but we are as happy as Larry” - which is a well-known Aussie expression of contentment. Meanwhile, Harley wrote, “may the finder be as well as we are at present.”
The bottle was in “pristine condition” without a single barnacle, said Deb Brown who carefully worked to extract the letters from the bottle. Once Brown removed the letters from the bottle, she used the magic of the internet to track down Neville’s great-nephew Herbie. “It’s been unbelievable,” Herbie said in an interview with ABC. “It’s sort of brought us all closer together. It really has.”
Happily, Brown also managed to track down relatives of Harley too. In fact, five grandchildren. “We are all absolutely stunned,” a granddaughter said. “There are five grandchildren who are still alive. We’re all in constant contact since it happened and we just can’t believe it. It really does feel like a miracle. We do very much feel like our grandfather has reached out to us from the grave.”
