A FAMILY get-together, the discovery of a locally known war veteran’s story and a new home for a plethora of valuable war records – all made possible as connections more than 1200 kilometres apart, finally came together.

Kerry Spencer, OAM, of the Gosford RSL branch in New South Wales, headed to the south-west to meet with Kaye and Wayne Annett and the Casterton RSL’s Barry Kent, to pass on the war medals and records of the late Keith Baggs, who went to school in Bahgallah and then served Australia during the Second World War, many years after.

The reunion all came about from a January meeting of the Bahgallah Memorial Hall committee, which had been working to determine servicemen and women to be memorialised on its new World War II honour board, which will be unveiled on Remembrance Day this year as the hall celebrates its centenary.

Ms Annett, who has actively pursued leads with any potential ties to the Bahgallah community, said the committee had particularly explored people who were recorded as having been a student at the old Bahgallah State School.

“We said, ‘We’ve got 16 names – does anyone know of anyone else’,” Ms Annett said.

“Muriel Wombwell said, ‘What about Keith Baggs?’.

“I remember his name because mum mentioned he was an old school friend (at Bahgallah).”

The initial search for information on Keith Baggs found itself at a tough hurdle.

His Bahgallah School record showed he had been enrolled for three years – from 1934 to 1936 – and his guardian was a Mrs Jane Menzies, with whom he lived within a short distance of the school on Menzies Lane.

Mrs Menzies was also listed as his next of kin on a military record found for him.

But that was where the trail went cold, as it would eventually turn out he was a foster child living with Mrs Menzies.

“This information sent us off on a totally incorrect tangent in our search to find any descendants,” Ms Annett said.

However, it picked back up again when her brother searched the name online, in the context that ‘Baggs’ was an “unusual” name.

It brought to light a newspaper clipping on a Keith Thompson-Bourke at an RSL presentation in Gosford on the New South Wales Central Coast – although no longer a ‘Baggs’, Keith’s old surname was referenced in the article.

Also mentioned was the care home he had stayed in, which Ms Annett contacted.

It turned out that within weeks following after that presentation, Keith had passed away on 3 February, 2021.

But Kaye was able to leave her contact details to pass on and, within minutes, a major breakthrough came in.

“I got a call from a lady who’d been his carer for some 30-odd years,” Ms Annett said.

“(She) was excited to hear that we were going to be honouring him, as he had been a die-hard military man.”

The carer revealed Keith had no family and had been in foster care during his youth, before he was adopted by a Thompson family.

He subsequently chose to change his surname to Thompson-Baggs and, after one of his three marriages, changed it again to Thompson-Bourke, taking on the surname of his new wife who apparently did not wish to be called a ‘Baggs’.

Furthermore, the carer’s husband, John, knew Kerry from the Gosford RSL, which had been granted Keith’s medals and awards, despite them being “naturally not relevant” to the branch.

“(John) came to me and said: ‘I’ve got this stuff, do you want it’,” Mr Spencer said.

“And then John gave me Kaye’s telephone number … so I rang Kaye.”

They began to make arrangements to bring Keith’s medals to the Bahgallah Memorial Hall, but as they discussed it, the connections intertwined deeper.

Mr Spencer revealed he was not only familiar with the local area, but he also had relatives here and was born and raised in Hamilton.

Kaye had yet to know Kerry’s surname (and vice-versa) but enquired when she understood he knew the area.

“As soon as he said ‘Spencer’, I said ‘Oh, you don’t know Daphne Spencer?’,” she said.

“He said, ‘She’s my aunty’.”

Daphne Spencer had married Ms Annett’s uncle, which meant the pair shared a cousin in local resident, Wayne Annett.

That ‘bingo’ moment secured the arrangement of the get-together which took place last weekend, allowing Keith’s story to be shared back with the local community.

Keith himself enlisted in Australia’s reserve forces in the early 1940s, during the height of the Japanese Empire’s rapid expansion in the Pacific theatre of World War II and the lingering fear of an invasion on Australian soil.

Initially in the army, he then moved into the naval reserve before joining the navy proper in 1946.

He served more years post-war and his medals included the Australian Service Medal 1945-1975 – with clasps for Japan and Korea – as well as the Korea Medal and his War and Service medals from 1939-1945.

Among the records brought to Bahgallah were service certificates, a discharge certificate from the Citizen Military Forces (the reserve forces of the time) and a certificate of qualification for an ‘Auxiliary Machinery Watchkeeping Course’, which he obtained in the early 1950s, while serving in HMAS Sydney.

After leaving the service and right up until his death, he spent his time working for and serving his local RSL and its families.

Mr Spencer affirmed the medals and records were in their rightful home in Bahgallah.

“I had no home for it, other than to stick it in a museum,” he said.

“It means something here – for me to hang it in our museum, it means nothing other than it wouldn’t be thrown out.”