Baby card

Imagine how Private Walter John Darnley must have felt when he received this card notifying him of the birth of his son, as he endured attack from both German and Italian forces in the desert outside Tobruk in April 1941. What feelings flooded his heart as he read the words inscribed on the card? “Dear Dad, I arrived at hospital on April 4, 1941 and mother and father are very proud of me… Signed Charles John Darnley.” Darnley was renowned as a musical and jovial man, having also fashioned a makeshift banjo to entertain his comrades on the battlefields. He was discharged from the army after being wounded by a bomb in Borneo in 1945 and spent nearly a year recuperating at Hollywood Hospital in Perth before eventually moving to Northampton, where he lived with his family until 1964. Darnley died in Perth in 1992, aged 79.