click here to go back to earlier years of Daniel's life
One of the memorable events of Dan's training days was the journey from Canada to England. He crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the Queen Mary which had been converted to a troopship. He later recalled that it was very crowded but an exciting journey. German submarines were patrolling the ocean but the Queen Mary was so fast it could outrun the German U-boats.
Queen Mary in her splendid colours. However she was painted in drab grey camouflage during her war service
In later years Dan did not talk much of the war itself, although he fondly recalled the friends he had made. He served with 58 Squadron, Coastal Command, with Stornoway in Scotland being a major base. Dan did state that his job was as navigator and bomb-aimer, and he usually flew in Halifax bombers, flying patrols looking out for German shipping in the seas around Denmark. Although not officially confirmed, Dan believed he had definitely sunk one German vessel and probably a second, although they would not have been large ships. On one occasion he was heard to wonder about the men who lost their lives due to his bombing, but then nothing more was said.
Dan's records, now in the possession of his daughter Catherine Kelly, show the following :
12 March 1945 1734 hours Halifax "E" JP301, P/O McDonald. Duty : A/S patrol in Kattagat, 6 x 5001. B. MG. remarks : attacked M/V in posn. 5715 N 1140 E estimated 3000 tons. Last bomb of stick was observed to hit stern : light flak : E.V. 2:00 hrs day flying 7:30 hrs night flying.
2 April 1945 1912 hrs Halifax "Q" JP297 P/O McDonald. A/S patrol Skag+Katt. Attacked M.V. 1000 tons photo shows near miss or straddle. 2:00 hrs day, 8:35 hrs night flying.
The abbreviation A/S is thought to mean anti-submarine and M/V or M.V. means motor vessel. Some time later, when further information became available, he wrote :
"Ship which was attacked on 12-3-45 was a 2000 tons ship "Ronaldsdeck" carrying German troops from Norway. This ship was sunk as a result of the attack. Swedish source.
"The attack of the 2-4-45 resulted in us being credited with a severely damaged".
Every day planes flew out on patrol. On many days, planes did not return. While acknowledging that a number of his colleagues did not survive (shot, drowned in the sea, burned in plane fire, or just never came back) , he did not say much more. Recent information indicates that Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) airmen flying with allied crews (mainly British and Canadian) in Britain constituted about 2% of all Australian servicemen who served in World War II. However this small group constituted about 20% of deaths and injuries incurred by Australian servicemen in that war. Although Bomber Command suffered even worse losses than Coastal Command, in which Dan served, his war was obviously much more dangerous than for many other Australian servicemen.
Dan was there. This is his photograph of the crowd outside Buckingham Palace
in London in May 1945, in the days after the defeat of Germany in World War II.
Dan (middle of the three airmen looking at the camera) and friends
mingle with the crowd in a London street in the end of war celebrations.
After Dan's death, this newspaper clipping from the Sydney Morning Herald of 7 June 1980 was found among his personal papers. It is not known that he ever spoke of it with anyone. Perhaps this was someone whom Dan knew personally or perhaps it was just someone from the same squadron. As noted below, Dan was also on a mission in a Halifax plane on the same day. But for fate, Dan might have met the same end.
Records maintained by Dan himself and retained in later years by his daughter, Catherine Kelly, show that Dan was also on a mission on that same day. On 26 February 1945, Dan was on a mission in Halifax "J" number JP299, commencing at 1100 hours. The duty was written as "bombing MK XIV radar", in the remarks space he had written "60x error at 3000' : 6 bombs application"; the flying time was recorded as "2:20 day". (However it is noted that the Australian War Memorial Roll of Honour database gives an alternate date of death, 25 January 1945, for F.O. Hugh James Alexander McLean while the Commonwealth War Graves Commission gives 25 February 1945).
After the end of the war Dan returned to Australia on the P&O liner Strathreadin travelling from Liverpool in England to Australia. The ship travelled via Malta, Port Said, Suez, Fremantle and Melbourne. The ship departed Liverpool on 17 September 1945 and arrived in Melbourne on 17 October, and presumably reached Sydney a couple of days later.
Daniel married Pauline Endacott on 18 September 1948 and they had five children and
nineteen grandchildren.
After the war, he worked for a short time as truck driver again, eventually resuming employment as a trainee "attendant" and later registered as a "registered mental nurse", as had his parents before him. Dan worked at the Parramatta Mental Hospital, later renamed Parramatta Psychiatric Centre, until his retirement in 1981.
When Dan started nursing, the modern tranquillising drugs were not available. In the early 1950s Dan worked the criminal ward at Parramatta and on one occasion narrowly avoided a head injury from a hammer wielding criminal patient. As a nurse, Dan was a compassionate and caring man. In one instance, men in a ward were so debilitated and so disordered that they were fed their meals outside because they made so much mess, and were served their meals with all courses sloshed into one container. When Dan worked in that ward, he objected to the treatment meted out to patients with the result that he was moved out of the ward. But several years later he was sent back as nurse in charge of that ward with a mission to make it better - a challenge which he accepted and achieved.
Dan (left of picture) and some other male nurses (Jack "J.D." Evans who was the guest of honour and wearing the dark suit, Keith Fredrickson, Charlie Neuman, Marty Vaurella, Ron Elliott, Jock Winwick and Bill Suttie) on the occasion of Jack Evans' retirement in December 1974. The photograph was taken in the dining room of the former ward 4, an 1880s sandstone building. If you look closely at the furnishings it can be seen that facilities for long-term psychiatric patients were far from lavish. The photograph shows the uniforms worn by male nurses in New South Wales' psychiatric hospitals in the 1970s. At this time about half of the psychiatric wards were segregated by sex; ward 4 provided care for male patients requiring long-term care, and the majority of the staff were male nurses.
Dan was an active trade unionist and an office bearer in the New South Wales Nurses Association for many years. He was later awarded life membership of the association. Experience of the conditions provided for nurses was a strong influence in Dan's active trade union involvement. He saw the Nurses Association as a way to help his fellow nurses directly and, by helping make conditions better for nurses, also to make conditions better for patients.
Dan suffered a serious heart attack in December 1970. If one could be lucky in such circumstances, he was at work and nursing colleagues quickly provided assistance, called a doctor and an ambulance. The doctors at Parramatta District Hospital told Dan's wife and two older sons that Dan's chances of survival were less than fifty percent. Life would have been very different if Pauline had been widowed at that time and the children aged from 7 to 21 had been left fatherless. It was not a good Christmas that year, but thankfully Dan recovered. Not so lucky his brother Jack who also suffered a heart attack in the same week; but Jack had been driving a tractor in an isolated location and, without assistance, did not survive.
In his retirement years, he particularly enjoyed the company of his grandchildren. When Peter moved to Brisbane and Margaret (and later Catherine) moved to Victoria, Dan enjoyed driving interstate to visit.
Dan had been the youngest child in his own family, had no cousins or other relatives on his mother's side, and saw too little of cousins on his father's side. His wife's little sister, Barbara, who had been the flower girl at his wedding, became his own little sister. After John Endacott died when Barbara was a teenager, Dan was later to enjoy a special place as an honoured older male relative. He had a special fondness for his nieces and nephews. It was a special honour when his niece, Vivian Swaab, daughter of Margaret Bowman, hosted a surprise 70th birthday party for Dan.
To maintain his health Dan exercised regularly, including walking and swimming. On his walks around Kellyville, he was known to strike up conversations with all whom he met. When he lived in President Road, he walked to the local shops almost every day, for exercise, shopping and a little socialising with regulars in the shopping centre.
Daniel died on 4 July 1992.
... and would have been irked by the description as "elderly" above!
He had seen death in war. And as a nurse he had seen many patients die; he always thought it was a special time to be with someone who was dying and just to help them through the last hours of their lives. As a nurse, Dan did that many times. Dan was never afraid of death, but he had expressed fear of being an invalid, being a burden on others, and dying a slow lingering death. He was spared that ending, dying a quick death while doing something he enjoyed.
He is commemorated by a memorial plaque at Castlebrook Memorial Gardens, Windsor Road, Rouse Hill. At site 27B Crossgrove Rockgarden No 1.
Another memorial plaque is located in Wall 23 at the War Service Garden of Remembrance,located in Rookwood Cemetery in Sydney (shown above).
