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Biography of Charles Edward Murray Puckle 1887 - 1915
 (A soldier of the Great War)
This page has no connection to Malvern in England
Overview
The mercantile firm of McCulloch Sellar and Company of Melbourne, founded
about 1862, continued after the death of its founders until the company
ceased trading in 1911. One of the last partners was merchant Charles Murray Puckle
of Melbourne, whose son Charles Edward Murray Puckle died at Gallipoli.
Charles Edward had lived with his family at Toorak, and was educated
at Melbourne Grammar School and Hawkesbury Agricultural College.
The service record of Charles Edward can be found on the
National Archives of Australia website. He enlisted at Blackboy Hill, Perth,
Western Australia, on 5th September 1914 as Private 818, 11th Infantry
Battalion, 3rd Brigade, 1st Division of the Australian Imperial Force.
He is described as height 5ft 7in, weight 130 Ibs, brown
eyes with dark brown hair.
He was a farmer and grazier of Kockatea Estate, Mullewa,
in Western Australia who farmed in partnership with another young man, Alister
Campbell Russell.
Charles Edward named his father as next of kin and also
asked for Miss T Burges of the National Bank, Belfast to be notified. Esther
Temple Burges was his fiancee.
Charles Edward was sent to the Dardanelles to join the
Gallipoli Campaign where he was soon promoted to acting Second Lieutenant and
commended for a successful attack on an enemy trench. Sadly, soon after he was killed in a
subsequent action.
There seems slight confusion about the date of his death
which was finally recorded as 3rd August 1915.
Charles Edward left touching instructions that his
personal belongings should be sent back to his father, who would know what
to do with them.
He is buried at
Shell Green Cemetery
Family
Charles Edward was the eldest son of London born Charles
Murray Puckle, the son of a vicar, and Caroline Amelia Shuter who had settled in Melbourne.
His younger brother Hugh Noel
Murray Puckle MB BS FRCS, who was born at Melbourne on 11 Jan 1890, became a surgeon. The London Gazette
reported Hugh's appointment as a temporary Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps
in 1915.
Hugh survived the Great War and married divorcee Kathleen
Elizabeth Saddler Mumby nee Hirschfeld in 1936 who was the daughter of
Austrian doctor
Eugen Hirschfeld. They had no children and he died at Hobart, Tasmania in 1945 bequeathing
his residuary estate for the creation of a medical scholarship, the
Hugh Noel Puckle Scholarship.
Hugh's widow, Kathleen, married third, in 1951, Harry
Eric Bagot, 7th
Baron
Bagot.
Charles Edward also had a sister Dorothy Eveline
Elizabeth Puckle who married late in life and left no heir.
Fiancee
Charles Edward left his residuary estate to his fiancee Esther
Temple Burges who after the Great War married his business partner, farmer Alister
Campbell Russell.
They continued to farm at Kockatea for a while but eventually had to
give up due to a series of droughts.
In 1967 the Australian and New Zealand governments
jointly agreed to issue an
ANZAC Commemorative
Medallion (which was not designed to be worn) to all veterans and the
next of kin of veterans who had served at Gallipoli.
Esther, Charles' fiancee,
wrote to the Ministry of Defence asking if she could be sent Charle's
Gallipoli medallion, as by then he had no other surviving family.
Click to return to biography of Robert Sellar
Click to
go to Casualties of the Great War - menu
1. Service records, National Archives of Australia
2. London Gazette 1915
3. Digital archives of The Argus newspaper, Melbourne
4. Game to the Last: The 11th Australian Infantry Battalion at Gallipoli
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