In the chaos of the Somme in WW1, a tiny YMCA Bible in a soldier’s breast pocket was all that stood between life and death. More than a century later, that same pocket Bible has been placed back in the hands of his family, at the Y’s Macleod Recreation and Fitness Centre.
Private Willie Smith was serving with the Durham Light Infantry in 1916 when his battalion was sent into Delville Wood, one of the most brutal sectors of the Western Front. Before they left, the men were issued small Bibles by the YMCA. Many were discarded. Smith slipped his into the left pocket of his tunic.
When a German shell exploded in front of his company, shrapnel tore into his chest. The Bible absorbed the impact and shielded his heart. Dozens of men around him were killed. Smith survived, evacuated to hospital with the Bible torn and buckled by metal and stained with his blood.
After the war, it was passed to his brother-in-law, the Reverend Peter White, a minister and former YMCA and Salvation Army chaplain, as a good-luck keepsake. White carried it through part of his own wartime service in Palestine, then took it with him when he and his wife Maud migrated to Melbourne after the second world war.
By the early 1970s, with no children to inherit it and their health failing, Maud entrusted the Bible and other wartime keepsakes to YMCA Melbourne for safekeeping. They were packed into a MacRobertsons Old Gold chocolate box and slipped into the archives, where they sat undisturbed for more than 50 years.
When an enquiry came from Willie Smith’s great nephew, Charles Jackson, YMCA Victoria governance manager Dawn Brown began piecing everything together. Her research confirmed the Bible’s link to Private Smith and brought the family and the Testament back together.
In late November this year, Jackson finally held the Bible that had saved his great uncle’s life, in a reunion filmed by 7NEWS Melbourne reporter Nick McCallum. For Brown, who had formed a close bond with the family through the process, it was “deeply emotional”. For the YMCA, the little Testament is a rare, tangible reminder of the organisation’s long, largely unseen role in the lives of service personnel and their families.
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