THE AUSTRALIAN ARK – Federation to the Modern Era | 1900–1982
Portrait of May Reynell (née Byard) who was the originator of the League of Loyal Women and the Battalion Clubs in South Australia. [AWM H16377]
of war in 1914, May’s brother, Douglas Austin Byard, volunteered with the 16th Infantry Battalion, and died shortly after. In response to the crisis of losing loved ones, May established the League of Loyal Women, a community group that organised care parcels and ‘Christmas billies’ for soldiers serving in war theatres. May also established the Wounded Soldiers Fund. According to Reynella historian Margaret Powell, ‘She was landed gentry to the town and people would look to her’. But broken and unsettled after learning of the death of both her brother and husband, each at Gallipoli, she left for Egypt, where she set up a ‘small tea house in modest tent’ next to the Light Horse training camp at Heliopolis, near Cairo. The children were left in the care of extended
family for nearly a year. After returning to South Australia, she continued to involve herself as treasurer and secretary of the League of Loyal Women. She also established the Reynella branch of the Red Cross and promoted tolerance and inclusiveness all her life. In 1940, just a few months after the death of her son Richard in the Battle of Britain, she proposed Goodwill Week to unite the differing cultures and religions in the South Australian community. The Reynell family legacy is remembered primarily through the 19th-century buildings and old cave cellar at Reynella and the colonial vinestock material known as Reynell Selection Cabernet Sauvignon. Carew Reynell’s younger brother, Walter Rupert Reynell, who served as a captain with the Australian Voluntary Hospital in France, went on to have a distinguished career as a physician in London and a specialist in shell shock and neuropsychiatry. But he never came home to the winery. Reports were also received that Trooper Sidney Hill-Smith was wounded in a skirmish with the Turks east of the Suez Canal. The same year, his father, Walter Grandy Smith of Yalumba, travelled to Egypt and India on a big game hunt. A cartoon later appeared in the Adelaide-based Critic in November 1922 featuring WG Smith in safari gear, standing on a boat with his rifle, and a gathering of African animals asking him, ‘I say, chaps, have you all got your lives insured?’
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