Oswald Dawes Gomme

Oswald ‘Ossie’ Gomme started playing for Claremont as a 16-year-old. By the time he enlisted at the start of the war in August 1914 he had represented the club for 11 seasons. As a member of the 11th Battalion he landed at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 and was subsequently wounded with a gunshot wound to the back on 1 August 1915. On 29 January 1916 he departed Suez for Perth but his return was of a temporary nature as he re-embarked for Western Front in August that same year with the 44th Battalion. Oswald Gomme survived the war and by 1934 had resettled in the city of his birth, Sydney. He died on 24 March 1973 at the age of 84. Three months later his widow N.P. Gomme made national headlines when she presented the a telescopic gunsight from the famous red triplane of Manfred van Richthofen, the Red Baron, who was killed on 21 April 1918 after his plane, according to reports, was shot by Australian machine guns. “My husband said he was a very handsome man, in his middle twenties. It was then that the soldiers souvenired parts from the aircraft as quickly as they could and ran back behind their lines to avoid the heavy enemy gunfire that had begun,” she said.