By Casey Neill
“We have a responsibility not only to say thank you but to tell them how proud we are.”
Sally Piper and the Healesville Jewellers team are doing just that through an Anzac Day commemorative window display.
“It’s a memory window to say ‘thanks for the service’,” she said.
The poppy-strewn showcase is a real family affair that started about five years ago as a tribute to Sally’s dad, Gerald Flanagan.
“My dad always said there were no real winners in war, there were just survivors – and they were all victims,” she said.
He was a Lancaster crewman who flew over Europe with the British Bomber Command during World War II.
“Dad’s plane was shot down two months before the end of the war,” Sally said.
The display includes details about the German pilot who shot the plane down.
Gerald was in hospital in England at the time.
“He’d had his kidney torn away,” Sally said.
“The crewman that took Dad’s spot in the plane was recovered after the war.
“The pilot did get out of it.”
Sally has seen a restored Lancaster.
“I have no idea how he got out of this tiny little window,” she said.
“He was a prisoner of war until the end of the war.”
She remembers her dad having nightmares when she was a little girl, and asking him what they were about. His reply was “the war”.
“There was no detail,” she said.
“They never spoke of it.”
But she said the display prompted other service men and women and their relatives to come in and share stories with her.
“Every year it’s been an absolute delight,” she said.
Since last year’s display Sally has discovered that her maternal grandfather, Frank Butler, fought on the Somme and at Pozieres in WWI.
He sent postcards home to her mother, Lois Butler.
“She was told as a child to treasure them,” Sally said.
Lois was given up as a baby, but her grandparents took her in – but she didn’t learn their true identity until years later, and that their son Frank was her father.
Sally’s great uncle Wilfred, on her father’s side, also fought at the Somme and Pozieres.
Jeweller and business partner Bruce Damman’s father was an RAF pilot in a Beaufort Bomber and his grandfather served on HMAS Stuart.
Sally’s brother, Michael Flanagan, was conscripted to the Vietnam War.
He does the research for the window and adds new items each year.
Sally attended the Healesville RSL sub-branch dawn service on Thursday 25 April.
“There is something so special. There is a connection in the darkness and the quietness of it,” she said.
She joined Michael and their sister for breakfast afterwards, and they stayed on for the 10am march.
“It’s a real family time,” she said.
The display was to remain in place until Sunday 28 April.
