Howard Brinsmead

Howard Brinsmead was born on January 15, 1882, the son of Edgar William Brinsmead and his wife Annie Bailie. Edgar was a son of John Brinsmead and one of the "& Sons" in the piano business. Howard was the third of five children, born a year before his brother Horace Clowes Brinsmead. Both were born at  29 Adelaide Road, Hampstead, London. 

In 1891, the census shows him living with his parents at 8 Eton Road, also in Hampstead. The family had a cook and a housekeeper. By the 1901 census, the family had moved to 16 Fellows Road, Hampstead. The rest of the family are all there, but Howard is not. By that point he would have been 19. Sometime during that ten year period, Howard joined the merchant marine. In 1901 he qualified as a Second Mate. By 1905 he was certified as a Master entitled to act as the Master of a Foreign Going Ship. On March 31, 1900, he also enlisted in the Royal Navy Reserve as a Midshipman, based on his experience in the Merchant Marines. Howard was promoted to Sub-Lieutenant in the Reserve as of March 1st, 1905. One legacy of his maritime experience, like most sailors at the time, was a tattoo on his right forearm - a dragon.

Howard's father Edgar Brinsmead died in 1907. While we know Howard continued with the Naval Reserve, he may have stopped going to sea in the Merchant fleet. By the time of the 1911 census he is boarding at 53 Moore Park Road, Fulham, London. He is listed as a motor engineer working in the motor industry. This was not that much of a switch since marine engineers had been familiar for years with the internal combustion engines beginning to be used in cars, buses and more recently aeroplanes.

Later in 1911 Howard moved to Toronto in Canada. There, whether right away or not we do not know, he entered the School of Veterinary Medicine. Documents he completed in a later visit to Canada in 1920 tell us that he took up Canadian Citizenship and that he was in Canada from October 1911 until August 1916, when he left to return to England to join the war effort. The University of Toronto's Roll of [wartime] Service shows that he graduated with a Bachelor of Veterinary Science degree in 1916. After that he became a Lieutenant in the Royal Army Veterinary Corps serving at the Veterinary Hospital in Bangalore, India.

His First World War medal record is brief. He appears from this record to have become a Captain in the Veterinary Corps.  We know from information provided to the inquest held into his death that he was badly gassed during the war and as a result was in receipt of a war pension of £84 per year.

After the war, Howard went to live in Melbourne, Australia where his brother Horace Clowes Brinsmead had moved once he received his appointment as Australia's Director of Civil Aviation. He travelled via Canada. There is a record of Howard's travelling to Quebec City, from Liverpool, aboard the Empress of Britain, arriving on September 7th, 1920. He listed as a referee on his Canadian travel documents Horace Clowes' father in law the Hon. C. McDonald, then Australian Minister of Finance. He was travelling with $6,000 and stated that his passage was paid by the government. He listed his mother Annie, then living in Southbourne, England, as his next of kin.

In 1921 he married Bertha Elizabeth Snell in Victoria (presumably Melbourne) Australia.

Howard died of poisoning by medication on March 25, 1929 at age 47. He had been taking morphine for the medical problems, including asthma and insomnia, that lingered from his experience in the war, and it appeared an overdose led to his death. At that time Howard and Bertha lived at 126 Barkers Road, Hawthorn, Melbourne, Victoria. He died at Allandale Private Hospital in East Melbourne, having been taken their after being found unconscious by his wife on the morning of the 24th.

According to his doctor, bad health had prevented him from working over the previous year. He was described as five feet eight inches tall. His brother Horace described Howard as being in "indifferent health" when he last saw him 6 days before his death. Horace described him as a civil engineer. Howard's wife said, while he was a vet, he had in fact recently worked as a salesperson, although not for some months. The Coroner's verdict was of death by narcotic poisoning, but was inconclusive as to the circumstances. There was no evidence to suggest Howard had intended to take his own life.

Howard's widow Bertha remarried, on February 3, 1934, to Dr. Harold Victor Sparkes, an Englishman whose parents were from Bristol, U.K.

Howard and Bertha had a son, John Dunning Brinsmead who was born at Pott's Point, New South Wales on August 11, 1922. He served as a signalman in the Australian Army, enlisting at Mount Keira and serving until he was discharged on May 7, 1946. His first wife's name was Julanne Adele and they were married in 1951 in Sydney, when John was 26. They divorced in 1955. In 1958 John married Myra Freda Cherry in 1958 at Chatswood, N.S.W.. He is believed to have had a son named David by one of these marriages.

John Dunning Brinsmead died at the Royal North Shore Hospital in Balmain, New South Wales on October 26, 1964. At the time of his death (and for at least 5 years before that) he was living at 25 Currawong Ave., Normanhurst, Sydney