A message in a bottle from World War I has been discovered 109 years after it was set adrift, captivating the descendants of the soldiers who wrote it.
The bottle, found on October 9 at Wharton Beach near Esperance in Western Australia, contained two letters written by Malcolm Neville, 27, and William Harley, 37, just days after leaving for the battlefields of France. The discovery was made by Deb Brown, her husband Peter, and their daughter Felicity during a routine beach cleanup. “We often clean the beaches and never ignore anything that looks like trash. This little bottle was simply waiting for us to pick it up,” said Deb Brown.
The letters, dated August 15, 1916, were written aboard the transport ship HMAT A70 Ballarat, which had departed Adelaide for Europe on August 12. Both soldiers were headed to support the 48th Battalion of the Australian Infantry on the Western Front.
Neville requested that anyone who found his letter deliver it to his mother in Wilcaugwat, South Australia, while Harley, whose mother had already passed, invited the finder to keep his note. Neville’s letter described life at sea: “The ship goes up and down, but we are as happy as Larry,” a popular Australian expression of the time meaning “very happy.” He also mentioned the food, joking about a meal that had been buried in the sea.
Tragically, Neville was killed in battle a year later, while Harley survived despite being wounded twice. Harley died in 1934 from cancer, believed by his family to have been caused by exposure to poison gas in the trenches.
Although the letters were damp, the writing remained legible. This allowed the Browns to notify the descendants of both soldiers.“It feels like a miracle. It’s as if my grandfather’s message reached us from beyond the grave,” said Anne Turner, Harley’s granddaughter, speaking to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
For Neville’s nephew, Herbie Neville, the discovery brought a sense of family connection: “It’s incredible… it’s tragic he lost his life, but this shows the kind of person he was. Truly remarkable.”
The bottle had likely stayed buried in sand dunes for more than a century until recent storms and waves uncovered it, giving modern readers a tangible link to the lives of soldiers preparing for one of the deadliest conflicts in history.
