Another Boulton 'Fly-Boy'

Men who experienced and survived the appalling trench warfare of the First World War were often keen for their sons to escape this carnage when the Second World War broke out in 1939. So it was with the Boulton family. Their young men took to the skies.

Peter Martin Boulton was born in the Sydney suburb of Ryde on 28 September 1920, the younger of two brothers.  His father was the local GP Dr Nigel Boulton, who had served as an army doctor throughout the First World War, in Egypt, Salonika and France. His parents separated when he was a small boy, and he lived at Ryde with his father and boarded for a time at his father's old school, The King's School at Parramatta.  Both of his parents remarried in 1927 but his step-mother Marie did not like having small boys around, even in school holidays. She forced Peter into an unwanted choice of going to live with his mother, now Mrs Mona Dee, at his step-father's home where he felt uncomfortable, so he often lived with his aunt Thea and his Dennis cousins at their home at Greenwich.

Peter and his older brother Philip (Pip) both served in the Air Force in World War II, as did their cousin Stephen Penn Dennis.  Pip happened to be in England when war broke out and he joined the Royal Air Force as Philip Hugh Boulton, Australian Pilot No 907098. The day after Pip completed his training as a night-fighter pilot and was posted to No 604 (Middlesex) Squadron, he was killed in an accident on 29 May 1941, travelling as an observer in a Beaufighter, after an air-sea firing exercise off Dorset in England.

Barely three weeks after his older brother was killed, on 21 June 1941 20-yr-old Peter caused great anxiety to his parents by enlisting in the Royal Australian Air Force, Service No 411990.

Peter Martin Boulton, Australian Pilot No 411990

Peter was trained to fly in Rhodesia and Palestine and piloted Hurricanes in the Middle East, but in June 1943 Pilot Officer P M Boulton was thrown out of a truck in the desert and his leg was so badly broken (fracture of left humerus, injury to left cruciate ligament of knee, simple fracture of sacrum) that he required a knee reconstruction.  He was sent back to Australia to the Repatriation Hospital at Jervis Bay and there he met his wife-to-be Doris Louisa Brentnall, a Women's Australian Air Force nurse from Wagga Wagga.

Flt Lt Peter Martin Boulton

After discharge from hospital, Peter was sent to 'Ferry Flight' at Richmond, NSW.  On 5 August 1945 Flt Lieut Boulton was taking a Mustang from Sydney to Queensland when he crashed on landing at Bohle River near Townsville and was so badly injured that at first he was left for dead, with a double fracture of the skull, his ears hanging off, haemorrhage of the eyes and broken jaw.

Luckily the first doctor's opinion that he would be dead within half an hour was ignored and someone took him to be operated on at Townsville hospital, where he eventually recovered.  At an Imperial Services Ball at the Trocadero in Sydney many years later, Peter was approached by an officer who asked if he was Peter Boulton.  When Peter said 'Yes', the man said 'Good God, Good God, I left you for dead'.  He couldn't get over it and stared at Peter all night.  Peter's wife Doris observed wryly 'no doubt that doctor had a sleepless night'.

Peter Boulton survived this plane crash at Bohle River, QLD

After the war ended, in December 1945 Peter returned to his pre-war job at the Vacuum Oil Company. Doris continued serving in the Air Force as nurses were needed to look after returning injured service personnel.  Three weeks after her discharge, Peter and Doris were married, on 2 April 1947 by Reverend Price, the Chaplain at his old school The King's School.

Peter’s post-war role as a salesman and assistant advertising manager suited his rather debonair style.  He was running the Mobil Quest when a young singer named Joan Sutherland won it in 1950. He and Doris proved unable to have children and Doris began her career with David Jones, a store made unforgettable by Madeleine St John's wonderful novel 'Ladies in Black'. Doris worked here for 25 years, including about 20 years as assistant buyer in the high fashion department on the 6th floor, with high prices to match.

Peter’s father Nigel Boulton remarried in 1951, to an old family friend Thelma Attwood who was an auctioneer at Lawson’s Antiques. When Peter's mother Mona Dee moved home around 1955, Peter and Doris moved in to her old unit, Flat 5, on the waterfront at 88 West Esplanade, Manly.  Peter had lived here before the war with his mother and step-father.  Here at Manly Peter and Doris lived stylishly for over 30 years. 

During their marriage they made some good friends, holidayed in various parts of Australia and New Zealand and also enjoyed a trip to South East Asia in 1974.  Peter tried to look after his mother Mona, widowed in 1951, and his step-mother Thelma, widowed in 1969.  In the late 1960s he sent his mother and his wife on a cruise to Colombo, aboard 'Strathmore'.  Doris recalled that even in her 70s Mona still liked to flirt and she was drinking a bit by then.

Peter retired in 1985, at the age of 65, and he and Doris enjoyed many walks along the Manly foreshores until the onset of his Alzheimer's disease and his failing memory transformed Doris back into a nurse.  She was almost four years older than Peter but she looked after him for some years until, eventually, she had to put him into hospital after she herself collapsed under the strain.  Within several months he died of a heart attack, on 29 March 1995, and thus he was spared the worst phase of Alzheimer's.

Doris stayed on in the flat for about three years but the 35 stairs up to the unit became too much to manage and she moved into the Drummond House Hostel in Manly in 1998.  Before she died at Bayview Gardens Nursing Home on 12 October 2008, she wrote her own life story for the family history being prepared by her niece Pamela Lloyd.

More of the Boulton family story is told in the book 'Brothers in Arms', available through BookPOD and online through major international outlets.