People Australia

Francis George Henry (Frank) Gallimore (1887-1942) plasterer, pigeon fancier, tile layer and ship-painter killed in industrial accident

Birth: 1887 at Dubbo, New South Wales, son of native-born Francis George Gallimore (1843-1897), labourer and sleeper getter, and Lilian Leighton Winterbottom, née Hughes (1868-1957), born at Chorlton-upon-Medlock, Lancashire, England. Marriage: 1909 at Balmain to native-born Elizabeth Sarah Grant (1889-1958). They had one daughter and one son. Death: 9 September 1942 in hospital at Sydney. Religion: Catholic. 

• Lived at Jelliby in his childhood; had moved to Sydney by 1900?
• Played Rugby Union and Rugby League football and cricket at Balmain, and was a highly regarded pigeon racer, holding a world pigeon flying record in 1913. President of the Leichhardt Pigeon Flying Club in 1919, he later had successes with the Rozelle Club.
• In business with his siblings as Hughes & Co, 138 View-street, Annandale, builders. Occupation in electoral rolls given as “ironiter”; it was the manufacturer of ironite paving. With his brothers, he was declared bankrupt in September 1927.
• On the night of 25 August 1942 Gallimore was one of thirty-five ship-painters and dockers who were working on a punt at Cockatoo dock defence establishment, scrubbing the sides of an oil tanker, when a quantity of petrol and oil exploded and they were enveloped in flames. Some of the men were plunged into the flames.
• Eight men were seriously burned. Gallimore died from his injuries a fortnight later, as did one of his colleagues, Henry George Garde, aged 36.
• Gallimore’s wife later became mayor of Leichhardt.