People Australia

Ted Parsons (right) with school friend Edward Thomas, Piccadilly Square, c.1942

Australian War Memorial

Frank Edward (Ted) Parsons (1917–1942) was born on 26 October 1917 in West Perth, Western Australia. He was the only son of Joseph Parsons and his wife, Mary Gellie Tennant Parsons, née Longmore. He was named after his father’s brother, Charles Edward Parsons, who was killed in the battle of Pozières on 23 August 1916. Ted completed his primary education at the Thomas Street State School in 1929 and attended Aberdeen Grammar School in Scotland until September 1930. Returning to Perth, he enrolled at Perth Modern School where his father was principal for twenty-seven years (1912–39).[1] Parsons was a prefect and a joint editor of the school’s magazine The Sphinx. He was also a member of the school tennis team that defeated Hale School in the final of the Slazenger Cup, and he matriculated in 1934 with a distinction in English and passes in history, Latin, French, and mathematics A.

Parson’s subsequent undergraduate years demonstrated a first-class mind and intellectual rigour. In 1935 he enrolled in law at The University of Western Australia (UWA), where he gained first-class honours in 1938, having spent 1937 and 1938 in residence at St. George’s College. His academic record shows fourteen distinctions from the seventeen subjects examined over four years. In his final year he was also president of the law faculty’s Blackstone Society, a member of UWA’s Student Guild Council, and vice-president of the Societies Council.[2]

After graduating, Parsons was appointed associate to the Hon. Mr Justice Dwyer and began his articles with Perth legal firm Messrs. Parker & Parker. At the same time, on 26 March 1939, he joined the Militia Forces of the AMF. In November 1939 he was promoted to corporal in a reserve unit, but by February 1940 he had been discharged to join the RAAF. He won his wings in November 1941, was admitted to the bar in the same week and, in recognition of his double achievement, his family and friends celebrated over dinner at the Esplanade Hotel. A week later, he left for England.

As well as two friends with whom he had been rooming in a Perth boarding house, he left behind a ‘most delightful’ Flora Barrett-Lennard who also boarded at Mia Mia. She was clearly very much in his mind during his further training in England, and in April 1942 he sent a cable to her proposing marriage. Flora cabled back her acceptance. The realities of war were, however, very apparent to him, and he wrote in his diary:

I am very greedy for life on this earth. I have little to look forward to but to return home to loved ones, to marry Barrie [his nickname for Flora] as soon as possible and struggle to make a living in a battered and shaken world. Be that as it may I definitely would not like to die. Perhaps things are better left like that – a strong determination to cling to life if possible and a strong conviction that as death is oblivion it is not a thing to be feared.[3]

Parsons was assigned to 460 Squadron RAAF, which had been formed in November 1941. It was attached to Bomber Command, which regarded Kassel as an important strategic target, situated as it was in central Germany at the intersection of north-south traffic between Hanover and Frankfurt and east-west traffic between the Ruhr and Saxony. This city was the home of the Henschel plants for locomotive, engine and vehicle production, and the Fieseler aircraft complex that produced Messerschmitt and Focke-Wulfe fighters. The Henschel railway works were considered the biggest in continental Europe.

Both the British and United States air forces flew several light raids on Kassel’s industrial areas during 1942 and early 1943, but Flying Officer Parsons took part in the first heavy raid. He was under no illusions regarding the risks involved in bombing missions. In a letter to one of his friends twenty-four days before his mission, he wrote:

Very soon we are off to an Australian squadron [460] to do a first tour of ‘ops’ – about 30 trips or 200 hours whichever takes longest. If I can get through my first tour I sincerely hope I never have to tempt fate by having another tour. The way the boys are getting bowled over you do very well indeed to get through 30 [trips] – or even 10. All too many are here today and gone tomorrow.[4]

On the night of 27 August 1942, a total of 306 aircraft took off from several airfields in Britain and formed up for the flight to Germany. Parsons was second pilot in the crew of six in Wellington Z 1259, which took off at 8.06pm from RAF Breighton in East Riding with almost 1.5 tonnes of incendiary bombs, along with nine other aircraft from 460 Squadron. There was only a little cloud over Kassel, and the pathfinders had been able to illuminate the area well. The bombers inflicted widespread damage, destroying 144 buildings and seriously damaging 317 more, including all three of the Henschel aircraft factories.

Bomber Command sustained just over ten percent losses in this raid, with thirty-one of its aircraft shot down – mostly by Luftwaffe night fighters – or failing to return.  Parsons was in one of twenty-one Wellingtons that were lost. The air gunner, Sergeant W. H. Tubman, was the only crew member to escape from the stricken plane and was taken as a prisoner of war. The aircraft crashed at Gladbeck-Rentford, about fourteen kilometres north of Essen. In the absence of an eyewitness account, those who did not return from operations were deemed to be missing. Parsons’s parents spent the next eleven months hoping their son had survived and was being held as a prisoner of war. 

It was not until July 1943 that word came through that Parsons was now presumed dead.[5] He was buried in Reichswald Forest War Cemetery along with Flying Officer John F. Summers (pilot,), Sergeant R. J. Munro (observer), Sergeant N. G. Bass (bomb aimer), and Flying Officer F. C. Pinfold (wireless operator/air gunner). He had been only twenty-four years old, one of fourteen members of St. George’s College who died in or as a consequence of World War Two. His fiancée, Flora Barrett-Lennard, married in 1944 and had three children. His father, Joseph Parsons, left the bulk of his estate to Perth Modern School to develop its library, and as a bequest ‘to cherish the memory’ of their son. In 1949 a group of Old Modernians funded the Frank Edward Parsons Memorial Prize in Law, still offered each year by UWA to a graduating student who ‘has displayed the most outstanding personal characteristics for leadership and service’.[6]

[1] Our History, www.perthmodern.wa.edu.au accessed April 2025.

[2] Student record, St. George’s College.

[3] Robert Lindsay Macmillan, The Life of Ted Parsons, 2015, privately circulated MS, p. 22. Robert Macmillan is a nephew of Ted Parsons.

[4] Ibid., p. 39.

[5] West Australian (Perth), 23 July 1943, p. 4.

[6] West Australian (Perth), 19 July 1949, p. 10.