Raymond Oswald Poole

Raymond Poole was born in Fiji, where his parents were Methodist missionaries. He joined the Merchant Navy as a teenager and served on a number of coastal vessels in Australia in the late 1920s and early 1930s. During the late 1930s and early 1940s he worked on other sailing vessels overseas and joined the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) in about 1942. With the RAN he crewed on Fairmile high speed boats in New Guinea until the end of World War II. After the war he worked in the Quarantine Service as a Launch Coxswain.