Sutton Railway Station

These days, the Sutton railway station is a sleepy relic, a station without a train, with nothing but the wind for company. Once a bustling wee hub, a place where locals from the Strath Taieri area came and went on their way to Dunedin. Step inside (or rather, peer through the old door), and you’ll find names scratched into the timber—some dating back nearly to the turn of the century. Among the scrawls left behind by idle hands are the initials of soldiers who once passed through, including one Arthur Charles Peat.

Arthur was 21 when he left Sutton in late 1914, off to do his bit for ‘The Great War.’ He enlisted with the Otago Infantry Battalion on the 13th of December and was promptly packed onto the HMS Tahiti, bound for Egypt. In early April, somewhere on the Red Sea, he wrote to his brother Jack, because that’s what one did in 1914 when one was about to do something life-altering and potentially catastrophic—one wrote home, preferably before seasickness set in. He described three days at sea before spotting the Suez Canal, the excitement of saluting passing ships, and the thrill of buying fruit from enterprising locals. Then came the train ride through the canal, followed by a jaunt into Cairo, where he had a look at the sights but only glimpsed the pyramids from a distance—an experience not unlike visiting Paris and only seeing the Eiffel Tower reflected in a puddle. He ended the letter in a hurry, promising to write more next time, presumably because the postman was already tapping his foot.

That next letter never came. Arthur and the Otago Infantry Battalion were shipped off to Gallipoli, where things quickly went from ‘unpleasant’ to ‘a complete and utter disaster.’ On the 7th of August, 1915, at Chunuk Bair, Arthur Charles Peat was killed in action. His name, along with the others who never returned, remains etched into the wood at Sutton station—a quiet reminder of lives that passed through, bound for places they would never see again.