Autographed and embroidered Union Jack: Miss Lillian Alice Scheidel

Autographed Union Jacked with the names over-embroideed in white, red and blue. The signatures include: The Duke and Duchess of York - 1927 (Later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth; Edward Prince of Wales - 1920 (later King Edward VII); Duke of Gloucester; Lord Allenby - 1926; Lord Baden-Powell; Lord Forster; Lord Montgomery of Alamein - 1947; Lord Bruce; Sir Phillip Game; Sir Dudley de Chair; Sir John Northcote; Sir John Monash; Sir Neville Wilkinson; Lady Edwina Mountbattern - 1946; Sir Ross Smith; Sir Keith Smith; Sir Charles Kingsford Smith; C.T.P. Ulm; Sir Henry Gullett; Admiral Field (HMS Hood); Admiral Dumaresq; Admiral E R G R Evans of 'The Broke'; Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser; Brigadier General Charlie Cox; Brigadier General C H Brand, General Rosenthal; Commodore Williams, RAAF; C. Bean (war correspondent); Frank Hurley; Earl Mountbatten and Australian Victoria Cross recipients Currey, Cartright and Maxwell.

The collection of signatures on this flag was begun in 1914 by Lillian Alice Scheidel (1885-1959) when her brother Norman Philip Scheidel enlisted in the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force to German New Guinea in 1914 and he and some of his fellow soldiers signed the flag. The tradition continued in 1915 when Philip re-enlisted in the B Company, 18th Battalion, AIF. Philip was killed 22 August 1915 at Gallipoli and has no known grave.

The Scheidel family would hold open house in Sydney for departing and returning members of 18th Battalion during the war, collecting more signatures for Lillian's flag. Another of Philip's sisters, Irene Louise Scheidel (1889-1974), also spelled Shidel, was a nurse. She enlisted in the AIF in June 1917 and served as a staff nurse at 14th Australian General Hospital in Egypt. She returned to Australia in April 1919.

Post-war the two Scheidel sisters and their widowed mother continued to hold open house at their Woolhara home, mainly for shell shock victims. They sent cars to collect the men from hospital and offered a quiet day out in a family home. This, combined with the gentle manners of the women, and music played by Lillian, who was a music teacher, was sometimes found to be a 'successful sedative where other means had failed'. Mrs Scheidel died in 1936 but the sisters remained in the family home. Lillian continued her autograph collecting for the flag, and the house was again opened to soldiers with battle neuroses during the Second World War.