Amethyst and pearl necklace : Miss Marjorie Ella Clark

Delicate gold pendant arranged in a diamond shape, set with three round amythests and a single teardrop amethyst, and seed pearls.

Born in Tumbarumba, New South Wales in 1893, Matthew Stanley Baumgarten was employed as a grocer at Carcoar, when he enlisted in the AIF at Bathurst on 13 November 1916, giving his name as Matthew Bamgarten. He had previously been rejected for service on account of his poor eyesight. Although he stated that he was single and named his father as his next of kin, Bamgarten was engaged to Marjorie Ella Clark, whose parents owned the general store in which he worked.

Assigned the service number 2816 and posted as a private to the 6th Reinforcements for the 33rd Battalion, Bamgarten left Sydney for overseas service almost immediately, on 25 November, aboard the troopship HMAT A72 Beltana. He arrived in England on 29 January 1917. After training there he joined the 33rd Battalion in France on 22 May.

On 10 June he transferred to the 1st Battalion's C Company. Bamgarten was wounded in his left arm at Broodseinde in Belgium, during the third battle of Ypres. He was evacuated to England for treatment and saw no further active service, being attached instead to various headquarters units in England after his recovery. He left England to return to Australia on 24 December 1918. Bamgarten purchased this necklace as a gift for his fiancee in February 1919 to celebrate his safe return from the war, and her twenty-first birthday, on 27 February 1919. The couple were married on 17 March 1920.

Bamgarten's brother, Frederick, also served in the war and returned safely. Each enlisted under the name Bamgarten, and it appears that the entire family changed the spelling of their name at the beginning of the First World War in response to anti-German sentiment. Despite this, Matthew married using the surname Baumgarten, although the family adopted the Bamgarten spelling permanently later in the 1920s.