in January 1914, where he took to a life of subsistence as a sheep shearer, harvest-hand and rabbitter. Soon after the outbreak of the Great War, he left Australia for Britain, from Sydney employed as a trimmer on the SS Rimutaka on 5 January 1915, to Liverpool on 8 March 1915. Walking through England and Scotland, he worked as a designer of printed tin box forms for Hudson Scott & Sons of Carlisle, and as a commercial artist for the highly regarded London commercial artists and advertising agencies, Carlton Studios and Charles F. Higham Limited. Higham's clients included Goodrich Tires, His Master's Voice and the British government. Though six of his brothers had enlisted in the Samoa Expeditionary Force and New Zealand Expeditionary Force, Wilfred Sinel attaining the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, his own attempt to enlist in Kitchener's Army was unsuccessful. Instead, he served part of the war as an able seaman in the British Mercantile Marine. Back in New Zealand and Australia, Sinel worked as an art director and commercial artist mostly on campaigns promoting American products until, on 24 August 1918, he shipped out of Sydney on RMS Niagara for Vancouver, touched at Seattle and, amidst the Spanish influenza pandemic and its precautions, entered the United States at San Francisco. He'd visited San Francisco before. United States Harold von Schmidt took him on staff at the advertising firm of Foster & Kleiser, creating posters and billboard advertising then booming to fill any vacant space in town, and working alongside the notable artists and designers von Schmidt, Maynard Dixon, Maurice Del Mue, Roi Partridge, Charles Stafford Duncan, Judson Starr and Otis Shepard. When von Schmidt left Foster & Kleiser, Sinel left too, and along with Maynard Dixon, David Hendrickson, Judson Starr, set up Advertising Illustrators, an independent group producing art for the various San Francisco advertising agencies, including Foster and Kleiser. The group did well for four years. At some point, Sinel, along with Del Mue, took time-out to explore the Sierra Nevada mountains, where he built a log cabin at Susie Lake, then, as winter closed in, returned to San Francisco and several job offers. In 1919 he was appointed as head of the art department at First National Pictures in New York. With the firm's publicity department in mid-June 1920, and having fitted out an automobile painted with graphics advertising the company's movies on the sides,