52 Ancestors 2023 - Week 4 - Education

 

52 Ancestors 2023 – Week 4 – Education

 

This prompt seems like an opportunity to write about the “great Gowrie school feud” of 1886, recorded in a series of letters now held in the State Archives of NSW.

The small file containing copies of these letters came to me on my mother’s death in 2018, and I found them fascinating.

Gowrie was a small school attended at the time by about 30 children, including the family of Henry and Eliza Whitten (nee Mason)# whose property, “Spring Creek” was in the Gowrie area.

The first letter in the file is dated 14 May 1886 and it comes from John Riely, teacher at Gowrie School.  It’s addressed to the District Inspector of Schools at Tamworth.

In beautiful handwriting, it describes an enclosed letter, from “Mr H Whitten” as “insulting and libellous”, strenuously denies the allegations it contains, and requests an impartial investigation.  He notes that Mr Whitten has never visited the school to “enquire into the truth or otherwise expressed dissatisfaction.”

Henry Whitten’s letter begins, “Sir it has come to my knowledge yesterday the way you have been teaching my children at school lately. It seems you blame our child Annie for not working her sum herself in her Book and abused and terrified the child with threats of dismissal from the school and other punishment…you have marked her a liar.”

Riely’s reply states that he “never wronged a child” and suggests that the proper course of action might have been for Henry to come to the school to discuss the matter.  He also suggests that Henry has been misled.

 On 15 May, a letter to the Inspector, written by Henry, was signed by 7 parents, who accounted for 25 of the pupils at the school.  It was accompanied by another letter from Henry which accuses Mr Riely of “immorality”

The situation worsened on 25 May when there was another letter from Mr Riely to the District Inspector to advise him that he had that day suspended two pupils – John Whitten, aged 16 and Roland Richard Whitten aged 14, pending an investigation.  

He writes, “R. R. Whitten has been convicted of pouring into the ears of the younger children the vilest obscenity.  Mr Whitten senior only sent these boys for a day or two, to create mischief” *

He goes on to say this:

“I have grave reasons to suspect that hostile ecclesiastical influence is at the bottom of the whole affair.”

(I suspect he might be right.  Mr Riely was a Catholic.  Henry, like all the Whittens was a Methodist of the most earnest kind –  non-drinking, non-dancing, non-gambling and probably anti-Catholic)

In his letter about the suspension to Henry, Mr Riely accuses him of encouraging the boys to rebel against his discipline and says that they have been guilty of “repeated breaches of Regulation 125 viz: gross insolence, persistent disobedience and profanity”.

The report of the Inspector deals with Mr Riely’s alleged “uncouth language”.  This seems to consist of the use of two nicknames – “long legged kangaroo” (of John Whitten) and “Billy the Bullock” (of Richard Rowland Whitten).  He also used the expletive “By thunder”.

Several children were called as witnesses and their evidence is included in the file.  Most say they have heard the teacher use the nicknames for the boys, but none make any complaints and there is no other incriminating evidence.  One boy, Michael Hough, whose father signed the petition, concludes his statement with:

“By Mr Riely I have never been punished unless I deserved it, and not always then.”

Even John Whitten, who complains of the nickname, says, “I have never heard Mr Riely say or do anything worse than what I have heard”.

It was enough for the Chief Inspector.  He wrote to the District Inspector on 28 May to advise that John and Richard Rowland had been hastily dismissed and should be reinstated.

And then on 15 June a final judgement delivered to the District Inspector:

“Mr Riely has been informed that his conduct in calling pupils by such names as “Kangaroo” and “Billy the Bullock” is highly objectionable and unjustifiable and must not be repeated.

In view of Mr Riely’s unpopularity with a large section of the parents the Minister deems it desirable in the interests of the school to remove him to another locality.  It is accordingly requested that you will submit arrangements for his removal as soon as practicable.”

Signed: J.C Maynard

Chief Inspector

All of this seems like a storm in a teacup now, but it nevertheless galvanised this small community to the point where a teacher was removed from his position and made to relocate.  We don’t know whether this was a welcome intervention or not, or the affect it had on his family.  Perhaps he was relieved to be quit of them all.

One of the great ironies in all this is that John Whitten was actually known as “Long John” within the family and is recorded that way in numerous family histories.  It’s hard to see why he and his father regarded the teacher’s nickname for him as such an insult.

 

# Henry was the brother of my Great grandfather, Anthony Whitten. His wife Eliza was the sister of Anthony’s wife, Charlotte.  Their children at the school were John (16), Roland Richard (14), Annie (12), Fanny (10) and Henry (8)

*My italics.  It does seem to me that both of these boys are of an age when they would normally be working on the farm and not at school.

 

52 Ancestors 2023 - Week 2 - Favourite Photo

 52 Ancestors 2023 - Week 2 - Favourite Photo

John William Gleeson 1889 - 1961

My paternal grandfather, John William Gleeson, universally known as Jack.  My sisters and I call this photo “Jack the Lad” – he looks cocky and self confident.

Jack was the firstborn of James Patrick and Mary Gleeson (nee Crummy), born at Leongatha in Victoria.  We don’t know why they were in Victoria – they moved soon afterwards to Lismore on the North Coast of NSW where their next 5 children were born, the fifth in 1901.

Jack had the rudimentary education of poor country boys at the time – he probably left school at 12.  His father had labouring jobs and worked on the railway for a time.  When Jack was about 10, his father was declared bankrupt * so times must have been tough.

My father wrote about his father’s work as a young man:

“At one stage, he was apprenticed to a tailor, and then to a cabinet maker. In both cases the apprenticeships were short-lived, for what reasons I never learned. One result of the first was that he never hesitated to sew on his own buttons, and, of the second, it inspired a lifelong love of woodwork which was the basis of one of his hobbies. He drifted, however, in his teens, into a variety of jobs, most of them labouring. For a time, he was a wharf-labourer, Lismore then being a port of some consequence. He spent a season cane-cutting in Queensland. He also worked at cutting out the water hyacinth spreading in the river and hindering the movement of the ships that provided the link between Lismore and Sydney. This job came to a sudden end when he inflicted a bad gash in the calf of his left leg with a razor-sharp axe that was the main implement used in the job. Again, he spent some time shovelling coal at the Lismore gasworks. During this period of his life, he was never afraid of work, but he had a short fuse and rarely held a job for long. In addition to his proneness to argue with the boss, he was also developing a taste for liquor which did not endear him to his employers.

Jack married Alice White when he was 21 and she 20.  I think she was probably pregnant as the wedding was very quiet.  I can’t imagine that her parents were very pleased – her father was a very well respected member of the town Council and Jack was not a good catch.  The Gleesons were Catholics, at a time of sectarian divide in Australia, and the family were poor, uneducated and unskilled.

His wayward work life continued as the first three of 6 children were born.  Then with World War I in its second year, he enlisted.

His WWI service papers show that he enlisted in May 1917 and began training at the Enoggera Base in Brisbane.  In September he was discharged.  Dad believed that he had been found unfit; 

his papers say that he was discharged at his own request “for family reasons”.

Soon afterwards he was involved in an altercation at his parents’ hotel which made the Brisbane papers.

James and Mary were the licensees of the Regatta Hotel at Toowong, in Brisbane. Jack was arrested there for using offensive language.  In the course of the arrest, Jack allegedly knocked the Constable to the ground, James Gleeson allegedly assaulted him and Mary Gleeson hit him on the head!

The saga played out in the press for a few days before Jack was fined 2 pounds and his mother 1 pound.

I wonder if it was the sobering affect of this which led to Jack returning to his family and joining the railways as a blacksmith striker, the first permanent job he had ever had.  He modified, and eventually gave up alcohol, and family life became more peaceful.

I guess it was about this time that he joined the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows (MUIOOF) in which his father -in-law and other members of the White family were prominent.  He became a JP, and he acted as a campaign manager for several successive (but unsuccessful) Labor Party candidates in the Lismore electorate.

Dad wrote:

 Anyhow, round about 1920, Dad gave up drinking altogether and thereafter became a typical householder, with a garden, a few fowls, a taste for household repairs and so on. His railway job changed a bit. He progressed from blacksmith striker to fitter’s labourer and thence to roster clerk. None of these jobs involved much improvement in his pay, but they did involve an increase in responsibility which was good for his self-esteem.

Jack in full MUIOOF regalia

The Great Depression put an end to this new found harmony.  My grandmother was bitter about it for the rest of her life, and now I can see that it effectively ended her marriage.

As a government employee, Jack suffered immediately from the measures imposed by the Lang government – first threepence then one shilling in the pound deduction from his wages.  Then the rationing of work, so that he worked two weeks out of three (and was unpaid for the unworked week).  In 1928 their last child had been born and although the eldest was now working and Dad was at University on a scholarship there were still 6 mouths to feed. 

The final straw was the Railway decision to move their headquarters from Lismore to Casino, about 20 miles away.  These days it’s an easy commute – in 1932 it meant that Jack had to move to Casino during the week and try to get home to see his family on Saturdays.  In view of the financial privations already imposed, this was difficult.

Nevertheless I believe the marriage hung on through the 1930s.  Jack and Alice were still at 8 Webster St together for the 1937 census, and it was at this time, I think, after he had left the railway, that he bought a small service station in Casino.  There are family rumours that there was another woman in Casino- whatever the reason sometime early in the 1940s Alice took Margaret, her youngest child, and moved to Sydney.

The service station in Casino.

As children, we didn’t question why our grandparents came to visit separately, although I recall those infrequent visits now. He was always loving towards us and interested in our lives and he and Dad seemed to get on well together – they had a shared interest in woodwork and I remember him helping with carpentry jobs around our house.

By late 1950s, Jack and Alice were back together at her home in Hurstville (a suburb of Sydney).  They had separate bedrooms, but the relationship seemed amicable enough.  He kept chooks and grew vegetables; she kept house.  I don’t know if he already knew that he had the lung cancer which finally killed him in March 1961, but she nursed him until the end.

Alice and Jack 1960

I have come to soften towards Jack as I’ve researched this.  He has long been regarded in the family as unworthy of our staunch and hard-working grandmother, and it’s certainly true that he wasn’t a model husband.  But given his tough early life, what we would now call “poor parenting” and then the Depression, his trajectory is, while not excusable, understandable.

52 Ancestors 2023 - Week 1 - I'd Like to Meet

 52 Ancestors 2023 - I'd Like to Meet

                                                                  Frederick Whitten

I met all but one of my grandparents when I was a child, and both of my grandmothers were still alive when I was a young adult, but I never met my maternal grandfather, who died two years before I was born.

 

Frederick (Fred) Whitten was born in 1871 at the family property, Lowestoft, near Quirindi, NSW.  He was the fourth child and third son of Anthony and Charlotte Whitten (nee Mason) who had settled on their property at the time of their marriage in 1865.   There would be 9 more children including twin boys who died as babies.

 

Fred and his siblings were educated at the little school built by their father on the property, but like most children of the time his formal education ended around the age of 12 and he began to work on the farm.

                                                      Lowes Creek School -Fred 4th from left

We know little about his early years but can assume that it was a life of hard work tempered by time with his large extended family and the activities of their church.  He was known as a good stockman and a good shearer (in the days of blade shearing). Their mother, Charlotte, was particularly religious and in the early years attended her nearest church (10miles away at Wallabadah) on horseback or by cart.  All the children would have accompanied her.

In 1902 Fred married Annie Florence Newcombe in Tamworth, NSW. He was 31 years old and she was just 21.  Sadly, within a year Annie had died in childbirth, leaving baby Gladys and her devastated young husband.  Her headstone in the cemetery in Tamworth is testament to his grief.

 It reads:

My dearest Annie has left me,

And gone to realms above;

My heart seems torn within me.

Yet I know that God is love.

She left me in the bloom of youth

When her course seemed just begun,

In grief and pain, I try to say

My God, Thy Will be Done

Fred and Gladys were fortunate that he had a large extended family around them.  Gladys was adored by her grandparents and bachelor uncles who all rallied to help.

Eight years later, Fred met Josephine Morgan at a picnic at Duri, not far from his home at Gaspard.  My mother said that ‘when he saw her step down from her cart, dressed in yellow, he was instantly smitten.”  They were married in the Methodist Church in Tamworth on 9 August 1911.

Josie was a Catholic, and a city girl but she willingly became part of his Methodist Church and threw herself into rural life. She became a life long member of the CWA (Country Women’s Association) and lived the rest of her life in the Quirindi community.

The first of Fred and Josie’s seven children arrived in 1912 – my uncle Keith Wesley Whitten.  He was followed by Jackie (1913), Ruth (1915), Connie (1919) Royce (1921) Gwynne (my mother, 1924) and Joan (1928.)

The growing family lived at Woodstock, Fred’s property next door to Lowestoft until 1924.  Jackie died accidentally (in 1920) and in 1924, while she was pregnant with Mum, Josie was thrown from the sulky as it was being driven to town.  Her hip was broken, and because of her pregnancy (and probably also because of limited medical treatment available to her) it was never set properly.  Although Mum was delivered safely at full term, her mother walked with a limp for the rest of her life.

In response to this accident, my grandfather bought a house in town and henceforth he commuted to the farm, spending weekends with the family at “The Meadows” in Fitzroy St, Quirindi.

My mother described it thus: ‘Dad would arrive in time for lunch on Saturday, having already been into town and placed his order for supplies for the coming week with one of the three grocers in town (he would patronise all of them in turn).  After lunch he would have a nap and then at night we would all be together at home.  Occasionally he and Mum would go out to the pictures or, if they were in town, to Sorlie’s (travelling show).

On Sunday mornings we would all go to church, then come home for a big lunch, often with other members of Dad’s extended family.  Afterwards there would be a big afternoon tea, then church again at night. 

On Monday morning Dad would go back to Woodstock for another week’s work.”

In about 1941, Fred suffered a stroke.  I don’t know the details, but he spent some time in Sydney and then came home to be nursed by Josie for the rest of his life.  Keith and Royce were already working on the property (although Keith enlisted and was absent during the war years).  Ruth and Connie were both married and Joan still at school.  Dad apparently told Fred around this time that he shouldn’t worry about Mum, because he was going to marry her (she was only 17 at the time).

He died in October 1947.  His obituaries in The Quirindi Advocate and The Methodist both describe a man of great integrity and kindness, dearly loved by his family and friends and regarded highly by his community.

I have two treasured mementoes of my grandfather Fred, both given to me by his youngest daughter Joan.  They are a little leather coin purse which he always carried in his fob pocket, and a silver spoon from Woodstock.

I wish I had met him.