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.