#52 Ancestors Week 36 - School Days

#52 Ancestors  Week 36 - School Days

I referred last week to the person who had helped my father in his first years of teaching – the person he described as his mother’s Aunt Lydia.

“Liddy” was in fact not “Lydia” but Elizabeth White, his mother’s first cousin. 

Elizabeth White, born in 1886, was the fifth of John and Esther White’s seven children – all girls except for John, known as Sonny, who was to die at the age of 37.

John White was a cedar cutter in the Boorie Creek area of the Big Scrub, near Lismore.  Elizabeth was a bright child who attended the Lismore Public School and then seems to have been recruited when very young to be a pupil/teacher.

I think this must have been around the time that Lismore became a “Superior School” – a primary school that was extended to provide general secondary education, and some vocational education, in communities where there was no secondary school.

Sydney Teachers’ College opened in 1906 and before this there were two training colleges – Hurlstone Residential college for women and Fort Street High School for men.  This was a long way from Lismore, and indeed from country NSW, where the pupil/teacher scheme continued to operate into the 1920s.

“Pupil teachers received instruction from the head teacher before or after school and in some cases also on Saturdays. During the day they were responsible for instructing lower classes under the supervision of the teacher, although at times they assumed sole responsibility. They received a minimal salary, which was less than the average farm labourer's wage, and 5 to 6 weeks annual holiday”*

In 1903, the Lismore Superior School had an enrolment of 441 girls with a Principal, 4 teachers and 3 pupil teachers.  Liddy later recalled that class sizes sometimes reached 72, and that she was paid 9 shillings and 4 pence per week (that’s about $32 in today’s money). 

Clearly, while they were young and enthusiastic, they were shamefully exploited.

An examination of a School Prizes list from Lismore in 1892 gives an understanding of what was being taught.  The boys’ prizes were for “Plain writing, Mapping, Drawing (animal or figure) and Specimen of letter asking for employment”.  Girls’ prizes were for “Plain Writing, Mapping, Drawing (landscape), Fancy Needlework, Plain Needlework, Six buttonholes, Darning a pair of cotton stockings and Specimen of a letter to a Friend.”

In a short essay written in 1981, Liddy recalled that uniforms were not worn to school , but conventional dress, with lace up shoes or buttoned boots.  Boys generally didn’t wear shoes at all until they went to High School.  In Lismore, that would have meant cold feet on very frosty mornings.  She described the games that children played in the playground –“rounders, prisoner’s base, cricket, hide and seek, hopscotch, marbles and jacks (made from pig’s knuckles)”  Some of these are familiar from my 1950s schooldays but I wonder how many of them are commonplace today?

Liddy was a teacher for 61 years.  In the 1930s she was Mistress of the South Lismore Infants Department, and she was teaching in Bangalow in the 50s.  By this time she was well past the official retirement age.

One of her pupils from those days remembers her well.  She wrote:

“My kindergarten teacher and favourite teacher of all time was Miss White at Bangalow Public School.   She used to arrive by Kirkland’s bus driven by Teddy Spears from Byron Bay every morning.  I used to watch her preparing for class…she spent time drawing on the blackboard, practising songs on the piano, making work sheets on the hand driven copier and preparing paints for class.”  This student later won a National Award for University Teaching and she says that she “felt the love of teaching was what I learnt watching Miss White drawing the day, the date, birds and flowers on the blackboard.”

Any of us who have been teachers would be thrilled to think that we had been so inspirational

.

Liddy lived on in Byron Bay with her sister and her niece after she retired.  She died at the age of 94 and is buried in the Byron Bay cemetery.

This class group from 1928 shows the variety of clothes girls wore to school.  The group

includes my mother in law.

*Education Research and Perspectives, Vo133, No. 2, 2006 Changing Patterns of Teacher Education in Australia Tania Aspland The University of the Sunshine Coast

#52 Ancestors Week 35 - At Work

52 Ancestors  Week 35 – At work

I come from a long line of illiterate peasants.  For hundreds of years, my forebears on both sides were agricultural labourers.  They worked hard from an early age and had little or no formal education.  Until the second half of the 19^th century, most of them could not read or write.

Had they all stayed where they were – in Ireland and England – this would inevitably have improved with industrialisation and the move to city life, but it was changed more quickly by migration to Australia.

The sons of my maternal great grandfather, Anthony Whitten (who arrived in 1862) were all landowners and two sons became Methodist clergymen.

In my father’s family, it was Robert White, his grandfather, who effected the real change.  Like most country children of the time, he left school at 12, but he never stopped educating himself, and he instilled in his children and grandchildren an appreciation of the value of education.  His daughter Alice, my grandmother, was determined that her children would have an education and she sacrificed much to make sure it happened.

My father (Bill) was the first member of his entire extended family to finish High School and the first to go to University.  He was fortunate that Australian Governments, for much of the 20^th century, had a scholarship program for the training of teachers.  The scholarship paid University fees and a small living allowance and the student was “bonded” to teach with the Department of Education for a period of five years.  He wrote in his memoir that he hadn’t really wanted to be a teacher (he would rather have studied Law) but that as a country boy from a poor family it was his only chance of higher education.

Thus we became a family of teachers.  First my father and one of his sisters, then my two sisters, my brother and I, and numerous cousins in the next generation all benefitted from the Teachers’ College Scholarship.

Bill graduated from University with a B.A Dip Ed (Bachelor of Arts and Diploma of Education) in 1934.  NSW was in the depths of the Great Depression, and the Department of Education had been forced to make staffing cuts.  Despite his “Bond” there was no job to go to.  He returned home to Lismore and tried to earn some money.  First he painted his grandmother’s house and fence, then he went to his uncle’s dairy farm – a job that gave him a lifetime loathing of cows and milk.

Then the Dept found him a teaching job.  With a BA Dip Ed with majors in English and History with a bit of Philosophy and Latin, he would have expected to teach High School.  Instead, he was appointed to teach at The Channon, a small school in the hills about 12 miles from Lismore.  He was one of two teachers, responsible for about 60 children, divided into two age groups.  He taught the 6,7 and 8 year olds.

These were the children of dairy farmers and farm labourers.  Most of them came to school having already risen at 4.00 am to muster cows for milking, then doing the milking before catching the bus or riding their bicycles or horses to school.  He recalled that they sometimes fell asleep at their desks, and having so recently done those jobs himself, he was understanding.

It is an irony that Bill, with his University education, relied heavily during his two years at The Channon on his great aunt Liddie, who was reaching the end of a long teaching career.  She had commenced teaching under the old “pupil teacher” system and by this stage was mistress in charge of Bill’s old primary school at South Lismore.  She had no formal Teachers’ College training but was extremely experienced, and generous, and Bill survived two years at The Channon with her help.

Bill’s career took him next to Woodburn, also not far from Lismore, and then to Quirindi in the North West of NSW where he met Mum.  He moved back to the city – to Sutherland High School – to help with the wartime teacher shortage, and then from there he and Mum went to Young, in the south west.  Somehow during the next nine years, during which they had four children, he managed to complete a Masters’ degree in History as a part-time student.

Like bank employees, teachers were expected to move regularly if they wanted promotion.  The whole family moved to Glen Innes in the north of NSW in 1954.  Here Bill would meet perhaps his greatest mentor, Frank Moroney, who was his boss as Headmaster of the High School.  Years later, when he became a Principal himself, he often approached an issue by asking himself, “What would Frank do?”

Country schoolteachers were expected to be involved in their community.  In Glen Innes Bill became part of a major civic exercise – the building of a Children’s Library.  The physical building was done by the Apex Club; Bill’s role was to chose and buy the books, and then prepare them for borrowing by adding them to the catalogue and assigning a Dewey decimal number.  For my elder sister and me, then aged about 12 and 9 and both avid readers, this was heaven.  We got first access to the books, painted the numbers on the spines, and worked in the library when it opened after school each day.

In 1960, Bill made his last move – to Dubbo in the Central West.  This was to become home for the rest of his life as he was first Deputy, then Principal, of Dubbo High School and chose to stay in the city after his retirement in 1973.

Because we lived in country towns with only one school, both my older sister and I were in classes taught by our father.  We were lucky – he was a great classroom teacher.  He also became a wise and thoughtful administrator who was much loved and admired by students and colleagues.  The boy who hadn’t really wanted to become a teacher enriched the profession by his 39 years of commitment.

Bill Gleeson - about 1962

#52 Ancestors Week 34 - Tragedy

#52 Ancestors Week 34 - Tragedy


The lives of our forebears were full of sadnesses.  Many children did not survive birth or the first few years of life.  Many mothers died in childbirth, leaving grieving husbands and children.  Many of our ancestors died of diseases for which we now have simple remedies, and the accidents which befell many of our forebears are now considered preventable.

Of all the many sad stories in my family tree, none is more truly tragic than the fate of my uncle Jackie.

Jackie was born on 16 November 1913, 18 months after my grandparents’ first child together, Keith. There was also a half sister aged 10, my grandfather’s daughter Gladys whose mother had died in childbirth.  Keith and Jackie were inseparable mates, and when Ruth arrived in September 1915, she became the third member of a tight knit little trio.

Jackie, Ruth and Keith - about 1919

They lived on the family’s sheep property about 13 miles from the nearest town and with seven crossings of the Jacob and Joseph Creek between farm and town.  The children had happy country childhoods with dogs, cats and horses, a creek to swim in and lots of extended family on neighbouring properties – their grandmother, uncles, aunts and cousins.   On Sundays, my grandfather would load them all into the sulky for the ride to church which would be followed by a huge family lunch and games with all the cousins.

On Saturday 12 June, 1920, my grandfather followed his normal routine – he rode to town to make grocery and other purchases for the coming week.  He left my grandmother at home with the children, which now included baby Connie, and the girl who was to help her.  We know nothing about this girl – not her name or her age or her background.  She is forever referred to in the family stories as “the girl”.

During the day it rained.  It rained so hard that the Jacob and Joseph Creek rose and rose and my grandfather was forced to stay in town.  Back on the farm, my no doubt frazzled grandmother sent the children off to play in the care of the girl.  When they returned late in the afternoon, Jackie seemed to be unwell.  He was quiet and listless as they ate their dinner.  Did he complain of a headache, I wonder?

As the night wore on, Jackie lapsed into unconsciousness.  My frantic grandmother quizzed all the children – what could have happened during the day to make him sick?

Keith told her.  The girl had demonstrated to them how to kill a rabbit, by chopping it across the back of its neck with the side of the hand.  She had demonstrated on Jackie.

Jackie died in the night.

My grandmother was alone and isolated in the house with the girl and the children.  The creek rose higher. There was no telephone and anyway, nobody could cross the creek – not her husband, nor a clergyman, nor the undertaker.  She laid Jackie out in the parlour and went about caring for the rest of the children, weeping into her apron.  It was to be two days before anyone could broach the creek and get to them.

There is such tragedy in this story.  Tragedy for my grandparents who lost a beloved son.  They talked about him for the rest of their lives, so that for my mother, born 6 years later, he was always a family presence. 

Tragedy for “the girl”.  How did she live for the rest of her life with the knowledge that she had killed a child?  My grandparents did not bring charges against her or even seek an inquest into Jackie’s death.  My mother thought that they would have wanted to spare the girl from the pain and notoriety such charges might have brought into her young life but she had to live with that burden always.

And tragedy for Keith and Ruth, who lost their best playmate.  Keith had a sadness in his eyes for the rest of his life.  Ruth committed suicide at the age of 28.  Nobody really knows why

#52 Ancestors Week 33 - Comedy

#52 Ancestors Week 33 - Comedy

Different generations find different things amusing.  The funny or mildly saucy postcard was common in the early 19^th century when all four of these were sent to my grandmother, Alice (b. 1890).  

Although they are not all dated, they clearly belong to her pre-married life. (ie before 1911)

The first one is from a friend, “Ida” and asks how Alice and “her bloke” are getting on.  It is dated 1907, so Alice was 17.  I have no idea who “her bloke” was at this time but perhaps he was like the “overworked clerk” in the image?

This one is dated 1909 and comes from Alice’s sister Violet, who was about 16 at the time.  She was away from home and she names the characters on the front of the card as “Miss King” and “Tick” and asks Alice to ask Tick if “this is the way he did it”.  Perhaps Tick was very short?

This one is undated and not written on.  Did someone give it to Alice or did she buy it and then not send it?

This one is both undated and unsigned but has a message which suggests that the “Alice” of the card represents our Alice.  It says, “Seeing as this is the next position you are about to take on, see that the bells are switched off when the boy arrives”.

Postcards are a dying industry in the age of the internet and the text message.  It’s hard to imagine that any of these would resonate today.  The gentle fun and innuendo of the messages and images seems very dated to us now.

#52 Ancestors Week 32 - Sister

#52 Ancestors  Week 32 - Sister

Last week I wrote about four Irish brothers who travelled to Australia in the second half of the 19^th century to make new lives for themselves.

This week, three Irish sisters who came in very separate and different ways, my husband’s grandmother and her sisters.

Jane, Agnes and Mary Kilroe were the daughters of Kieran Kilroe and his wife Catherine (nee Dolan) who lived at Shannonbridge, a small village on the Shannon River in County Offaly, Ireland.  Not much is known about the family – we think that Kieran was a farmer with a small amount of land.

Kieran and Catherine married in 1878.  Their first two children died in infancy, but they were followed by Rachel (1881), Jane (1883), William (1884), Mary (1885), Catherine (Katie, 1888), Keiran (known as Joe, 1890), Agnes (1893) and Patrick (1895).

I have searched for Jane’s arrival in Australia without success and perhaps one of the reasons I can’t find her is that she was travelling under another name.  Her grandson has told me that the family believe that she came to Australia as a nun, but then left the convent to marry.  If this is true, then it’s a secret that seems to have stayed within her own family – Paul believes that his mother was unaware of it, and that it would indeed have been seen in the past as a shameful secret to be kept.

Jane married here in 1904, when she was only 21.  She doesn’t appear in the family in the Irish census of 1901, when she was 17, so  it is reasonable to assume that she was by then in the convent, and perhaps already in Australia.  The man she married was Alexander McMillan, a Cobb & Co coach driver who was 11 years her senior.  How and where she might have met him, and whether he was the reason she fled the convent, we will never know.  They had four children together, the youngest of whom – born in 1922 – is still alive but sadly without the kind of memory that might shed light on some of my questions.  Jane died in 1955.

Jane McMillan (nee Kilroe)

Margaret Agnes was the youngest girl in the family.  We know nothing of her young life – she had left home by the time of the 1911 census – until she appears in the outgoing passenger lists of 1912.  Bound for Townsville on the ship, “Perthshire”, she is 18 years old and gives her occupation as “Nurserymaid”.  In 1917, she appears in the electoral roll as a resident of Boulia, in Queensland, not far from Jane’s family, but then in 1930 she marries Frederick Wallace Sewell in Coonamble.  How she came from Boulia in Queensland to Coonamble in NSW is a mystery.  Fred Sewell was a member of a family of orchardists in Tenterfield and they were soon living there, amongst his family.  She was 37, Fred was 8 years younger, and there were no children.  She died in 1942 aged only 49.  Fred married again and did have children with his second wife.

Mary Josephine Kilroe married Robert Keogh in Dublin in June 1913.  They had two children, Kathleen (1914) and Annie (1918), and then on 21 February 1920 he died, at the age of 31.  He died of tuberculosis, after having been weakened by injury in a shunting accident on the railway where he worked and was buried in a paupers’ grave in the Dublin cemetery.

Robert and Mary Keogh

There was nothing for Mary to do but to take her daughters home to her parents in Shannonbridge, but she must have realised that there was no future for them there, so in 1928 they too came to Australia.  Mary had work lined up as a housekeeper for the bishop in Grafton, NSW and then soon after the family moved to Lismore where she worked as the housekeeper at the presbytery and then in a boarding house.   There are photographs of a visit to the Sewell family in Tenterfield (about 160k away) but there is no evidence of a renewed relationship between Mary and her big sister Jane.

I am struck by the contrast between the closely connected lives of the four brothers I wrote about last week and these three sisters.  I realise that, as women, they had almost no control over their destinies; the men they married determined the paths of their lives, and they had to go where those men led them.  Any bond they may have had as sisters was assailed by the physical distances between them.  Their children and grandchildren grew up unaware of each other until  Ancestry and Facebook, which have helped to piece some of their stories together.

Mary was fortunate that her daughter Kathleen married a man who was comfortable about having her live with them throughout their marriage until her death in 1958.  A few years later he and Kathleen returned to Ireland to visit the remaining family – Katie and Joe, neither of whom married.

In 2017 Paul and Brendan and I visited the Dublin cemetery where Robert Keogh’s grave now has a headstone (provided by Paul’s sister).  Sadly, there are two other paupers buried there whose names are not recorded.  We also went to the cemetery at Clonmacnoise, near Shannonbridge where William, Joe and Katie all lie.  So many of the Australian descendants of these three women have visited Shannonbridge that we are always welcomed with open arms in the local pub.

Robert Keogh's grave in Dublin

#52 Ancestors Week 31 - Brother

#52 Ancestors  Week 31 - Brother

The story of Ireland in the 19^th century is the story of emigration.  Of the 12 children of Edward and Martha Whitten of Roscrea,  the youngest five were to emigrate to Australia.  Russell Bell, in his history of the family, suggested that they came as a result of a tuberculosis scare in their home country, but we don’t know.  We do know that the story of Irish emigration is partly that the relatively small holdings could not support the large number of children generally born to them and Edward’s eldest son Robert had inherited the house on his father’s death.

The Whittens had occupied the property known as “Fancroft”, a few miles from Roscrea, in County Offaly (formerly King's County)  since about 1795, when Edward, son of William Whitten and Prudence (nee Clery) was born.  There were two older sons, Anthony and Robert but I assume both died young, as it was Edward and his wife Martha (Lucas) who inherited on William’s death.

Of Edward and Martha’s children, the four youngest boys, Edward (Ned), Anthony, Henry and Joseph came to Australia.  (Their newly widowed sister Ann Elliott came too, with her son, but that’s a story for another time).  It seems that Henry and Anthony came first – via America.  There is an entry in Alfred Whitten’s travel diary (written in 1912) which says, “we visited a John McBride, who went to America with Father (Anthony) in about 1860.  Father worked in St Charles, a town on the Missouri, in the USA, for William McBride, for two years”

On their arrival in Australia, Anthony and Henry lived in the Singleton area, where they got to know the Mason family who came from Ballingarry in Tipperary, not far from Roscrea.  They sponsored their youngest brother Joseph, who arrived on the ship “Sir John Moore” in 1863 and settled nearby at Chain of Ponds.  Ned came last, in about 1865.

Within a few years Anthony and Henry married two of the Mason sisters, Charlotte and Eliza and both couples took up 40 acre blocks near Wallabadah.  Anthony and Charlotte travelled there on horseback on their “honeymoon” with 17 head of cattle, two horses and a dog.  The distance is about 100 miles, over a mountain range, so Charlotte (aged 23) had an early introduction to the rigors of life as a farmer’s wife.

Anthony Whitten

Henry, who married Eliza in 1867, also began with a 40 acre block, but then moved about 4 miles north to Gowrie and acquired another 100 acres.  Between them, Anthony and Henry eventually owned about 2500 acres of this country.

Henry Whitten

Ned settled at Sugarloaf, on the other side of the hill from his brothers, and at the age of 46 married Elizabeth Freestone.  They had 7 children in 12 years, the last born after Ned’s early death at the age of 58.  He is buried at Wallabadah, near the graves of Anthony and Charlotte.

Edward "Ned" Whitten

These three brothers maintained close relationships throughout their lives.  They all had large families (Anthony had 13 children, Henry had 9) and many of their sons also became graziers and farmers in the area. There is a story that when Ned was dying, Anthony rode over the mountains to Quirindi for medicine, but the bottle broke on the way back.  Anthony was heartbroken when Ned died shortly afterwards.

Joseph is the brother that the family knows least about, as he became estranged from the others.  As good Methodists, the Whittens were teetotallers, but Joseph established himself as the licensee of an inn and wine saloon which was an important halfway house for coaches on the main northern road. (The inn was still there in the early 1990s but as it is on land owned by the Electricity Commission and occupied by the Liddell Power Station it was unoccupied and neglected.  It was rapidly falling into disrepair when I saw it then and had been vandalised so that all the fine timber joinery, including the staircase, had gone). 

Because Joseph dealt with alcohol, it seems that the other brothers never saw him again.

Joseph’s history lends some credence to the aforementioned tuberculosis story, as nearly all of his children died young.  He married 16 year old Joanna Devitt at Chain of Ponds in 1867, when he was 26, and they had 11 children but only four of them lived past the age of 30 and many of them left young families when they died.  Joseph is buried in Singleton with two of his children, Matilda (known as Barney) who died at 17, and Percival, who was only 7.

Joseph Whitten

#52 Ancestors Week 30 - Easy

#52 Ancestors Week 30 - Easy

The easiest branch of my family to research has been my mother’s family – the Whittens.  This is because so much research was already done by the time I came along – By one Russell Bell, who married my mother’s first cousin, Doris Whitten.

Russ was a teacher in Quirindi when he met Doris – he actually taught my mother, so was a colleague of my father on the staff of Quirindi District Rural School in the late 1930s.

When he retired from teaching (in the 70s, I think) he decided that a family history would be an interesting project, and he set about collating all the information he could find from all branches of the family.  My mother’s half sister, Gladys (born 1903) was a good source of information, and there were third generation descendants of the original migrating brothers (Edward, Henry, Anthony, Joseph) and sister (Annie) who all had stories to share.  He was lucky that the Whittens are all great storytellers, so everyone had interesting tales to tell.

Russ’s history is all the more remarkable because it came long before the internet made communication so immediate.  He had to write letters…. and wait for answers.  He had to apply and pay for for birth, death and marriage certificates that sometimes turned out to be for someone who wasn’t related at all.  The document he produced at the end, in 1984, was handwritten, and duplicated on that now-ancient machine known to all teachers – the gestetner.

More recently another family member – my second cousin Tim Hobson, has updated the entire Whitten family tree and placed it all on the internet on a site called, “Whittens in Australia”.  And I too have a tree on Ancestry which has, thanks to modern technology, expanded and enlarged upon Russ’s original story.

It’s not all easy, however, as any researcher of Irish history will tell you.  The Irish records are still a struggle and I have a few burning questions yet to be answered. 

Were the original Whittens in Ireland Huguenots?

Was their land really granted to them by Oliver Cromwell?

And (a true Aussie question) … Are we related to legendary AFL player Ted Whitten?

Russell Bell