#52 Ancestors 2021 - Week 13 Music

 #52 Ancestors 2021

Week 13

Music

Music was a big part of my mother’s life, and I believe it was because of the influence of her mother, Josephine Whitten (nee Morgan). 

Josephine married into the Whitten family who adhered to fairly strict Methodist principles. There was no alcohol, no dancing and no cards.  But Josephine and her sister Elsie loved to sing and so at least in their household there were piano lessons and family singing around the piano.

For Mum, the lessons didn’t last long – the teacher was one of those ruler-wielding nuns who sucked all the joy out of playing.  Mum was lucky – she could continue to play by ear.  She believed, like her mother, that music and singing were part of a happy and optimistic outlook on life and she didn’t let the lack of formal training get in the way of her enjoyment.

Dad had come from a different tradition.  There was no formal training and no instruments in his childhood but his father and his grandfather both sang - mainly Irish songs – and he discovered classical music at University.  When he met Mum and her family, he joined in their musical evenings and he and Mum loved to sing together.  They sang at their wedding reception – the song, “My Hero” from a popular musical of the 1940's called “The Chocolate Soldier”

We had no piano when I was growing up but Mum and Dad sang at home and, especially, on the many long car trips we took to visit relatives.  There were no car radios in the 50's and early 60's so this is when we children learnt the songs of Gilbert and Sullivan, and Cole Porter and Irving Berlin and the popular songs of WWII.  Dad loved the songs that his Irish grandfather had sung (“The Rose of Tralee”) and the songs of Richard Tauber and Lawrence Tibbit.  We were encouraged to sing the songs we were singing at school and, as we got older, the folk songs of the 60s. (Peter, Paul and Mary were big.)

The piano arrived in our house after my Grandmother’s death in 1968, and from that time, the Christmas Eve sing-a-long became a tradition.  Mum would begin by playing Christmas carols, but then the older songs would be played – G & S, Vera Lynn, the popular musicals of the 50s and 60s (My Fair Lady, South Pacific, Camelot).  Mum and Dad would always do “The Girl that I Marry” and we all learnt the Whiffenpoof Song.

As the grandchildren grew they added their voices, and then their instruments.  First a couple of guitars, then a few more.  Bec could now play the piano, and Alex and Amanda added the clarinet and saxophone.  New songs came with the guitars – especially The Beatles – and Mum especially loved Patrick’s rendition of “Rawhide”.  

Mum’s last big Christmas Eve sing a long was in 2016, when there were about 20 people – children and grandchildren and in-laws outside under the stars, singing along to 5 guitars.

When she was admitted to a nursing home after a stroke, Mum could no longer watch TV but she could listen to music.  We found recordings of many of the old songs she loved and played them constantly.  We found a recording of “My Hero” and she sang along, remembering all the words.  I have a little recording on my phone of her singing along to “Look for the Silver Lining” just two months before she died.  It’s almost unbearable to watch, but it expresses so much of who she was.

Dubbo Christmas Eve singing 2016.

#52 Ancestors 2021 - Week 8 - Power

 52 Ancestors 2021 - Week 8

Power

This week’s prompt is "Power" so I am writing what I know about the Power family of my 2 x great grandmother Bridget Power, known as Bedelia.  She was the mother of George Frederick Power Morgan who married Mary Jane Black and fathered our grandmother Josephine before disappearing from her life when she was a small child.

                                                              Bedelia Morgan (nee Power)

Bridget was the 4^th child of Peter Power and Mary Murphy who lived in the small town of Elphin, in county Roscommon, Ireland.  When she was seven years old, her family emigrated to Australia with a large contingent of their countrymen, many of whom were their close family.

AAmongst the 191 Catholics from the Parish of Elphin were:

·         Peter and Mary Power (nee Murphy) and their children, Patrick 12, Catherine 10, Ann 9, Bridget 7 (my 2x great grandmother), Maria 6 and Anthony 4.

 

·         Mary Power’s sister, Bridget, widow of Peter’s brother, John, who had died in 1838 aged only 37 leaving her with 4 children - Peter 13, Patrick 11, Elizabeth 7 and John 3.

 

·         Peter Power’s brother Theophilus (known as Offey) and his wife Winifred.  He was coming to employment as a shoemaker for Mr Smith, of George St, Sydney.

 

·         Michael Power, aged 21, a clerk

 

·         Eleanor Power and her husband Kelly McKeone, who had a job as a carpenter in Sydney at 2pounds 8 shillings per week.  Their children were Eliza 12, Bridget 10, James 7, John 5 and Francis 3.  Their baby Ellen, aged 2, was the first of 13 people to die on the Crusader.*1

      Peter and his family settled in Paddington, which was a very poor part of town in the nineteenth century.  They had two more children.  James was born in 1840 and Ellen the following year.  When Mary died at the age of 55, “after a long and painful illness, which she bore with Christian fortitude”*2 she was living with her daughter Bridget and her husband George Morgan.  Peter then seems to have moved in with their daughter Annie, as he was there when he died of “apoplexy” in 1868.

 Some of the other Power emigrants fared much better.  Peter Power, son of the widow Bridget, became a Councillor and Mayor of Williamstown in Victoria. Peter’s son, Ernest was chief sub-editor of the Age newspaper and his grandson (Ernest’s son) was Kevin Power, a long time member of the Canberra Press gallery.*3

 Michael married and became a successful Auctioneer and General Commission Agent.  He died at 37 but he left his family able to afford to educate his three sons in Ireland.  They all returned to successful careers in Australia- Virgil became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in Queensland, John a doctor in Gympie (QLD), and Frank was an MLC and Minister for Justice in Queensland.  One of Frank’s grandsons was Sir Noel Plunkett Power, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Hong Kong in the years immediately preceding the handover to China.

 

                                                                     Virgil Power

Others did less well.  Francis Glynn Power Morgan, a great grand uncle of mine, was the co-respondent in a particularly scandalous divorce.

 Researching the Power family has been made simpler by the fact that so many descendants were given “Power” as part of their Christian names.  This includes my Great Grandfather (George Frederick Power Morgan).  I have no way of knowing why this should have been the case, but it continues to this day.  Elizabeth Power (daughter of the original Bridget) gave all her children the name and some of the next generation hyphenated it, so there are Power-Malones in Victoria who are descendants.

I have also been struck by the number of Power descendants who were journalists and writers. As well as the aforementioned Ernest and Kevin, there was James Power, a journalist who was killed in action in 1943, Francis Power who wrote several books and pamphlets and Lawrie Power, a sub-editor at the (Melbourne) Herald.  Further back, James Gunning Nelson Plunkett (b 1833) was the newspaper proprietor of the Catholic Northern Press in Liverpool.

My cousin Petera Atkinson (daughter of Lawrie) also cites Roy Neville Connolly, press secretary to Sir Arthur Fadden who is a 3^rd cousin to her, and probably to me too although I haven’t verified that.

And, of course, there are my brother Michael Gleeson, a former ABC correspondent in Washington, niece Josephine Tovey of The Guardian and sister Libby Gleeson, distinguished writer of children’s books.

 

 

*1The Commander of the Crusader was Captain Inglas, an experienced seaman. The Surgeon was Dr Birdcastle. There were 42 crew members and 283 immigrants. On the voyage there were 13 deaths, including 3 from smallpox. The Crusader arrived in Sydney on 15th January, 1840.

*2 Death notice SMH 27 Feb 1863

*3 Fun fact – In the famous photo of Gough Whitlam on the steps of Parliament House after his sacking, Kevin Renton Power is holding the 2UE microphone

52Ancestors 2021 Week 5 - In the Kitchen

 #52 Ancestors 2021 Week 5 - In the Kitchen

My mother was not a good cook.  She often said that Dad taught her to cook on their honeymoon, but his repertoire was limited so I wonder what they ate?  Fish probably, as they were at Brunswick Heads.  He loved fish and she didn’t much like it but would have eaten it anyway.  And apparently her first landlady, at the tiny flat she and Dad lived in during the first year of their marriage, taught her to make custard.

Despite this, she did a few things well.  Roast lamb with all the baked vegetables for Sunday lunch.  Monte Carlo biscuits. Enough to fill an ice-cream container for us to take back to University in our luggage after the holidays.  Pavlova on special occasions like afternoon tea parties for the wives of Dad’s staff members.  If you were very lucky, there might be a spoonful left over to share.

Frankly I’m amazed that she managed to put a meal on the table every night especially during the years when there were three pre-school children plus one at school and a husband and father who came home and expected dinner to be ready.

To be fair, Dad often did Sunday night dinner, which was always a laid-back affair.  He was good at pancakes and scrambled eggs and leftover roast lamb and veg on toast.  And his signature dish was a concoction known as “onion, onion and tomatoes”, which I remember eating a few times when Mum was in hospital having babies.*

Neither of my grandmothers was much of a cook either.  When I think about it, I realise that they had a limited range of ingredients. There was always lots of meat - especially lamb - in Australia, and steak and sausages were staples. They were always served very well done. There wasn't much pork and it was always fatty.  Chickens were for special occasions and came out of the backyard - yours or the neighbour's.  Someone had to chop its head off and pluck it. Rabbit could be shot and fish could be caught and they both needed to be prepared by the cook.

My paternal grandfather had an enviable vegetable garden when I was a child, but that range was limited too.  Tomatoes, carrots, beans, pumpkins, cucumbers.  No zucchini, no broccoli, no garlic, no capsicum, no herbs. Beetroot and asparagus came out of tins.  Lettuce was always iceberg. 

Typically of her generation, my grandmother always managed to destroy these fresh vegetables by cooking them to death.  I remember the beans being boiled for ages and emerging grey and mushy.  I don't remember cauliflower but it would have been cooked to a sludge too.  She was good at jam making, and pastry.

All of us children remember her sago pudding.  We would get a finger-wagging lecture from Mum before we arrived at my grandmother’s house.  We had to eat everything that was put in front of us, and no complaints.  That included sago pudding, which we dreaded! 

Funny, I quite like sago now.

Josie, Mum's mother, prided herself on her damper, which had allegedly won a Blue Ribbon at the local show at some time in the past.  I don't recall ever eating it.

What I do remember of our visits to her house in her later years was Mum’s surreptitious cleaning of her pantry.  “Don’t eat the Vegemite,” she would warn us.  “It’s 6 years past its use-by date.”  (Vegemite is possibly indestructible so that probably didn’t matter.)  Mum and her sister, who was often visiting at the same time, would conspire to get their mother out of the house – their husbands would be enlisted to take her to the cemetery for a visit – and then they would frantically clean everything in sight, throwing out old food from the fridge and pantry and replacing old jars with new ones. 

My generation came of age at a time of abundance and multi-culturalism.  We have access to exotic ingredients from all over the world, and cook books and television cooking shows to teach us how to use them. And if we still don’t feel like cooking, there is always the take-away.

 

 

*I make it myself now as Sunday night comfort food.  Very gently sauteed onion rings in butter with chopped tomato added and then stewed gently until the whole thing is like thick soup.  Delicious on toast, with cracked black pepper.

52Ancestors 2021 - Week 4 - Favourite photo

 52 Ancestors 2021 - Week 4 - Favourite photo

This photo of my mother was taken in 1942 when she was 17.  She is dressed in the costume she wore for a revue put on by the Patriotic Younger Set in Qurindi, a small town in NSW, Australia. 

The local paper said that Gwynn Whitten "sang very prettily".  She could remember most of the song years later when three of her granddaughters reproduced it for "The Pet Lamb Show", a play about her life which was written and performed for her 80th birthday.

Patriotic Younger Sets sprang up all over the country in the first years of World War II.  They gave those at home an opportunity to help the war effort by raising money, but they also served to entertain and boost morale.  The line-up in this cast includes many of Mum's childhood friends and her cousin Beryl. The director is Russell Bell who was a teacher at Quirindi High School, married to Beryl's sister Doris.

Mum married at the end of 1943, and never performed on stage again, but she was a great storyteller. There must have been a strong performance gene as two of her granddaughters are actors, and other members of the family have appeared in both amateur and professional productions.

 

#52 Ancestors 2020 - Week 51 Winter

 #52 Ancestors 2020  Week 51

Winter

There aren’t many places in Australia where it snows enough to build a snowman.  When I was a child in Glen Innes, on the New England Range in NSW, it often snowed in the winter, but usually it was a sleety dusting which passed quickly.

One night, in the winter of 1958, it really snowed. 

The next morning must have been a Saturday as our parents were still in bed and called us to come into their room, which faced our front garden.  “Look out of the window,” they said, thinking that we would see the lawn covered in snow.

We opened the curtains.  There, looking in on us, was a snowman, complete with hat, scarf and pipe.

The teenagers who lived next door had built it in the night as a surprise for us.

Here we are later in the morning as the snow is beginning to melt.  Rugged up against the cold I am here with my sisters and brother, three of the neighbourhood kids and Lillah Smith, one of the builders of the snowman.

#52 Ancestors 2020 - Week 41 - Newest

 #52 Ancestors 2020 

Week 41 - Newest

I thought for this prompt I would share my newest discoveries relating to the Whitten family, which have come about because of a recent visit to Quirindi, the family’s home town in the central west of NSW.

After several months when most of us in Australia were unable to travel anywhere because of COVID 19, the idea of a trip was very attractive.  We planned to visit the local Museum, which holds my grandmother’s wedding dress, and the cemetery, and to stay at a guesthouse which is attached to the tiny church which was the Quirindi Methodist Church before the creation of the Uniting Church.

This little church had been the centre of my Quirindi ancestors’ lives and in acknowledgement of my great grandmother Charlotte it is now named “The Whitten Room”.  There is a plaque on the wall inside:

 As we checked in, I mentioned to the receptionist that I had attended a service at the church when I was a child.  The occasion had been the dedication of a memorial to my late grandfather, Frederick Whitten and involved some work on the church organ.

“Would you like to see it?” she asked.

She led me down a corridor to the organ which now sits, unplayed, but visible to all who stay at this place.*

The highlight of our visit to Quirindi was the Wedding Dress.  I wrote in a previous blog (#25 Ancestors 2020 Week 23 – Wedding) about my grandparent’s wedding and used this beautiful photo of my grandmother.

The dress lies in a tissue-lined box.  It’s very fragile now, and the silk lining is beginning to disintegrate.  The silver thread on the bodice has tarnished to a rather dramatic dark grey. It’s nevertheless still a spectacular dress and I’m grateful that it’s still here after 109 years and is lovingly cared for.

Small country town museums do a wonderful job on a shoestring.  All of their workers are volunteers who love their history and try hard to preserve it.  This little town has been shrinking for years with faster cars and highways making the large nearby regional city of Tamworth easily accessible for shopping and services. I don't think there is anyone left in Quirindi to whom I am related or who would even remember much about my pioneering family, so I am especially grateful for their care of this precious family heirloom.

* sadly I have since learned that this is not the original organ restored by my Grandmother, but a more recent acquisition.  The original was taken by a family member who convinced the Church that it should have been hers.  I have no idea where it is now

#52 Ancestors 2020 - Week 40 - Oldest

 #52 Ancestors 2020

Week 40  Oldest

The oldest members of my mother’s family were her cousins, twins Betty and Edith “Peggy” Cavill. 

They were born in 1916. 

Betty died aged 101 in 2017.  Peggy died aged 103 in 2019.

Betty and Peggy were the children of Bessie (nee Fleming) and Thomas Cavill.  It was Bessie’s parents, William and Mary Josephine Fleming who had taken in my grandmother Josie and her sister Elsie when their parents had separated. (see 52 Ancestors 2019 “Nurture”)

Betty and Peggy had two brothers, one older and one younger.*They had a happy childhood full of music and entertaining.  Their mother played the piano and their father had a beautiful singing voice.  They were in the same class at school and sat together – apparently Peggy always came top of the class and Betty came second.

They remembered their teenage years as being full of balls and parties.  My mother, whose sister was about their age, reminisced about the times they would come to Quirindi to visit and all the girls would go off to dances dressed in beautiful gowns. 

Both the girls met their future husbands at a dance.  By this time World War II was on, but they married (Peggy in 1940 and Betty a year later) and when their husbands came home, they bought houses very close to one another.

Peggy had two girls and Betty had two boys and the families grew up together, spending their holidays on the south coast of NSW.  When the children grew up, both Peggy and Betty got jobs at Channel 10.

They never lived more than a suburb apart, and in their old age, both widowed, they moved to the same nursing home.  Here they celebrated their 100^th birthday in 2016 and were TV celebrities for a day when the morning shows ran the unusual story of twins celebrating 100 years.

 

 

*Their sister-In-la w, wife of their older brother Alan, died shortly after her 104^th birthday in 2017.