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| Edith May Geddes |
| 8 Apr 1889, Adelaide, SA 2 Aug 1913, Perth, WA 12 June 1985, Perth, WA Catholic Housewife Bowen Bourke Mathew Jones Mary Josephine Jones Sheila Elizabeth Jones Nancy Alicia Jones James Brian Jones Kevin Francis Jones Margaret Cecelia Jones Peter John Leon Jones |
| "The people of Perth: a social history of Western Australia's capital city" C.T. Stannage, 1979, p.250 In 1894 Bartholomer Stubbs fled Victoria and settled on the Kalgoorlie goldfields. Late in the 1890s he came down to Perth, moving into Subiaco. In Subiaco, Stubbs plied his trade as a tailor and in time bought a house. An active though conservative union man, Stubbs was elected as the local MLC in 1911. His children went to the local Roman Catholic school. In 1913 his stepdaughter married a local man called Jones who worked as a clerk at the Swan Brewery. With the aid of a grant from the Workers' Homes Board (created in 1912) they bought a block of land in the bush along the sandy track known as Heytesbury Road, a mile from the shopping centre. A local builder named Henderson designed and built for them a brick and iron house. Despite financial stringency they raised a family and were active in church and community affairs. As Mrs Jones was to put it: "We put a deposit on a workers 'home and paid 15s per week and reared a family of eight. At 4 pounds a week we had no luxury." One of their children married into the Henderson family. Some members of the family still live in Subiaco (1979), as does the aging Mrs Jones. In February 1916 Mrs Jones' father, Bartholomew Stubbs, MLC, ordered his son-in-law to stay in work and care for his daughter and the children. He then volunteered for service overseas. He was 46 years of age. In September 1917 he was killed in action on the Western Front. Stubbs had won 'freedom and honour' for his family in Subiaco. He believed that their achievement was worth fighting for - even to death." Memories of the Bush and Jones's Folly Sunday Times, 25 May 1975. Moving house has never been a problem for Mrs Edith Jones; she went to live in Heytesbury Rd, Subiaco, in the days when it was all bush and honey flowers -and she couldn't imagine living anywhere else. Her timber and iron house with the wide passage and rambling back verandah was the one she went to as a bride in 1912. "This was the house we wanted; the one we were happy in," Mrs Jones says, "and I'm still happy living in it. "My husband was the first white child born in Subiaco, and his parents built the first house here - called Jones's Folly because it was so far out of town. "I remember when I was a child, seeing the camels camped in front of that house; merchants used to stop there because it was the only place around. "Such a pity that old house was demolished. "There was one occasion I vividly remember when my mother took me to visit my grandmother in South Perth. "The horse-drawn tram went off without me and I ran all the way to the South Perth ferry through the bush." Mrs Jones and her husband raised seven children in the house in Heytesbury Rd, enclosing the back verandah as the family grew in size. "I used to take the children swimming at Crawley, and we walked there through Kings Park; it was so beautiful then, alive with orchids and kangaroo paws." Although the house has little furniture now - Mrs Jones has given some of her things to the Subiaco museum - the place is so full of happy memories that it makes no difference. "We've had wedding parties and big family gatherings, my sons used to grease the back verandah and we would dance to the piano." That piano, remarkable for its ingrained tracery of leaves and flowers and elegant with its candleholders, found its way to Perth -- and Mrs Jones's living room -- by chance. It was on the high seas, bound for a world exhibition, when World War 1 was declared, and the ship put into the nearest port, so the piano was sold here. "Over the years I have enjoyed doing the usual things like painting for the house, and perhaps I would have liked to decorate it again, but I've never wanted to alter it", Mrs Jones says. "We never had a great deal but we were very happy. "I don't think life was any harder then than it is today because what we didn't have, we did not miss." Probably the newest thing in Mrs Jones's house is the television set, but she's too busy knitting and doing fine handwork for grandchildren, to turn it on very often. "It's no good unless there's a reasonable program on -- like boxing or football. Or maybe parliament." Identity prized : a history of Subiaco by Ken Spillman,1985. Asked whether her husband went to the war, one Subiaco woman, [Edith]the daughter of Bartholomew Stubbs, a Member of the Legislative Council for the district, replied: 'No, that's why my father went ... He came home and told me, and I said "Why you, at your age?" He said "To save your husband". (p.204) The Geddes Mystery, by Brian Jones, Spectrum, 2002. Edith, with her snow-white hair and thick glasses, was the quintessential grandmother. She was so frail and gracious that I naively thought, when I was a gangly 15-year-old, that she must have always been old. I couldn't imagine she had once been young and had lived an adventurous life of her own. It was a real awakening when she talked about her past. She said that, as a 16-year-old, she joined the thousands who packed into Hannan Street, Kalgoorlie, on that stifling hot day in 1903 when the sprinklers of the famous water pipeline to Perth were turned on for the first time. She remembered the wild revelry but abhorred the political bickering which, she believed, led to the suicide of the engineer, C.Y. O'Connor. As she spoke, the pages of my high school history book came alive. These things really happened, and my Gran was there. It was wonderful. She talked a lot about her mother's people, the Rewells and the Tappers, who had been among the earliest pioneers of Perth. Her uncle Will Rewell had lived in the little house adjoining the old flour mill in South Perth, now one of the city's tourist attractions. Edith enjoyed playing there as a child and remembered how her uncle used to keep swans: 'He enclosed a small part of the Swan River and reared all the Black Swans that used to roam the river, their main food being boiled barley and corn,' she said. 'As the Swan River became more inhabited, the swans became frightened and wended their way further up the Swan, where they were gradually sniped off.' But these were apple-pie stories to be expected from a grandmother. What staggered me was the intrigue surrounding the Geddes family -- her parents and her grandparents. The saga, known in the press as 'the Geddes mystery', erupted when Edith was three months old; and it changed the course of her life. |
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