The Norway spruce

One of the reasons I fell in love with my house in the first place was the Norway spruce. It must be at least as old as the house, and is now more than twice the height. If the Forest Road (west) side of my house is comparatively horizontal in emphasis, the spruce hoists a delightful exclamation mark on the right. In so many respects they fit together perfectly. (This view is from the north.)

However, two arborists who know what they are talking about lately broke it to me that my tree is seriously ailing, and will eventually need to be cut down. There are certain things in the short- to middle-term, in other words over the course of the next few seasons, that can be done to improve the health of my fine old tree, but I am told none will alter the long-term prognosis. There is also the possibility, however remote, that should we experience another storm as severe as Hurricane Irene my tree could snap in two, and the potential consequences of that are unthinkable.

Mum loved trees, and I think I have inherited that rather endearing quality from her. Much of her life was devoted to protecting various trees at Metung from the ravages of relentless westerly gales, the poor soil (little more than a sand dune, really), the possums, and other enemies. In the circumstances she accomplished much. I can only think of one occasion when Mum accepted that one of her trees, or indeed any tree, really needed to be cut down. That was the enormous, rather squat cypress that stood directly in front of the house, entirely blocking the view of Bancroft Bay—though I am quite sure that was not the reason why it was cut down. I remember also how wistfully Mum regretted the loss of the wonderful old liquid amber that the new neighbors felled to make way for the house they built in 1979, right after flattening old one at 18 Denham Place. Now, barely eighteen months since I took possession of my very own, for the first time in my life I am faced with the unwelcome prospect of having to cut down a tree, and not just any old tree—a mighty presence, an old soldier, a stalwart veteran of a hundred storms, still standing ramrod straight but these days with a discernible stoop. It just isn’t fair.

Mosquito Point

Mum again:

It was a really tricky business for my mother to feed us at Metung. Meat was ordered from the butcher in Bairnsdale and came on the boat until later it came on the mail car. This was an ancient vehicle with an extra seat so that it took about 10 passengers. Passengers from Melbourne by train caught the bust to Lakes Entrance at Bairnsdale, got out at a house in Johnsonville which was also the local post office, waited there with the Metung mail bags, assorted parcels, etc., to be collected by Mr. Howlett in the mail car, driven across on the punt at Johnsonville, and eventually to Metung. By the time of WW2 we were living in Geelong and the journey for my mother must have been appalling—up at daybreak to catch a very early train from Geelong to Melbourne in time to get the Gippslander (changing from Spencer Street to Flinders Street with several kids and mountains of luggage through platforms absolutely packed with train travelers—petrol rationing put everyone onto public transport—what a good thing for the environment but ruinous to Mum’s nerves), the long slow trip to Bairnsdale, the bus, the mail car and finally Metung by about 5 p.m. if we were lucky, then unpacking, making beds, feeding us. We spent the entire summer holidays at Metung—10 weeks. Before we went to Geelong we probably went from Raeshaw for longer, I don’t remember. We had a chook pen and used to take hens down with us for the eggs, and Anne’s pony. Also, I’ve been told, in the very early years, a house cow. The block included that which is now the Weymouths and extended on the other side to what is now occupied by the motel. Later we bought milk from the Casements, whose cows kept coming in and eating such trees as Mum was able to keep alive (no town water, only tanks and none to spare for the garden except the occasional bucket of bath water). We didn’t have electricity connected until 1939 (I think that was the year). The oak tree had to have a wooden guard round it to protect it as the cows continually chomped it. Probably why it developed the root system which sustains that giant now. I think the Casements’ cows must have been more or less (rather more) free-range then, as the Casements lived over on Mosquito point. I can remember the Misses Casement rowing across in a heavy, narrow dinghy which seemed to sit low in the water, in all weathers to (a) milk the cows, and (b) deliver to milk. There was an Italian market gardener who used to come round in his motor boat selling vegetables. I can remember going down to the jetty with Mum and thinking how lovely he looked, dark hair, olive skin, the array of colourful vegetables in the trim wooden boat. I wonder what happened to him.

The Misses Casement—Ethel, Meanie, Maud, Dorrie, May, Savina, and Roberta—and their brother William were first cousins of the Anglo-Irishman Sir Roger Casement, who was tried and found guilty of high treason then hanged following the Easter Rising of 1916. The case was especially traumatic in its wider, imperial context because Sir Roger Casement had earlier distinguished himself in the British Foreign Office, specifically by bringing to light the appalling atrocities perpetrated in the Congo by the administration of King Leopold of the Belgians—hitherto in effect a vast and vastly profitable personal fiefdom. Sir Roger Casement’s grandfather Hugh sailed to Melbourne much earlier, in the 1850s, and in 1894 his son David (Roger Casement’s uncle) bought land and built a house on Mosquito Point at Metung for his enormous family of eight children. Somewhat incongruously, he named it Dingle Dell. The Casements evidently swam their cattle across from Shaving Point—and clearly from time to time back again also. It is unclear whether the scandal of their famous kinsman’s trial and execution touched the Metung Casements during or indeed after World War I. It must have had at least some impact, though of course on Mosquito Point they were just about as isolated from any damaging fallout as they could have been. As far as I can remember, Mum never once mentioned it.

The mighty oak beside Balmadies at Metung was grown from an acorn prudently harvested by Gran from the tree at Kilmany Park that was, in turn, planted on his visit there for a day of shooting in May 1901 by the Duke of Cornwall and York, the future King George V.

Happy New Year!

New Year’s Day? It’s incredible. The accelerating rate at which it arrives! I suppose the reason for that is that each passing year forms an incrementally smaller proportion of one’s entire lifespan, and no doubt that must make it feel as if they fly past faster. I’m not quite sure why New Year’s Day always puts me in mind of the Radetzky March and An der schönen blauen Donau because when I was growing up in Australia invariably we spent it at Metung, messing around on the shores of Bancroft Bay and Lake King, often in sweltering midsummer heat. In his heyday, Dad would join the sail-past in the old Jubilee, and we would give three hearty cheers to the commodore of the Metung Yacht Club—which event is just about as far from the New Year’s Concert in the Wiener Musikverein as it is possible to stray, yet now I am pottering around the house thinking of both: Metung and the Strausses (Elder and Younger), which evidently produce more than the hint of a spring in my step. And somehow this New Year’s Day, I have more of one—being filled with hope and energy and excitement about what this particular year will bring. I wish you, dear readers, as much of the same as anyone can reasonably expect, all the luck in the world, and I send you, wherever you may be, and for what they are worth, my warm greetings for a happy and prosperous 2012.

The Kookaburra

There is a slightly odd piece in the current issue of the New Yorker in which David Sedaris describes an intimate encounter not so long ago with a tame kookaburra over lunch in Daylesford, Victoria. Reading this I was immediately transported to the weatherboard house at Metung, where, in the very early morning, perched high in the branches of the enormous ghost gum that overhangs the boat-shed, a pair of extremely competitive kookaburras occasionally woke us up with a loud impromptu performance. I’ve always thought “laughter” a poor analogy for the distinctive cry of that muscular bird the kookaburra—except for those scarily over-emphatic, tooth-baring, rapid-fire, ack-ack-style baboon-screeches occasionally uttered by seasoned cocktail party-goers slightly too shrill in their grimly determined sociability. In fact it wasn’t only the kookaburras that unleashed a noisy dawn chorus. Between their limited engagements I recall waking up in the morning to the far more mellifluous song of the pied currawongs, the butcherbirds, the Australian magpies, the bellbirds, the aptly named whipbirds, the honeyeaters, the scratchy-sounding wattlebirds, the noisy miners, the fairy martins, maybe even the subtle mopokes (known more properly, I gather, as the southern boobook, or Ninox novaseelandiae), and very occasionally a rather perplexed and disoriented-looking king-parrot, or else a sulphur-crested cockatoo. Meanwhile, gazing out across the back lake, where we fed kitchen scraps to the seagulls, I always found it hard to take my eyes off the pelicans, those majestic, stately, yet grunting survivors of some antediluvian epoch, or else to keep track of the lissome cormorants after they dived energetically for fish. From time to time, against the evening sky, high above the line of scrubby dunes that separate Bass Strait from the lakes, you could spot a lone sea eagle wheeling hungrily. I have no idea what they sound like.

The Trumbles at Leisure

This informal group portrait, which was taken in about 1963 or 1964 by Dad at Metung on the old Zeiss camera, using kodachrome slide film, captures certain innate qualities that have descended through generations of Trumbles.

Above all it is the seriousness, the consistent refusal to engage in light banter or jollity, the unflinching Puritanism (as of Elders of the Kirk), indeed the crippling shyness that strike one most forcefully nearly fifty years on.

Left to right: Mum, with Ritmeester cigarillo; Nick, somewhat subdued; an unidentified young female person wearing the oversized spectacles (Amanda insists that this widget is not her); Simon “Soprano”; Joey, and Uncle Colin, wearing the traditional headgear of an Australian legal practitioner.

The facing wall was newly papered with posters, handbills, trunk and wine-bottle labels, cancelled tickets, maps, and other ephemera patiently accumulated by Mum and Dad in the northern spring and summer of 1961 on their extended tour of Europe.

The large bottle in the foreground is a reference not so much to obstemiousness or moderate consumption, but rather to the fact that Rémy Martin (now Rémy Cointreau) were a loyal and longstanding client of Mallesons, and their proprietors, M. and Mme. André Hériard Dubreuil, old and generous family friends. I gather Mme. Hériard is still alive.

According to Uncle Colin’s engaging memoir (privately published), in the 1960s M. Hériard, our grandfather, Tom Compson Trumble, and Edwin Peatt, managing director of Nathan and Wyeth, who were agents in Australia for Rémy Martin, found and purchased land suitable for planting a vineyard at Avoca in Victoria. At first it was called Château Rémy, but for reasons that are not entirely clear to me the name was later changed to “Blue Pyrenees Estate.”

Although the original plan was to produce brandy, in due course the grapes yielded too little sugar for that so champagne and other wines resulted. The Hériards evidently loved the place, but eventually sold it after Uncle Colin retired. It is still there. So is Metung, but the bottle must have gone out with the other empties.

How lucky we were to grow up on those happy, hilarious, television-free summer holidays at Metung. True, the bottle of T.C.P. antiseptic (slightly to the right) is a reminder of splinters, stubbed toes, barnacle cuts from the jetty, and minor sailing accidents but fortunately nobody seems ever to have been seriously injured; never to my knowledge bitten by a snake or poisonous spider, and the only local indigenous wildlife I recall are possums, kookaburras, and a lone echidna which put in an appearance in about 1976.

The blue plastic sugar container with white lid continues to provide excellent service. I seem to recall the mixmaster leaning against the wall on the far left went back and forth with us from Melbourne, but I cannot imagine what Mum used it for (apart from mining the annual Christmas pudding). It sits on a superior kind of green Coolgardie safe in which butter and other perishables lived.

By the time I came along the shapely, antediluvian fridge was around the corner off to the right, right next to the loo, but at this date it may have lived in the detached laundry, along with the old washing machine and mangle.

Dad got most of the doors and windows from junk sales, and built the rest of the house with his own hands. The old boatshed predated it, and was then still used for storing boats.

Metung

In about 1898, my great-grandparents, William and Sophie Pearson, first started bringing their family to Cunninghame, as Lakes Entrance was then known, for their summer holidays in East Gippsland. They usually took either of the two passenger steamers from Sale, the Sale Steamship Company’s Omeo or the Dargo, or else the Dahlsens’ 109-foot J.C.D., or their Gippsland from Bairnsdale.

On one occasion “Long Peter” Nielsen of the Gippsland lost his master’s ticket for six weeks after a Gippsland marine court of inquiry found that he had overtaken the Omeo or the Dargo in Lake King, recklessly circled her, and steamed past again flying pennants that read “cock o’ the walk.” It seems probable that this lapse of judgment was caused by intoxicating beverages.

Granny recalled:

The boat left at 2.30 after the Melbourne train got in and used to get to Cunninghame any time between 8.30 and 10.30. But we did not mind how long it took. The first excitement was to hurry down to the saloon and get seats for dinner. It had two long tables on either side. The seats were red velvet. There was a gorgeous smell of fried fish and roast meat and puddings and the same for tea at 5.30, so warm and comfortable! Sometimes Lake Wellington could be very rough indeed, however it never worried us children. The boats were driven by wood fires. I can see the big logs being shoved into the furnace. All the crew seemed to be the same each year, and were very kind and good to us. We used even to be allowed to stear the boat.

The first time the family visited Lakes Entrance, they stayed at the Club Hotel, while my great-grandfather searched in vain for a suitable block of land on which to build a house. At this date, the steamers came and went from the Kalimna jetty, there was only a rough dirt track skirting Jemmy’s Point, and there were no cars, and hardly any other holiday-makers. It must have been heaven.

Great-grandfather Pearson nearly gave up searching for somewhere to build, but eventually purchased a property “on the front,” and in due course built a pretty house, which has long since been demolished. In the early 1970s, Granny recalled that the original house was on the site of what she called Victoria House, but that too has now vanished, no doubt obliterated by the Lakes Entrance strip mall.

In due course the Pearsons recruited local servants, including a Russian and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Markovitch. Mrs. Markovitch was cook and housekeeper. Mr. Markovitch, or “Markie,” as the children knew him, did odd jobs, and looked after the boats.

It was a great excitement when we got our first motor boat. It used to belong to the [Richard] Brownlows at [Eaglescourt, overlooking the Mitchell River and Eagle Point Bluff, near] Bairnsdale, and was one of the first on the Lakes. When they got a “bigger and better” one, father bought the other. I think they often regretted selling it, as the Brownlows’ new one was never the family boat that the Bonegilla was. We kept it until during the 14–18 war, whilst we were in England, when my father was advised by his businessman in Australia to sell it. How sad we were, and how we missed her when we returned to Lakes Entrance for visits and no “Bonegilla.”

The Bonegilla, which was named after my great-grandparents’ first property near Wodonga, was actually one of two lifeboats salvaged from P.&O.’s elegant S.S. Australia, which, on June 20, 1904, went aground on the Corsair Rock off Point Nepean, and was afterwards wrecked by fire.

Most satisfactorily, the Bonegilla was widely understood to be the fastest of the five private motor boats plying the Gippsland Lakes before World War I. I am reliably informed that it had a single-cylinder Standard engine. Certainly this was the farthest any member of our family took the concept of speed, and all subsequent attempts to make motor boats even work at all proved sadly futile.

Occasionally, well before World War I, the Pearsons came to Metung to stay with their friends Dr. and Mrs. Jack Tuthill, who in 1910 built a house they called Allambie, which still occupies a commanding site, high above Gardiner’s Creek.

The settlement, as distinct from the locality, at first took its name from Rosherville, the charming old pub on the shore of Bancroft Bay, which was built in the 1870s on the site of the present monstrosity, and burned down in suspicious circumstances in the 1950s. The pier was built next to the pub, and not the other way around.

The aboriginal (Kurnai) name Metung, which apparently means “tea-tree” or “mainland,” or “bend in the lake,” possibly all three or none, came into general use in about 1888, around the time the pub changed hands, and was somewhat pompously renamed the Scarborough (“The Gem of the Lakes,” according to nearly contemporary advertorial).

Not surprisingly, Metung attracted a number of distinguished early holiday-makers, some of whom settled there permanently, including the explorer and mineralogist Dr. Alfred Howitt; His Honour Judge John Burnett Box; and John King, the second son of Rear Admiral Philip Parker King.

The Bull, Bury, Byrne, Cantrill, Casement (in fact a nephew of the Roger Casement who was hanged for treason in 1916), Hunter, and Travers families all clustered around these notables in the neighborhood of Metung rather early, and there was also a small Chinese community, including an enterprizing market gardener called Poo Chong (“old Pooey”), whose plot was near the Buffalo Patch.

In 1920, now widowed, and having returned to Australia from England, old Mrs. Pearson bought Allambie from Dr. and Mrs. Tuthill, and, perhaps for moral support, her sister, Aunt Nance (Gooch) and her husband, Uncle Arthur Gillion, also bought land at Metung, on the hill behind the village, and built a house there.

In due course, my grandparents, William and Helen Borthwick, bought a substantial block of land on Shaving Point from the solicitor and New South Wales grazier, James (“Jim”) McLaughlin, on which in 1926 they built their pretty house Balmadies, where Mum and her siblings enjoyed many idyllic summer holidays.

Writing to Gay Halstead in the mid-1970s, Aunt Anne recalled:

We had super holidays; there always seemed to be a tribe of children with or without attendant parents; most of them couldn’t swim. A certain board on the jetty (one of the first jetties in Metung) was painted brown and the non-swimmers were not allowed past it without an adult. (It speaks volumes for the sort of discipline of the times, that no-one did.) Of course, it was fiercely and jealously policed by us swimmers!

It seemed it was always sunny, but when it did rain we’d be be turned out in minimum clothing for a long walk to the Bluff along the shore. We got so wet that it didn’t matter, as it counted for our bath for the day. Water was always short and our ablutions pretty sketchy, a swim before breakfast being the only rule; we had one hot bath a week, the water being heated in the copper, and each child dunked in turn, beginning with the smallest, followed by our clothes.

The Balmadies land was gradually and repeatedly subdivided. The old tennis court, which was paved with asphalt, was sacrificed to provide a block of land for the Byrnes.

Another chunk of land was evidently sold back to Mr. McLaughlin so he could resume his fishing activities, which he missed.

Another wedge-shaped parcel of land was given to Mum as a wedding present, and offered plenty of room for Dad to build our house, which he did so with his own hands, on the side of the property closest the Misses Curr, and, finally, much later on, Granny gave the last allotment to Aunt Anne and Uncle Henry, who built their house on the north side.

Originally there were four Misses Curr, Margery, Kitty, Elaine, and Fairlie, but I have only the dimmest recollection of two, then one: Fairlie. Their mother’s sister was the Mrs. Tuthill from whose husband my great-grandmother Pearson purchased Allambie.

The Tuthills must have thrown in their boat Carino, as well, because Aunt Anne remembered it being used as the Borthwick family’s principal vessel, mainly to transport hordes of children to the Barrier and back, for picnics.

In a neat twist, the Carino was the other lifeboat salvaged from the wreck of the Australia, and it must have given Granny particular satisfaction to retrieve and re-enact those happy memories of beach picnics aboard the Pearsons’ Bonegilla.

I do not know what happened to either boat.

Uncle David

-->

Uncle David, on the verandah at Balmadies, Metung, teaching me all about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

David William Pearson Borthwick (1921-2000) was Mum, Uncle John and Aunt Anne’s eldest brother. He was a yachtsman, pilot, farmer, and great friend to many. A fourth generation Gippslander, he was born and spent his early years at Raeshaw, his parents’ sheep property at Fulham, near Sale.

On May 9, 1927, with his parents, David witnessed the opening of the Provisional Parliament building in Canberra by the Duke and Duchess of York (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth), an occasion upon which every aircraft in the fledgling R.A.A.F. was excitingly grounded, and all the pilots returned to Point Cook unhurt, but by train. Clearly, aged six, from that moment only the Air Force would do.

At nine, David went to Geelong College as a boarder. He was a prefect, and represented the school in rowing and athletics.

In 1940, David entered Ormond College to study engineering at the University of Melbourne. War had broken out in Europe, and he volunteered for the Royal Australian Air Force as air crew. As a member of the Empire Air Training Scheme, he trained at Somers, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and in England. After six weeks’ operational training on Hurricanes, at Unsworth in Lancashire, he was posted to the Middle East.

Shortly after arriving in Cairo David contracted malaria, and went to the Sudan to recuperate. His host was Douglas Dodds-Parker, governor of the Blue Nile province, not far from the Ethiopian border, such as it was, who gave David a lasting interest in the region.

Dodds-Parker was a veteran of the Sudanese Political Service in the Anglo-Egyptian administration, and closely involved in the Special Operations Executive push to restore the Emperor Haile Selassie to his throne, a goal that was attained rather easily in 1941, to the lasting humiliation of the approximately 20,000 Italian personnel who were captured by an allied force not much larger than 1,700 men.

When travelling by camel with His Excellency on imperial business, David celebrated his twenty-first birthday (August 8, 1942) in a mud hut in Khartoum.

He then joined 450 Squadron flying Kittyhawks, and took part in ground strafing, escorting light bombers and dive bombing operations before, during, and after the Battle of El Alamein (July 1942).

On November 9, 1942, David was shot down by a Messerschmidt Me109. It was reported that his aircraft had crashed in flames, and that there was no chance of survival. However, he had parachuted clear of the plane, an instant before it crashed behind enemy lines.

He was severely wounded in both legs, and was unable to walk. Knowing that the British forces were advancing, he bandaged his legs with pieces of his parachute and set out, crawling backwards for four days in a sitting position, using his hands for propulsion. He survived by eating beetles, and drinking dew. On the fifth day he was found by two Bedouin who helped him reach and cross the British lines.

David was in hospital in Cairo for six months before returning to Australia in a hospital ship.

After more rehabilitation, he was posted to various bases in Australia before returning to operational flying in 1944 with 78 Squadron on Noemfoor Island (in the Papua province of the Dutch East Indies’ western portion of New Guinea). He was mentioned in despatches for the second time after leading an attack on a heavily defended Japanese base.

In December, his legs were causing him difficulties, and he was sent down from the islands.

The R.A.A.F. offered him an intelligence job but, rejecting the idea of not flying, he resigned from the Air Force and joined Australian National Airways as a commercial pilot.

During the next four years, he flew DC2s, DC3s, and the very rare DC5 on the Sydney, Brisbane, Broken Hill, and Tasmanian routes. In 1949, he resigned from A.N.A., and bought a farm through the Soldier Settlement Scheme at Giffard, on the shore of Bass Strait, along a stretch of the Ninety Mile Beach in East Gippsland.

He developed a productive farm, rearing sheep and Hereford cattle. He was an early and vigorous experimenter with techniques of cultivating salt-tolerant plants for his livestock.

David was also one of the original members of what would eventually become the Metung Yacht Club.

In 1986, he bought Chindrina, a 26-foot yacht which he and his two sons, my Borthwick cousins Ian and Keith, sailed from Hobart, Tasmania, across Bass Strait to Metung.

In 1970, he sailed down to Hobart again (with Dad and their old friend Kenneth Aitken as crew), but most of his sailing was around the Gippsland Lakes, either solo, or with a crew of family, and friends. The occasionally shambolic Marley Point Overnight race became an annual event from its inception, with his children and grandchildren all assisting.

David Borthwick died on September 1, 2000, after having suffered a stroke, and was survived by his wife Jeanie, two sons, and six grandchildren.

Acknowledgment: This obituary was written by David’s son, Keith Borthwick, with the help of family and friends, and appeared in The Age newspaper (Melbourne) on November 17, 2000. It is here slightly augmented.

David and Jeanie also had a daughter, Janet, who was my godmother.

As a little girl she had been a bridesmaid at Mum and Dad’s wedding in 1949, and Mum was especially attached to her.

She grew up, followed both her parents to the University of Melbourne (and her mother to Women’s College, as it was then known), and afterwards worked for a time in counter-intelligence circles. The authorities were somewhat taken aback when Uncle David robustly sought assurances (in person) that Janet’s undercover activities would not put her in harm’s way.

On one occasion she tailed a visiting Soviet agricultural delegation to Wangaratta, and it would be amusing to know exactly what information the K.G.B. gleaned en route—interesting ways with manure, perhaps?—and what information Janet noted in the relevant file; I do not know if she spoke any Russian.

Janet got married at St. George’s Church of England, Malvern, to which ceremony I was allowed to go, wearing an extremely fetching pair of bottle-green velvet shorts, smocked white shirt, and a pair of red patent-leather buckled shoes. I vividly recall Uncle David’s tail coat, and spectacular collapsible silk top hat.

Janet and her husband moved to a farm near Albany in Western Australia, but in 1969 was killed in a tragic car accident.

No parent recovers easily, or ever, from the death of a child, but I am sure David and Jeanie were long comforted by the knowledge that Janet’s infant son, Robert Campbell, who survived the crash, grew up, spent regular holidays with his grandparents, his uncles and cousins, then studied engineering, and prospered.

Robert now lives with his own family in New Zealand.

Up-Jenkyns!

Mum and her siblings spent many idyllic summer holidays in Balmadies, Granny’s house at Metung, on the shore of Bancroft Bay.

It was there in about 1947, attending to what was even then a slightly anachronistic ritual, when Dad timidly asked to speak privately with his future father-in-law, intending formally to request Mum’s hand in marriage.

He must have tackled this simple task rather badly. Perhaps Dad was nervous, or even prolix—in any event obscure—because, without hesitation, my grandfather escorted him down the back passage, out past the kitchen and through the laundry, along the garden path, all the way back to the outside loo. It seems Grandfather Borthwick formed the impression that Dad was simply asking for directions.

The old house at Metung was and is a wonderful place, and the Borthwick children and their hordes of school friends spent many summer evenings after dinner playing games, of which “Up-Jenkyns!” was perhaps the most exciting.

The rules of Up-Jenkyns! are fairly straightforward.

Two teams of players sit on opposite sides of a table. Team A passes a sixpence from person to person under the table, so that Team B does not know who is concealing it.

The aim of the game is for Team A to keep the sixpence hidden, and for Team B to locate or dislodge it by issuing commands such as “Up-Jenkyns!,” commands which require Team A to adopt standard but tricky hand positions and gestures.

When Team B calls “Up-Jenkyns!,” the tightly clenched fists of the players on Team A must be at once placed in full view on the table.

The first player on Team B then carefully scans the fists for any sign of sixpence possession, and also the faces of his opponents to detect any hint, any flicker of self-consciousness, or some other clue as to the location of the sixpence.

Having made the best possible assessment, the first player reaches over and touches the hand in which he hopes the sixpence will be, saying, “Tip It.” The hand is then opened.

If the guess is correct the sixpence passes to Team B, and play recommences. If wrong, Team A repeats the process, hides it again, and the second player on Team B tries to discover its whereabouts. Strategies of bluffing and deception are liberally employed by Team A in an effort to mislead Team B, whilst various types of call are deployed as confusingly as possible by Team B, in an effort to flush out the sixpence. Systems of scoring vary from family to family.

According to The Weekend Book, as authoritative a source as I have been able to locate,

Orders can only be legally obeyed when given by one of the Captains; and if the team which is hiding the Sixpence obeys any other order, it loses. The “In” team, which is hiding the coin, must put up its hands the instant the opposing Captain calls “Up-Jenkyns!” but he ought to allow them at least five seconds before he calls. He can keep their hands in the air as long as he likes, for examination purposes; the “Down” calls are “Down-Jenkyns” (hands can be put down as players please); “Smashums!” (hands must be crashed down on the table): “Crawlers!” (hands placed quietly on the table, and fingers quietly undone till the hands lie flat): “Open Windows” (hands must lie on the table with all the fingers but not the thumbs apart); and “Lobster-Pots” (finger-tips only to rest on the table, and fingers to be held at an angle to the palm). In lifting the hands only the Captain’s order must be obeyed; but he should allow free and fair consultation to his own side first. Scores can be played for, by the number of separate “wins,” or the show of hands on the table when the sixpence is discovered. Before the game starts, all rings and spurs to be removed. After the game, let the provider of the sixpence see that he gets it back!

Up-Jenkyns! was popular enough by the 1920s to put in an appearance in The Sittaford Mystery (1931) by Agatha Christie, but some years ago a correspondent to the Guardian suggested that Up-Jenkyns! was played much earlier by young naval officers around the wardroom table using a small object or token representing the ear of Captain Robert Jenkins (d. 1741).

Captain Jenkins was in 1731 master of the merchant brig Rebecca, bound for Jamaica, when according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, he was “boarded on 9 April by a Spanish coastguard off Havana. Jenkins was half-strangled and beaten by the Spanish, who wished to get him to reveal suspected hidden contraband. After failing to discover anything, the Spanish commander cut off part of Jenkins’s ear, ‘bidding him to carry it to his Master, King George’.”

The Jenkins affair contributed much to public enthusiasm for war with Spain, which broke out eight years later for different but related reasons. It was nevertheless known as The War of Jenkins’ Ear.

Meanwhile, I doubt if Up-Jenkyns! is in any way related to jenkinsite, which the Oxford English Dictionary, citing the American Journal of Science, series II, Vol. XIII, 1852, defines as “a variety of hydrophite, found as a fibrous incrustation on iron ore.”

If indeed Up-Jenkyns! was a happy by-product of The War of Jenkins’ Ear, I cannot account for the corrupt spelling. Perhaps one of my readers may know, or care to comment.