The sheep

Uncle Tony Trumble has been mining the bottom of his cupboard in southern Tasmania. Here he is, circa 1932, with Uncle Arthur, one of our great-grandmother Campbell’s many Frew siblings. According to Uncle To, Uncle Arthur asked him to go in and bring him a baa. Tony marched in and attempted to do so. The baas were understandably startled, and Uncle Arthur had to go in and rescue him. This is what is happening in this action shot, presumably captured by Pa—evidence, perhaps, of the long Trumble tradition of capturing on camera moments of distress experienced by the children. I am rather taken by Uncle Arthur’s belt and braces, and that traditional stockman’s hat. Uncle Arthur’s property was at Binalong, near Coonabarabran, northeast of Dubbo in New South Wales. My grandparents drove all the way up there in the car they knew affectionately as Leaping Lena. Arthur Frew was a well known identity in the district, and gates to his memory were not long afterwards erected at the Binalong Show Grounds. In about 1939 the Coonabarabran Agricultural Society co-opted those gates for their own show grounds, but after the war Binalong demanded them back. Much later Uncle To investigated, and found them in a very diminished state. He dug up the committee and donated a couple of hundred dollars to get them fixed. It cost a great deal more than $200, but the Show Society generously paid the difference. I gather Uncle Alec has since called in to check up on them. Thus our footprint endures.

Who we are, part 2 (Dad)

Our grandfather, T. C. Trumble, a descendant of the Trumble hunter-gatherers of Northern India and the Levant.

Thanks to the National Geographic Society’s Geno 2.0 Project, I can now dilate further upon the distant origins of us Trumbles. All such genetic studies begin with the identification of the “marker” for our oldest male ancestor, and walk forward thence to more recent times, showing at each step the line of his descendants.

What is a marker? Each of us carries DNA in every cell of our body, a hugely complex combination of genes passed from both Mum and Dad. This combination endows us with traits that range from eye color, height, and bone structure (fabulous, if I do say so), to athleticism or otherwise, creativity, intelligence, and even susceptibility to certain diseases. As part of this process of combination and re-combination, the Y-chromosome is passed directly from father to son down a purely male line, in our case the Trumble line, unchanged from generation to generation. Mitochondrial DNA, on the other hand, is passed from mothers to their children, but only their daughters pass Mitochondrial DNA to the following generations. In other words it traces a purely maternal line. We have already dealt with this, and, with it, our exciting dalliance with Neanderthal and Denisovan man.

Now, parts of the DNA are passed on unchanged, unless a mutation occurs—a random, spontaneous, natural and usually harmless change. The mutation, known as a marker, acts as a beacon; it can be mapped through generations because it, too, is passed down through the generations for thousands of years. When geneticists identify such a marker, they try to determine when it first occurred, and in which region of the world: in Ethiopia, or Manchuria, or the Yukon, or Borneo, or Tierra del Fuego. Each marker is essentially the beginning of a new lineage on the human family tree.

Branch M42: ca. 75,000 years ago

The common direct paternal ancestor of all men alive today was born in Africa around 140,000 years ago. Naturally he was a Trumble. He was neither the first human male nor the only man alive in his time. He was, however, the only male whose Y-chromosome lineage has survived until now. All men, including our direct paternal ancestors, trace their ancestry to one of this man’s descendants. The oldest Y-chromosome lineages in existence, belonging to the “A” branch of the tree, are found only in African populations.

Around 75,000 years ago, the “BT” branch of the Y-chromosome tree was born, defined by many genetic markers, including M42. The common ancestor of most men living today, some of this proto-Trumble’s descendants began the journey out of Africa, to India (!) and to the Middle East. Small groups would eventually reach the Americas. Others would settle in Europe, and some from this line remained near their ancestral homeland in Africa.

Individuals from this line in Africa often practice cultural traditions that resemble those of their distant ancestors. For example, they often live in traditional hunter-gatherer societies. These include the Mbuti and Biaka Pygmies of central Africa, as well as the Hadza of Tanzania (formerly Tanganyika), a range of possibilities that I feel quite sure would have tickled my late father, and filled my mother with deep skepticism and, perhaps, a wry or mischievous chuckle. She was modestly proud of her own ancestors.

Now, as M42-bearing populations migrated around the globe, they picked up additional markers on their Y-chromosomes. Today, there are no known BT individuals without these additional markers.

Branch M168: Africa/Asia, ca. 70,000 years ago

As the proto-Trumbles left Africa, they migrated across the globe in a network of pathways that spread out like the branches of a tree, each limb of migration identifiable by a marker in our DNA. For male lineages, the M168 branch was one of the first to leave the African homeland.

Moving outward from Africa and along the coastline, members of this lineage were some of the earliest settlers in Asia, Southeast Asia, and, significantly, Australia, the Aboriginal Trumbles. Some from this line would even travel over the land bridge to reach the Americas. The Trumble who gave rise to the first genetic marker in our lineage probably lived in northeast Africa in the region of the Rift Valley, perhaps in present-day Ethiopia, Kenya, or Tanzania. My preference would be for Kenya, a distant premonition, as I have already put it, of gins-and-tonic on the verandahs of suburban Nairobi or in Happy Valley. The descendants of this rather blasé Trumble became the only lineage to survive outside of Africa, making him the common ancestor of every non-African man living now.

Why did this Trumble and/or his descendants leave Africa? The first migrants probably ventured across the Bab-al Mandeb strait, a narrow body of water at the southern end of the Red Sea, crossing into the Arabian Peninsula soon after M168 originated—perhaps 65,000 years ago. These beachcombing Trumbles made their way quite rapidly to northern India and Southeast Asia, following the coastline in a gradual march eastward. One can see it, I think, in the satisfactorily Brahmin Trumble eyebrows. By 50,000 years ago, they had also reached Australia. These were the ancestors of today’s Australian Aborigines.

It is also likely that a fluctuation in climate may have contributed to our ancestors’ exodus out of Africa. The African ice age, as we have already seen, was characterized by drought rather than by cold. Around 50,000 years ago, parts of the inhospitable Sahara briefly became habitable. As the drought-ridden desert changed to a savanna, the animals hunted by our ancestors expanded their range and began moving through the newly emerging green corridor of grasslands. Our nomadic Trumble ancestors therefore followed the good weather and the animals they hunted, although the exact route they followed remains to be determined. In addition to a favorable change in climate, around this same time there was a great leap forward in modern Trumbles’ intellectual capacity. Many scientists believe that the emergence of language gave we Trumbles a huge advantage over other early human species. Improved tools and weapons, the ability to plan ahead and cooperate with one another, and an increased capacity to exploit resources in ways we hadn’t been able to earlier: all these allowed ancient Trumbles rapidly to migrate into new territories, exploit new resources, and replace or subsume other hominids such as the Neanderthals.

Branch M89: South Asia (hmmm) or West Asia, ca. 50,000 years ago

The next male ancestor in our ancestral lineage is the man who gave rise to M89, a marker found in 90 to 95 percent of all non-Africans. This Trumble was born around 50,000 years ago in northern Africa or the Middle East. The first Trumbles to leave Africa probably followed a coastal route that eventually ended, satisfactorily, in Australia. Our ancestors followed the expanding grasslands and plentiful game to the Middle East and beyond, and were part of the second great wave of migration out of Africa.

Beginning about 40,000 years ago, the climate shifted once again and became colder and more arid. Drought bore down upon Africa and the grasslands reverted to desert, and for the next 20,000 years, the Saharan Gateway was effectively closed. With the desert impassable, our Trumbles had but two options: to remain in the Middle East, or to press on. Retreat to the home continent was no longer an option. While many of the descendants of M89 remained in the Middle East, others continued to follow the great herds of wild game through what is now modern-day Iran into the vast steppes of Central Asia.

These semi-arid grass-covered plains formed an ancient “super-highway” stretching from eastern France to Korea. Our Trumbles, having migrated north out of Africa into the Middle East, then traveled both east and west along this Central Asian superhighway. A smaller group continued moving north from the Middle East to Anatolia and the Balkans, trading familiar grasslands for forests and high country.

Today, geneticists have found the lineage in 1% to 2% of Pakistani and Indian populations. However, it is about 4% of some Austro-Asiatic-language-family-speaking groups in India. It is about 9% of some Dravidian-language-family-speaking groups in India, and it is 9% to 10% of male lineages in Sri Lanka. In Borneo, Borneo!, it is about 5% of the population. In Malaysia, it is about 6% of the population.

Branch P128: South Asia, ca. 45,000 years ago

The next male ancestor in our ancestral lineage is the Trumble who gave rise to P128, a marker found in more than half of all non-Africans alive today. This man was born around 45,000 years ago in the Middle East or Central Asia. The descendants of P128 migrated to the east and north, picking up additional markers on their Y-chromosomes. This lineage is the parent of several major branches on the Y-chromosome tree: O, the most common lineage in East Asia; R, the major European Y-chromosome lineage; and Q, the major Y-chromosome lineage in the Americas. These Trumbles went on to settle the rest of Asia, the Americas, and Europe; many others traveled to Southeast Asia. Today, P128 individuals lacking these additional markers are rare in most populations, and are most commonly seen in Oceanian and Australian Aboriginal populations.

Branch M45: Central Asia or South Asia, ca. 35,000 years ago

This Trumble traveled with groups in the open savannas between Central and South Asia during the Paleolithic era. These were big game hunters, and parents to two of the most widespread male lineages in modern populations, one that is responsible for the majority of pre-Columbian lineages in the Americas (haplogroup Q) and many others from Asia and Europe. Another one that spread farther into Asia produced the highest frequency lineages in European populations (haplogroup R). Today, Trumbles of this lineage who do not belong to a descendant branch are rare, and geneticists have found them most often, again, in India. These populations include such diverse groups as the Saora (23%), the Bhumij (13%), and Muslims from Manipur (33%).

Branch M207: Central Asia, ca. 30,000 years ago

Trumble M207 was born in Central Asia around 30,000 years ago. His descendants went on to settle in Europe, South Asia, and the Middle East over the following 20,000 years. Today, most western European men belong to one branch—R–M342—all descended from this glorious Trumble lineage. While it appears to have been one of the earliest to settle in Europe more than 25,000 years ago, more recent population expansions associated with the post-glacial re-population of northern Europe after the end of the last ice age, as well as the spread of agriculture during the Neolithic, also contributed to its high frequency in Ireland, Britain, France and Spain. One descendant lineage—R–L62—is common in Eastern Europe and India (again; are we detecting a pattern?), and was probably spread in part through the migration of Indo-European steppe nomad Trumbles over the previous 5,000 years.

Branch P231: Central Asia, ca. 25–30,000 years ago

The Paleolithic Trumble who founded this lineage was also a nomad. His descendants include two major branches that today account for most European men and many others from Central Asia, West Asia, and South Asia.

Branch M343: South Asia or West Asia, 17–22,000 years ago

The first Trumbles of this lineage lived as hunter-gatherers on the open savannas that stretched from Korea to Central Europe. They took part in the advances in hunting technology that allowed for population growth and expansions. When the Earth entered a cooling phase, most Trumbles from this line sheltered in the southeast of Europe and in West Asia. It was from these regions that their progeny rapidly expanded when the ice receded once more. Some of these Trumbles migrated west across Europe. Other Trumbles moved back toward their distant ancestors’ homelands in Africa, passing through the Levant (!). Through these movements and the population boom triggered by the Neolithic Revolution, these Trumbles and their descendants came to dominate Europe. Today, it has a wide distribution. In Africa, geneticists have found this lineage in Northern Africa (6%) and central Sahel (23%). Its frequency in Europe is at times high and at other times moderate. It represents about 7% of Russian male lineages, about 13% of male lineages in the Balkans, about 21% of Eastern European male lineages, 55% to 58% of Western European lineages, and about 43% of Central European male lineages. In Asia, most men of this lineage are found in West Asia (6%) and South Asia (5%). However, trace frequencies of around one half of a percent from this lineage are present in East Asia, our very distant Han Chinese Trumble cousins.

Branch L278: West Asia, date yet to be determined

While some Trumbles from this group traveled west into Central Asia, others moved south toward the Levant. Today, they are present in trace frequencies of less than 1% in Italy, the Ukraine, and the region of the Pannonian Basin, pottering about in their characteristically Trumblish way.

Branch P310: West Asia, date yet to be determined

Trumbles of this lineage strolled into Central Asia, Europe, and the Levant (!). One such Trumble branch has the highest frequency of any male line in Western Europe. However, rather than a single movement across Europe, this lineage’s branches may represent many simultaneous and successive waves of migration. Today, it is 48% to 52% of male lineages in Ireland. This comes as no surprise to us, for we already knew that our Irish great-great-grandfather William Trumble (1828–1908) emigrated to Australia from Ballymote, Co. Sligo, in 1841, aged fourteen. The family also had connections to the little town of Castlerock, near Lough Foyle in Co. Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Their father, John Trumble, was evidently a freeholder, and their mother’s name was Ann (née Knott). John Trumble survives in the land records for two parishes in the neighborhood of Ballymote, Co. Sligo. It seems he paid a church tithe or tax for arable and bottom land, and what is unsentimentally described as “reclaimed bog” at Feenaghroe in the parish of Toomour, to the tune of £1/10/10½.

However, looking at the much farther distant horizon, we are now sure that Branch P310 also represents 45% of those in France—Les Trumbles. It is about 38% of the male population in Spain—Los Trumbles. It is about 8% of male lineages in Italy—i Trumble. It is about 5% of male lineages in Oman. It is 1% to 2% of the male population in Iraq and Lebanon—the Lebanese Trumbles. It is also 1% to 2% of the male population in Kazakhstan, the sturdy Kazakh Trumbles. Today, members of this lineage are even more widely distributed across Europe and West Asia. Yet they reached their highest frequency in Ireland where we and our descendant branches contribute to between 35% and 38% of the male population. It is between 1% and 2% of male lineages in Germany—Die Trumbln. It is about 2% of the male population in Croatia. It is also present in some paternal lineages from the Ashkenazi population of eastern Europe. Can this perhaps mean that certain Trumbles were in fact once Jewish, or, at any rate, proto-Jewish—because this almost certainly predated Abraham and Sarah by several millennia? Quite possibly, and, if so, how very wonderful!

His malaria

You find out things. Among the mountain of paper Mum left behind is this spare communication from the village of Ladava in the Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea—where by coincidence I went on a school excursion in 1979—reporting to the relevant authorities in Melbourne, and, presumably, onwards to our grandparents, that Dad was diagnosed with malaria and admitted for treatment on January 23, 1944, when he was serving as an able seaman in the Royal Australian Navy. This was just a few days prior to his twenty-second birthday. I fancy the note in pencil, explaining what “B.T.” meant, was made upon further investigation by my grandfather, Tom Compson Trumble—and I bet the information came from his brother Hugh, the eminent brain surgeon. “Bacillary tertian” was a serious form of malaria that certainly killed many American and Australian servicemen during the war, so Dad was lucky. My grandparents must have been frantic with worry. Dad obviously recovered, returned to active duty, and, in due course, retrieved the document and filed it after he was demobbed and returned to live at home in Huntingtower Road. I never knew he suffered from malaria. To the best of my recollection he never once mentioned it, and as far as I know he was also fortunate not to encounter any recurrence of the disease. As I contemplate this thing about which I knew nothing, I realize that Dad hardly ever mentioned the war in the Pacific—any aspect of it. I know he was present in Tokyo Bay aboard an Australian patrol boat when the Japanese surrendered on September 2, 1945, but I cannot recall him ever describing that or any other wartime event. He was certainly a member, and a longstanding one, of the so-called Heroes’ Club, the Toorak branch of the Returned Servicemen’s League, so perhaps with considerable self-discipline he preferred to sequester his wartime experience, and share it only with men and women who also served. That bond between them must have been very strong indeed. Still, perhaps I should have made a better effort to ask him all about it—or was there some tacit sense that he wished to protect his family from that portion of his youth, and also that his family preferred to let him do so? Perhaps there were dark aspects of it that were best left to recede, above all, I suppose, the fear and the danger and the difficult task of re-entering civilian life afterwards as if nothing much had really happened. Certainly his stone deafness in one ear was partly caused by close proximity to big guns. That much I do recall Mum telling me, so he must have seen action—in the Coral Sea, I think. But I never knew about his malaria.

Robert Trumble

In my slightly callow way I have occasionally referred in these pages to our cousin Robert Trumble, and his dotty historical works The Golden Age of Cricket and The Trumble Family in Australia. Alas, Robert Trumble died recently, and, as his obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald makes clear, he was a remarkable man. I only met him once or twice, but most recently he paid me the compliment of coming along to hear a talk I gave a few years ago at the National Gallery of Victoria. Due to a process of generational slippage that has played havoc with the relevant chronologies, Robert was actually the first cousin of our late grandfather, T. C. Trumble, though Cousin Robert was many years younger than Pa, in fact almost an exact contemporary of our beloved father Peter. Robert Trumble was therefore our first cousin twice removed. However, we Trumbles are clannish and comparatively insular as regards our extraordinary shared heritage. Robert’s son, Simon, with whom I have been in touch lately, recalls a moment in the early 1970s when Simon proudly showed his father a brand new electric guitar. He suspects Robert had no idea what it was. In comformity with traditional Trumble parenting techniques, Robert was also given to thrashing his son on the tennis court, impeccably attired in long white trousers and a long-sleeved shirt, looking rather like those Wimbledon gents of the 1920s. Robert was very tall, lean, physically strong, gentle, kind, and, yes, undeniably eccentric—a true Trumble. Most importantly, Robert’s dogged work in connection with resuscitating the reputation of the French composer Vincent d’Indy was conspicuously unacknowledged at home in Australia where cultural matters are shamefully undervalued. In this sense, at least as a musicologist and composer, Robert came unto his own, but his own received him not. The French knew better. In 2003, the Republic of France conferred upon Robert Trumble the rank of chevalier dans l’ordre des arts et des lettres. May light perpetual shine upon him.

Pa

Further chair

A major development in respect of the chair. Using his new laptop computer and a wireless internet connection, Uncle Tony writes from a caravan park at remote Charters Towers in Far Northern Queensland: “I definitely remember that chair. I cannot remember in which room it was, but it was definitely at Huntingtower Road. It may even have been at Portsea at some stage.”

The pretty house in Huntingtower Road, Armadale, was where our grandparents raised their family of four Trumble boys in suburban Melbourne between the wars. Portsea, by contrast, is at the very end of the Mornington Peninsula, hard by Point Nepean and the treacherous mouth of Port Phillip Bay. There in the 1920s Nan and Pa built a boxy weekender, set back from the main road along a sandy winding dead-end track that was rather ambitiously dubbed “Macgregor Avenue.” Macgregor Avenue ran roughly parallel with Campbell’s Road, which I believe was named after our mining great grandfather, Alexander Campbell of Argyll, sometime director of the Broken Hill Proprietary Block 14 Company, Ltd., and chairman of its useful subsidiary, the King Island Scheelite Co. Presumably he surveyed it. The old house at Portsea occupied a cheerful rise (essentially a sand dune). I vividly recall Nan’s garden, with its somewhat counterintuitive sloping lawn, vigorous hedges of oleander, the sumptuous but exceedingly thirsty rhododendrons, and above all the background noise of fragrant, crunchy, untamed ti-tree scrub that encroached upon the perimeter, and seemed to stretch all the way to the ferocious ocean beaches. There cannot have been any neighbors until comparatively recently, just dense, crouching ti-trees, and the never less than deafening summertime uproar of local birds and insects.

Uncle Colin and Uncle Alec may have more to add, but at this early stage I like to think of Pa sitting in my chair at Portsea, quietly pondering on behalf of his clients, the National Bank of Australasia, Ltd., and the Australian Bankers’ Association, the pertinent and crucial free trade provision of the Australian Constitution as it bore upon the trade in dried fruits—in other words crafting his brilliant legal argument in the famous case of Commonwealth of Australia v. The Bank of New South Wales, which at Whitehall in 1949 was decided on appeal in favor of the banks by their lordships of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, a stunning cold-war victory over the creeping, grasping talons of socialism.

Uncle Tony is on his way to Mareeba in the Atherton Tablelands, not too far west of Cairns, whence he will head west into the Northern Territory, to attend the annual race meeting at the approximately three million-acre Brunette Downs Station at Threeways in the Barkly Tablelands, 220 miles northeast of Tennant Creek. By my calculation this epic journey from southern Tasmania and back again will cover not less than 5,200 miles by road.

The Pigeons

Our lives hang by the most tenuous threads of gossamer.

Prompted by a postcard rumination by my wise brother Hamish (received this morning), I am led to this conclusion by the curious fact that in the later stages of World War I my late grandfather, Tom Compson Trumble, “Pa,” as we knew him, who served in the Royal Naval Air Service and the Royal Flying Corps, was shot down over the North Sea, and one of his crew was killed.

Successfully he ditched his bullet-riddled flying boat, which Nick seems to recall was built of mahogany, wire and canvas, and promptly released his homing pigeons. These brought word of the incident to home base (above), and a destroyer was immediately dispatched to tow Pa back to England.

He must have had to wait for quite a long time, not knowing if enemy ships, submarines or aircraft were in the neighbourhood. Unfortunately the flying boat sank en route, but without any further loss of life.

How close those bullets must have come to hitting Pa, and how nearly that flying boat didn’t make it. And without those plucky carrier pigeons, no Pa. And no Pa: no Dad, nor any of us, not at least in our current configuration. And so, and so, and so, by some miracle we dangle at the end of any number of those fragile threads of gossamer.

Pa

Our grandfather, Tom Compson Trumble (1898–1970), known to the Peter Trumbles as “Pa,” and to the Colin Trumbles as “Cum-pa,” was the youngest of the six children of John William Trumble, the cricketing legend and solicitor of note, and his wife Susan (née Davies).

All five of Pa’s older siblings were interesting, and each bore the middle name of Compson, presumably some now forgotten inheritance of their mother’s family, who lived in a pretty house called Leddicott in Lavender Bay, McMahon’s Point, North Sydney. I presume her mother’s maiden name was Compson.

Mabel Compson Trumble (1889–1961) was a teacher of French and English and for some years joined the staff of an exclusive school for young ladies at Montreux in Switzerland. Auntie Mab, as she was known, was the author of a French reader for young children entitled Micheline et Didi, which, together with charming illustrations by her brother-in-law, the artist A. E. (“Peter”) Newbury, and slightly less interesting ones drawn by a cousin, Arthur C. Trumble (more like diagrams, really), was published in Melbourne in 1935 by Macmillan, in association with McCarron, Bird & Co.

Micheline and Didi are fox cubs who live with their parents, Monsieur et Madame Renard, in a comfortable, middle-class, three-storey tree-house with hammock. According to our eccentric cousin Robert, this brief but intelligent publication may be regarded as the first book ever written by a Trumble. But it also attests to the vision and prescience of McCarron, Bird & Co., whose shrewd proprietor obviously recognized that spark of genius that distinguishes Trumble women in every generation, as indeed his grandson Bruce Stewart did, and still does.

John Compson (“Jack”) Trumble (1891–1968) served in the A.I.F. during World War I, and afterwards settled at Red Cliffs, a few miles south of Mildura, on the River Murray, where he occupied himself with the cultivation, harvest, and production of dried fruit. Uncle Jack was a confirmed bachelor, and evidently a familiar figure in the Long Room at the Melbourne Cricket Club.

Ruth Compson Trumble (1892–1964), affectionately known as Auntie Winkie, married the tonalist painter and disciple of Max Meldrum A. E. (Peter) Newbury. She is to be seen, seated in a comfortable leeward dune at Anglesey, with two separate representations of the same little boy, their son David Newbury, who grew up to be an artist also, in a fine oil painting from the mid-1920s by Peter Newbury that currently hangs in my brother’s sitting-room in South Melbourne.

Hugh Compson Trumble (1894–1962), graduated M.B.B.S. from the University of Melbourne and at the outbreak of World War I joined the first A.I.F. as a medical officer, and served in France. He won the Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry in action, and went on to become a pioneering neurosurgeon, working for many years, indeed attaining great eminence at the Alfred Hospital, in close collaboration with his brother-in-law, the distinguished neurologist Dr. Leonard B. Cox. He is fondly remembered as an ingenious inventor in his Toorak potting shed of surgical instruments, including (inter alia) a grotesque but ingenious device for lifting portions of skull that is to this day known as a “plough.”

Nancy Compson Trumble (b. 1896) married Leonard B. Cox in 1925, and subsequently engaged Edna Walling to create a beautiful garden at Folly Farm at Olinda, in the Dandenong Ranges, just outside Melbourne. Aunt Nan was a keen golfer, and I think it may have been through her that Pa and Nona (Iona Heather Campbell) first met in about 1919, appropriately on the golf links at Royal Melbourne. Certainly prior to the Coxes’ marriage, Miss Trumble (Aunt Nan) and Mrs. Trumble (Nona) are frequently listed as golfing partners on the Victorian Ladies’ Interstate Team, with entirely respectable handicaps.

Tom Compson Trumble went to school at Brighton Grammar School, metriculated at the very early age of sixteen, and was dux of the school. He commenced his legal studies at the University of Melbourne in 1914, but these were eventually interrupted by the war. Like his two brothers, Pa joined up as soon as he could, aged eighteen, serving not in the A.I.F., but at first from June 1916 in the Royal Naval Air Service, and subsequently as a pilot officer in the Royal Flying Corps based at Folkstone in England. In effect he was a pioneer of the R.A.F.

Somewhere out over the North Sea, on July 24, 1917, Pa and his crew sank a German U-boat by dropping something lethal out of the cockpit of their flying boat, an achievement that was mentioned in despatches, and eventually garnered a payment from the Admiralty of £3 3s 3d, his share of the prize money. On another occasion his flying boat was shot down over the North Sea, and one of his crew was killed. He successfully ditched the bullet-riddled aircraft, and released his carrier pigeons. These brought word of the incident to home base, and a destroyer was immediately dispatched to tow him back to England. They must have had to wait for quite a long time, not knowing if the enemy was in the neighbourhood. Unfortunately the flying boat sank en route, but without any further loss of life.

After the War, Pa resumed his legal studies at Melbourne, obtaining in record time the truncated LL.B. that was devised for ex-servicemen. It was still relatively unusual for solicitors to earn law degrees, and in fact Pa showed such talent at university that he was encouraged to consider teaching in the law school. Instead he chose to become articled to an ancient solicitor at Malleson, Stewart, Stawell and Nankivell, as it was then known, and was on March 1, 1920, admitted to practice at the Victorian bar. By then Pa was engaged to Nona, the only daughter of Alexander Campbell, a director of the Broken Hill Proprietary Block 14 Company, Ltd., and Chairman of the King Island Scheelite Co. They got married the following year, when Pa was a salaried solicitor at Mallesons. They spent their honeymoon adventurously cruising on a motorcycle, Nona riding comfortably in the side-car.

Pa did not remain at Mallesons for very long, however, because in April 1922, three months after Dad was born, evidently not seeing any immediate prospect of entering the full partnership that he had been led to believe might come straight away, Pa left the firm and instead went into partnership with his father, J. W. Trumble, and Edward J. (“Ned”) Hamilton, another young solicitor, and, as “Trumble and Hamilton,” the three men practiced together in Temple Court, 422 Collins Street, Melbourne, until their firm merged discreetly and profitably with Mallesons on Monday, October 27, 193o, and they moved back to 46 Queen Street.

Pa remained a partner at Mallesons for most of the rest of his professional life, eventually becoming senior partner, in which role he was eventually supported by his two eldest sons, Dad and Uncle Colin, who joined Mallesons on the same day not too long after the end of World War II.

The culmination of Pa’s legal career was when he was one of the instructing solicitors to Garfield Barwick, Q.C. (a future Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia) in the famous case of Commonwealth of Australia v. The Bank of New South Wales, which was decided on appeal by their lordships of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.

Pa came to this enormous case fresh from an impressive victory over the dead hand of socialism in the matter of Melbourne Corporation v. The Commonwealth (State Banking), which reached the High Court of Australia in 1947. From December 10, 1945, he had served as the principal solicitor for the City of Melbourne, a role he eventually lobbed to his younger son, Colin. The justices found that the free-trade provisions of the Australian Constitution prevented the Chifley government from expediently forcing the City of Melbourne to change its banking arrangements to the considerable benefit of Canberra, and at the expense of local ratepayers.

Nan and Pa sailed to England with the Barwicks aboard the Stratheden in 1948, and took up residence at Claridge’s for eighteen months, while the case was prepared, argued, heard, and ultimately decided in the banks’ favor, in effect overruling the High Court of Australia, and overturning the Commonwealth’s wicked Banks Act of 1947.

The case was complex. Pa’s clients were actually the National Bank of Australasia, Ltd., and the Australian Bankers’ Association, but the government of the state of Victoria also had an interest in the matter, arising from the serious implications of the proposed nationalization of the Australian banks for the cultivation in and around Mildura of raisins, and the pertinent and crucial free-trade-between-the-states provision in whichever article of the Australian Constitution, an issue in which Uncle Jack Trumble was obviously deeply concerned.

Rarely, if ever, has dried fruit assumed such constitutional importance, and the case stands as a tribute to the ingenuity, not to say brilliance, of my grandfather’s legal reasoning.

Afterwards Pa sat on the boards of several public companies, including H. B. Dickie, Ltd., the distinguished Australian towel, sheet, and pillow-case manufacturer, and Younghusband, Pty. Ltd., the old firm of stock and station agents, of which he was also chairman. Another was an wholly respectable firm of organ builders, for whom Pa drafted an impeccably worded contract in which a Melbourne representative of the company undertook “to erect an organ in the chancel of St. George’s Church of England, Malvern, according to the churchwardens’ specifications,” of whom Pa also happened to be one.

Pa was a devoted Freemason. He was also a keen golfer, and made a unique contribution to the history of the Royal Melbourne Golf Club when in 1930 the club committee took the controversial decision to sell its land in Sandringham, and seek a new and more spacious but far less convenient and possibly less attractive site further away from Melbourne, there to build a new and extravagant residential club house.

Perceiving the full and worsening impact of what ultimately turned into the Great Depression, Pa conceived a far cheaper and less disruptive solution to the underlying problem, which was that the Club was becoming so hemmed in by semi-rural/semi-suburban development in the locality, and the links so overcrowded, that future growth and prosperity seemed impossible. So over a period of several months he walked all over the surrounding neighborhood of Cheltenham, patiently and quietly seeking options to purchase from the local cocky farmers enough contiguous (above all cheap) blocks of land on which to lay out a second eighteen-hole golf course, adjacent to the original.

For this plan to work it was vital for these negotiations to be conducted with each cocky as discreetly as possible, so that none of them got wind of the Club’s intentions, and the prices were held down as far as possible. When the Club committee, of which he was not a member, haughtily rejected Pa’s shrewd plan (even though by then he had successfully secured the vital options for the equivalent of a song), a majority of members forced its resignation and substituted men of vision, who proceeded to save the Club a fortune by going ahead and carrying it out.

One thinks of the famous epitaph of Sir Christopher Wren in St. Paul’s and, in respect of Pa, hearty, otherwise oblivious golfers playing the second course at Royal Melbourne might justly say “Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.”

I have only the faintest recollections of Pa, mainly, I think, as an enormous pair of highly polished brogues, which I recall studying intently at floor level in the sitting-room at 18, Denham Place. I must have been at most a toddler, but by all accounts Pa was a pretty silent man, evidently as shy as he was gentle, hardworking, and clever. By this date he had assumed the role in semi-retirement as the one of the first two consultants to his firm (1965). The other was Roy Macarthur. Pa retained that position until March 3, 1970, the day he died.

Like Nona, Pa was a rather stylish smoker of Benson and Hedges cigarettes, and was also noted for his own method of preparing an enormous, proper, and somehow rather surprisingly uncharacteristic Caesar Salad, an art which he learned whilst vacationing in the United States.

Evidently, Pa drove Nona right across, from Boston, Mass., to San Francisco, following back roads, and collecting match-books along the way. These exotic mementoes used to live in a large bowl on a side-table at Gordon Grove. Had these survived one might easily have reconstructed that epic journey, but I prefer to think of them taking the southern route, and being captivated by a fine Caesar Salad somewhere stylish, in Santa Fe, N.M., perhaps, or Palm Springs, Calif.

Pa and Nona raised their four boys in the pretty old house in Huntingtower Road, Armadale. The family car was known as “Leaping Lena,” a vague acknowledgment that, as much as he had been a brilliant, not to say heroic airman, Pa was somewhat less reliable on the open road.

In a privately published volume of reminiscences, Uncle Colin has sketched a beautiful portrait of the family’s happy life in Huntingtower Road. Pa used to get up at 5.30 in the morning to “clean out the clinker,” and get the coke-fired hot water started. How many city solicitors today could do that, or even contemplate it?

They built a little holiday house in amongst the tea-tree scrub in Macgregor Avenue, Portsea, and, after Pa retired, they moved to Pearcedale on the Mornington Peninsula, and, finally, to a sleak and snappy small modernist house in Gordon Grove, South Yarra, tucked into a fiendishly inconvenient spot just off Punt Road, on the busiest, steepest, and most lethal stretch of the hill rising on the left bank of the Yarra.