When he wrote this letter
to his father, Alexander Hay Borthwick, my great-grandfather William Borthwick
was a boarder at the Bonnington
Park Academy, a school for boys established not long before in 1858 at Peebles
on the River Tweed in Scotland. The hand is simply exquisite. He was at this not quite thirteen years old.
Bonnington Park
Peebles. 10th
April, 1863
Dear Father,
I received the
welcome letter sent to me by my mother, and was delighted to hear in it that
you were all quite well. There was a remarkable discovery made in this school
on Thursday week. We found in a certain boy named David Barclay an heir to the
Scottish throne, but the worst of it is there is no throne in Scotland for him
to inherit, so I think it might have been as well that he did not know it, for
he may think of raising a rebellion, and if unsuccessful he may be hanged. We
got a whole holiday last Friday as it was “Good Friday.” I enjoyed a good game
at cricket, and after it was finished some of the boys went out to a walk with
one of the tutors to see a small house called the “Black Dwarf’s Cottage.” It
is very small, and the door is not quite three and a half feet high. A man
showed them the dwarf’s portrait. He has a very large head with a kind of
nightcap on it, and a long pole in his hand. His right name is David Ritchie.
The first eleven got their cricket things last Friday, but we only got ours
last night, and I think they are very good. Mr. Angus, our minister, who is on
the continent, is coming home soon. I hope Mother, Alexander, and Janet are
quite well. With kind love to all at home,
In times of merriment, my late father used to enjoy tormenting Mum by referring to her, and her Borthwick forebears as “filthy lowlanders.” This was based on the presumption that his own mother’s Campbell antecedents were sufficiently embedded in the Highland clans, notwithstanding the Hanoverian outrages of Colloden and Glencoe, of which Mum was careful to remind him, somewhat sniffily, by way of slightly less good-humoured risposte.
The Borthwicks were indeed a border family, but with some distinction.
According to a lengthy memorandum drafted in his elegant longhand by my great-great-grandfather, Alexander Hay Borthwick, and prudently preserved for posterity by Aunt Jean—evidently much consulted in her researches—the Borthwicks of Raeshaw, meaning the border-dwelling Borthwicks of Dumfriesshire and Midlothian, were descended from William Borthwick, fourth Lord Borthwick of that Ilk, of Borthwick Castle in Midlothian (above).
Lord Borthwick was Governor of Stirling Castle and guardian of the infant King James V following the catastrophic defeat by the English in Northumberland of the invading Scots army at the bloody Battle of Flodden Field on September 9, 1513. Lady Borthwick, whom this Lord Borthwick married in 1491, was Margaret, the daughter of John Hay of Yester.
In the early seventeenth century, Lord Borthwick’s junior, junior, junior descendant, William Borthwick, wound up as Laird of Raeshaw at the head of Gala Water in the Scottish borders, about twenty miles southeast of Edinburgh.
“The families of Borthwick and Pringle,” wrote Mr. Borthwick, “were at that time the most influential in that [unpromising] part of the country, and as even happens in these present times [c. 1880], they had constant disputes about their marches [boundaries] which led to a quarrel between the above William Borthwick and James Pringle, resulting in a duel with swords in which James Pringle was killed.”
The wording here is intriguingly passive, as if James Pringle’s death was some kind of regrettable accident, and William Borthwick did not, in fact, slay him in cold blood.
“William Borthwick fled to Eskdale in Dumfriesshire and remained hid in the woods there for a long time, his property and everything belonging to him being confiscated. He never returned to Gala Water, but when he had reason to think the duel was forgotten and that he was safe from prosecution, he took the big sheep farm of Howpasley at Howick on Borthwick Water in Roxburghshire, where he died, leaving two sons, William and Thomas.
It is not clear what Mr. Borthwick meant here by the hold-all term “took.”
In any event, “They kept Howpasley until the disturbances in ‘Bluidy Clavers’ time, c. 1685 [the death of King Charles II] when they were advised not ‘to sign.’”
John Graham of Claverhouse, first Viscount Dundee (c. 1648–1689) was responsible for policing the Scottish borders during the long period of religious unrest during the 1670s and 1680s, and was notorious for his persecution of the Covenanters. “Not signing,” here, apparently refers to the Borthwicks’ determination along with many others in the southwest of Scotland to adhere to the Presbyterian conventicles, and to resist the imposition of bishops, the Church of Scotland, and everything else to do with the Catholic King James VII [of Scotland; II of England], and the Stuart hegemony.
“In consequence of this their farm and stock were taken from them. All they had left were a few sheep which were ‘at grass’ on the farm of Glendinning on the Westerhall Estate.” According to a marginal note, Mr. Borthwick fastidiously notes that property was farmed by his father until 1874.
“The Lady Johnstone of that day had the farm of Glendinning in her own hands. She ordered all her sheep into the faulds so that those belonging to William and Thomas Borthwick might be secured (possibly for herself as she was on the other side of religious opinion). However a shepherd named Reeve slipped the sheep over the fauld dyke. Thus they got to the hill and were preserved for their rightful owners. Soon after this William Borthwick took the farm of Glendinning, and in 1701 married Janet Scott, sister of David Scott of Merrylaw.”
Again one notices Mr. Borthwick’s use of the term “took,” and one wonders where this left Margaret, Lady Johnstone, daughter of John Bannatyne of Corehouse and relict of Sir James Johnstone of Westerhall, Member of Parliament, Sheriff of Dumfries, who was thoroughly bound to the Restoration Stuart Court, but let us presume that she was not in any way a beneficiary of the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
The eldest son of William Borthwick and Janet Scott was naturally also William. This William Borthwick farmed Glendinning up to 1753, when he sold his stock by public auction: namely 820 ewes, 520 quinter ewes [meaning ewes in their third year], 490 gimmers [two year-old ewes], 60 dimmonts [ewe lambs after weaning], 560 ewe hoggs [roughly half way between a dimmont and a gimmer], 480 wedder hoggs [castrated rams of the same age as ewe hoggs], 50 old tups [rams], and 40 tup hoggs [uncastrated rams of the same age as wedder hogs], yielding a grand total of 2,960 beasts, not including black cattle and goats. Unfortunately the hammer prices have not survived, and although William purchased with the proceeds a farm called Cassock, he was forced to retire, aged sixty, a ruined man.
This is not by any means the only instance of financial incompetence on the part of our various Scottish ancestors, nor indeed of the tendency to resort to violence, and those patterns offer surprisingly little reassurance from the genetic standpoint. Still, there is some pluck and resilience also, and, in common with “Egon, Fool of the Forest,” that wild and undaunted person from whom Dad claimed direct descent via the Campbells, Mum’s Borthwick ancestor was evidently shrewd enough to survive in the woods of Dumfriesshire for quite a long time. Whether either strand has better equipped us to lead productive lives in modern Australia, or elsewhere, is another question entirely.
This is the farm called Raeshaw, at Fulham, near Sale in East Gippsland, where my mother and her siblings were born, and spent the earliest years of their childhood before the family moved to Geelong in 1936.
Granny’s baby Austin is parked on the drive, and the structure by the front gate on the far left is in fact an old Melbourne cable tram which my grandfather bought and installed in the garden as an extremely exciting plaything for the children.
The tennis court on the right was where the children’s lessons were conducted by the family governess, Kit Fife, and my grandfather created little open-air work tables for the children descending in scale according to the appropriate age and dimensions of each. A vital part of the children’s daily lessons was a long walk along the railway line, and much of value was learned on those foraging expeditions, and even imaginations fired.
Mum remembers monitoring for several months a genuine fairy circle, and delivering gifts of home-made fairy crockery and flatware for which there were always enchanting thank-you letters written out on gumleaves waiting for her the next day. These were in fact created by Mungie.
The enormous vegetable garden must have gone quite a long way towards feeding the whole household at the height of the Great Depression, and, of course, there was always a convenient supply of mutton and lamb.
I think the stables where the children’s ponies lived must be the structure tucked just behind the house to the left, behind a stand of trees.
This photograph was taken “from the Shell Company’s machine, ‘Golden Shell,’ flown by Captain F. C. Penny.”
This charming group consists of my Borthwick great-grandparents: William, standing in the middle, wearing the light suit and a black armband, and Ada Maud Mary (Bell), seated, third from left.
She is surrounded by members of her enormous Bell family, including her parents, seated in the wicker chairs on the right, and Mrs. Bell's ancient mother, tiny Mrs. Wallen, who presides in the middle with her cane. The older gentleman on the far left must be a Bell or Wallen uncle, and the remainder Bell siblings, including Aunt Ethel Cavanagh; Aunt Gwladys Bowman (affectionately known as Paddy), and Uncle Arthur E. Bell, top right, with his cheerful pet sulphur-crested cockatoo.
The photograph was taken in about 1890 outside the National Bank of Australasia in Sale, of which my great-grandfather was for the time being manager, while his father-in-law was manager of the local branch of the Bank of New South Wales.
It is said that William first met Ada whilst she was kicking a football in the garden of her father's bank.
My great-great grandfather, William Borthwick, was born near Borthwick Castle in Midlothian, not far from Edinburgh, and was certainly a distant kinsman of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and, I suppose, on that principle, all subsequent Lords Borthwick in the peerage of Scotland, who are also chiefs of the Clan Borthwick, Barons of Heriotmuir, and Lairds of Crookston. His wife’s maiden name was Jane Murray.
Their son, my great-grandfather, also William Borthwick, was born on December 4, 1850, and emigrated on his own aboard the S.S. Ravenscraig, the ship which presently brought the first ukulele from Madeira to Honolulu in 1879. William Borthwick arrived at Port Melbourne in July 1870, aged nineteen and a half.
William joined the National Bank of Australasia Limited in Melbourne, and rose rapidly; in fact he did so well that before long he became the youngest man ever appointed manager, in this case the Bank’s branch at Maffra in East Gippsland (above).
There he met his future wife, Ada Maud Mary, the daughter of Edward Connor Bell and Katherine Anne Wallen.
According to Aunt Anne, on the first occasion upon which William set eyes on Ada, she was kicking a football in the grounds of the local branch of a rival bank, of which her uncle was manager.
Somewhat weakly, despite his middle name, E. C. Bell always insisted that his father, a Writer to the Signet in Dublin, was Scottish, not Irish, on the unfortunate, oft-repeated basis that“Had I been born in China, I would not have been Chinese.”
After ten years at the National Bank, William Borthwick bought into Mr. Little’s stock and station agency in Sale—which duly became known as Little and Borthwick.
According to a useful advertisement placed in The Gippsland Mercury (1898), Little and Borthwick (late English, Little, & Co.) were the local agents for the Land Mortgage Bank; the Curator of the Estates of Deceased Persons; the Peninsula and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P. & O.); Messrs. R. Goldsbrough, Woolbrokers, and the Liverpool and London and Globe Fire and Life Insurance Company, in other words practically everything.
They also conducted auctions and carried out valuations “in any part of Gippsland,” and lent “large and small sums of money” on mortgage or freehold estate, in effect behaving very much like a bank.
In 1885, with the proceeds of this rather successful business William purchased a property four miles west of Sale, across the road from the Pearsons’ Kilmany Park.William Borthwick named it Bald Hills, presumably after the eponymous Bolkonsky estate in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which first appeared in English translation in the same year. The land is west of Fulham, near where the Sale aerodrome now is.
As neighbors with strong Scottish connections, the Borthwick and Pearson families grew up in close proximity and while the Borthwicks were not nearly so rich as the Pearsons, they were evidently prosperous enough to enable Aunt Jean and Aunt Kath and possibly their mother also to travel to Europe for an extended holiday in the 1920s, presumably after great-grandfather William Borthwick died, and again in the mid-1930s.
On that later occasion they traveled aboard an Imperial Airways Short “C” Class flying boat, a 16-day journey which induced temporary deafness but offered by way of compensation nightly hotel accommodation somewhere pleasant, and conversation-free dinners.
My grandfather, W. A. Borthwick, was an eccentric but by all accounts lovable man. Uncle John recalled that he used to torment his sisters, especially Aunt Jean (above), by ostentatiously examining the lunulae on their fingernails for evidence of creole ancestry or, as he put it in those bad old days, “a touch of the tar brush.”
So irritated by this slur upon the genetic inheritance of their mother, Ada Maud Mary (Bell), known affectionately to her grandchildren as “Da,” in old age Aunt Jean was careful to transcribe not her own recollections, which would have been equally fascinating, but those of her great-grandmother Wallen, which she wrote when, as an old lady, she lived in a large house in Hawthorn called Harlech that belonged to her son, the businessman and journalist Uncle Robert Elias Wallen, sometime chairman of the Melbourne Stock Exchange, and Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.
Mr. and Mrs. Francis Robertson Wallen, my three times great-grandparents, and seven of their eight children sailed to Victoria during the Gold Rush aboard the famous Great Britain. Robert, probably their eldest son, who was born at Port of Spain in Trinidad on June 5, 1831, came slightly ahead of them on the Rip Van Winkle. The cargo was consigned to him; he was only twenty-one years old.
Both ships reached the total chaos of Hobson’s Bay and Sandridge (Port Melbourne) in November 1852.
Francis Wallen was an Irishman from Co. Donegal, who spent the early part of his life in Trinidad and St. Kitts, where the family had sugar plantations. His wife, Catherine Anne, was the daughter of a sugar planter called Charles Hobson, and was born on the island of Dominica in the Lesser Antilles on May 6, 1812, during the eruption of Soufrière, the volcano on St. Vincent. Her mother’s Audibert family, which had Huguenot connections, actually fled France during the Terror, and sought refuge on their sugar plantations in the West Indies which by then were on islands controlled by Britain.
Not long before her birth, during the uprising of 1796, in a naval raid, French cannonballs destroyed Mr. Hobson’s house, and shortly afterwards enemy marines destroyed what remained, even his furniture. Between the hurricanes and this loss, the family’s circumstances were much reduced, and it became necessary to take Catherine, her brothers Charles and Edward, and her sister Eliza to England, together with a black nurse called Madelon.
The Hobson family sailed back and forth between England and the West Indies numerous times, so their fortunes cannot have been too badly damaged, and the purpose of these voyages was to place the children in an array of thoroughly ad hoc, presumably inadequate, and characteristically disorganized Regency educational establishments, such as the small private school run by the three unmarried Misses Babington in Chelsea, sisters of “the great Dr. Babington of London,” and to arrange for guardians and others, including Mrs. Aston and “Aunt John,” who from time to time stood in loco parentis while Mr. and Mrs. Hobson were in Dominica, gradually churning out more and more children.
Aunt Jean was careful to note that in the Caribbean the term creole was often used to describe anyone who was born and raised locally, regardless of ethnicity, or, as she put it, “everyone, of any race or color, human, animal, or feathered.”
Undeniably, the Wallens of Trinidad and St. Kitts owned slaves on their plantations, but when one of Mrs. Hobson’s Audibert cousins on St. Vincent, an eldest son no less, eloped with a colored girl, his French-speaking mother, Mrs. Hobson’s aunt, thought it such a disgrace that she could not bear to remain on the island.
Obviously desperate, she took the whole family to Canada, suffered immensely from the cold, lost everything, then came back again, this time to Martinique, where she set up a little mixed business eventually much patronized by “everyone,” including the Governor of St. Vincent, Admiral Sir Charles Brisbane (1808–29), “who always got his champagne by the dozen.”
Though perturbed by that bit about the mixed business, Aunt Jean seemed to think all this was reassuring.
And regardless of my grandfather’s imaginative insinuations in respect of the lunulae—he was certainly right about at least one collateral branch—our Borthwick–Bell–Wallen–Hobson–Audibert creole matriline threads its fertile way through the full extent of the nineteenth-century British Empire, from Scotland and Ireland to the Windward Islands, Canada, India, and Australia.
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 TheSittaford 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.
William and Helen Borthwick, my grandparents, at Raeshaw, Fulham, near Sale, East Gippsland, c. 1924.
William Arthur Borthwick (1894–1953) was the fourth son and sixth child of William Borthwick and Ada Maud Mary, the eldest of the eight daughters of Edward ConnorBell and Katherine Anne Wallen.
William senior, my great-grandfather, migrated from Scotland in 1869, aged 19, after his father, Alexander Hay Borthwick, refused to buy him a commission in the Indian Army, in which two of his uncles had served with some distinction.
He may have been prompted to go to Australia by the fact that his father’s brother, Uncle John James Malcolm Borthwick, preceded him, and created in about 1850 the Tarong station atop the Blackbutt Range in the South Burnett region of southern Queensland, approximately sixty miles due west of Caloundra, and was one of the first men to ship wool from Brisbane.
On reaching Melbourne he joined the National Bank of Australasia Limited, and became the youngest man ever appointed manager of a branch, in this case at Maffra. Thence he was eventually transferred to Sale, where the family settled permanently.
My grandfather’s eldest brother, the namesake of their grandfather, Alexander Hay Borthwick, or Uncle Lex, as he was known, served in the A. I.F., lost an arm in Palestine, married Eva Sage of Mildura (a nurse whom he met whilst recuperating), and settled on the land not far from Cowarr in East Gippsland.
The second brother, 1st Lieutenant Keith Borthwick of the 8th (Victorian) Regiment of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade, fell on August 7, 1915, in the first wave in the famous Battle of the Nek at Gallipoli, one of the most famous but costly moments in Australian history. Because he was an officer, the name of Lt. Keith Borthwick, and his occupation (grazier), appear in one of the most haunting footnotes of Bean’s official history. The hundreds of ordinary diggers who died were, of course, not listed.
The third brother, John Malcolm, had much earlier chosen to pursue a career as a professional officer in the British Army, but evidently committed suicide at Aden in 1908, aged 20.
He had two younger sisters, Aunt Jean and Aunt Kath (Kathleen), a talented viola player in what Uncle John used to describe mischievously as “Ziggy Zelman’s Follies,” but which was, in fact, the budding Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, whose first concert took place on December 11, 1906, under the baton of Maestro Alberto Zelman.
Neither Aunt Kath nor Aunt Jean (q.v.) ever married. As a dedicated volunteer, Aunt Jean transcribed by hand entire books in Braille. She and Aunt Kath lived together, first with their mother, known affectionately as “Da,” in Adelaide Street, Armadale, and then in a modest ground floor flat in Myamyn Street, a few doors down from Granny.
My grandfather, William, came after Aunt Kath, and, finally, the baby brother, Ronald Murray Borthwick, who also served in the A. I.F., and eventually married Aunt Meryl, the daughter of Dr. Hagenauer of Sale.
On November 10, 1953, at the Veterinary School grounds at Parkville, Uncle Ron demonstrated a revolutionary stock cradle, which was thought to have considerable influence in the treatment and control of foot rot.
According to an engaging memoir she wrote in the early 1970s, Granny knew the Borthwick family when they were all growing up together in and around Sale. She recalled Aunt Kath coming as Red Riding Hood to a big fancy-dress dance in the drawing room at Kilmany, and, later, in 1912, Granny’s coming out year, going to dances in Melbourne and golfing tournaments in Traralgon with Lex and Keith Borthwick.
The war was as costly for the Borthwick family as it was for scores of others. My grandfather volunteered for active duty, but was prevented from serving due to a heart condition brought on by having contracted rheumatic fever as a child.
In the end he lost two brothers, who, if they had survived might conceivably have been more suitable husbands for my grandmother, such is the vague sense one gets from a close reading of the relevant portion of Granny’s memoir, which was written long after William died of a heart attack at Berwick in 1953.
Helen Pearson, my grandmother, in London, c. 1913.
Helen (Granny) was the daughter of the Hon. William Pearson, M.L.C. (1864–1919), and his wife Sophie Emily (née Gooch).
Granny was born on November 27, 1893, at Bonegilla Park, Wodonga, and grew up with her brother Roy, her sister Emily (Aunt Mim), and their younger cousin Mollie (Mungie) at Kilmany Park, near Sale in East Gippsland.
She was the head girl at The Hermitage in Geelong in about 1911–12.
Bafflingly, the family spent the years of the First World War living in Europe. At first they were stranded. When war broke out the family was touring Wales in a motor, and had great difficulty finding anyone who could speak English. Uncle Roy immediately joined the British Army, and served in the 13th Hussars in France and Mesopotamia. Although the Pearsons sailed back to Australia at the end of 1914, after a few months they turned around and came straight back again, presumably at some risk of enemy attack, to be nearer Roy, and possibly to resume a style of life in England that clearly suited their daughters. They settled in a large house called The Orchard on Chorleywood Common near Rickmansworth, on the northeast edge of London.
At the Hermitage, Granny recalled seeing her first aeroplane, a black speck that appeared over the You Yangs, but in early 1914, on a visit to Menton in the south of France, she actually flew in one.
William Pearson died prematurely in 1919, and Kilmany Park was sold not long afterwards. The station was subdivided, and the house was turned into a glum Presbyterian Boys’ Home.
In 1918, Aunt Mim, who was by then the widow of a British army officer, Pat Jackson, contracted Spanish influenza. Granny caught it too. They were both lucky to survive, as were their parents. The family returned to Australia at the end of 1918.
Soon after the end of the war, Helen married my grandfather, William Arthur Borthwick, a grazier, at Sale on October 27, 1920. Before the war she had known his older brothers, Lex and Keith, who was killed in the first wave at the Battle of the Nek at Gallipoli.
The Borthwicks were neighbors. Their property, which was creatively named Bald Hills, shared a boundary with part of Kilmany, and the Pearson and Borthwick children grew up together. Reading between the very discreet lines of Granny’s handwritten memoir – the name of Keith Borthwick crops up from time to time in connection with dances in Sale and Melbourne, golfing tournaments at Kilmany and Traralgon – one wonders whether there was more than a hint of affection between Granny and him. Keith Borthwick survives in one of the most haunting footnotes to Bean’s official history, but fell in perhaps the most disgracefully futile action at Gallipoli.
Helen and William Borthwick settled on a farm called Raeshaw, at Fulham, quite close to Bald Hills and Kilmany Park. My mother Helen (b. July 20, 1926), her brother David (1921–2000), their sister Anne (1923–1986) and brother John (1929–2006) were all born at Raeshaw. Anne and Helen followed their mother to The Hermitage.
The family moved to Geelong in 1936, and eventually settled first in a large house called Raith in Newtown, then at 188, Noble Street, where they remained throughout the final years of World War II.
As a child my grandfather had contracted rheumatic fever, which permanently weakened his heart, so although he volunteered for active service in World War I, unlike his two brothers, he was not allowed to go. In the late 1940s, Granny and Grandad moved from Geelong to Berwick, where he died far too young of a heart attack in 1953 – obviously I never knew him.
Granny retired to a big, rambling Edwardian house with a pretty garden at 5, Myamyn Street in Armadale. She died at Lynn Private Hospital in Melbourne on February 12, 1975, after a brief diabetic illness.
