The Willis family

New to our reference collection is The Willis Family History, compiled by Shirley Doolan, a privately published monograph. It gives new information on two influential figures in the early development of Manly: Thomas Willis and his brother, Reverend Robert S Willis, who was minister of St Matthew’s Church. The family history goes back to Cumberland, England, where their father, Joseph Scaife Willis was born in 1808. Joseph was briefly the occupant of Fairlight House, circa 1875-6. Joseph’s wife, Janet Speir, was from Renfrewshire, Scotland. The book contains photos of each of them.
Robert Willis was a member of the first class to graduate from the BA course at Sydney University, in 1856. He was ordained in the Church of England in 1865, and ministered at Shoalhaven, where he met his future wife, Julia MacKenzie, who is commemorated by a memorial in St Matthew’s Church. He was minister there 1876-1894, and was a significant landowner in the Manly and Manly Vale area.
Thomas Willis was a shipping agent and insurance agent, with offices in Pitt Street, Sydney, and was one of the signatories to the 1876 petition which successfully lobbied for the establishment of Manly as a municipality.
It’s good to see such well researched family history being made available.

New Sydney website

After several years of planning, the Dictionary of Sydney website is now live, at www.dictionaryofsydney.org
The website is well worth exploring. A simple browse of the entries gives an indication of the wealth of information contained in the Dictionary. You can search for artefacts, buildings, events, natural features, organisations, people, places (including short histories of a suburb) or structures. From what I have seen, the entries are clearly written, usually between 500-1000 words and have been tightly edited. So far, the content amounts to more than 600,000 words. There is a good selection of maps which can be browsed.
The Dictionary is bound to burgeon in time into something gigantic, so the structure has been kept fairly simple, allowing it to accommodate material indefinitely. It will be interesting to see what it becomes in the future, but it has made an encouraging beginning.

Bringing home the bacon

Thanks to Terry Metherell for drawing my attention to an article which appeared in the Brisbane Courier, Tuesday 1 January 1878. Titled “A Queenslander in Sydney”, it is a long piece about the writer’s impressions of Sydney. It includes a description of Manly’s Fairy Bower, then still relatively unspoiled, and there is also this account of the entertainment on offer at Manly on Boxing Day, 1877:
“But, if Christmas Day was calm, Boxing Day was not. Once more the scene shifts to Manly Beach, and we are on the verandah of the Pier Hotel, and the steamers, and the barrel organs, and the German band, and the holiday folks, are coming in: Emu, and Breadalbane, Goolwa, Phantom, and Royal Alfred, ‘one down, 'tither come on,’ come looming round the Middle Head, disgorge cargo and are off again for more in a merry follow-my-leader style. Buckets of ‘prog’ [food], guns, fishing tackle, and babies form the chief impedimenta of the ‘camp followers,’ and a nervous invalid accustomed to the quietude of Cleveland or (say) of Bowen, would be startled out of seven years' growth by the bustling noise and scene... One melancholy death occurred on Boxing Day, at Manly Beach. There is rigged out from the pier, like the boom from the Wolverine, a spar, well-greased; and at the end of it is slung a four-dozen case containing a pig, to be the prize of him who first walks the pole and gets him. After about a couple of dozen spills off the greased spar and into the water, one daring cornstalk [youth] hugged the boom and got the pig out, and it fell into the water, in the clutches of the swimmers, who, in disputing the prize, six at each leg and two at each ear soon drowned it; and, this we believe was the only life lost at Manly Beach during Boxing Day.”

Not Brighton

When the residents of Manly wanted to have the place recognised as a Municipality, they lodged a copy of their petition on 18 March 1876, but, as historians George and Shelagh Champion discovered “the document was lost by the Government!” A second petition was lodged, with more success, which was published in the New South Wales Government Gazette of 14 August 1876. There are two odd things about this second petition. It stated that it was signed by 63 persons, but as far as I can see only 60 names were appended. And it asked that the Municipality to be incorporated should be named ‘Brighton’, so how did it come about that the place was proclaimed as Manly? At a public meeting called on 27 November 1876 in Manly for the purpose of recommending a person to act as Returning Officer for the first election of aldermen of the soon-to-be-declared Municipality, a Mr Slattery took the opportunity of protesting against the change of name from ‘Manly’ to ‘Brighton’ and suggested that a deputation wait upon the Colonial Secretary, John Robertson, to ask him to retain the old name. As George and Shelagh Champion note: “A comparative newcomer to Manly Beach proposed as a secondary and unforeseen item on the agenda, at a meeting called for another purpose, that the name ‘Manly’ should be used instead of ‘Brighton’!” And surprisingly, the Colonial Secretary granted the request of the deputation, and proclaimed the Municipal District of Manly, on 6 January 1877, despite noting in the same paragraph that the petition he had received had prayed for the Municipality to be known as the Municipal District of Brighton.
So who was the 'Mr Slattery' who pulled off this coup? In fact, he was rather more influential than has previously been thought. Born in Ireland in 1844, Thomas Michael Slattery came to Australia with his family in 1847. He became a lawyer, and at the time of the petition, had risen to be Chief Clerk of the Supreme Court of NSW, no less, at the very heart of the NSW Establishment. He was a crony of the influential Manly businessman and Mayor of Sydney, John Woods, a fellow Irishman. Slattery was a wily operator, and later became a Member of Parliament for Boorowa and Minister of Justice in the 1880s, not to mention a Knight of St Gregory. He would have had the ear of Robertson, the Colonial Secretary, and between them he and Woods would have had no difficulty in persuading him to drop ‘Brighton’ and go with ‘Manly’, or indeed any other name they chose. But after all that, having finagled the name change Mr Slattery soon moved elsewhere. He died at Mosman in 1920.

Gallipoli Nightingale

Among the names on the Manly Roll of Honour of those who served in World War One are a handful of women. most of whom served as nurses. One Manly nurse in particular appears to have been an unsung heroine. She was Florence Ethel Spalding, daughter of the late William and Mrs Mary Spalding, of Hope House, West Esplanade, Manly, and later of 52 Darley Road, Manly. Born in Goulburn in 1881, she lived in Manly with her mother before serving in the AANS prior to the war. When war broke out, she rejoined and left Sydney on28 November 1914 on the Kyarra for Cairo. In April 1915, she was one of the team of nursing sisters who served on the hospital ships at the Gallipoli landings. “I went backwards and forwards there till the evacuation”, she wrote. She was twice Mentioned in Despatches, and for distinguished services in the field she was awarded the Royal Red Cross Decoration (2nd Class) on 1 January 1916; the Decoration 1st Class is only very rarely awarded. While nursing Australian soldiers at Cairo, she fell in love with Mr William Fidler, and left the nursing service to get married to him, returning to Australia in March 1916. National Archives records show that she was also the recipient of the 1914/15 Star, the Victory Medal, and the British War Medal. She applied for the Anzac commemorative medal and badge in 1967, by which time she was living at Hunter’s Hill. She died in 1976. Marianne Barker’s book Nightingales in the Mud, though it does not mention Sister Spalding, is a very good source of further information on the Gallipoli nurses.

History Week

History Week runs from 5-13 September 2009, and Manly Library is marking this year’s theme of “Scandals, Crime and Corruption” with a display of memorable front page stories from the Manly Daily and other newspapers. One of the more unusual cases was recorded by the Queenslander newspaper in March 1883. Two Queensland Aboriginals were discovered in the bush near Manly, one wearing a shirt, the other nude. When challenged by the local policeman, Senior-Constable John Leplaw, the two ran off. When Leplaw went to apprehend one of them, he produced a knife from under his shirt and wounded the constable. But with assistance, Leplaw was able to subdue and handcuff the pair, and took them by the Fairlight ferry to prison in Sydney.
It transpired that the two Aboriginals, with seven others, had been procured in Queensland by an agent for the well-known P T Barnum circus, who had brought them to Sydney with the intention of removing them to the USA. None of them could speak a word of English. When the case came to court the Magistrate, Mr Marsh, stated that it appeared to him as though the Aboriginals had simply been kidnapped. The two men in question had escaped from the agent and were endeavouring to find their way home when they were approached by Senior-Constable Leplaw. Marsh instructed the police to investigate the agent’s behavior to see if criminal charges should be brought against him, and the two Queensland Aboriginals were set free. But did they find their way home? The newspapers don’t tell us, so we can only speculate.

A Hero in Waiting

A group of photographs showing the young Roden Cutler has just been donated to our collection. Among the photos is this one, taken in 1940 at what looks like Martin Place, Sydney, of Roden aged about 23, with his younger sister Doone.
Colleen McCullough, in her biography Roden Cutler VC, notes that the 2/5th Field Artillery Regiment sailed for Suez on the Queen Mary in October of 1940. The following year Lieutenant Cutler won his Victoria Cross.

La Stupenda

There was a treat for music-lovers on 8th September 1948, when Manly Music Club presented one of its regular ‘musicales’ at St Andrew’s Church Hall in Raglan Street. Accompanied by her teacher, Aida Summers, was the 21-year-old Joan Sutherland, in a recital that included arias by Handel, Mozart, and Richard Strauss. The young Joan Sutherland performing ‘Porgi Amor’ must have been quite something. She also performed a group of three songs by the American composer and accompanist Frank La Forge, one of which, ‘I Came With a Song’ is still available in Dame Joan’s back catalogue on Decca. Sutherland left Australia in 1951 for Covent Garden, so this would have been a rare chance to hear her in a recital setting before her international success.
The other artist performing that night was the pianist Igor Hmelnitsky, well-known in Sydney as a soloist and piano teacher.
This programme is one of a number kindly donated to our collection by Mr Boyd Osborne, augmenting our existing group of programmes of Manly Music Club recitals.