January 2012 – Edition 82

Forgetful Me!

Until recently I had been concentrating on four of Edwin’s brothers, William George, Charles, Robert Cane and Arthur Reginald (all of whom have descendants who read the Journal), but had gradually assembled some disjointed information about Edwin and his descendants. Particularly I had been interested in finding more information about the people in a photograph from the South Australian Library’s archives which Donald had sent me.

Donald is obviously intrigued by the photo because he has sent me a number of reminders about it.

The photograph

Donald had certainly located a great photograph. But who are the people in it?

My first source of information is a note written on the back of the photo “PORTRAIT: Arthur Jerrems with his sister Edie, daughter Edith Maud (later Mrs. E.L. Hogg) and Granny James. DATE ca.1915.”

My other sources of information were:

(a) a CD Rom containing South Australian Birth Deaths and Marriages records up to 1920 (really up-to-date”!)
(b) numerous newspaper extracts from the Adelaide “Advertiser”, culminating in
(c) information from a descendant, Doug Hogg (this was a major breakthrough).

I located an enthusiastic Doug through a Public Family Tree placed on Ancestry.com.

I will now spend some time talking about the four people in the photo.

By the way, this is a different “Arthur” to the Arthur Wallace Jerrems from the United States described in the Jerrems Journal of April 2009.

Arthur’s father was Edwin Lewis Jerrems, who was born in Gainsborough, England in 1845, and migrated to Melbourne, Australia with his mother and siblings in 1859 (this family forms the basis of all the Australian families who read the Journal and most of the US families). Edwin, a printer, probably headed off to Sydney (his 1873 death notice says “late of Sydney”) to make his fame and fortune soon after his father Thomas Jerrems died in Melbourne in 1866. Three of his brothers, Thomas, William and Charles (the latter of whom were also printers) also spent time in Sydney in the mid to late 1860s, but Edwin may not have stayed long because he married Mary James on 25/12/1869 at St Luke’s Anglican Church in Adelaide.

Edwin and Mary had 4 children: Edwin Lewis (Jnr) born 1870, Alice born 1871, Edith Maud, and Arthur born 1873. Sadly, their father died a mere 5 weeks after Arthur was born.

In due course Arthur married Alice Anne Monck (a widow, former married name Monck but maiden name Kearns) on 22/7/1896. By coincidence Arthur’s sister and his wife were both named Alice. They had one child, a daughter, Edith Anne born on in 1897.
I will tell you more about Arthur later.

“Sister Edie”. Arthur’s sister Edith Maud (“Edie”) is standing on the left hand side of the photo. I will tell you more about her later, also.

“Daughter Edith Maud”. Standing on the right hand side of the photo, she is in fact Edith Anne referred to above as the only child of Arthur and Alice. The person who devised the photo’s caption made a mistake. Edith was known as “Edie”. I will tell you more (lots more!) about her later, also.

“Granny James”. Granny James was the mother of Mary James, who married Arthur’s father (Edwin) in 1869.

It is interesting to see how people dressed in those days. The moustachioed Arthur is dressed in a sober dark suit and possibly a waistcoat, and his sister Edie is wearing a conservative long dark dress and dark coat. They are probably in their “Sunday best”.

Young Edie is wearing a long white top and skirt and high black boots, as befitting a “young flapper” of that era. A beaming Granny James, in true “little old lady” style, is happily rugged-up in her wheelchair, with a white or cream shawl and other warm tops.

Arthur’s brother Edwin and sister Alice

Briefly, Arthur’s brother Edwin Lewis Jnr died in Adelaide in 1932 leaving a widow Florence, who died in 1964. No children are mentioned in the death notice. Although Arthur and Edwin lived only 3 miles (5km) from each other, it seems that they had not kept in touch.

Alice married John Kay (born 1870, died 1946) in 1897. She died in 1953.

Arthur and his wife Alice

At last I have reached Arthur! Arthur was a farrier and blacksmith who concentrated on the farrier aspect, possibly explained by his love of horses (farriers made and fitted horseshoes). His grandson Doug remembers Arthur referring to his grand daughters affectionately as “fillies”. He died in 1956.

Alice traces back her Kearns (also originally spelled Cearns) family to Ireland where a relative of Doug’s has located their place of origin. Alice owned the Globe Dining Rooms (see photo) at 75 Hindley Street (a major street in the centre of Adelaide) between 1901 and 1922. She died in 1936.

“Dining Rooms” were the equivalent of modern day restaurants. With a staff of five people, as shown in the photo, it would have been quite a large operation.

Initially I painstakingly accumulated quite a lot of fragments from the “Advertiser” about Edie, the first being a quaint reference to her participation in the opening celebrations at the Elite Skating Rink in 1913 (at the age of 16), where she was dressed picturesquely as “Pearly Queen and Puss in Boots”.

Edie marries

Edie helped in her mother’s Globe Dining Rooms. Then (according to her son Doug) she formed a friendship with a young local policeman whose “beat” included the Globe Dining Rooms. As part of his police duties he would call in to the dining rooms to check that the staff (particularly Edie) was safe and that the quality of the fare was satisfactory. In due course she married the solicitous policeman, Ernest Leslie (“Les”) Hogg.

Les Hogg

Les, born in 1898, came from a large family who lived in the Orroroo/Black Rock farming area north of Adelaide. He traced back to a family that had migrated to Australia in the 1820s and had later played a part in helping to pioneer the development of farming land in central South Australia. He trained as a blacksmith (as did his brothers George and Allan) and enlisted in the Army in late1915, being assigned to the 43rd Battalion and later the 10th Battalion.

Les served in the infantry in many of the terrible battles in France and Belgium and was wounded on three occasions but (with his two brothers) returned safely to Australia. The only blemish on Les’s war record was that when he was in hospital in England recovering from his first wounds (to his hand) he forfeited threepence from his pay for breaking a cup! Perhaps he did not like English tea?

When he returned to Australia Les wanted to be a policeman but was initially rejected because he was too young (there was a minimum age of 20 years for policemen). Like many youngsters Les had put his age up (in his case, to 18 years and 10 months) to enlist for the Army.

After he turned 20 and his application to join the police force was accepted part of the training involved drill (marching in formation with weapons). The sympathetic commanding officer exempted Les from this, knowing that Les had done enough drill training in the Army to last him a lifetime.

Married in historic (1841) St John’s Anglican Church, Adelaide in the mid 1920s Edie and Les had three daughters, Gwenda, Avis Edith and Betty, and two sons (Doug plus a boy who died when he was young).

In later years Les was a Railways detective.

Edie died in 1965 and Les died in 1976.

Edie married Keogh (given name not known) and they had at least 3 children, Albert, Peter and an airline pilot (name not known). Her husband was killed in a railway accident in about 1935.

The place and date of the photograph

Doug says that the photo was taken in Adelaide’s Botanical Gardens. Although the approximate date of the photograph is stated on the back of the photo as being 1915 it was probably taken a few years earlier because Granny James died before 1915.

Conclusion

By locating Doug I have been able to fill in one of the pieces of the jigsaw of the members of the Jerrems family who migrated to Australia in the 1850s. I now have a multitude of stories to be told about Edwin’s descendants, but I have had to be selective due to constraints on the amount of material we can publish in the Jerrems Journal. This article will at least give you an outline of Edwin’s branch of the Jerrems family.