Sitting Pretty

The little girl in our prompt this week is clearly posing for her portrait in a photographer's studio and she looks very sweet. Her beautiful dress reminded me of the following portrait of my aunt, Joan Patricia Morrison, who must only have been about a year old when it was taken in about 1922. As the first surviving child born to my grandparents John and Mona, she would have been their pride and joy.  Pat as she was always known is not sitting at a desk here, but she did grow up to become very studious and obtained her Masters degree at Oxford in the 1940s. 

                                              

        Here is Pat working away on some manuscript, with all her papers spread out in front of her. I imagine her desk was not big enough!

                                                

                          Here she is again, still sitting pretty in later life.

When Pat passed away in 2011, it was a very big task for my mother, sister and others to sort through all Pat's documents, photographs, books and other memorabilia, as she had thrown out very little, despite residing in a small council flat for many years.  I thnk my mother found it all rather daunting, and also it was quite emotional for her to read through many years' worth of  correpondence between Pat and their parents while she was working overseas.

  I've previously written a tribute to Pat and her life achievements which you can read here.

Continuing with the theme of the prompt, here is our son Kim, Pat's great nephew, at the computer desk in 1997.

                          

and our daughter and Pat's great niece, Laura the teacher, at her desk in her classroom. With a class of 20 or more six year olds, I don't imagine she gets to sit down there very often!

Finally two photos of our granddaughter Isabelle, who is Pat's great great niece. This first photo was taken on a visit to us in Melbourne earlier this year. What Google Photos identified as a desk is in fact a dolls' house that was made for her mother by Isabelle's paternal great grandfather. It was placed on the table so as to be out of her curious little brother's reach.

Here is Isabelle back home in London, sitting at her mother's computer desk and wearing a dress that I made for her Aunty Laura above, back in 1989.

For more posts that may or may not be prompted by that pretty little girl sitting at the writing desk, go to Sepia Saturday #389

One in front and one behind

Cute kids indeed! Those two terrors like they would be getting into mischief just as soon as they climbed off that make-believe axe-headed horse of theirs.

I've posted about kids on rocking horses before here, and I'm presently on holidays but before I left home I found this sweet little studio portrait of my mother's sister Joan Patricia and her brother Ken. The photograph was probably taken in about 1925 or 1926, the year my mother was born. I've blogged about both Pat and Ken before. I never knew Ken, because he was killed in 1943 in WW2 at only 19, well before I was born, but my Aunty Pat almost made it to 90 and achieved much in her long life.  Here they are just innocent little children looking angelic and natural together, even though this is a posed shot. I love it.

For more posts on the theme for Sepia Saturday #384, click here.

Big Sister, Little Brother

This week the Sepia Saturday prompt shows a couple of unknown children photographed in light and shade. We don't know whether or not they were brother and sister, but it seems probable, and on that basis I've put together the following collage. The main photo taken by their mother Claire shows two of our grandchildren, Isabelle and Otis, flanked by photographs from earlier generations on their mother's side of the family. Their mother, grandmother, grandfather, one maternal great grandfather, and both maternal great grandmothers all came from families in which the first born child was a daughter, followed by a son.

The smaller photos from left to right and top to bottom show the children's great great Aunty Pat and her younger brother Ken; great grandmother Jean (younger sister of Pat and Ken) and their younger brother Derek; great great Aunty Pat and youngest brother Peter (16 years' difference between these two); great grandfather Ian and his big sister Valarie; great grandmother Mary and her younger brother Cyril;  grandfather Roger and big sister Ann; grandmother Jo and little brother Guy; mother Claire and little brother Kim. The children's father is also the little brother to a big sister but I don't have a photo of them as children.

 Then I came across this additional photograph, which is not of siblings but merits inclusion because it seems to match the prompt in shade and expression to some degree. It shows yours truly looking up at a lady called Jocelyn Ward, who was my mother Jean's very dear friend from their days in teachers' college together and was one of her bridesmaids. Jocelyn came to visit us in Australia at least once.  She did not marry and had no children of her own, but was always very good to us and I remember her fondly. She wasn't able to come to our wedding but we met up with her in Christchurch NZ on our honeymoon afterwards. Sadly Jocelyn passed away a few years later in 1981 in her early fifties, suffering I believe from multiple sclerosis.

For more blogs based on this week's Sepia Saturday prompt, click here.

                                                    

Finally, because it's Easter this weekend, here's a page from my baby book, including a paper serviette that must have been at my grandparents' Easter table. My name is written inside but at just four and a half months old I doubt that I used it! 

  Happy Easter to all who celebrate!

On Yer Bike!

The theme for October is "From Here to There", and the prompt photograph shows a group of lady cyclists out for a ride. My first photograph shows my Aunty Pat and her brother Ken 'riding tandem' on their tricycle in about 1925. They must have been aged around 4 and 2 respectively. Young Ken had a lovely head of hair back then! Both Pat and Ken have featured in my blog a number of times, in particular here and here, but in this photograph they are simply young and innocent children having fun together on their tricycle.  

That tricycle was to last through four more children in the Morrison family. Below is young Derek taking his turn, followed  a few years later by Graeme and Peter, on this occasion riding it in the snow. I don't have a photo of my mother riding it, but I'm sure she would have also had her turn.

Uncle Peter above was exactly fifteen years older than me, as I was born on his fifteenth birthday. Here I am getting a dink from my Dad on the handlebars of his bike in Cambridge England in 1954, where bikes were and still are a very popular mode of transport. No child seats or safety helmets back then, but somehow most of us survived.

Back in Christchurch NZ as a 3 year old I regularly rode my smart 3 wheeler between home and my grandparents' house, Uncle Peter was still living there with his parents, but the old family tricycle beloved by him and his siblings had probably been given away by this stage.

I'll finish with a photograph of a real tandem bike. I've ridden tandem a couple of times and I can't say I enjoyed the feeling of not being in control, but here is Sergeant Pilot Bob Featherston, looking relaxed and carefree as he rides on the front of a tandem bike with a similarly uniformed friend in Bournemouth, early in World War 2. Bob had enlisted with the RAAF and was serving with the RAF Bomber Command. It cannot have been very long after this ride that the Lancaster of which he was in charge was shot down during a raid on Berlin. Bob was promoted to Flight Lieutenant whilst imprisoned in Stalag V111B, in Lamsdorf, Poland, where he was interned under harsh conditions for over two years, from January 1943 until the end of the War. I'm glad he was able to have some fun beforehand. 

The photograph comes from my late father-in-law Bob Featherston's collection of negatives. Another friend must have taken the shot for him.

For more blogs on this month's theme, just hitch a ride, any way you can, across to Sepia Saturday #344.

Aunty Pat's Postcards: Episodes of What?

This week's Sepia Saturday prompt shows a film maker and camera crew filming part of a documentary on Bondi Beach, Sydney, in 1951. 

Below are four  postcards from my late Aunty Pat's collection. They show episodes 2, 4, 5 and 6 of what looks like some medieval drama series, but the cards don't reveal anything further.The cast are all elaborately costumed and seem to be involved in some kind of formal ceremony that includes dancing. Many male cast members are wearing tunics, fancy headdresses and collars, and a group of monks can be seen in Episode 2. Although some of the boys holding heraldic scrolls are quite young, this appears to have been quite a professional production.  It must have been important enough to be filmed, photographed and recorded on postcards and must also have been of some particular significance to Aunty Pat, for her to have saved the cards in her collection. It's a shame I don't have cards for episodes 1 and 3, but I'm not sure they would be of much assistance in solving the mystery. 

All I can discover from the information on the reverse of each card is that they are English Series postcards and were photographed, printed and published by Photo-Precison Ltd, St Albans. No clues as to a date or location for the scenes,  According to this web site on Publishers and Postcards of the Past, Photo-Precison Ltd was founded by two RAF photo reconnaissance officers, and in 1963 the company bought fellow postcard publishers J B White of Dundee. Photo-Precision was itself taken over by Colourmaster Ltd in 1969. 

•  Does anyone have any suggestions as to what the title of this series might have been and/or  the film location?  That church in the distance could be located almost anywhere in England. It looks like there is a  long hessian screen hiding some structures in the background that probably weren't considered appropriate to the time period of the series, and there may be some onlookers in the background of Episodes 4 and 6. Most of the cards in Aunty Pat's postcard collection date from the 1940s and 1950s.
•  I wrote a tribute to Aunty Pat here in 2013. If only I could ask her to solve this mystery, although of course, if she were still with us, I wouldn't yet have her postcards to peruse and wonder about!

For more blogs this week on cameras and camera crew, or on films, filming and film locations of subjects known and unknown, just roll cameras over to Sepia Saturday #316.

• Postscript 5.02.2016: Fellow Sepian Barbara Fisher was able to identify the event and location very quickly, and directed me to the web site called The Redress of the Past which features Historical pageants of England, and explains all about the post-war historical pageant that took place in St Albans in 1948, commemorating 1000 years since the town was founded.  You can read all about it there, and my Aunty Pat would very likely have attended a performance, as she was studying at Oxford at that time. Thank you so much, Barbara!  

Here is an online photograph of the Cathedral of St Albans. The tower and rear wing  appears in the background of the Episode 2 postcard.

http://www.katapi.org.uk/images/Churches/StAlbansFront600w.jpg

Beach baby, beach baby, give me your hand

Our Sepia Saturday prompt for this week is a photograph of  Bondi Beach, Sydney Australia in 1908.  Below are two photographs of Bondi, c. 1948, from my Aunty Pat's postcard collection.  As you can see in Pat's first photograph, there was a lot of development around the beach foreshores in the forty years between these photographs and the first image, and not a lot of it was particularly attractive architecture, although it has been smartened up a bit in more recent years.  There are no longer any sand dunes but the beach sand itself is much improved, compared with 1908 when it looked to have been rather rocky in the foreground.

This view is taken from the opposite direction, showing the Bondi Surf Club on the right and the southern headland.

Early family life in Bondi

We moved from Canberra to Sydney in April 1980 when our first child Claire was two months old, and for the following two years we rented a little semi-detached cottage in the suburb of Rose Bay, within walking distance of Bondi Beach. Bondi wasn't really our favourite local beach because it is fairly exposed and always crowded, plus the fact that there was always a lot of litter in the sand, for example cigarette butts, discarded straws, bottle tops, ring pulls etc, that babies love to pick up and put in their mouths in an instant, but still, it was our closest beach. Some weekend evenings we would drive over to the shopping strip above Bondi Beach and queue up for some good local fish 'n chips. It was also fun to join the crowds admiring the lavish window displays of the many European style cake shops and to occasionally lash out on one or two slices of their luscious slices in a takeaway box for dessert back at home. Below are a couple of collages showing Claire growing up on Bondi Beach.

Clockwise from top left: Sitting on the promenade wall at 6 months, August 1980; trying out the toddlers' pool at 10 months, North Bondi December 1980; stepping out at a year old and taking a different view of the beach, February 1981

           Clockwise from top right: Easter 1981 (x 2); 18 months, rugged up on the sand at Bondi in August 1981; on the grass above the beach at the annual Festival of the Winds in September 1981; back on the beach, 2 years old and ready for a surf, February 1982

             

In May 1982 we bought a house in Turramurra, a suburb about 20 kilometres north of the city centre and so we moved away from Rose Bay. Of course we came back now and again to visit friends but we were no longer close to Bondi.  It was much easier to drive to Sydney's northern beaches such as  Dee Why which I've mentioned in an earlier post, or up to other beaches on the Central Coast than to face the traffic chaos that often occurred on the Sydney Harbour Bridge,  although we still did so occasionally in order to reach our old favourite southern beaches such as Bondi, Coogee and Bronte, which I've  also blogged about here previously.

A very well-known Australian photographer called Max Dupain took many famous photographs of Bondi,  including one which you can see here, simply entitled Bondi 1939. I once attempted a poor imitation of it, and  I must admit my shot was not even taken at Bondi, but was on the Central Coast, c. 1993. 

The following photo was taken on the steps of the Bondi Surf Club by my mother, after my husband had taken part in the annual City to Surf 14 km fun run. The pounding mass of runners used to charge past the top of the street where we previously lived, and parking would have been so much easier, if only we still lived there. The first City to Surf Fun Run took place in 1971 and will be held again in 2 weeks' time, on 8 August. In the local runners' group of which we were members in Turramurra, a number of people were proud to say they had participated every year since 1971. I even managed it myself half a dozen times in the past, mostly walking I confess, as I'm not a runner and it's a very hilly course. One year I took a series of photos en route  using my then very basic phone camera. They are not worth showing here as they are only pixelated printouts, but my caption of the last photo looking down on Bondi Beach reads:"The best view is at the end".  Unfortunately from that point the finish line is still about a kilometre away!

With over 80000 entrants already registered this year, the City to Surf claims to be the biggest event of its kind in the world, and with so many runners and walkers plus crowds of spectators and supporters lining the route, it will be no doubt be practically impossible to move anywhere around Bondi that day, even on foot! Afterwards people can have trouble getting back home, as the nearest train station is several kilometres away and they have to either line up in very long queues and then pile into buses, or alternatively toil uphill to the Bondi Junction station. The Bondi tram ceased running in 1960, but in any event it never could have coped with these numbers! Some runners cool down afterwards with an ocean swim, but not too many as it is winter of course. Sydney winter temperatures could well reach the low to mid 20s on a sunny day however, and there will always be hardy locals who swim the length of the beach each day, plus visiting international  tourists taking the plunge, just so they can say they've swum at the famous Bondi Beach.  We haven't taken part for over 10 years now, and hope to be relaxing on a beach somewhere on the Queensland Sunshine Coast on City2Surf Day this year, 9 August 2015.

                                                                  City to Surf August 1984

   Proof of completion: a slimmer, curlier me after my first City to Surf, 1998. My bib entry number was      probably also about where I came in the race result as well!

                                                 
                      


                      

Back for another Festival of the Winds at Bondi in 1995, with views showing both ends of the beach.

You might like to click here for an interesting site on the history and development of Bondi, including photographs.

I could have included a clip of the American group First Class singing their hit song 'Beach Baby, Beach Baby' in 1974, but instead thought you might enjoy this one filmed on Bondi Beach. The guy who starts it off is a rather unlikely looking dancer, but still, he carries it off quite well!

                                                             
That's enough from me, but for more beach photographs worldwide, just click here and dip your toe in at  Sepia Saturday # 289,

Making a Difference: Patricia Morrison, Lifelong Worker for Peace and Justice

With the topic for Sepia Saturday 195 being International Peace Day, it seems appropriate that I should contribute a brief tribute in honour of a personal hero of mine, namely my late aunt, Patricia Morrison, known to her family as Pat. Christened Joan Patricia Morrison, she was born in Dunedin New Zealand on 29 October 1921, but soon afterwards her father finished studying law in Otago and the family returned to live in her mother Mona's home town of Christchurch. The eldest of a family of six, Patricia was a very bright student, and her interest in history, peace and human rights developed from primary school onwards.  In 1932 aged just eleven, Patricia won First Prize Senior Division for her entry in a Peace Essay competition organized by the New Zealand No More War Movement. The newspaper photograph below shows young Patricia holding one end of the peace banner that she was awarded, and she also received a book as part of her prize. Sadly I haven't discovered a copy of her prize winning essay.

   

Patricia attended Somerfield Primary School, where she was Dux in 1933, for which accomplishment she received her first medal, shown above. She continued to excel at Christchurch Girls' High, and then obtained an MA degree with First Class Honours in History at Canterbury University. In connection with her master's thesis, she wrote a book on Christchurch entitled The Evolution of A City, published in 1949, which  included a discussion of the considerable drainage problems that were faced when building a city upon swampy plains and underground streams. This is an issue which has been recognised as being particularly relevant today, in light of the disastrous liquefaction that occurred when damaging earthquakes struck Christchurch in 2010/2011, and  Patricia's book is still regarded as an authoritative historical work.

 Patricia won a three year scholarship to Oxford where she obtained another MA, and was active in the Student Christian Movement at both Canterbury and Oxford. Her interest in pacifism and international work led her to accept a position in Geneva in 1948 with the international committee of the International Students Service, having responsibility for field workers and working to find jobs for students and others displaced as a result of World War 2.

  

Patricia, back right, with her siblings, c. 1942: Derek, Jean (my mother), Peter, Ken, who was killed in WW2 and Graeme. Only Jean is still with us. She remembers Pat as a happy child and an avid reader, always helpful and caring to her parents and siblings.

While working in Geneva in 1950, Pat sent a  package of Swiss lace as her wedding gift to sister Jean, and it was skillfully made into Jean's wedding gown by their Aunty Bess, who was a professional dressmaker.  Pat was back home in Christchurch for the baptism of her  first-born niece in 1953

 Patricia returned to New Zealand in the early 1950s, but a few years later she began working for the YWCA, and returned to Geneva, where she was based at  the World YWCA headquarters. She travelled widely, often visiting remote and often dangerous parts of the world on her own, where she would meet with fledgling YWCA groups and listen to the needs of the local women and their communities, doing whatever she could to help, encourage and inspire them.  Patricia and her parents corresponded weekly while she was away, but she once said that she hoped her father John did not know what she was doing, or he would have told her to give it up and come home! Patricia never married, but her twelve nieces and nephews regularly received handmade gifts for Christmas and birthdays, sent by their Aunty Pat from these distant countries.

One of Patricia's early passports,which were filled with stamps and visas from her extensive travels over  the many years of her working life

These nativity dolls sent to me by Aunty Pat  in the 1960s were made by women she had visited in the World Y.W.C.A. Centre  at the Aquabat Jaber Refugee Camp in Jericho,Jordan

Leaving the World YWCA after ten years, Patricia then moved to London and worked there for another five years as General Secretary of the World Congress of Faiths, with a committee of leaders of six major world religions. When she finally retired and returned home to Christchurch, she continued to support, volunteer and be actively involved in many causes back in her home town of Christchurch. In 1997 she was awarded the Queen's Service Medal for her community work, and in the year of the 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1998 she was chosen as the YWCA -Aotearoa New Zealand Human Rights Hero. 

Patricia Morrison with her brother Derek, wearing  her QSM at the medal presentation in 1997

Patrica's Queen's Service Medal, now in my safekeeping.

Acknowledgement of Old Girl Patricia Morrison's achievements in 1997, in a publication of Christchurch Girls High.

 Patricia's inner city council flat was badly damaged in the earthquake of February 2011 and combined with failing health, this meant she had no option but to move into a rest home. She struggled to cope with increasing frailty, but in response to my mother's suggestion that perhaps she should take things more easily, she simply replied: "Don't tell me what I should or shouldn't do, I know what I can do". For as long as possible she intrepidly continued to attend frequent  meetings for the myriad of causes she supported, either walking to them in the inner city or on occasion taking a taxi to those that were further afield.One night she apparently got the address or date wrong, and was left in the dark at deserted hall, but thankfully a couple of girls who had been attending a AA meeting nearby kindly offered to see her home safely! 

My mother's scrapbook includes this cartoon and quote
by Bill Watterson, sent to her by Pat in 1998, who obviously
 felt that it  applied specifically to her
.

Somehow that cartoon reminded me of this photo of little Patricia aged 4, already reading and eager to go to school and learn more

     

Despite her dogged determination to go on doing what she loved, Patricia's health deteriorated rapidly and she passed away on 30 August 2011, just a couple of months short of her 90th birthday. At her funeral, which was widely attended by a large number of people including her many friends and acquaintances, several peace hymns were sung, including the one below, and a special candle was lit in her honour. Shirley Erena Murray, author of  "Sing a Song for Peace and Justice", is an internationally acclaimed hymn text writer from Invercargill NZ, and was a personal friend to Patricia. A year earlier we had happily sung another of her songs, 'Come to a Wedding', at our daughter Laura's wedding, little knowing that through Auntie Pat we actually had a personal connection to the author. The other hymns chosen, "Deep in the Human Heart" and "Make me a Channel of Your Peace", were also very relevant to the selfless way Patricia had lived her life.

                                              

The following extract from the obituary given at Patricia's funeral by Kate Dewes, herself a notable and awarded peace activist, tells more about Patricia's extraordinary achievements and interests, and shows the esteem in which she was held:

"Early in 2011 our Women's International League for Peace and Freedom group met together to catch up and plan the upcoming annual Hiroshima and Nagasaki Lantern ceremony. The smiling faces that day masked the depths of devastation we have all experienced since the [Christchurch] earthquakes started over a year ago. Some, including Patricia, lost their homes and we all knew people who had died....

She was a diminutive, self-effacing, humble woman who achieved amazing things as a leader promoting issues for women and families all over the world. She was a financial supporter of [the] Disarmament and Security Centre, the Peace Foundation, the Campaign Against Foreign Control in Aotearoa (CAFCA) and the Anti Bases Campaign (ABC), to name a few of the over 70 groups she supported.

 In 2002 when Christchurch celebrated the 20th anniversary as the first Nuclear Weapons-Free City and became the first Peace City, Patricia was one of the inaugural recipients of the Mayor's Peace Awards. The citation recognised her leading role in the United Nations Association organising Model UN Assemblies for schools in Canterbury, the annual Lincoln Efford Memorial and John Grocott Peace Lectures... She was involved with a leading women's organisation which was pushing the boundaries everywhere on a wide range of issues. One example was when the US branch of the YWCA 30 years ago protested against the possession of guns. Their vociferous opposition resulted in them losing their funding, and male colleagues resigning from their advisory boards. But they stuck to their principles, which she admired. She admitted that she would often "take the flak" when she supported the younger women in YWCA who were trying to do things differently - like training social workers from all different ethnicities and faiths."

 

Citation on reverse of Peace Award

Joan Patrica Morrison, 1921-2011, on this International Peace Day, 21 September 2013,
 we salute you!

To read more blogs on the subject of World Peace, check out this week's  Sepia Saturday



Postscript:
Just as an aside, when looking through Pat's papers I came across the following anecdote related by my mother, which would have been quite apposite to last week's Sepia Saturday blog, #194:  "While at Oxford Pat puzzled her tutors by always knitting as she studied, and said she could not study without knitting. During the war years, immediately preceding Oxford, Pat had knitted big sea boot stockings and balaclavas for men in the Merchant Navy. As a family we would sit around the warm fire knitting. As one brother remarked thoughtfully, 'there are only two people in this family not knitting, one can't and the other won't. The 'can't was the baby and the 'won't' was our Dad."

And finally... I thought I had no real sewing photographs whatsoever, but then just the other night I came across this one, among the treasure trove of papers and family photographs that had been stored for years in Auntie Pat's garage. I don't remember ever having seen it before, but I think that it must have been taken at the work place of Pat's Aunty Flo. Flora Euphemia Forbes worked in Christchurch City as a tailoress, and I believe she is the smiling lady in a white blouse, standing next to the suited young man wearing a jaunty tie at the far left of the group, middle row (second from end).  I can't resist appending it here.