2. Herbert ("Bert or "Slim") Wrigley - Family roots

http://xanthoulabertwrigley.blogspot.com

            Herbert (‘Bert’ or ‘Slim’) Wrigley - Family Roots

Herbert Pascoe Wrigley was born in England on the 30^th of November 1919, in Ashton-under-Lyne, then a small town just outside the city of Manchester, now showing on the map as an outer suburb of the city.  He was the seventh out of eight children of Thomas Wrigley and Florence Holden: George, Tom, Emily, Claire, Florence, Harold, Herbert and Eric.   His two elder brothers, George and Tom, came to Australia first, probably in 1920, it seems for health reasons.  George, having suffered from being gassed while fighting in France during WWI, was looking for a warmer climate and better working conditions than could be found in an English industrial area.  The rest of the family followed late 1921 or early 1922, with Bert not yet three years old and Eric a baby, no more than a year old.  The family settled in Yarraville, near Footscray, a suburb of the city of Melbourne, in the state of Victoria.  

Not a great deal is available in the way of history of that family back in England and of the conditions under which they arrived and settled in Australia.  I will briefly give here what I have been able to find through various sources: a few family documents, some letters and photos, and pieces of oral history by members of the Wrigley family.  It seems that Bert’s grandfather, by the name of Frederick William Wrigley, was the son of a well-to-do family who owned a paper mill in Manchester.  But, having fallen in love with a girl working in the mill and having married her against his family’s wishes, he was disowned by his father.  They considered he was marrying “beneath his station”.  So that branch of the Wrigley family had to work harder at making a living.  The Wrigley family’s ownership of a paper mill is confirmed in a letter, written by a relative in England many years later as a response to an enquiry by one of Bert’s elder sisters.  In 1953, Claire (the third-born) had planned a trip to England with her daughter Fay and wanted to try and reconnect with her roots.  Claire had some memories herself, since she was around thirteen years old when the family left England. Her father gave her the name and address of a relative in England and Claire wrote to her.  I found the reply she received in the box in which my sister kept the Wrigley family documents and photos.  Dated October 21^st 1953, the letter includes a fairly long list of names of several members of the Wrigley family and what happened to them.  It also contained the following “….. The mill passed out of the Wrigley family a long time ago now, it was sold to the present owners, which is sad.  I always feel there are not many Wrigleys left as there seem to have been mostly daughters in the later generations…..”

Among the very few family documents available, the marriage certificate of Bert’s parents, Thomas Wrigley and Florence Holden, both nineteen years old, dated 20^th February 1897, also gives us some details.   In it, the profession of the father of the groom is listed as “Paper-Stainer”, a skill he might have learned working in the family’s paper-mill until his “disgrace”.  That of his son Thomas is listed as “Collier” (working in the coal mining industry), and that of his wife Florence, as “Winder” (working in a cotton mill operating a piece of machinery with that name).

Bert’s father, Thomas Wrigley, must have joined the British army not too long after his marriage and was sent to Africa to fight in the Second Boer War which ended in 1902.  It seems that from the start he served as a paramedic. There is a well-preserved studio photo in which we see a good-looking young man in the British army uniform, with a light moustache, wearing a large-brimmed hat folded up on the left side and a white band with the Red Cross on his left arm.  The photo was very likely taken before he left for Africa (a wise thing to do before going off to war), where young Thomas witnessed what is considered by historians as one of the bloodiest wars in which England became involved.

There is also a service medal featuring Queen Victoria and bearing four bars across the ribbon with the following inscriptions, indicating the campaigns in which the young man participated: “Cape Colony”, “Orange Free State”, “South Africa 1901”, and “South Africa 1902”.  From the medal, we can guess fairly accurately that he must have served for at least two years, probably longer.  A later photo, which I will describe further on, shows Thomas Wrigley wearing that very medal.  A second medal featuring King George V is from WWI, with the simple inscription of 1914-1919.  A third one features a winged Victory and has the following inscription on the back: “The Great War for Civilization 1914-1919”.

“Grandpa Wrigley” (as he was referred to when I met him in 1955) left his war medals, with a handwritten note inside the box containing them, to his grandson John Stephen Wrigley, first son of Bert and Xanthoula, when he died in 1959.  The boy was then only seven years old, but as “Grandpa” lived his last years with them, he must have felt closer to this grandchild than to the others -- he had another six, four boys and two girls.  He writes: “I wish to give my War Medals to my grandson John S. Wrigley so that he may wear them like other children on Anzac Day.” John also has his Uncle George’s war medals, two from WWI, exactly the same as his grandfather’s mentioned above.  George, Bert’s elder brother, enlisted in the army at the outbreak of WWI and eventually reached the rank of Sergeant Major.  John also has Bert’s seven war medals.  He kindly put all of them at my disposal, with as much other information as he had, for the purpose of writing this story.

It is easy to see from Thomas Wrigley’s war service medals that during his married years in England he spent considerable time in the army and away from home.  At least there was a space of twelve years in-between the Boer wars and WWI.   In 1914 he was 36 years old, but he served again as a paramedic attached to a hospital ship.  From those years of service, I found again in my sister’s “Wrigley Family” box nine post cards that Thomas sent mostly to his wife Florence and to his elder son George.  The first postcard to his wife shows the “Gloucester Castle” an eight thousand-ton steamer belonging to the Union-Castle Line, which was, as he writes “made into a Hospital ship”.  He also writes that they “landed” on July 4^th, but doesn’t say where.  It must have been France, more specifically the port of Dieppe, since there are three postcards from that city, one to his wife, one to his son George, and one to his son Tom.  Two other postcards are from Paris and two more from Malta.  One of those two, dated 29^th October 1915, is addressed to his son George, who seems to have already engaged in the war, and having been gassed, was sent back home on leave.  Here is what I can decipher:

Dear Son

Thanks for your letter, I am very pleased you are getting on so well, but mind you don’t overdo yourself (...)  I was looking what would happen after the War is over, but if you are better in health I don’t mind.  It is raining like the devil but I am all right if the tent pegs hold and no wind gets up for there is only 4 inches of soil then you are on solid rock.  I hope you are all in good health, your mother said she did not feel well in her last letter.  Don’t forget what I told you. 

I remain Your Loving Father.

The last card, addressed to his brother, is a humorous one satirizing the daily schedule of recruits, featuring a fully loaded British soldier looking exhausted.  On the upper left hand corner we read:

RECRUITS -- ORDERS of the DAY

8 HOURS        DRILL

8 HOURS        ROUTE MARCH

8 HOURS        TRENCHING

GOD SAVE THE KING!

At the bottom:           

AND THEN WE HAVE ALL THE REST OF THE DAY TO OURSELVES!

On the back Thomas writes: “Dear brother, Is it as bad as this at your end?”

It seems that his brother must have been in the army as well.  The rest of the writing unfortunately isn’t legible, it was written in pencil and I can only make out a word here and there.  Those cards are nearly a hundred years old...

The family photos are quite revealing: A very nice one of Florence, Bert’s mother, is remarkably well-preserved for more than a century.  It shows her with their first-born George, who looks about two years old.  Although there is no date on it, we can guess that it is probably from around 1900, since George was born in 1898, a year after the marriage. The photo is taken in the studio of “Mrs. J. Bardsley, Photographic Artist, 216 Stamford St., Ashton-under-Lyne”, the same studio that had taken the photo of her husband Thomas before he went to the Boer War.  It shows a beautiful young woman, in a nice though dark-colored dress, with abundant dark brown and curly hair tied in an elegant bun behind her head.  She is looking lovingly at her son.  The little boy is dressed in a dark velvet suit with a wide collar, wearing brand new shoes and white knee-length socks. 

A much later and larger in size family photo, this time not a studio photo but taken in front of a brick house, so it isn’t as well preserved as the previous one, shows Thomas Wrigley sitting on a chair wearing his army uniform, with his Boer War medal hanging on the left side of his chest. His wife Florence is sitting next to him dressed elegantly and wearing a large hat, a large white poodle on her right and a young boy about three years old dressed in white standing on her left -- the sixth born, Harold.  They are surrounded by five more children: standing up on either side of the photo are George and Tom, the two older boys, wearing suits, white collar shirts with a tie, and hats.   Emily, the eldest daughter, with long and beautiful curls of hair falling freely on either side of her face, is sitting down. Two other little girls, daughters Claire and Florence, are standing more in the background.   On the back of the photo we read: “Taken August 1914”.  It was probably taken after Thomas had enlisted, since he is wearing his military uniform, and before he was sent away to serve as a paramedic on the Hospital Ship.  Having a full family photo taken seems like an appropriate step to take before going off to war again.  By now they have six children; the youngest seems to be about 3-4 years old.   In 1914, Thomas and Florence are both 36 years old and have already had six children within 17 years of marriage.  Just that is an amazing achievement for a couple who had no inherited wealth and probably had no help at home. Florence had one child every two to three years, and she looks as slender as before!   The seventh and next to last child, Herbert, was born five years later, on the 30^th of November 1919, and Eric a couple of years after that.  By then WWI had ended and the family was already considering the move to Australia. 

I spent some time looking at and reflecting on those photos, because they can tell us quite a lot. What they indicate is that in spite of a large family, Thomas and Florence seemed to have been managing fairly well in Ashton-under-Lyne, well enough to feed, clothe nicely their six children and send them to school.  So their move to Australia was likely to be less out of desperation or poverty-level living conditions than out of a desire to give their children a better life, in a better climate and in a country far removed from a war-torn Europe.  Also, their two elder sons had made the decision to leave England and they must have wanted to be close to them.  Still, uprooting oneself is difficult at any time, and doing it with a large family is even more so.  Just travelling with six young children, one of them still a baby, from England to Australia at the beginning of the 20^th century, couldn’t have been an easy undertaking.  When they arrived, the area of Footscray and Yarraville, where the family settled, was a predominantly working-class suburb of Melbourne with quite a few factories close by.  It seems that the two elder sons who came to Australia first were able to set up a modest home in that area so the rest of the family could join them.  The parents were able to get jobs there, George and Tom went up to Ballarat for a while gold prospecting like hundreds of others, and the younger children went to school.  They all survived the change well and were able to make good lives for themselves.

That is about the extent of information available on Bert Wrigley’s roots.  His life really begins in Australia, but before I continue with his individual story, I will say here something about this family, drawn from my own experience of meeting all of them after I arrived in Australia in 1955 at the age of eighteen.  Over the five years of my living with Xanthoula and Bert, and over the total of seventeen years I lived in Australia before I left for America, I interacted with many of Bert’s brothers, sisters and their families on several occasions.  I was witness to the closeness between them.  During their life-time they visited, helped and cared for each other in an exemplary manner.  None of the members of that original family is now alive, with Claire, the third-born, being the one to outlive all the others.  She passed away in 2008 at the age of over one hundred and one years. Except for the eldest brother George, all of them married and most of them had a family.


Go to the next blog 3."Bert enlists".