Phew! Where to start ? When it comes to family research , my wife is a tenacious genealogist who makes Miss Marple's findings and deductions pretty dull.
At times she shouts Eureka! after tracking down a missing link she has been chasing for decades.
During the past few weeks, emails have been flying backwards and forwards between Australia and England in an extensive search which has been going on for 30 years for a friend in Blighty, first met in Darwin , now cooking a sweet and sour pheasant , according to her just in email .
At times she shouts Eureka! after tracking down a missing link she has been chasing for decades.
During the past few weeks, emails have been flying backwards and forwards between Australia and England in an extensive search which has been going on for 30 years for a friend in Blighty, first met in Darwin , now cooking a sweet and sour pheasant , according to her just in email .
In addition , in recent days , the sleuth has made astounding discoveries about our family in New Zealand and Australia and received unexpected photos from long lost relatives
One of the surprising photographs , taken in 1942 , was of me , aged four, with a cousin wearing his first Salvation Army band uniform in Sydney ; for a time I lived with a family of musical Salvationists.
I can remember bandsmen parading up and down the side of the house in Leichhardt loudly playing , apparently practising , perhaps for competitions.
Close examination of the welcome Salvation Army photos which kept on coming in and further online research unravelled a story which started to read like Damon Runyan's Guys and Dolls .
I can remember bandsmen parading up and down the side of the house in Leichhardt loudly playing , apparently practising , perhaps for competitions.
When I was a child , for some strange reason , I stuck a shirt collar stud up my nostril , did not tell anybody, which resulted in frequent nose bleeds. A brain tumour was diagnosed . However , while I was living at Leichhardt a tambourine playing Salvationist took me to a more alert medico who peered up my hooter , inserted tweezers , pulled out the stud and unleashed a torrent of foul smelling blood and maybe a cry of Hallelujah.
Close examination of the welcome Salvation Army photos which kept on coming in and further online research unravelled a story which started to read like Damon Runyan's Guys and Dolls .
A snap which grabbed my attention showed my Kiwi paternal grandfather, left , with a walking stick , accompanied by a grandson, taken by a street photographer in postwar Sydney . In the background is a poster for Joe Taylor's Celebrity Club in York Street , owned by a man mentioned in the David Hickie book , The Prince and the Premier , covering the rise of organised crime in Australia . Taylor , a racehorse owner and huge gambler , was said to have been the biggest power behind Sydney's illegal gaming rackets for many years. The Premier in the book being Sir Robin Askin , a keen gambler who received brown paper bags , not containing an Oslo lunch. The notorious Lennie McPherson rated a mention .
One of those who worked as a bouncer for Taylor , referred to as The Boss , at Thommo's Two Up School , was Jack Gibson, an amateur boxer and prominent footballer , who did some North Queensland cane cutting in his early days , described as Australia's greatest ever rugby league coach , including not very successful NSW state of origin sides .
This blogger has some knowledge of Thommo's, which became a floating two up school, that operated at times in bush near the House of David , bottled beer available , where my unsuspecting Australian maternal grandmother was taken one night and she was fearful of being caught in a police raid . She told me of being led by my uncle through bush , seeing lights in the distance , men standing about in rings .
In 1950 , columnist Arthur Helliwell , from the British Sunday publication , People , lobbed in Sydney on a world tour . Sydney , he wrote, was a rough, tough, money-mad, good time city, where uncouth, swearing "sports" loved racetracks and two up gambling schools.
He specifically mentioned Joe Taylor's Celebrity Club and Sammy Lee's nightclub where the food , music and floor shows compared with Mayfair's best. He even visited Thommo's Two Up School and was impressed by the cockatoos who kept watch and whistled loudly when a stranger was spotted .
After a good look round , he wrote :
Sydney has an underworld that puts anything I have seen in London, New York, Paris or even Marseilles in the shade . Its sordid , lawless East End terrorised by a riff-raff of thugs, hoodlums , gunmen and larrikins , who would make the spivs of Soho's naughty square mile look like characters from a charm school is more dangerous than the jungle after dark .
Was this photograph of my grandfather , who married a Salvation Army matron he met in New Zealand , near a poster for Taylor's Celebrity Club deliberate-showing the devil is everywhere or intended to be a joke ? In 1948 Taylor gave vaudeville artist, producer and entrepreneur Queenie Paul the job of organising entertainment for customers and she hired leggy female singers , American entertainers were brought out , female groups from Sydney, Sunkissed Girls , toured Singapore and Malaya .
In recent years , a Sydney newspaper recalled Thommo's Two Up School , referring to the new casino in Darwin at Mindil Beach where you could toss pennies legally in comfy surroundings .
In recent years , a Sydney newspaper recalled Thommo's Two Up School , referring to the new casino in Darwin at Mindil Beach where you could toss pennies legally in comfy surroundings .
Among the snaps of people in the Salvation Army in Sydney was the above wartime group photo of a band at Leichhardt (incorrectly spelt in the pic ), now a trendy suburb, abounding in sinners and gamblers ?, probably without a Salvation Army group to save lost souls . Another photograph, dated October 1951, is a group of solo horn players inside the Salvation Army Campsie Citadel, described as one of the three best in Sydney .
A further surprise, unearthed by my wife in recent days , is the fact that her great grandmother , teacher Eleanor Dumper, whose brother-in-law was the London publisher John Dent, was listed as a suffragette in 1892 in New Zealand . Women there voted for the first time on November 18, 1893. The same year, Elizabeth Yates was voted mayor of Onehunga, Auckland , the first such post held by a female in the British Empire .
