10 minute read
Motor Mechanic
George arrived back in Melbourne in the autumn of 1930. The New York Stock Exchange had crashed in October 1929 and the world economy was spiraling into depression. The Big Brother Movement stopped sponsoring new migrants in early 1929 and its Melbourne operations may have ceased altogether.10 George could not recall whether he had lost touch with his big brother, Mr Hooke, or why he did not contact him, but on arriving in Melbourne he had no job, nowhere to stay and precious little money.
While he could afford it, George stayed at the YMCA, but he soon had to leave. He met an artist and for a while he hawked hand-painted brooches around Flinders Street Station, in exchange for dossing on the floor of the artist’s room. George recalled soliciting customers: ‘Lady, buy your lovely daughter a genuine hand-painted bird or flower brooch and get one for yourself. Only sixpence each’. He also spent many days looking in shop windows for ‘Help wanted’ signs, riding out to suburban shopping centres on tram running boards, but there were no jobs. He was always hungry. He recalled going into cafés and ordering soup at nine pence a plate:
They'd bring my soup. I'd polish it off and put the bowl on another table and look hungry, which wasn't hard to do, because I was hungry, really hungry. There were several waitresses or even the same one would come past and ask, "Haven't you had yours?’ at which I’d look at the empty table, shrug my shoulders, or say something like, ‘It doesn’t look like it’, and await the second bowl. Sometimes I think they knew.
His artist friend ‘shot through’ and George slept for a while in a cellar in Spring Street, where his spare shirt and second pair of boots were stolen.
In desperation George eventually approached his Big Brother, who let him stay at his holiday cottage in the Dandenongs provided George cut and stacked wood for him. He stayed there about a month and, on his departure Mr Hooke gave him a copy of the Pocket Oxford Dictionary ‘inscribed in tremulous handwriting’. George recalled that it was the first gift he’d received since leaving England and he kept it for the rest of his life. After that he wrote a few times to Mr Hooke, but they never met again.
During the Depression a large number of ‘Little Brothers’ returned home to England, but George never even considered that as an option.11 He got in touch with James Cozens, his first employer in Willatook, and returned there in late 1930:
How glad was I to be home in my 10ft x 10ft hut and quite happy bathing behind the hedge with one foot at a time in a kero tin … The cows were no longer smelly … I regarded 40 minutes or so winding the separator at the steady 45 turns per minute a pleasant exercise (I still speeded up a little at the end to get my fingerful of real thick cream). The hours slashing Scotch thistle were no longer arduous, even though at weekends the distant laughter of the tennis players on the court near the school plagued my ears. In fact, nothing was a burden now that I had learned that to have work was the most important thing and right now was a time to hang on to a job and make yourself as useful as possible – give it a go at all times. I was never out of work again.
While helping with the morning and evening milking, George’s major project for Cozens was to build a shed. Cozens had been sceptical of George’s ability to do this, so ‘to convince him I got some white cardboard … no more than 18” square and drew on it to scale every plate, stay, stud, rafter, and ridge truss … I cut and folded the detailed cardboard into a model of his shed, complete with a bill of materials.’ Cozens took this to the local timber merchant, who said it was ‘spot on’. To carry out the job, George bought his own tools and then worked every day, except when he was needed to take livestock in to market.
After finishing the shed there was not enough work for George on the Cozens’ farm, but he was offered work by a neighbour, L.E. Richardson, who had a small block and was far less well established than Cozens. At Richardson’s, George slept in a shed with a dirt floor, on a bed made of four forked sticks driven into the ground, with chaff bags threaded over the side rails. Again he had to bathe in a kero tin, but there was nowhere to hide so he had to wash at night. He negotiated his first pay rise since arriving in Australia – he was now to receive 15 shilling per week, with one weekend off each month. His main task again was milking and during the day he had bluestone boulders to remove from around the farm yard, a small paddock to sow with corn and other chores. He recalled ploughing the paddock with a single furrowed plough pulled behind an old grey horse and then sowing the seed by pushing a one-wheeled sowing machine down every fourth furrow ‘What a come down from the tandem six and eight furrows I had last driven.’
About this time George bought a motorbike, and he went in to Koroit for his licence test. The local policeman told him to ride up to the pub and back, but George was showing off a bit and fell off when he did his U-turn too quickly. The policeman still gave him his licence, together with the advice ‘Don’t come back into town for a while till you’ve learnt not to fall off ’. The motorbike gave him greatly increased independence and he began to spend most of his free time at Smith’s garage in Koroit. Through the garage he got his first car, a dilapidated Citroen with a tiny seven horsepower engine, which he spent many hours repairing and rebuilding. He began to stay in town on his free weekends and helped in the garage without pay whenever they were busy.
In 1931 George turned 21 and he went into Warrnambool to have his photograph taken to send to his mother, but that was a rare contact. George and his mother were not good correspondents and they gradually lost touch. From the early 1930s he had virtually no contact with his family in England.
After a few months it became clear that there would not be enough work for him on Richardson’s farm. As the Depression worsened, the small dairy farmers on the soldier settlement estates no longer had the cash to pay farm hands and George realized there was no future for him in farming. He still held his boyhood ambition to become a mechanic and decided that he would move into Koroit and see if he could get work at the garage. He took a room at the Commercial Hotel for £1 a week and spent his days serving petrol, helping the mechanics attend to breakdowns and taking cars for test runs. At first this was unpaid, but after a while he made himself indispensable and began to be paid for some of his work.
Two large jobs helped him turn his work at the garage into a full- time job. When the wooden floor of the garage collapsed under the weight of a truck loaded with fertilizer, George offered to rebuild it, which involved restumping the entire floor. For this he was paid 25 shillings a week, leaving him 5 shillings after paying his rent. Soon after he had finished this job a local farmer crashed his truck into a tree, putting the chassis out of line. The garage could not spare the time for the major repair job involved, so George said he could do it. He had recently bought a copy of Dykes Automobile Encyclopedia and with the help of this and some hydraulic tools he managed to do the job. After that he was taken on full-time by the garage.
George recalled that the garage was a wonderful place to gain skills and experience and he had some interesting experiences there. One of the regular customers was Reg Ansett, who used to stop by when driving his big Buick from Hamilton to Warrnambool. The garage owner always used to demand cash up front from Ansett, as he felt sure he would go broke. Another story George remembers was the time,
A well-heeled grazier drove straight into the workshop, unwound his lanky form from out of the magnificent Cadillac, and in a stentorian, authoritative voice said, ‘Cut the arse off the back of this and make a truck out of it. Don’t forget demountable side rails. Oh! and give me a bit of a hood over the front seat.’ And he was out the door where his wife was waiting in a newer Cadillac. The one he left wouldn’t have been more than two years old, but looking in the rear seat it was obvious that many a ewe, calf and pig had been hog-tied in there, hay bales, fertilizer, barbed wire, you name it, had traveled in there. No attempt had been made to conceal the fact.
Next door to the garage was a blacksmith’s shop, and the smithy would often borrow George when he needed a striker. George enjoyed this as he loved the ring of the anvil. By this time George had bought himself another car, a French Amilcar. He bought it from a farmer, who had never used it, and George found it in a shed covered in fowl manure. He soon cleaned it up and became a ‘bit of a lair’ in his sporty car that was ‘about as fast as anything on the road’.
As he became older and financially more secure George began to develop more social interests. He joined the local bowls club and played the occasional game of golf. He also joined the Masonic Lodge in nearby Port Fairy (Koroit, being a largely Catholic town, had no lodge of its own). This expanded his circle of friends, filled a couple of evenings a month and gave him his first experience in public speaking.
And then there were girls. He suddenly realized that his flannel shirts, heavy, round-nosed shoes, uncreased trousers and self-cut hair were ‘not quite the in thing’. He bought new clothes and went to a barber, who introduced him to ‘perfumed Vaseline.’ Soon he had met Ethel Murnane, who he married on 16 April 1938 at the Sacred Heart Church in the Melbourne suburb of Preston.
10 The Big Brother Movement remained active in New South Wales and sponsored many boys in the 1950s and 1960s.
11 Sherington estimates that about one-third of Little Brothers in Victoria had returned to England by the mid-1930s. ‘The Big Brother Movement’, p. 281.
