FROM THE
ARCHIVES Rev Tim Daniel during WWI, courtesy Australian War Memorial.
By Shannon Lovelady Warning: Sensitive content. All names of the Daniel family have been changed.
For this edition, we thought we’d share some of the in-depth research we undertook for Dr Susan Maushart in her writing of our centenary history, This Little World. This is one of the stories we did not include. To tell it, we go back to 1916, when Ellen Daniel came to PLC. Back in 2013 we found ourselves wondering why her recorded guardian was our Founder, the Rev George Nisbet Dods, as both her parents were still living. We decided to look further into it and did not expect to find what we did! Ellen’s parents, Tim and Lilly (six years older) married in Ireland in around 1898. Their children William and Ellen were born in July 1900 and December 1901 respectively. Tim Daniel was an ambitious Presbyterian minister who arrived in Fremantle with his wife and children in July 1902. A third child, a little boy, was born in January 1903 but, sadly, died two months later. We began tracking their movements after they arrived in WA. Rev Daniel was very active and there was much reported on him in the newspapers. We looked in the social pages for mentions of what Lilly was doing, alongside her prominent husband. We checked for all the usual things - charities she supported, people she visited, dances at Government House, afternoon teas and important events she attended, all the usual mentions ... but there was nothing. A very big silence all around her. In 1915, Rev Daniel enlisted to serve in WWI as a military chaplain. He stated he was married, so we could presume
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Black Watch 2022 Edition One
Lilly wasn’t dead, but it was very unusual for him to name his 15-yearold son, William, his next of kin. Ellen was put into PLC and William into Scotch College. At night, and on weekends, Ellen went home to Rev Dods’ home in West Perth, as Rev Dods had a daughter, Chrissie, around Ellen’s age. William was initially also under the care of Rev Dods too but, after a few years at Scotch, his guardian changed to P C Anderson, who was then the Principal of Scotch College. Ellen finished her schooling here at the end of 1919 and Rev Daniel returned from the war in 1920, very highly decorated. He gathered Ellen and headed off to South Australia from where Ellen wrote back, quite cheerfully, of her services as her father’s aide, standing by his side. Again, we wondered, where was Lilly? And then we found her dying in
Claremont years later, and an awful realisation hit. She might have been in Claremont Lunatic Asylum. Going about confirming this required some thinking outside the box and a welcome collaboration with mental health services and historian, Dr Philippa Martyr, and a week or so later we’d done it - confirmed poor Lilly Daniel had indeed been admitted to Claremont by her husband on 1 December 1911. Her admission form records that he told them she had, naturally, become quite depressed after the loss of their baby boy in 1903 and that she had been mentally unwell, on and off, for the past 6-7 years. Periodically, it says, she neglected herself and
