Charles Gittins and Mabel Murray married in 1898. They had nine children, counting Arthur, and eight grandchildren:
Arthur (1897—ca.1960) m. ca.1950 Don (Donna?) [surname unknown].
Charlie (1898—ca.1987).
Frank (1900—ca.1964) m. ca.1940 Florence MacDonald.
Albert (1902—ca.1987) m. ca.1935 Jean Loovey (Dolores, Shirley, Gayle).
John (1902—ca.1990) m. ca.1940 Maud Williams (Geoffrey, adopted natural son of Ron and
Ruby, and Pam, also adopted).
Ethel (1905—ca.1962) m. ca.1925 Michael Miniter d. 1943 m.1950 Harold Parsons. Mae (1907—ca.1985) m. ca.1928 Arthur Horsenell divorced ca.1939 m. Clenneth Williams ca. 1942.
Blanche (1910—1988) m. 1929 Ian McRae (Eion, Gwyneth, Graeme).
Ron (1916—ca.1996) m. ca.1940 Ruby Gibbings d. 1942 (Geoffrey) m. ca.1945 Betty Gomm (Kaye, Leslie, Kenneth).
Charles and Mabel made their first home in a brick house by the brick-yards, on what is now Albany Highway at the Albany Circle. Charlie, Frank and the twins Bert and John were born in Albany .
In 1899 Charles got a job with the Western Australia Government Railway as a length runner--track safety inspector--on the just-completed Great Southern railway between Albany and Perth. In that capacity Charles had to propel himself manually along the track on a four-wheeled vehicle called a trike, and making the trike go was by far the toughest part of the job. The extremely arduous daily workout no doubt served as good preparation for the physical demands of the farm life he was to take up a decade later. In those days before labor-saving farm machinery, a farmer needed a strong back and plenty of muscle!
In preparation for life on a farm, Charles built a makeshift house of out of discarded railway sleepers (US ties) near the railway line at a place then called Tingerup (now Wansborough) 75 miles north of Albany, and he and Mabel with their five sons moved to Tingerup in 1904.
The next additions to the family were two girls, Ethel, born in Albany, and Mae, born in Tingerup.
About 1908 Charles and Mabel moved with the family, now seven children, to a 4000 acre farm a few miles to the north-west of Tingerup, in the Shire of Tambellup. There Charles built another makeshift house. Like the McRae house in Meckering, it had walls of bags sewn together, but it attained a higher level of comfort since the bags were stiffened with cement to stop them flapping about and to keep the wind out. One improvement over the previous dwelling at Tingerup was a chimney with a fireplace place for cooking indoors.
Meanwhile Mabel's sister Eva had married [first name unknown] Hill, and they had one child, Clem. The Hill family also had a farm in Tambellup, located just east of the Byrne farm. Hill died in a freak accident--he was taking a driving lesson from local farmer Tom Hull, when the car they were driving stalled on the rail crossing at Tingerup and was struck by a train. Eva sold the farm and lived the rest of her life in Albany. Clem Hill eventually lived in the Northern Territory but returned to Tambellup to help celebrate the Shire's centennial in 2006.
Back to the Gittins family: The first few years in Tambellup, until about 1915, were arduous and uncomfortable, but Charles and Mabel saved some money and eventually they had a builder put up a proper house, a weatherboard structure with a corrugated-iron roof. It included an iron wood-burning fireplace and such decorative features as a stamped-zinc ceiling. The new place had large underground cistern for rainwater, fitted with a hand-pump of the kind nowadays seen as a decorative antique. A later masonry adjunct provided shelter for Mabel when she did the washing and also accommodation for the older boys, who were by this time approaching maturity.
The Gittins family in Tambellup, about 1923. Back, from left: Arthur, Charlie, Frank, John, Bert.
Middle: Mae, Ethel, Blanche. Front: Charles, Ron, Mabel.
(Photo supplied by Anne Bell nee Gittins, daughter of Geoffrey, granddaughter of John).
In 1916, with the war still dragging on, Arthur joined the army and served in France between 1917 and 1919 as a Private in the 51st Infantry Battalion. In the course of his service he was hospitalized twice, once for mumps and once for influenza, but he suffered no wound or injury and returned home in good health in 1919. (Source: Anne Bell nee Gittins).By good judgment and unremitting hard work, Charles Gittins laid the foundation for the family’s eventual prosperity. But he did not allow the drudgery of day to day existence on the farm depress his kindly and whimsical spirit, nor did he allow it to dampen his interest in the world beyond his immediate experience. He was fascinated with world events. He followed the news avidly as it unfolded in newspapers and periodicals, from which he often read aloud to the family and anyone else who would listen. A skeptic, he habitually referred to "The World News," an Australian weekly of the 1920s, as "The World Lies." He invariably accompanied his readings from "The World Lies" with his own version of events, "The Truth" as he called it. To him, the truth really mattered.
Charles was also interested in the latest wonders of science and engineering. He was quick to appreciated the potential importance of the mechanization of farm work. With the older boys of the family, Arthur, Charlie and Frank, he was using a tractor for farming years before many others in the district. The family’s first tractor was a chain-drive Titan of about 1909, a ponderous machine with a chain drive and a 44-gallon (US 50-gallon) fuel tank. The remains of the tractor are located as shown on the map of Tambellup and vicinity, south of the house, between it and the salt lake (Source: Graeme McRae of Albany, Western Australia).
Other early machinery on the farm included two trucks, a Dodge and a Rugby—the latter furnished, oddly enough, with separate speedometers for different settings of the gear lever. These vehicles ran reliably at speeds up to twenty miles per hour, and already offered enormous advantages over horse-drawn cartage.
In his spare time Charles liked to tinker with popular scientific ideas of the period. He tried to make a perpetual motion machine using horseshoe magnets, and those magnets were still turning up here and there on the farm decades after his death there in 1926, at age 64. He was buried at Tambellup.
Mabel did not share Charles’ buoyant temperament. At portrait of her at about 50 is a picture of dreary exhaustion. The iron-gray hair is drawn back in a utilitarian bun, and the features of the round face sag pitiably. Mabel might once have been a cheerful, lively girl, but by middle age she saw only the cloud inside the silver lining. Quick to blame and persistent in censure, she habitually cast herself as martyr and complained unrelentingly of her fate. "She never let us have any fun," Blanche said. Because of her lugubrious temperament, for years family members had to make a conscious effort to give her due credit for her achievement in bearing and lovingly bringing up nine children in conditions harsh as a wilderness camping expedition.
To be sure there were bright spots in her later life on the farm, and she remembered them fondly. For example, on one Christmas Day in the 1930s the family had gone off to picnic on the banks Gordon, leaving Mabel at home alone and apparently forgotten. But Arthur saved her day when he arrived unexpectedly in a brand-new car and took her on a leisurely drive around the farm.
Mabel passed her last years living alone in a small house in the town of Tambellup (G on the map), and as described further on she seemed happier there than on the farm.
Mabel died in 1950 at age 75, and was buried alongside Charles at Tambellup.
Continue reading: 2.2.2 Blanche’s Youth "Hunger is the best sauce."
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2. Blanche Gittins (1910-1987) Background and Youth (-1929)
2.2 Tambellup
This Topic2.2.1 Charles and Mabel (1896-1926) Mabel (-1950)
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