On the rare and special occasions when Granny entertained, she would unlock the door to the cupboard under the stairs and emerge with some beautiful pieces of silver or glass wrapped in velvet or tissue paper. Each item had a story, as indeed did many things at Towong Hill. I could understand where Mum’s love of stories and her own story-telling talents had come from. For both Granny and Mum, certain special objects had a strong power of association and often acted as catalysts stimulating fond memories.
Granny knew each of the portraits hanging in her house by name and exactly where each of the ancestors depicted fitted on the family tree. As Granny lived far from her original home in Brisbane and in an otherwise often empty house, the ancestors must have given her a sense of belonging. Each time I arrived to stay at 49 I felt like I had been swept into a wider family. It was comforting, inspiring and spooky in equal measures.
Granny was tall and well built. She looked as if she could command troops as well as a large extended family, yet she was a gentle person who hardly raised her voice and moved slowly, with dignity, like a ship under full sail in her waisted dress with flowing skirts. I thought she was very beautiful.
Granny treasured her possessions, possibly most of all for the memories and associations with people and events they brought her. The treasures were the result of decades of careful collecting. As a girl, Mum used to go to sales with her mother and she was with Granny when she bought a sofa and two armchairs for the drawing room. The chairs were narrow with high arms, and Mum and Uncle Edward used to joke that some of the more amply proportioned Girl Guide commissioners visiting Granny would get wedged in the chairs and stand up with them stuck to their bottoms.
An Indian tiger skin hung on the wall above the stairs and two mounted boar heads were hanging above the sitting room and dining room doors. These rather macabre trophies scared me so much that I would not go downstairs alone at night. Mum’s eldest brother, Ian, had shot the tiger in India in 1929. Luckily there was a bathroom and a loo upstairs, so I didn’t have to walk past the tiger in the dark, but I could still feel its fierce presence.
Granny’s house was a tribute to Grandfather’s military experience in different parts of the world, and to a lesser extent Ian and Edward’s military service in the 1930s in India and during the Second World War. Once she took me upstairs to the box room and proudly showed me Roman coins that Grandfather had found while bathing with his soldiers in the Dead Sea or scratching around with trenching tools in Egypt during the First World War. I had never seen anything so old, worn and battered. Unlike now, back then it was not illegal to remove small souvenirs from Egypt and Palestine. On top of a cupboard in the box room there was a pith helmet; until Granny brought it down to show me, I’d imagined helmets made of grapefruit skins turned inside out.
One afternoon when I was seven, Granny was in the pantry where she was unpacking and trying to clean some old chocolate boxes with Queen Victoria’s head on them. The Queen had sent them to the troops one Christmas during the South African War. Another day during the same visit she suggested I put on my favourite blue-and-white striped party dress, with tiny pink roses on the blue stripes. Then she ordered a taxi and took me on my first visit to the Shrine of Remembrance. She asked an attendant in uniform if he would kindly unlock a glass display box with a book in it and show me Grandfather’s name. He pulled on a pair of white gloves and turned the leaves of this special book until he found the page with the name ‘Chauvel, Sir H.G. “K.C.M.G.,” “K.C.B.” ’. It was written in magnificent calligraphy and seemed to be the longest name, taking up two lines in the first column on the page.
‘The “H” was for Harry. George was his second name,’ Granny explained before moving on to the letters following his name. I quickly forgot all she said, except that Grandfather had been a very important person. Nobody else’s name in either of the columns took up two lines so either he was important or greedy – not that I would say ‘greedy’ to Granny. She was very proud of him and wouldn’t have liked it. She said, ‘Don’t forget who your grandfather was.’ We then went up onto the balcony so we could see St Kilda Road leading down towards Port Phillip Bay.
Granny had beautiful handwriting and she wrote in fountain pen, forming the loops and shafts of each letter carefully as if she had all the time in the world. In the afternoons she brought out letters Grandfather had written to her while he was serving in Palestine and she was living in England looking after Ian, Edward and Mum. She was painstakingly copying Grandfather’s letters into large leather-bound books. Rather like Mum, she seemed to hero-worship Grandfather; she said that during the First World War she had lived for his letters. In 1917, when they were living in Cambridge, sometimes she could hear the awful deep rumbles and booming sounds coming from the war in France. Knowing from the newspapers and from bereaved friends and relatives of the losses, she tried to ensure that the wives of Australian servicemen received newspapers too, so they would know more about what their menfolk were doing. Before she wrote on each page Granny measured and drew faint pencil lines to ensure she kept her writing tidy. She carefully pasted black-and-white and sepia photographs and drawings beside the letters they accompanied.
Grandfather’s letters were only detailed in so far as censorship permitted. Both he and Granny loved flowers and he often remarked about the wildflowers he saw. Flowers he found in the Wilderness of Judea he pressed between the pages of the Bible covered with olive wood; I have Mum’s illustrated copy of the New Testament and it is still filled with his now disintegrating cuttings. While Mum was not such a keen gardener as her parents, she, too, loved wildflowers and wrote about them in her diaries and books.
Granny began compiling Grandfather’s letters in the 1920s. In my earliest memories she had already completed the first volume of letters covering Grandfather’s time at Gallipoli and in Egypt, and was working on the second volume. In Chauvel Country Mum explains that she first knew she wanted to write when her mother started transcribing Grandfather’s letters, when Mum was about seven. She decided, ‘I too, would write a book and have it bound in calf. Mother even gave me a piece of leather, but I do not remember what was written on the pages inside the binding. I do know that, slowly and certainly, to write a book became an ambition.’1
Some thirty-five or more years later, Granny had almost completed what must surely be a unique collection of letters and memorabilia. It is a work of art. She had an acute sense that Grandfather and the Light Horse had contributed to a decisive period in history, but she was humble and didn’t put her name to anything.
The book is now in the War Memorial in Canberra.
7
Brilliant Times and Places
It was Granny who told me, and any of her grandchildren who wanted to hear, the thrilling story of the Chauvel ancestors’ escape from religious persecution in France in an open boat across the English Channel following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes on 22 October 1685. The original edict from 1598 had given full civil rights to Protestants, or Huguenots, and widespread persecution followed in the wake of the loss of these rights. At least some of the Chauvel ancestors were Huguenots.
The discovery of the story of the French side of our family was the result of a chance meeting between Grandfather and Monsieur Jean Chauvel, a diplomat who had served in China and later as French ambassador in London and at the United Nations, at a dinner on board a ship in 1923. When they realised that they shared the same surname they began to discuss their family histories, trying to find the link that would explain the coincidence. Until that meeting it appears that the Australian branch of the Chauvel family had been in effect cut adrift, having lost touch with the French branch. Indeed, until that time the Australians didn’t even know if any of the French Chauvels had survived the French Revolution of 1788–89. Monsieur Chauvel told the story of all the family having been guillotined except for one little boy, who had among his meagre possessions a watch inscribed ‘Chauvel de Martinière’.
Granny to
ld another thrilling story of how an English ancestor by marriage named Captain Piercy had fought valiantly in a 1779 naval engagement off Flamborough Head on the Yorkshire coast against a superior French force under the command of John Paul Jones. Decades later when I was travelling through Dumfriesshire in Scotland, purely by chance I came across a bleak white house with dark window frames where John Paul Jones was born. Locals said he was a bit of a lad and was reputed to fly women’s underwear from the mast of his ship. It was as if I had found a tangible association with my family story – not that Granny ever mentioned undergarments flying from the mast! It seemed such a small cottage for the larger than life character whose career started as a buccaneer and ended with his role as founding father of the United States Navy. It was strange that Granny thought of Jones mainly as a formidable pirate when in fact he had led a fascinating life. But even if I was discovering some inaccuracies, Granny’s stories were still captivating.
While Captain Piercy’s ship, the Countess of Scarborough, was captured and Sir Richard Pearson’s ship, Serapis, surrendered, the convoy of forty-one merchant vessels together with its valuable cargo escorted by these two warships was able to escape. I have never seen the diamond given to Captain Piercy by the grateful British government, but my cousin Richard, who has seen it, infers that it glitters more in legend than reality. Mum wrote of this diamond in Chauvel Country: ‘I have thought of it for years as something like a family dice [die] – if I should cast the Piercy Diamond on the chart of my life, where would it land? Which have been the most brilliant times and places?’1
Other tales sparkled in Granny’s repertoire. It must have been upon Granny’s mother-in-law that the bushranger Captain Thunderbolt called at Tabulam, the Chauvel property on the Upper Clarence River in northern New South Wales, while the men of the family were away in Grafton. Granny told how the women showed Thunderbolt’s party over the house, where fortunately there were no valuables, before directing the outlaws in the opposite direction from the one in which their men would be returning home. While the brave adventurer Captain Piercy was one of Mum’s heroes, I thought she should have accorded her more direct ancestors similar accolades, but Mum preferred the male role models.
Granny wrote the story of the Chauvel family as she knew it from family papers and records and from what Grandfather learned from Monsieur Jean Chauvel. Later, I typed up Granny’s notes and Mum used them as the basis for the first chapter of her book Chauvel Country. Subsequent researchers have suggested that the Chauvels may have come from Brittany rather than the Loire (as Granny always thought), or perhaps from both regions; so far conclusive evidence has not come to light. Those of us who grew up on Granny’s version and have copies of her notes love her stories, and we admired her efforts to research and to give her grandchildren a sense of history. Granny was a great raconteur and I wish I had asked her for more stories.
For Mum, the very walls of her old home in South Yarra echoed with the tales and adventures of ex-servicemen and the stories of Chauvel ancestors who served in different parts of the world. There were swords that had been used in battles long ago, and shell cases from the Great War – one of them stood in the hall near the front door and held the standard of the Desert Mounted Corps, a red pennant with a white cross.
Philippe Batters, a resident of Murphy Street, quite accurately described the house as a ‘museum’.2 It was a much more orderly museum than Towong Hill, and when I was a child it was the best museum I had ever seen.
Before the houses in Murphy Street were renumbered, 49 had been number 33, not that this mattered to anyone. On my seventh birthday, Mum said that she thought the number seven was magic, so I wonder what she thought about the number 49 – did it indeed possess seven times the magic of seven? Whether the number 49 was auspicious or not, 49 had a special place in Mum’s affections as her childhood home, and also in those of many of Granny’s grandchildren.
It was from 49 that Mum had started to ride when she was about eight years old. When she was about twelve Grandfather organised for her to have riding lessons at the Remount Depot behind Victoria Barracks, but it was really Grandfather who taught her most of what she knew about horsemanship. When Uncle Ian was posted home from India in 1930 he and Mum began hunting with the Findon Harriers Hunt Club. She knew when she married Dad that hunting was a thing of the past, but I suspect there were moments when she would have given anything to have been able to return to those halcyon days. Mum said Grandfather was a shy man, but she always managed to strike a chord with him when they talked about horses and riding.
Later, in Chauvel Country, Mum wrote a most evocative description of an early morning in the garden at 49, when she was staying with her parents during the Second World War:
I could sometimes hear the distant sound of a ship’s siren coming up from the Bay – that sound which we used to hear so often in South Yarra, when we first lived there after the Great War. It used to evoke in my memory the visions of limitless ocean and strange coastlines, and also the calm feeling of the family surrounding me – Mother, the boys, Nanny, and Dad no longer riding with his soldiers but back with us in the bright light of Australia. The soft ringing of Christ Church bells, too, would enfold me in my childhood’s knowledge of certain love, and the cooing of the Indian doves murmured with peace and happiness.3
Mum often described her memories of those years as being bathed in brilliant sunshine.
It was difficult for any other place to usurp Mum’s love of her first home. I suspect that in the early years after her marriage she often felt more at home at 49 than she did in her own home at Towong Hill, which she and the family shared with the Mitchell family ghosts. It was at 49 that she began her writing career, starting with a series of stories called ‘Eve’s Wood’, which she wrote for her sister Eve’s tenth birthday. She continued to write, sharing stories with Alice Nicholson, the cook, at the table in the dark kitchen at the back of the house. It was a humble but determined beginning to a long and successful career.
8
‘Like a Wave Lifting Everything’
Number 49 was more than a museum of personal and military history. Mum loved the parties and the way of life she had enjoyed while living there before she and Dad were married. It wasn’t so much that the Chauvels were particularly sociable, it was more that Grandfather’s wartime service and position as Inspector-General brought with it travel and a number of official functions. Many senior military and ex-military friends and colleagues were guests at 49, and there were also special occasions to celebrate. In 1934, a year before Mum married Dad, there was the centenary of Melbourne and the visit to the city of the Duke of Gloucester for the dedication of the Shrine of Remembrance. Mum was shy, so Granny and Grandfather agreed that she could do secretarial training if she accepted the invitations to functions they wished her to attend to overcome her shyness. She must have loved every moment of the pomp and ceremony and surely missed it all acutely in the relative isolation of Towong Hill after she married Dad.
Even though Grandfather had died nine years before the royal visit in 1954, Granny was keen to rise to the occasion. While I was too young to remember anything apart from hearsay and glimpses of fabulous evening dresses hanging in wardrobes, the Queen’s visit and the opening of Parliament in March 1954 provided the ideal opportunity for Mum to savour once again the high-society life she’d loved so much before she and Dad were married.
She wrote about it in detail to her younger sister, Eve, in a series of long letters describing the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh’s arrival at Essendon Airport in Melbourne and the procession at ‘eight miles an hour through what is supposed to be the most tremendous welcome so far.’1 The letter describes in thrilling detail the opening of Parliament, which Granny and Indi also attended. Mum remarked that the Queen ‘read her speech very well and with less high pitch than in Sydney (that apparently being nerves)’. Mum went on to describe the Queen as wearing ‘a rather ugly tiara, like a high, solid picket fence of
diamonds, highly satisfactory for Indi, of course, but anyway the whole effect was of great magnificence’.
For Mum, the ‘Government House Ball was really the party, the wonderful occasion of the whole time’. Mum and Dad would have been invited as Dad was a member of parliament in the Victorian government, and he had relatively recently been attorney-general and solicitor-general – both Mum and Dad were well connected in Melbourne. After a lengthy account of the people who had been invited, Mum described the Queen processing through the ballroom and then standing on the dais while the national anthem was played. ‘That,’ Mum remarked, ‘was the most magnificent moment of the tour I think. This small, completely regal figure in either white tulle or foaming lace, all sewn with silver, a glorious tiara, and against the background of blue velvet.’ Mum added, ‘I realised then, much more forcefully than before, what a job she had taken on. The scene was almost unbelievable, for Melbourne, because in front of her, too, were women in the most wonderful dresses I’ve ever seen, and jewels, and men in uniform, and the enjoyment and excitement were like a wave lifting everything.’
Later in the nine-page letter, she mentioned that women spent about £150 or £200 on each evening dress. As Mum had seen Mrs Cain, the wife of the Victorian premier, wearing a blue organza evening dress with embroidery on the bodice very similar to one she herself was planning to wear, she dashed out to Georges and bought another far more striking dress. In her letter Mum remarked, ‘I just could not appear in the same dress as Mrs Cain.’ The dress she bought was made of ‘oyster brocade with a pattern of gold thread roses on it, a beautifully cut skirt and the top of the bodice embroidered with gold sequins and large beads and a halter neck also embroidered’. It was the sort of dress she thought she should have had for the other evening functions during the royal visit.