The Horsekeeper's Daughter

by Jane Gulliford Lowes

  By the end of the strike, Edie was a young woman of twenty. Jobs were incredibly hard to come by, for both men and women, and she took a job as an attendant at the ladies’ rest rooms behind St John’s Church at the top of Church Street and the back of Marlborough Street. The restrooms were housed in a one storey building, and as well as housing the ladies’ public conveniences, they contained a sitting area with polished wood benches, and opened out onto a small garden. For over forty years Edie looked after the ladies’ rest rooms, and kept them immaculately clean and tidy, and she lovingly maintained the little garden. Everybody in Seaham Harbour knew Edie Threadkell, and Edie Threadkell knew everybody else. She also got to hear about everything that went on in the town, from the gossiping women who visited her little domain.

  Although the Durham miners garnered some optimism from the Labour Party gains in the 1929 General Election, and the election of Ramsay MacDonald as MP for Seaham Harbour, Labour did not have enough seats for an overall majority and were forced into coalition with the Liberals. Seaham suddenly found itself at the centre of British politics, but this did little to ameliorate the situation of its townspeople. Any hopes that their situation might be improved under Ramsay MacDonald’s government were quickly dashed when the economies of the industrialised nations were plunged into steep recession by the Wall Street Crash, when the American stock market collapsed. The effect of the Great Depression was brutal and immediate. Coal mines were shut down across the country, creating one hundred per cent unemployment in some small towns and villages, and the number of miners in Durham fell by around sixty-five thousand from 1924 to 1931.74

  By mid-1931, unemployment nationally was around two and a half million. MacDonald put forward proposals for savage cuts in public spending and lost the support of many of his own senior ministers; he resigned in August 1931 and was asked by the King to form a National Government of all three parties, in an attempt to deal with the crisis. He did so but was expelled from the Labour Party for his pains, set up his own party, and would become a reviled figure in Labour politics for decades. Increasingly side-lined by poor physical and mental health, he resigned the role of Prime Minister in 1935, and lost his Seaham Harbour seat to Labour’s Emmanuel Shinwell in the 1935 election.

  As things went from bad to worse for the people of Seaham and Seaton, Edie faced her own trials. On 25th July 1930, after a short illness, Robert Threadkell passed away, aged seventy seven. In Edie’s box, underneath the letters and photographs sent by Bill and Topsy Campbell, lies Robert Threadkell’s will, and the Grant of Probate to his Executors. Robert left his estate of £201 2s 10d (around £11,700 today) to Fanny, after providing legacies of £5 to each of his daughters from his first marriage, and to Edie.

  Despite the dire economic situation and the straitened circumstances of the miners and their families, Seaham was changing. In 1926, when the town was at its lowest ebb, construction began of a large new housing estate at Carr House Farm (later known as Deneside) designed to provide homes for some of the town’s poorest residents in anticipation of slum clearance around the railway line and the bottom of Church Street.

  The first mains electricity arrived in the town in 1927, and new schools opened in Camden Square, Princess Road and Low Colliery. The town began to take on a form much more familiar to its current residents, and by 1936 over three thousand people had been rehoused.

  Even Seaton Village was changing. By 1938 the tiny village school closed its doors and said goodbye to its very last pupil, Adamson Raffle. In the same year, the ancient little square of ten cottages and farmhouse that had sat opposite the Village Farmhouse for centuries, with their outside staircases and courtyard well, which Sarah would have known so well from her time in the village, were demolished. All that remains is the front step of one of the cottages, now the stile which leads to the Dun Cow field.

  17

  The Gunalda Hotel

  While the folk of Seaham were enduring unprecedented hardships, on the other side of the world, on the farm at the foot of Tamborine Mountain, Bill and Topsy Campbell were also struggling to make ends meet. Severe droughts in 1919, 1922 and 1923 affected the Coomera region badly, and were followed by floods in 1924 and 1925. Further drought in 1927 and more seemingly endless rain in 1927 and 1928 rendered farming an increasingly difficult way to make a living. Drought, flood, drought, flood. That’s always been the way in Southern Queensland. It still is.

  The Campbell family had grown too – a fifth child, Jimmy, was born in 1921. Life was hard, especially for Topsy, caring for five small children, as well as the men of the house, Bill and William senior. All eight of them were crammed together in the little slab cottage that William had built thirty years before for Sarah, with no sanitation, no water, and no electricity, and Topsy yearned for a different life away from the never-ending drudgery of her existence.

  For the children, however, growing up at the foot of the mountain seemed like paradise, as they roamed across the fields and through the forests, splashed in the creeks and dammed streams with their friends from the neighbouring farms on their way home from the tiny country school in Maudsland, which their father had attended years before. In Gloria A Coghill’s book 125 Years of Schooling in the Coomera,75 there is an interview with Willie Campbell, the eldest of Bill and Topsy’s children, in which he describes his school days.

  “I remember when the virgin scrubs were cut and the hundreds of birds of all kinds flying out of the last fig tree to fall. Our countryside teemed with doves, pigeons and numerous other lovely birds and of course every burned-out tree stump would house a big carpet snake. Most of my schooldays were spent at Maudlsland State School. I remember my first day at school. My teacher was Mrs Westmann and I was terrified, so much so, my cousin Susie Bignell had to take me home. On my second day of school I hit Teddy Bignell on the nose and made it bleed because he held onto the tap of the school tank and wouldn’t let me have a drink of water…

  With my best friend, my cousin Wally Bignell, we swam the river together, played endless cricket, ate enormous amounts of bananas at Mr Yaun’s banana plantation plus anyone else’s fruit growing in our vicinity, in fact we must have resembled a couple of flying foxes. It really was an idyllic childhood.”

  Perhaps the children were too busy to notice the decline in their grandfather William; perhaps they were used to his bad temper and his eccentricities. By all accounts, in his later years William was not a pleasant man. By the time his fifth grandchild was born, William was already in his seventies, and his health, his patience and his mind were beginning to fade. Wrecked by decades of hard manual labour, he was still deeply affected by both the deaths of his first son at Ghinghinda and his dear wife Sarah twenty years later. Bill and Topsy had to make a heartrending decision. How they must have debated, discussed and argued; how many tears must have been shed, how many cross words exchanged. Was it the right thing for William? Was it the right thing for them and the children? Perhaps William’s health and state of mind left them no choice.

  In 1922, while Topsy was pregnant with her sixth child, William Campbell was taken far from home and across Moreton Bay to North Stradbroke Island, and admitted to Dunwich Benevolent Asylum. He would never see his little farm again.

  The precise medical reason for William’s admission to the asylum is unknown, as under Queensland State laws, his records cannot be accessed until one hundred years from his death. For over eighty years, from 1865 to 1946, the asylum served the state of Queensland as a public institution for the elderly, the poor, the destitute, alcoholics and the chronically sick. Men outnumbered women, who were housed in separate wards, by almost six to one. It was always underfunded, and always understaffed. Able- bodied inmates were meant to staff the asylum themselves, but many were simply too elderly or infirm to assist. Up to the mid-1920s there were rarely more than twenty paid staff to look after around a thousand inmates.76 Cheap labour was supplied by the local aboriginal populati
on, right up until the asylum closed in 1946. Appallingly, only for the final twenty years were they paid, and only then after they took industrial action and petitioned the government; prior to that they received only rations.77

  An article in the Brisbane Courier commented:

  “Dunwich is a home rather than an asylum…although generally regarded as a retreat for the aged, well or infirm, it has become an asylum for the young also, for the inebriate, the epileptic, and some mental, cancer, and consumptive cases, elements that are undesirable amongst the old folk, although those seriously afflicted are segregated… There are serious cases which might well be placed in other and more suitable asylums, and which are allowed to mingle more or less freely and indiscriminately with the inmates, which is bitterly resented by the majority of the old folk.”78

  The inmates were housed in wards, or in a tented village in the grounds. Those who lived outside must have endured a difficult existence in the extremes of the Queensland climate. The asylum was served by a large general kitchen, a bakery, laundry, bath house, post office, library and reading room; there was also a barber’s shop, a general store, and an entertainments hall with a stage.79 Although inmates were allowed visitors, Brisbane was a three hour ferry ride away. How many could afford to make the journey? How many bothered? The author of the article noted with interest, “the keenness of the inmates to keep in touch with the outer world”. In reality, they were probably desperately homesick; for all intents and purposes, they were prisoners on their island home. So many of those poor old souls had already reached the end of the line by the time they were admitted to Dunwich. Having become a burden to their families and to society, they were simply abandoned there.

  Those inmates who were well enough and had sufficient funds were sometimes allowed “back home” for holidays, provided of course they still had a “back home” to go to. The Brisbane Courier article records how,

  “Many old folks return to the asylum much the worse for their visits. It is pitiable to see such ‘returns’ – old men, often sodden with drink, with filthy clothing, starved, sick and penniless. These unfortunate beings are readmitted, and after being bathed, shorn, freshly clothed, rested and fed, in a few days are again happy and contented.”80

  I do not know how often or indeed whether Bill Campbell ever made the journey to see his father in the asylum. With six small children and a farm to run, would he have had the time? Dunwich is not an easy place to get to, from anywhere. Did William pine for Tamborine? Was he lonely and confused by his new surroundings? Perhaps his health was such that he was glad of the rest and the care he received; maybe his mind was such that he no longer knew where or who he was, and no longer cared.

  Bill did travel to Dunwich at the end of September 1926; when he returned on 2nd October, he brought back with him his father’s body. William Campbell was buried in an unmarked grave in the little cemetery at Upper Coomera, just a few yards from where his beloved Sarah had been laid to rest fifteen years before.

  The hardships that the people of Seaham endured throughout the 1920s and 1930s were echoed throughout the industrialised nations of the Empire, as the economic crisis in Britain reverberated across the world. The Australian economy began to sharply decline in the early 1920s, and by the middle of the decade the country was in severe recession. The London-based banks would no longer lend to a Queensland Labour government they considered to be too radical.81 The Bank of England had advised the Australian state governments to make huge cuts to spending on public services and to cut wages to make exports more competitive. At the same time, the British financiers refused to allow the Australians to default on their loan agreements, and the country was crippled financially. As agriculture, the wool trade and mineral mining were affected by huge downturns in international markets, commodity prices fell sharply and businesses of all sizes shut down. By the late 1920s unemployment was already ten per cent, even before the Wall Street crash in 1929 sent the industrialised world hurtling into the most severe depression of modern times.

  Times had always been hard for the Campbells – did Topsy and Bill notice any significant difference to their income in the second half of the 1920s? Had their daily struggles to make ends meet become even more difficult? Dairy production was the one sector of the Queensland economy that had actually increased though the 1920s, and milk production had almost doubled between 1920 and 1930. There were around twenty family dairy farms on and around Tamborine Mountain and Upper Coomera after the First World War, and some of these were very successful, in particular those belonging to the Hollindales, the Birds and the Wilsons.

  Topsy had never been content with the life of a farmer’s wife, and had always dreamed of bigger and better things. She had spent her entire life looking after other people – her many younger brothers and sisters, her own six children, her husband and her elderly father-in-law. Her uncle Sam Bignell, who farmed the neighbouring land, had tried for years to persuade William Campbell to sell him his eighty acres, so that he could increase his own landholding and expand his successful dairy farm but the old man had always steadfastly refused. However, with his death, the way was clear for Topsy to put her plans into action, and in 1928 she finally persuaded Bill to sell their small farm to her uncle Sam.

  Bill Campbell did very well out of the sale of his land, and was paid the sum of £1,600 (around £90,000 today). This must have seemed like a fortune at the time and, with cash to spend, Topsy and Bill looked around for a suitable new business venture in which to invest.

  In early 1929, just as the country was about to plunge into the worst economic crisis in its history, the Campbell family left “Campbell’s Mountain” for good. The wooden slab cottage with the tin roof that William Campbell had built for Sarah and their little boy was abandoned, fell into disrepair and was eventually demolished. The land that William had worked so tirelessly for years to clear of forest was swallowed up by the Bignell’s dairy farm and, after thirty-five years, the Campbells were gone. Did Bill leave his friends and relations on the mountain with a heavy heart? Or was he glad to be leaving the endless toil of farm life for good, looking forward to a new adventure with his newly-gained prosperity? As his mother Sarah had done when she waved goodbye to her mother and sisters at Durham station over forty years before, Bill Campbell was about to change his future.

  Topsy had always had a fancy for being the landlady of a busy hotel or public house. With no experience of the hospitality industry, and no experience of any business other than farming, in 1929 the Campbells purchased the lease on the Gunalda Hotel, a country pub with letting rooms out back. Topsy’s ambitions were about to be fulfilled.

  Gunalda lies northwest of the little country town of Gympie, a hundred and seventy miles north of Upper Coomera, far beyond Brisbane and on the edge of nowhere. Then home to around three hundred and fifty people, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, this was prime logging country, and the little town (in reality a small village) was the thriving centre of the local farming and forestry communities. Situated on the main north–south road that snaked down the eastern side of Queensland, it was a regular stop off point for the loggers and wagon drivers transporting timber and goods the length of the state.

  Topsy revelled in her new role as chatelaine of the Gunalda Hotel. Every night she would be in the bar, laughing and chatting with the customers, the centre of attention. The children soon adapted to their new surroundings and quickly made friends. Topsy organised regular “themed” evenings and parties, and there was always a band playing on a weekend. The hotel was at the very centre of village life. A report from the Maryborough Chronicle of 15th June 1933 describes a “Highland Night” held at the hotel, hosted by Topsy of course, with the Maryborough Pipe Band, a dancing competition and prizes, attended by around twenty local couples. “The function was a great credit to the organiser Mrs Campbell.”82

  In reality, however, the hotel business was in trouble almost from the very
beginning. A local newspaper report from January 1930 reveals that the Government Health Inspector had received complaints about the Campbells keeping pigs in the back yard of the hotel; he attended at the property and served an improvement notice, threatening prosecution if the animals were not removed. Bill and Topsy were farmers not business people and sadly things began to unravel for them fairly quickly. In November 1931 Bill was prosecuted for non-payment of taxes and was fined two pounds, plus three shillings and sixpence in court costs.

  The Campbells had taken a huge gamble in selling the farm and purchasing the Gunalda Hotel, but their chances of making a success of their new business venture faded by the day as Queensland was gripped by the Depression, the decline in the economy speedy and aggressive. In June 1930, unemployment was already at almost twelve per cent; within the year it was over thirty per cent.83 The government of the day was in dire straits and started selling off gold reserves to try to generate cash, in the face of huge political and social unrest. Many new immigrants who arrived during this time were treated with open hostility, especially those who had made the journey from Greece and Italy. There was an upsurge in radical politics, both on the far right and far left, with nationalist and fascist groups engaged in open confrontation with communists and socialists.84 Tens of thousands of unemployed men travelled the length and breadth of the country looking for work; around sixty thousand people were on “susso”, the state sponsored sustenance payment, which paid tiny amounts and was only available to those who had already been out of work for months and who were often literally starving.