The old chap worked on a property just out of town about three or four miles, I think.
‘P. C. Hughes,
With the pinchin’ shoes.’
He was quite a poet. Have you seen his poems?’ [I nodded yes.]
Q: ‘Were you in his class? Was he your teacher?’
Oh, no! He’d retired from teaching many years before that. He was only a country teacher in those early days when they had those part-time schools. You’d teach three days at one school and two days at another one, and then reverse the procedure the following week. I don’t know their history there. He was probably retired from teaching and working on properties and that’s how I knew the family.
Q: ‘You said Pat was a little younger than you. Were they combined classes?’
Oh, no! When I went to school, there were about 200 to 250 kids there. It was up to Intermediate standard, no higher. I only went to sixth class there and then I was pushed off to Sydney to a boarding school. The Hugheses moved from Cooma when I was at boarding school and I knew them at Ashfield as well. I used to visit their place on days off. I didn’t know of them at Haberfield until much later.5
Q: ‘So you knew Pat at Cooma and Ashfield. What were your impressions of him as a young bloke?’
Oh yes. Oh, a very smart young boy, top of the class. So were his sisters. He went to Fort Street later on. Connie went to Fort Street as well but that was down at The Rocks. They had segregated boys and girls, didn’t they!’
Q: ‘How big of a place was Cooma then?’
At a bit of a guess, I’d estimate about 2,000 to 2,500 people. I think there were between about 200 to 250 at the school that went up to Intermediate standard.’
Q: ‘Do you have any memories of Pat at school, at sport or anything like that?’
Well, they didn’t have sport that much in those days, a big rough old playground at the school; they weren’t fields like they are today. We had a couple of tennis courts there. I was a bit of a keen player, but not much good.
Q: ‘What about Pat?’
I can’t remember him playing. His sisters played. Of course, him being a couple of years younger, you didn’t come into contact with the younger ones quite as much.
Q: ‘You were more friendly with the sisters?’
They were more in our class. Yes.
Q: ‘You came to Sydney. What was the boarding school you were at?’
I went to Holy Cross College at Ryde.
Q: ‘You used to visit the family during your days off?’
I probably only visited a couple of times a year … That would be about the late 20s, or around 1930/31, I think. Pat used to build model aeroplanes in those days out of balsa wood like little match sticks.
Q: ‘He must have always been keen on aviation then?’
Must have been.
Q: ‘What about his older brother, Bill? He must have been there.’
I didn’t know much about Bill. He was the youngest one that still lived at Cooma that I knew. The rest of the whole family had gone away. I didn’t know any of them. I don’t know what he even did for a living.
Pat started an apprenticeship with a watchmaker, so Connie told me once. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I can’t verify that.’
Q: ‘Around about this stage, Pat was friendly with a bloke called Pettigrew. Do you have any memory of someone of that name?’
No. Once I went back to Cooma on the property, I never saw any of them again. I only heard about them. Then Pat joined the air force so I only know there what I’ve heard.’
Q: ‘You said he did model making of aeroplanes, does anything else come to mind?’
Not really. We were only school kids then.
Q: ‘How old would you have been then?’
About sixteen.
Q: ‘So Pat would have been about fourteen?’
That would be right.
Q: ‘How did you get to their family home at Ashfield? Did you go by tram with your parents?’
Oh, no. My parents were in Cooma. They never moved from Cooma.
Q: ‘When you arrived there [Ashfield], who would be there to greet you?’
Oh, the whole family, the old people, Mr and Mrs and I’d say from Bill down – Bill, Marge, Connie and Pat. His father was Percy.
Pat’s father was the first Paterson Clarence Hughes, although everyone did call him Percy. This probably evolved from him using his initials, ‘P. C.’, when signing or writing poetry.
Having left home at the age of sixteen, he was a jack of all trades. As well as on occasion being ‘a country teacher’, he ran the post office at Peak Hill, at various times worked on and managed two properties in the Monaro district and gained renown as a ‘bush poet’.
Pat’s sister ‘Connie’ mentioned by Jock Goodwin, was Constance Olive Hughes, the tenth of the twelve children. Constance’s daughter Dimity relates:
At that stage, Paterson, or Percy as he was known, divided his working life teaching school at Peak View and the nearby settlement of Jerangle. He was artistic with a gift for calligraphy and highly literate, as was his mother, which was of course unusual for people in the bush in those days, and (using a pseudonym) he contributed bush poetry to the Bulletin. One of his best poems was a eulogy to Henry Lawson who was apparently a friend.6
From Peak View the family moved to a large property called Tarsuson the Murrumbidgee on the other side of Cooma which Percy managed for a German pastoral company. My mother recalled that the day they arrived what passed for a ballroom was full of pumpkins at one end while a rabbiter and his dogs were camped in the other half. It sounded like a pretty idyllic place for kids to grow up with miles of country to go roaming in and orchards, one full of almond trees.
Caroline did all the cooking, housework, dressmaking and gardening – her produce often won prizes at the Cooma show – while Percy, as often as not, sat reading in a large chair by the fire. He might have been an intellectual sort of fellow but he was also tough. If he was out droving and developed a bad tooth, he would operate on himself with a penknife.7
Percy wrote his last poem, The Tablelands, while recuperating after losing his right leg when he was aged ninety or ninety-one. He was successfully fitted with an artificial leg and insisted that it was ‘better than the original’ up to his death in 1970. Jerangle Public School named its library the ‘Percy Hughes Library’ in honour of the man who was a teacher there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
THE TABLELANDS
I’d like to go back to the tableland,
That world designed neath the Master’s hand,
With its verdant hills and mountains grand,
And crystal streams a’purling;
To the rolling plains where the lakelets lie,
To mirror an arch of peerless sky,
With lazy cloud ships drifting by,
Their snow white sails unfurling.
When spring returns with fairy tread,
To wake the earth from winter’s dead,
Her gems in all their beauty spread,
In tints and fragrance tender.
Mid every shade of nature’s green,
Where shafts of sunlight romp between,
The wattle reigns - the bushland queen,
In all its golden splendour.
To me in memory still it speaks,
Of old bush tracks and shady creeks,
Of mists along the distant peaks,
And wild birds westward homing.
And when the evening shadows steal,
And daylight fades - yet I may feel,
The magic of its gloaming.
Time’s ruthless hand brooks no delay,
And swiftly speeds the years away,
Far from that spacious yesterday,
When I was a carefree rover.
When the heart was young and the world was wide,
In the scented breath of the morning tide,
And magpies carolling over.
To th
ose who wrought with me of old,
Those grand bush mates with hearts of gold.
Whose friendship I was glad to hold.
Through fair and stormy weather,
I dedicate this verse of mine,
With kindly thoughts in every line,
For good or ill through Auld Lang Syne,
T’was ours to share together.
P. C. Hughes (1874–1970)8
In the early 1930s the Great Depression hit Australia as it did in the rest of the world. Percy’s move to Sydney seems to have been because of the need to find work, but there was also a rift in the family.
Pat Hughes’ nephew was Laurence Hughes Lucas. His first memories of the Hughes family date from when half of them were living in Knocklayde Street, Ashfield, an inner western suburb of Sydney. In 2013 he recalled these details.9
I was born in 1929 and my ‘flesh to flesh’ period with Pat covered merely 1933 to 1938, but young as I was, across those years, there are vivid memories and impressions still recallable about an unusual young person. Pat was impulsive (but not without purpose) and very conscientious about his obligations to the family, e.g., his homework, house duties and relationships with his brother and sisters.
The only timeline to build upon comes from Marjorie who claimed to have gained her driving license in Cooma at the age of seventeen (?). Born in 1913, it makes the move to Ashfield at about 1930 because she said that they moved soon after that event [the license].
My earliest memories of Knocklayde Street would be from 1933 onwards. The Federation home they rented had a pond full of terrapins, so my sister and I were always eager visitors from Concord.
The family disposition at that time was something like this:
Old Perce was a gardener at Coogee;
Helena my mother, married, Concord;
Dorothy, Coogee, married;
Jack, Charlie and Fred in established jobs and married except for Charlie who married in 1938 or 1939;
Muriel, married, Kiama.
Living with Caroline and Pat were Constance waiting for her eighteenth birthday to later start nursing at Camperdown Children’s Hospital; Marjorie who worked in retail and became an assistant buyer for sports and leisure wear in a city department store; and Bill, single with the PMG Wireless Regulating Authority. And finally Valerie, single, studying accountancy and working in the office of a garage on Parramatta Road.
So I guess that Caroline, Pat and Con were supported by the incomes of Marjorie, Valerie and Bill.
An undercurrent of hostility would surface towards old Perc especially when the older siblings came to visit. Some had mixed feelings but certainly no family member found fault with Grandma.
She was Pat’s darling and vice versa. She was a Pollyanna holding a glass half full and standing beside a sundial (which only reads the sunny hours!).
And the two older singles, Bill and Valerie, were Grandma’s rock.
All the family members (except Grandma and Pat) exhibited a measure of cynicism which came directly from old Perc. I could go so far as to say that Pat missed out because he was never really exposed to his father for a long period so wasn’t he lucky to have been infected by Grandma’s roseate world plus the get up and go attitudes of Val and Bill?
But, by and large, I was proud to be a member of the Hughes putsch. They were opinionated, garrulous, and quarrelsome and my sister and I loved them for their warmth and generosity towards their young cousins.
The death of our father in 1933 sparked off frequent visits to Knocklayde Street. I suppose our mother drew a little closer to the family for moral support and my sister and I naturally gravitated towards young Pat for entertainment. We were not disappointed. He would organise ‘dress ups’ for the three of us on the basis of popular adventure stories he would be currently reading. I remember one ‘scene’ was my sister Patsy (aged only seven) kneeling in an upturned cane lounge with motorbike helmet and goggles (from Bill?) as Amy Johnson battling the elements in her Moth Jason.10
It got to the stage where we would stay over weekends. I would sleep with Pat in a big double brass-knobbed bed. One night I awoke shivering and when Pat asked what was wrong I told him about my cold feet. He got up, heated Grandma’s iron, wrapped it in a towel and placed it in the bed on its side so that my feet were on the sole plate. I slept like a top.
After dark the house was ablaze with lights, gas and electric, but there was no lighting in the gloomy pantry. When Grandma asked me to fetch an ingredient, I baulked at the sight of a harmless ‘daddy long legs’ spider on the wall. Pat was doing his homework at the kitchen table while monitoring my ‘sooky’ antics. He jumped up and asked me to show him the spider’s locality, following close behind. I can still feel the kalsomine powder as his hand closed over mine, sweeping the spider away and filling my fingernails. His only explanation was to say to me that I should always make things happen – not just let things happen to me!
When our father died in 1933, Pat used to visit us at Concord and in 1934 he stayed for some months, commuting daily to Fort Street and keeping his favourite sister company. Pat berated our mother for not taking us out. He would say that she had to get outside herself. Magically, his fifteen-year-old entreaties worked on his thirty-five-year-old sister and it wasn’t long before we enjoyed Saturdays and Sundays around Sydney: the Zoo; Hyde Park; Observatory Hill, etc. He became an advocate for our dearest wishes. My sister got a supply of Collins story books and I got a Hornby train set. He never asked our mother for anything for himself though.
He was at that early age an Anglophile par excellence, so he must have known that Collins was British. The same for Hornby, so I suspect he steered our mother towards politically acceptable articles!
Both he and Bill were modellers and before he returned to the family he had scratch-built me a model of Amy Johnson’s Jason. It was either blue and silver or green and silver. It even had a spare propeller attached to the fuselage. Of course, he was an Amy Johnson fan so it was a twist of fate that Pat would ultimately be buried in Amy’s home town of Hull, an end denied her because of her loss in the Thames Estuary.
I don’t know why or when Old Perc left Caroline but the family were guarded about any extended discussions on the subject. It was just that all we cousins couldn’t understand the situation so we were always asking questions – to no avail!
Did he feel that his own twelve kids were the turkeys preventing him from soaring like an eagle? He didn’t see too much of them. He was a provisional teacher and I think it meant that for a couple of days he would saddle up and ride to one provisional school and for the remainder of the week go in another direction to another school. So Caroline managed the Peak View Post Office, grew and stored her own fruit and vegetables and generally cared for the family. There must have been compatibility though, because our own mother would tell us that both parents would ‘doll up’, saddle up the sulky and spend Saturday night at the local dance, returning in the early hours of Sunday morning.
It meant that the three eldest, Helena, Muriel and Jack were tasked with caring for the rest of the brood, plus themselves. Perc claimed that he and Billie Hughes were first cousins, based on his ‘claim’ that they had common grandparents.11 It has never been explored to my knowledge. But I do know that Perc had visited Billie at Loyalty Square in Balmain. He said that Billie had told him to stop writing poetry and get interested in politics! Perc had those Janus qualities which would have helped.12 In a second he could go from a Bo Jangles style singing western folk songs to a man of letters (admittedly Australian literature only).
In 1936 our mother married a navy man who was transferred to Flinders Naval Depot in 1939. We followed to reside within commuting distance at Frankston on Port Phillip Bay.13
Young Pat was a good sportsman, excelling at swimming and football, and as well as his keen interest in making model aeroplanes he experimented with electricity by making crystal radios and the like. His brother Bill (who Pat usually called ‘Will’ i
n his letters) recalled that on one occasion Pat fused out the whole house and consequently was ‘black-balled’ by the rest of the family.
When the family moved from Cooma to Ashfield and later to Haberfield, Pat at first attended Petersham Boys High School where he became close friends with John ‘Peter’ Pettigrew. Bill Hughes remembered them together:
Re the life of Peter Pettigrew, I can only offer a short summary of his association with our family. He was a year younger than Pat and lived in Haberfield with his mother and a sister. He had a brother and a sister married. His father was a builder in the district but had died some years before. He attended Petersham Boys High School with Pat and after having gained their Intermediate Certificates, Pat went to Fort Street Boys High but Peter was enrolled at Sydney Grammar School. At the age of 18 he left school and obtained a position with the MLC Insurance Coy and, remained there until selected for Point Cook. I only saw him several times after that as a cadet. When and how he sailed for England I do not know, but I recall that Pat wrote in one letter that Peter had arrived in England and they had met up, that is where I lost contact as I shortly joined the army myself. Somewhere I have a notice of his death, announcing that Mrs Pettigrew of Glenbrook and sister Phyllis had received news of her son and brother’s death.14 I understand the sister was living at Glenbrook for health reasons … As for Peter himself I can only speak in the highest terms and it’s hard to imagine any conduct of disrepute. He was a well mannered lad – no vices – and treated as one of the family in our home and an ideal companion for Pat.
Fort Street High School is the oldest government high school in Australia. It was on 8 January 1848, the then Governor of New South Wales, Charles FitzRoy, established a Board of National Education to implement a national system of education throughout the colony. The board decided to create two model schools, one for boys and one for girls. The site chosen for Fort Street Model School was the old Military Hospital at Fort Phillip on Sydney’s Observatory Hill. This school was not only intended to educate boys and girls, but also to serve as a model for other schools in the colony. The name ‘Fort Street’ is derived from the name of a street which ran into the grounds of the hospital and became part of the playground during its reconstruction. The school was officially established on 1 September 1849, when the conversion of the building was approved by the government. This original school building is visible today beside the southern approaches to the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The establishment of Fort Street School marked the establishment of a non-denominational system where the government undertook education, separate from religion. Today it remains a selective public school operated by the New South Wales Department of Education and Training drawing its students from across the Sydney metropolitan area.
A Spitfire Pilot's Story: Pat Hughes: Battle of Britain Top Gun Page 2