Vere street, Collingwood
Image © Collingwood Library
Labelled only Alpha Cottage with bootmaker, 1880, these photographs are held by the City of Yarra library, which lists the location of these shots as unknown. It is such a beautiful set of what seem to be family photos, that I wanted to try and find out more. A closer look revealed some subtle differences between the two photographs – the positioning of windows has changed, for example, suggesting a time lapse between the two photographs being taken – but at the same time the trees are the same height, the same fence palings are broken, and the same signs are in the windows, suggesting that the pictures are not so far apart that they can’t be seen as part of the same series. Although the information in the archive regarding the photographs is scant, a couple of other clues revealed themselves in this examination of the photographs, so I set about trying to solve the mystery of the location, and hopefully find out a little more about the subjects in the image.
Armed only with “Alpha Cottage”, “1880”, “156” (the number of the house as shown in the photographs), “bootmaker”, and a tentative assumption that the image may be of a house in the Yarra council area (although that was not necessarily the case at all), a search through old newspaper advertisements soon revealed a John Green, bootmaker, resident at 156 Vere Street, Collingwood, and although the front has been considerably altered, it appears that this is the house in the photograph, most of which remains in largely original condition. The Melbourne Sands Directory confirms that a John Green, bootmaker, did indeed reside at the above address in 1880.
With such a common name, John Green is a difficult character to trace. There appears to have been at least two men of the same name residing in the Collingwood/Abbotsford area, and even by trying to narrow it down to John Greens who are bootmakers in Melbourne, there appears to be at least two of those as well! Untangling the various sources took time and patience. What I have been able to ascertain is that the bootmaker John Green of Vere Street was born in Yorkshire in 1835. He had arrived in Melbourne by 1866, where he married Julia Elizabeth Porritt in Collingwood in August that year. They had at least nine children, although sadly three or four of them had died in childhood, including twin girls who died of separate illnesses before they were two, and before these photos were taken in 1880.
John and Julia Green still had a large family, including several older children, by the time these photos were taken. In the first photo, the two girls in what look like maid’s aprons are too old to be children of the Green family, and are possibly therefore employees: if the Greens were doing well enough to be able to afford to employ non-family members, they may well have wanted this recorded on their family portrait day. Another possibility is that these young women are possibly Mrs Green’s younger sisters, employed in some capacity in the family business. The other two figures in this photograph are presumably Mrs Julia Green, and therefore probably Edmund George Green, born in 1876 (the other boys being either too old, or deceased by 1880).
Image © Collingwood Library
The supposed Mrs Green appears again in the second photograph, making the older, bearded man presumably the bootmaker himself, Mr Green. The other figures are then relatively easy to ascertain by age: the eldest girl, Frances Mary Annie, was 13 in 1880, and the eldest boy John Preston was 12, making it most likely that they are the two quiet, solemn and important-looking figures in the centre of the photograph – perhaps mum and dad had overstressed the solemnity and expense of family portrait day! John Preston in particular is striking a pose designed to impress. The younger figure could either be Julia, aged 10, or Arthur, aged 7. It seems odd that one child would be missing from the photographs, but I cannot find any reference as to why that would be the case. The hat suggests a boy, but the height suggests someone older than seven.
Tracing my John Green has proved almost impossible: for example, there are two John Greens in Collingwood – a French polisher and a bootmaker – as well as at least two, possibly three John Green bootmakers in the Melbourne metropolitan area. This makes it virtually impossible to sift through references by either profession or residence. For example, in Feb 1871 in East Collingwood court, a 35-year-old shoemaker named John Green was fined 20s, and 40s in damages, for “wilfully breaking a pair of scales in the shop of Mr J Pollock, butcher.” The locale, age and profession given for the defendant make me believe that this is almost certainly the John I’m looking for, but I can’t offer solid proof.
A John Green, also a shoemaker, was charged with drunk and disorderly, and damaging an officer’s uniform in Hawthorn in 1873. Another reference to John Green, a shoemaker in Hawthorn, describes another altercation with a butcher, this one named Baker, in Jan 1874, in which Green allegedly demanded payment for a pair of boots: he entered Mr Baker’s shop, became abusive, and challenged him to a fight. At this hearing it was noted that “the defendant…has been several times convicted of similar offences.” But, how many of these are MY John Green?
Hawthorn and Collingwood are quite far apart in terms of there being two John Green’s in the same trade, who both seem to like a bit of a drink, and had a tendency towards violence when their demands were not met. Another clue may lie in the case of a “neglected child”, a “small boy” named John Green, brought before the magistrate’s bench in Hawthorn in November 1872. His father was called to explain as to why his young lad had been caught hanging about with undesirables. Mr Green explained that he had lately removed from Collingwood to Hawthorn in order to get his son away from a gang of Collingwood roughs with whom he had been associating. Perhaps it is our Green family after all? Dad begged the magistrate for another chance to rehabilitate his boy, as this was not junior’s first run in with the law. Perhaps this also explains the thoroughly unimpressed visage of John jnr in the 1880 family portrait. Could John jnr really been hanging with street toughs at the age of four or five? Perhaps, if dad and possibly mum really were drinkers and brawlers, an unsupervised young lad from Victorian working class Melbourne may have been tempted to play at ‘Artful Dodger’ in order to pass the time.
A young John Green of Hawthorn was also charged in July 1872 with jostling passers-by and falsely selling newspapers as part of a group of young louts, so I’m doubting at this point that it’s the same family. Even the most precocious five-year-old would be unlikely to be considered physically intimidating by your average pedestrian, and probably not sophisticated enough to be working a paper scam as well. But 1870s Melbourne was rough, so who knows? There’s certainly too much here for me to unpack in one post.
Yet another bootmaker called John Green, this time apparently from Prahran, was involved in a strange case involving the suicide of a woman in the Yarra river in 1884. Initially this John Green had rescued the woman as he saw her slipping under the water by wading in and pulling her up by the hair. She apparently explained that she had slipped, but did not thank him for the rescue. As it turned out, the young woman was determined to return to the water, and completed her sad mission as soon as Mr Green left the scene.
As you can see, the untangling of John Greens, even those who were shoemakers by trade, is well-nigh impossible, so in the end I have returned to the scant facts I have been able to glean regarding the Green family of Vere Street. His wife Julia was born in Kent, and emigrated to Australia as a child, where her family settled in Collingwood. She married John and raised all of their children there, seemingly for at least ten years in the little cottage on Vere Street, and she died in 1921 in East Brunswick, having never moved far from what had become her home. John had died the previous year at the age of 85 in Preston, so perhaps Julia Green had moved in with a family member back in the old neighbourhood before she too passed away. Their eldest daughter Fanny had died in 1887, and was interred in Melbourne General cemetery on the 20th December. Her funeral left from 156 Vere Street. John jnr and Julia jnr both married, raised large families and lived long lives, John jnr ending his days in rural Victoria, while Julia remained in Melbourne. The two younger boys, Arthur and Edmund, also married, but had much smaller families. One more child, William, was born at the Vere St cottage after these photos were taken (in 1881), but I have to further information on him to date.
In this case, while I was not able to satisfy my curiosity too much with regards to the family in the photograph, I was however able to solve a little mystery held in the photo archives of the City of Yarra. While further research needs to be done in order to confirm my conclusions here, I’m sure a lot more could be brought to light about the family’s time in this house if I had the time to delve further into the records.
