Victoria street, Erskineville
Image © City of Sydney Archives, Sydney Reference Collection, 085802.
Today I’ve come across a pair of images from one of my old neighbourhoods, a quiet tree lined street just around the corner from my old home. One of the photos is clearly labelled “17 and 19 Victoria street, Erskineville,” and the second simply “Victoria street.” Looking closely at both (and armed with some good knowledge of local details), it was possible to confirm the second image of the four girls out the front of a small home, are indeed standing in the front garden of number 19.
Although this pair of images form a part of a resumption photograph series, now in the City of Sydney Archives, thankfully Victoria street was never resumed, and today is now one of the most beautiful streets in the area. Now lined with shady paperbarks and lush green plantings, the images from 1937 tell a story of a completely different neighbourhood. The roads look bare and hot, the houses run down, and the people who lived in Erskineville were, for the most part, the working poor. Many were associated with the railways. The life of the inhabitant of number 19 in 1937, a Henry Charles Winston Miles, was no different to most in that area. He worked as a fettler on the local railway lines. It was a dirty and dangerous job, maintaining the rails on busy sections of track with virtually no safety procedures, and many fettlers met nasty ends under a train.
Image © City of Sydney Archives, Resumed properties: Erskineville, d1_28061
Henry Charles was born in Waterloo in 1884 to Henry Snr and his wife Lucy. His family life was fairly tragic: two of his brothers died in their first year, and the family moved around New South Wales frequently, presumably following work. Henry returned to the inner city and married Lillian Gray in 1905, but tragedy would continue to follow him in his own young family as well. His first son Henry Samuel Charles, known somewhat curiously as Jack, was born shortly after they wed, but the following three children, Charles, Samuel and Ernest, would all die in their early years, leaving Jack an only child.
There must have been trouble at home, too: in 1917 Jack, aged 12 years 4 months, was sentenced to a period in Mittagong Home for Boys, a juvenile penitentiary for wayward youth. I don’t know what Jack did to merit this, and boys could be sent to Mittagong for anything from minor theft, to truancy, and “waywardness”, so it was perhaps more a symptom of his environment than anything else that he would go down this path. Whatever the reason, Jack seems to have learned his lesson: no further brushes with the law are recorded, and in 1924 he marries Eileen Kellion in Redfern, and settles down to start his own family.
Henry Charles and Lily are still living at number 19 in 1937, where our story opens, but are by now too old to be parents to the two young girls in the photograph. Jack and Eileen, on the other hand, have three girls: Phyllis (b.1924), Frances (b.1929) and one other who is still living, according to a family tree published by a family member on ancestry.com.au. So perhaps this is a photograph of the granddaughters come to visit? The two girls inside the gate certainly seem to belong on the property, so I’m pretty confident that Frances, being eight years old at the time, is one of them. Furthermore, in the long shot of Victoria street you can see one of the little girls riding a bike, while a man in suit and hat stands in the front garden, speaking to the neighbours in number 17.
As the family in this photograph seem to have an online presence, I’ll be getting in touch to see if I can get a confirmation of identity. If the youngest sibling is indeed still living, perhaps I can even bring her some joy by revealing to her a previously unknown pictorial record of her childhood. This is really what research like this is all about, after all.
No matter how this story turns out, it’s nice to see resumption photographs that, in the event, turned out to be of an area which was not resumed, and wonderful to see a candid moment in the life of a typical Erskineville family preserved by one of the government photographers.
