The Quest for the Greenhams in Ipswich - Chasing Our Past At Home (Transcription)

Melanie: Good evening and welcome to tonight's Chasing Our Past at Home.  My name is Melanie Rush and I'm the digital archivist and historian with Ipswich Libraries Picture Ipswich collection. Joining me tonight as moderator is Deannah Vieth, Team Leader with the library's Public Programming team. Thank you very much for joining us tonight for Chasing Our Past at Home. We would like to commence this evening by acknowledging the traditional custodians on whose land we gather today and pay respect to elders past, present and emerging. We are glad that you've been able to join us tonight from the comfort of your own home. We ask that everyone keep their microphones on mute and your videos turned off. If you have a question you can write it in the chat section. You'll find the chat button at the bottom of your screen. If your questions are not responded to during the presentation, we will ensure that they are by the end of tonight's talk. Now as always we can see attendees log in but we realise that there may be more than one person sitting in front of your computer. So if you could please indicate in the chat how many people are watching tonight from your home. We will be recording tonight's session for inclusion in the Picture Ipswich collection as a resource. Typed questions or chat will not be part of the recording.

Tonight we are joined by Margaret Henty. Margaret has worked as a librarian at the Australian National University and as an educator and policy advisor with the Australian National Data Service in Canberra. Some years ago she was given a handwritten journal of her grandfather, John Greenham and this started her quest to discover the Greenhams of Ipswich. Margaret is joining us tonight from her Canberra home and we warmly welcome her to our virtual Ipswich community for tonight's Chasing Our Past at Home. I will now hand you over to Margaret.

Margaret: How are you tonight?

I'm good and it's all over to you now.

All over to me. Well, thank you all you lovely people who've come to listen to this or watch this webinar tonight. I can't see any of you but you can see me but I'm here to talk about the Greenham family in Ipswich but I'm not a resident of Ipswich, in fact I've only visited Ipswich briefly. So I thought perhaps I should start by saying something about myself and what led me to do this.

I was born into the Greenham family. My father was Charles Greenham and he was born in Brisbane in 1910. He moved to Canberra in the early 1930s to work for what is now CSIRO and he lived here for the rest of his life. My older brother Peter and I were born here and have spent most of our lives here.  Charles was the son of John Ernest Greenham and Harriet Greenham who married in 1902 in Brisbane. Both died well before I was born so I didn't know anything much about them or their stories. Which brings me to how my investigation of the Greenham family began. I'd never shown any particular interest in the family history until a couple of years ago but once my interest was sparked I became engrossed as many do including this chap.

A couple of years ago my sister-in-law suggested that I might be interested to read the travel journal written by my grandfather, Ernest Greenham, which he had found among a clutter of family records at the bottom of the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. I knew very little about this man, my father's father, who had died when my father was only seven. What I did know can be quickly summarised. John Ernest Greenham was born in Ipswich in 1871 and he worked in a bank. He attended Ipswich Grammar School and on my bookshelves are several handsomely bound books prizes he won in the 1880s. Ernest was married - he was known as Ernest by the way rather than John because his father was John, his grandfather was John and they go way, way back. Ernest was married to my grandmother, Harriet Parker and they had three children, Claire, Arnold and Charles, my father. In 1917, Ernest died of pernicious anemia, a disease for which there was then no known treatment. After this some unexplained rift had developed in the family so that my father's family had little contact with their Greenham relatives from that time on. Ernest's background was a mystery to them, although my father hinted that his father's family had money or at least substantially more money than did his widowed mother who struggled to make ends meet. My father did speak about his aunt Eleanor, his father's sister, who'd been a doctor, the first Australian-born woman to be registered as a doctor in Queensland. She had paid for the education of three children in Brisbane after their father's death. She was known within the family as Ella and I will use that name from now on to distinguish her from her mother, another Eleanor, and for those who might be watching this webinar in the hope of learning more about Ella, I'm sorry but you're going to be disappointed. I never met her and my father said little about her, although he clearly remembered her with affection and respect.

The journal which my sister-in-law gave me starts with Ernest's account of being in London and then follows him through Britain, France, Switzerland and Italy, ending almost in mid-sentence when in Naples. Thinking the journal might be of some historical value, I wrote to my cousins, Ros in Victoria and Margot in England to ask their opinion about what we should do with it. Back came a reply from Margot revealing that she had a second handwritten journal covering Ernest's departure from Naples, travel in Egypt and through the Holy Land back to Australia. Some months later I unexpectedly found a reference to John Ernest Greenham in the library catalogue of the University of Queensland. This turned out to be a third journal covering his trip from Ipswich to Tilbury. The Fryer Library kindly provided me with a copy. All the journals have now been transcribed into electronic form and a printed copy can be found in the Ipswich Library. When I get around to it the two journals currently in my possession will join the third in the Fryer Library.

This is a sample of Ernest's beautiful handwriting and gives you some idea of the things he wrote about and he says here, "I passed heaps of cotton mills and woollen mills and often thought of the picture of the Lancashire lass as I saw the mill girls with their shawls over their heads. The wooden clogs that I saw around Manchester amused me very much - they make so much row -  tramp tramp tramp, one can hear them ever so far off. The journals aren't really relevant to the story of the Greenhams and Ipswich so I won't talk anymore about them. Their importance is that they sent me on this journey of discovery. Ernest would never have imagined that one day his journals would be put together in this way. Neither would he have imagined that his life would have been so little known to his grandchildren that finding the journals would have led to so much inquiry into his personal history and that of his forebears. I've done this using official sources such as immigration records, birth certificates, newspapers, books, journals about the history of Ipswich and Queensland, Ancestry.com and anything else I could muster. The name Greenham in association with Ipswich crops up frequently from the 1850s in the National Library's Trove service and a visit to Ipswich helped provide me with some context but no relations. So this is the family that I knew about when I started, just three generations including my own, and this - you probably can't read that and it doesn't matter - what it tells me though is that Ernest came from an extended family of Greenhams which could trace their ancestry back hundreds of years. Ernest's grandfather, and I'll call him John Senior to distinguish him from his son, came from the village of Norton Southampton in Somerset in 1855, accompanied by his wife Maria and his son John Junior. They'd all been born in that village as had generations of forebears. The church of Saint Mary the Virgin contains family records mentioning the Greenhams back to about 1540.

This is another photo of Norton Southampton. I've used these two photos deliberately. They were published in 1895 which was the year that Ernest went back to Somerset to visit his family, to meet his family for the first time. John Senior and Maria were both [inaudible] when they emigrated. This was comparatively old so they would have been thinking about the future prospects of their 14 year old son apart from their desire to better their own situation. Two days after this ship arrived in Moreton Bay in early December 1855 an advertisement appeared in the local paper listing the trades of the assisted immigrants and stating that they will be available for hire the following week. This is how John Senior would have obtained employment but I have no idea who it was with. From Moreton Bay the three would have made their way to Ipswich, probably traveling up the river as the roads were almost non-existent. In 1855, the Greenhams were just three or 14 567 new assisted immigrants arriving in New South Wales. John Senior fitted into the largest occupational group, that of agricultural labourer. By the time of their arrival, Ipswich was an important headquarters for settlers of the Darling Downs and more distant stations. You're probably familiar with this painting which dates from about this period and the original was in the Ipswich Art Gallery. I wonder what the Greenhams' first impression of their new home might have been. The town was set out in a grid with long wide streets stretching across the lower part of a hill, hills all around and the Bremer River at the base of the valley. The population is small, not yet having reached 3000 which it did five years later. Ipswich may have been small in 1855 but it was bustling. There were over 35 shops and other services on offer - general stores, drapers, saddlers, livery stables, ironmongers, tobacconists, bakeries, butchers, several wines, spirits and ale merchants, a bookstore, a stationer, a chemist, a watch and clock manufacturing and a piano tuner by the name of Mr Diggles. There was a Mr Hazelton offering to capture your family for posterity with portraits in a superior style using his daguerreotype apparatus. There were two banks, a Mutual Benefit Investment and Building Society, a School of Arts, a choral society, a racecourse and jockey club which would not have appealed to my upright family, and the bible society which probably would. There was a sawmill, a tinsmith, a cabinet maker and a barber who also made and sold stock whips. Both the Anglican and Congregational churches had erected buildings and a Presbyterian minister had been appointed. There was a small Wesleyan chapel and Roman Catholic services were held regularly. The Greenhams soon realised their dreams of becoming property owners. Four years after their arrival, John Senior was listed on the electoral roll of the district of West Moreton as a freeholder in the parish of Ipswich which tells us that he paid off the debt incurred from the family's fares to Australia and he'd become a freeholder in an extraordinary short time. In 1862, three years later, John Greenham Junior, at the age of 21, started to purchase land and both father and son continued to acquire property for many years. John Senior became a farmer on land to the south east of Ipswich near the old racecourse and electoral roles indicate that he remained there for the best part of 50 years. He grew cotton, although it was not especially profitable except during the years of the American Civil War. He may also have grown tobacco, wheat and maize and he may have even dabbled in sugar growing. Maria remains invisible. How she occupied her time once in Australia we can only guess but as a farmer's wife she would have had her hands full with tending both house and kitchen garden, grappling with an open wood-fired stove, breeding poultry for eggs and meat, perhaps keeping a cow and pig or two, preserving and bottling, sewing clothes by hand and attending church. Her house would have been very different from the stone and thatch she knew in Somerset, being probably wattle and daub, with dirt floors and no way to keep out the mosquitoes and other pests. They never became rich but they were able to make an adequate living on their land until retirement many years later.

Greenham family were all baptised in the Church of England but at some point they joined the Wesleyan Chapel in Ipswich and they remained active members. Here they found a congenial and supportive community in which coincidentally many of the major leaders of the town were gathered providing a business network which he was able to take advantage of as his career developed. I had no idea that they were Methodists which was yet another surprise when I investigated the family.

The family had chosen a good time to come to Australia and particularly to Ipswich. The population was growing rapidly, facilities in the town were expanding. John Senior chose to pursue a life in agriculture but John Junior looked elsewhere.

John Junior went to work for Benjamin Cribb and started a drapery store in Ipswich in 1849. He worked there for about eight years after which he went into partnership with Benjamin Davison and John McFarlane, fellow Wesleyans. The three ran the drapery business known as Davison and Co which became Greenham and McFarlane when Davison left the business in 1867, and this is one of their advertisements from the paper - I couldn't make it any bigger otherwise you wouldn't be able to read it. They sold pretty much everything associated with fabric. This included men's, women's and children's clothing, needles, threads, ribbons, buttons, hats, rosary, boots, mosquito nets, holland blinds, sheets, towels, blankets and more. Initially the business was located in their own premises in Argyll House in Brisbane Street opposite St Paul's church, right in the centre of town. This is also given as John Junior's residential address in the 1869 and 1870 to 71 electoral rolls, so it's likely he lived above the shop. In 1873 the business moved to larger purpose-built premises on the corner of Brisbane and Nicholas Streets and branched into groceries as well as drapery. Reading about the business in the newspapers, we learned that Greenham and McFarlane also acted as agents for tickets for picnics, excursions, concerts, tea meetings for those such as the Greenhams committed to Temperance and other events held by the church. But John Junior had other things on his mind than being a draper. He became active in public life early on in his career and this can be seen as part of his religion which encouraged him to work towards the greater good. His signature can be found on many of the petitions to the Mayor of Ipswich seeking public meetings on such matters as 'adopting such measures as may be deemed necessary for the preservation of the uninterrupted navigation of the river from Brisbane to Ipswich'. He nominated and supported candidates for the electorate of South Moreton for election to Parliament. He contributed to local causes through what was known as the subscription. The Queensland Government required the local community to subscribe a certain amount before it would make any contribution. When the need for a new Mechanic School of Art was recognised in 1861, he contributed 10 shillings. This is the building which now contains the Art Gallery. Methodism became the cornerstone of John's life. In 1866 he was one of a group of seven preachers who led craft class meetings as well as preaching at open-air meetings designed to attract newcomers into the congregation. He enjoyed choral singing, he became an active member of the [inaudible] Ipswich Total Abstinence Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society which supported missionary activity both locally and throughout the Pacific. After 1864 he travelled to Sydney at least once a year. During one of these trips it's possible that he met the woman who was to become his wife. Eleanor Johnston came from Ireland where she had been born in 1843 in county Armagh into a large Methodist family. Why and when Eleanor came to Australia is open to speculation as I could find no record of her arrival. It's likely that Eleanor met John through the church although perhaps she made her own way to Ipswich and met him through the drapery as she was a milliner by trade. Maybe they flirted over the buttons and rolls. Like most women in 19th century Australia, she remains a shadowy figure. She donated seven shillings and sixpence to the Ipswich British and Foreign Bible Society, she won prizes at the West Moreton agricultural show, she advertised to domestic help, she was active, very active, in the church collecting funds, proselytizing and cooking for afternoon teas and suppers. She was active in the Temperance movement. The photo here shows Eleanor probably in her late 30s or early 40s. She was a good-looking woman whose face reflects determination. Their first child was John Ernest born in 1871 and generally known as Ernest. Two years later came Eleanor Constance known as Eleanor and three other sons arrived at roughly three year intervals after that, Henry Johnston, Herbert Francis known in the family as Burt, and Cecil Evelyn known as Lyn or Len.

John Junior and Eleanor started their married life living in Newtown so they may have lived with or close to John Senior and Maria. Five years later they were living in Limestone Street right in the centre of town and convenient to the drapery business, schools, shops and most importantly the Wesleyan church. The house is called Wisteria but without a street number it's not possible to identify it further. This picture shows a typical house of the period and these can still be seen in Limestone Street.

I think this is a photo of the house but I cannot be certain. The photo would seem to date from about 1892 and there's nothing known about it other than the unidentified handwriting on the bottom, 'This is Eleanor', referring to the young Eleanor, not her mother. A closer look suggests that the others in the picture are Ella's grandfather, John Senior and her two youngest brothers, Burt and Len. I guess that the penny farthing tricycle belonged to Ella which she used to take her to school. It's a woman's penny farthing designed with a seat to enable her to ride it in her long dress and on the ground you can also see the dog, a little sausage dog on the lawn [inaudible].

While Eleanor was involved with child rearing along with her other activities, John Junior was getting on with making his way in the town as was his business partner, John McFarlane. Ipswich was developing rapidly and a review of its progress published in 1888 reported proudly, 'We have a splendidly finished railway station, a flourishing gas factory, promising waterworks, six banks, various lines of omnibuses, a double line of railway between Ipswich and the metropolis, several new and handsome hotels, notably the Royal and the Imperial, a number of new and expensive shops, chief amongst which was [inaudible] Cribb and Foote's, to say nothing of Greenhams,  O'Sullivan's and Taken's buildings, beautiful primary private residences on every hand, wonderfully improved streets with concrete water tables and what else he cannot call to mind,  oh a projected Girl's Grammar School and so on. The name of the business changed to Greenham and Company when John McFarlane left and was replaced by Thomas Bennett.

In January 1877, John Junior was named as a Justice of the Peace. This involved administrative duties such as witnessing statutory declarations and judicial duties such as issuing warrants. One of his judicial responsibilities was acting as an honorary magistrate sitting on the bench with the full-time police magistrate when required. The court was conducted in the Hanson Courthouse erected in 1857 in the style of the Victorian Romanesque. John Junior was elected to the local municipal council for a three-year term in 1877 and re-elected in 1880. He was also on the committee of the West Moreton Agricultural and Horticultural Society and a trustee for the cemetery. He served on the board of directors of the Ipswich Woollen Manufacturing Company during its establishment phase, resigning in 1883 in frustration about what he saw as poor management. The company was actually set up by his partner, John McFarlane.


And here's a photo of the man himself. One of the duties of the honorary magistrate was to serve on what was called the Revisions Bench which was responsible for overseeing the electoral role, adding new names as people became eligible and deleting them on death or departure. On the 3rd of November 1881 there was an enraged letter to The Queensland Times about a hearing of the bench the previous Tuesday when 35 people were refused registration for the forthcoming election. A battle of words began as to the merits of the case. It seems that some of the applicants were underage and some were workman living in tents while engaged in the temporary work of building the railway so they didn't appear in the rates books. Tempers were raised in correspondence and editorials in the newspaper raged back and forth.

The matter was referred to the Queensland Attorney General and the result was removal of the commissions from the six Ipswich magistrates that sat on the Revisions Bench, John Junior being one of them. Later that month he attended his last meeting in the municipal council having resigned shortly before. Why he resigned I don't know. This was however not the last of the matter. All six disgraced Justices of the Peace were recommissioned later that year. John Junior resumed his role as honorary magistrate and continued to serve until his retirement many years later. He never again sought a place on municipal council. Just a couple of weeks after his recommissioning as a JP, a fire broke out in the store one night completely gutting the building. By the time it was extinguished the roof had collapsed and there was no possibility of resuming business there. Business however opened again within two weeks with a great salvage sale in temporary premises. Some months later in 1884, the business partnership was dissolved by mutual consent. Thomas Bennett took over the business and John Junior let it be known that he would be retiring for a while. This he did, sailing to England following April on board the Orient and not returning until the end of November over six months away. Eleanor and the five children stayed home.

John Junior used the insurance [inaudible] from the fire to build a replacement for his burnt out property and Thomas Bennett moved back in. The new building was on the intersection of Brisbane and Nicholas streets. Following his refreshing trip to Europe, John Junior decided to extend the building which became the 'handsome pile' as reported in the paper known as Greenham Chambers, large enough to accommodate professional suites and more shops and occupying a full block. The extension cost two thousand one hundred pounds, a huge sum at the time and this is it more or less as it is today. I think this photo's a bit old. It's now known as Nolan's Corner. The new building supplied him with a good income from that time as he turned his sights to managing his other investments in land and local businesses, while continuing to play his part in public life. He was listed on the electoral role as being of independent means but still living in Limestone Street. He made space for new activities in his busy life,  the most notable of these were working towards the establishment of the Deebing Creek Aboriginal Station. The major issues identified by those setting up the settlement were alcohol and the need to provide relief and education. It's interesting to note that while he was concerned about the situation of the aborigines, he never recognised that his own fortunes had been built on their disposition at such other times.


He continued to invest in local businesses which had the potential to bring significant employment and generate income for the town. One of these was the Phoenix Engineering and Rolling Stock Company Limited that had registered under the companies act of 1888. As well as being a foundation shareholder he served as chairman of the board of board of directors for many years and at least one of his sons, Henry was employed there for a time. Ipswich was home to the biggest railway workshops in Australia so the proposed company fitted well with available skills and markets. He maintained his role on the board until 1902 when the company was in financial trouble and unable to pay for staff and materials. In 1901 his father, John Senior died. The obituary described him as always bright spirited and enthusiastic. Maria died three years later. They had retired from their land and were now living in Limestone Street near their son and his family. Ipswich was not the city to which they had come to nearly 50 years previously. Its population had nearly trebled to the point where it was declared a city in 1904. One property John Junior acquired in 1907 was made up of two land portions then operating as Orangefield, a large orchard in what is now the suburb of Eastern Hills not far from the land which had previously been farmed by his father. Some of it was subdivided later and a handsome house of the old Queensland style was built by John Junior and Eleanor at 57 Salisbury Road.

Number 55 next door was occupied for many years by his son, my great uncle Len and his wife Marjorie and their family. Eleanor died in 1928 at the age of 86 after a marriage a few days short of 50 years. John Junior lived on for another three years. A long and detailed obituary in The Queensland Times outlined his career and commented that many changes have been affected in the city during the late Mr Greenham's long and successful business career, and the name Greenham was associated with a good many of them. He'd made much of his popularity in the town and said he was well liked by his tenants. His funeral was well attended. But we might like to turn our attention now to the five children who can be seen in this photo with their parents. Ernest was born (Ernest [inaudible] on the back left) was born in 1871 to very different circumstances to those his father and grandfather had experienced as children back in Somerset. Like most families, the children were brought up with their parent's values and beliefs, Methodism, abstinence from alcohol and gambling, service to the community and hard work tempered with music, sport, family activities and a modicum of fun. We know little of their early years. All the boys attended East Ipswich  Primary school and Ella went to the Central Ipswich State School. In secondary school all the boys went on to Ipswich Grammar School. Ella was enrolled as the pupil number one at Ipswich Girls Grammar School after being at boarding school early in her secondary years, where she might have met up with my grandmother, Harriet Parker who later became her sister-in-law. All the children seemed to do well in both their formal schooling and in learning music but of the five children I know most about Ernest, my grandfather, a gambler, and I never had the opportunity to meet many of those children and other than his sister I was barely aware of their existence. This is the family again on the wedding day of Ernest and Harriet who's sitting down. His two brothers are sitting on the step and another brother at the rear. My paternal grandparents, my father's parents on the left and Ernest's parents on the right.

Ernest did well at school after which he joined the Royal Bank of Queensland where he worked the rest of his life. With a 10-month trip overseas when he was 24 and a move to the district office at the bank the following year, his great passion was playing the organ and he played for the Ellenborough Street Church as their official organist until his move to Brisbane, where he then played for the Kangaroo Point Methodist Church. He married in 1902 and had three children, dying at the age of 46 in 1917. It's interesting to note that he was married in an Anglican church and that his children were brought up as Anglicans. I'd be interested to know what his parents thought about that, but I shall never know.

By 1917, Ella was well established in her medical practice in Brisbane where she stayed for the rest of her life. Henry, the third child, emigrated to the United States where he was joined by his sweetheart, Lillias Winning from Ipswich. He took out American citizenship but didn't stay there, returning to Ipswich where he initially managed Orangefield the orchard for his father and then he moved to Brisbane with his wife and children. Herbert also immigrated to the United States where he studied engineering and became a citizen, but he never returned to Australia to live. The youngest brother, Len joined the Bank of New South Wales after leaving school and became an accountant. Like Ernest he took a break and travelled overseas, visiting the United States, England and Europe in 1908. He made his home in Ipswich where he married Marjorie Horsley and they had two children. He died prematurely in the 1920s. In 1911, more Greenhams arrived from Norton Southampton, George Greenham and his wife Edith. George was a stonemason according to his immigration papers and the grandson of John Senior's eldest brother, Samuel. George and Edith settled into Ipswich where they continued to live until their deaths in the 1950s. Little is known of their lives other than they had two children both of whom it would seem moved away. There are now no Greenhams living in Ipswich. Today there is a Greenham Street, close to John Junior's and Eleanor's house in Salisbury road and not far from the farm owned by John Senior and Maria. His family is not forgotten there and I think that brings me to the end of what I had to say. Have you got any questions Melanie?

Melanie: Thank you Margaret for that presentation. I actually first came across the Greenham name back in - I'll say it very quietly - 1993 so nobody can figure out how old I am, but it was my first week of Grammar School and I remember going into the library and there was a bronze bust in the library and we were all taken over and shown this bronze bust and of course it was Eleanor Greenham who had enrolled in the school 101 years before my year level started the school. So that was the first time I came across the Greenham family. The second time was a few years ago when I was researching Benjamin and Laura Taylor, the photographers who had their IXL studio in Greenham's Chambers, and of course the third time I came across the Greenham family was when the Rawlings family invited me to have a look in their basement at what was Greenham's Chambers and I found the papers there. So thank you very much for sort of filling in and expanding for me and everybody else watching tonight a little bit about this Greenham family who I've been hearing about a lot over many many years but just never never knew the full story. So firstly, I thank you for your presentation. If we have any questions for Margaret now's your chance. Please write them into the chat. We already have a thank you and that is from Hal Greenham so he is saying thank you for tonight's presentation and so that Helen Claudia.

Can you tell me, I know you weren't discussing them so much tonight but can you tell me a little bit about the contents of the journals because as I said to you earlier I'm jealous that you have family journals when my ancestors never left me anything like that so can you tell me about..

Margaret: As I said there are three journals but the middle one deals with England, Ireland, Scotland and Europe and that is fat. It's 267 pages as I recall and I've typed every one of them. The first journal takes them from Tilbury to London and the last one from Naples then back to Australia. They're very detailed, they're not particularly introspective, they're, you know, today I did this and I saw this and I met so and so. He met up - one of the really interesting parts of his of his journal is that he met up with so many people in England either that he had known in Ipswich or were related to people that he knew in Ipswich so, as he travelled around, particularly in Britain not anywhere else, but as he travelled around Britain he kept meeting these people and so I would have to look them up and find out who they were and this is part of the reason why I annotated the journals when I transcribed him so thoroughly. He'd been the best man at somebody's wedding for example, he refers to it in his journals. He talked - oh, he got a letter from the man that he'd been best man for talking about the Eisteddfod which had been held in Ipswich and the Congregationals had won the choir section, not good, and vicky to make quite a lot of comments about choirs. His great passion was music and everywhere he went he found an organ to play or to listen to. He went to concerts, he went to anything that involved music. I hadn't realized until I started fiddling with the journals that our lives are so backgrounded by music, you know, you get in the car, you turn on the radio, you have music. His life wasn't, that sort of thing just wasn't available then and he mentions all the opportunities, so many different opportunities to hear music to the point where he talks about the songs of the birds, the buskers, the groups of musicians playing here or somewhere else, but as I said his huge passion was the organ. He went around London going into every church he could playing the organ. He never said whether or not he got permission. I hope he did but he just loved it and it was utterly eye-opening. I mean if you can imagine this young man brought up in Ipswich, he had been to Sydney at least once that I know and he'd probably been to Brisbane but he'd never been to a concert, he'd never been to an art gallery. While he was in many ways very well educated, particularly in terms of history, ancient history and classics, he had reasonable German and his Latin was very good,  this was just all absolutely new to him, so it's extraordinary.

We've had a question come in from Tanya. She was just wondering where the journals were available. So, you've recently published...

I've transcribed them all. I have published, not published, I have printed a book which contains a transcription of all the journals. It also contains a much more detailed story than the one we gave tonight and you can find two copies in the Ipswich Public Library. There's also one in the State Library of Queensland. I sent one into Ipswich Grammar School and there's one in the National Library.

Yes I can confirm we have a copy in the Ipswich History Room and in the Rosewood History Room, so at the Ipswich Library and the Rosewood Library you'll be able to find copies and you can read them there. We've had a question from Jane who is part of the Ipswich Hospital Museum so her question is going to be on Eleanor. She just wanted to know a little bit more about where Eleanor studied.

Eleanor went to Central Ipswich Primary School as a primary school child. There wasn't any secondary education available for girls so her parents sent her as a boarder to Brisbane Girls Grammar School and which my grandmother, her future sister-in-law, was also attending at that time and they must have known each other. Eleanor when she left school won the prize in Queensland for botany and one of the things that my father had in his possession when I was much younger were a whole lot of botanical illustrations done by my grandmother, so I suspect they did know each other. I'm told that Ipswich Girls Grammar School was influenced or that its building was influenced very largely by parents of the Ipswich Boys Grammar School because they wanted similar sort of facilities available for their daughters, which you know in early 1880s it's really late 1870s is quite remarkable. When Eleanor then went to Ipswich Girls Grammar School she graduated. She did extremely well. She got a scholarship to the University of Sydney. She went off to the University of Sydney but  as I understand it there are other girls from Ipswich Girls Grammar School who went at that time which is really remarkable. She studied medicine. She graduated in 1901, registered to practice in Brisbane where, of course, being a woman they sent her to the maternity hospital... that's  the only thing we were interested in I suppose. Anyway she left that very shortly thereafter and set up her own practice. When I was about, I don't know, 15 or something, I had to go to an ear, nose and throat specialist here in Canberra and he said, "Oh are you related to the Eleanor Greenham by any chance?" and I said yes i was and "oh" he said - no-one told me that he had studied under her at some point in his medical career. He was being extremely forthright but he described her with such admiration so she must have been a bit of an unusual person at that stage.


I understand she was one of the first women or the first woman to have a car and a driver's license.

Yes, yes and there are wonderful photographs of her in her car and she participated in automobile gymkhanas, whatever they are.


We've got a couple more comments coming in. So the Ruby family thanking us for the presentation and Tanya is thanking you for sharing your research and your family history. We have a comment from Wendy saying that Ella was great friends of Estelle Cribb who went with her to Sydney to study maths and of course later became a teacher at Girl's Grammar, and we have a comment from Helen Puller, who is one of the archivists at Ipswich Girls Grammar School, saying that 'Eleanor studied at the University of Sydney and one of the significant photos in our archives is her graduation photo. Estelle Cribb was the other student who also went at that time and she attained a degree in mathematics.'

Can you tell us a little bit more about your actual research process. So you're given this incredible gift of handwritten journals. What did you do with them from there?

What did I do? Well, I got it and I read it through and my sister-in-law Claudia, who's also watching this, had also read them through and I thought this is too valuable to be let fall apart. I mean you can see from the photo that I used that it's not in a wonderful state, it's in a less wonderful state now I would say. I thought look I'm going to transcribe this so that my grandchildren and his descendants can get some benefit from it. So I did that and at the same time I was writing to my cousin in England and my cousin in Victoria saying what are we going to do about all this and so my cousin in England sent her journal out and Rosemond in Victoria started transcribing that one and as I was going through, I was annotating the journal as I went because there were so many references to people that I'd never heard of and I needed to find out more about it and it just seemed to me that I knew nothing about this family, or you know almost nothing and so I needed to start somewhere. I really started with general histories of Queensland. You look up Ipswich. I have access to the National Library here which has lots of stuff as you know. I went to the National Library and I spent quite a lot of time just simply reading histories of Ipswich, a lot of stuff from the Ipswich City Council actually which they have, and then I got into Trove. At the same time as I got into Trove, I got into Ancestry.com. Trove is just that. It is an absolute treasure trove, it is remarkable, and I don't know whether John Greenham was friendly with the editor, or quite what, of the Ipswich newspaper but, by golly, you know there are Greenhams everywhere. So the difficulty there was not finding enough it was finding too much and being able to narrow it down. As I was going through Trove I was correcting articles there. I corrected an enormous amount in Trove, mainly so anybody coming along later could find things.

Ancestry.com was hugely useful, especially for the more distant relatives. What else did I do? I came to Ipswich and paid a visit and I didn't know that Greenham's Corner still existed and I'm kicking myself now because the pandemic has, needless to say, got in the way of revisiting.  Actually, that was really, really good. The people at the Ellenborough Street Church were lovely. Somebody gave me a little organ concert which was nice. This was the organ he would have played on those years ago. Actually it wasn't, they didn't put the organ in it from the same church my grandfather had gone but he went back and played it.

All the stuff from Trove I downloaded, and I have files and files and files called things like Greenhams in Trove 1855 to 1860, Greenhams in Trove 1860 to 1870. They proved absolutely wonderful. I ended up with more material than I could ever possibly have used for anything I think, so I then had to do a timeline so I knew exactly what was going on when. That was helpful. The timeline put out by the Ipswich City Council was helpful too. I think that's probably about it. Collected over three years.

I did find that interesting. Even though I know the history of Ipswich in the early 1850s, it's still interesting to hear it again, that story, because my own family comes just a few years after the Greenhams arrived. So it's, you know, it's a fascinating time that sort of early history so it's good to be able to put your family history into that local history context when you're doing your research. Would you have any advice on anybody starting their family history research?
Be methodical. I am not particularly methodical and I really had to struggle because you just end up overwhelmed with stuff. Keep a record of everything that you do, keep a record of every resource that you used because you think 'Oh, I'll remember that' and three months later you don't. So, yeah, that's my advice, be methodical.

Okay, well I think that's pretty good advice so unless anybody else has any questions for Margaret. We're getting some more comments in, let me see if I can read them. So we have one from Bill Rawlings. He's saying that he looks forward to you returning to Ipswich to investigate the Greenham Company records that Colin Rawlings acquired in approximately 1968 [inaudible] his portion of the Greenham Chambers. Very exciting filing cabinet there, and from Michelle we have, 'Thanks Margaret, it was lovely to hear more of John's story' and Michelle is from the IGS archives.

Oh, can I just say a thank you to Michelle. She was wonderful and provided me in fact with one of the photos that I used tonight. She was very helpful, and the Ipswich public library as well, Melanie.

Anytime. That's what we're here for. If anybody needs any research help with Picture Ipswich, come and find us. We also have a thank you from Jane Kingston and Julie Rush, my mother, also thanks you, and Michelle is now saying, 'You're most welcome Margaret, we've loved following your story. So thank you everybody for your comments tonight and a very special thank you to Margaret. Oh hang on, we're getting some more in. Toni Risson, one of our local historians, saying, 'Congratulations Margaret on a great presentation' and thanking me as well. So thank you Toni. So thank you Margaret for tonight's presentation. I've really enjoyed it, I hope everybody else has enjoyed it as well. We would really appreciate attendees' feedback on tonight's events and Deannah will send out a short survey to you very soon after tonight's presentation. So if you could please complete it and return it to us. This is just so we can improve our program and also you can provide us with suggestions of future topics as well. Our next Chasing Our Past will be, at the moment, on Tuesday the 30th of March for a very special evening that will be celebrating the centenary of the Royal Australian Air Force. So the following day the RAAF is 100 years old so we're going to celebrate that the night before. Please continue to follow the Ipswich Libraries and Picture Ipswich Facebook and Instagram accounts and the Ipswich Libraries website for details on this event and when you will be able to register. A quick plug for the library. As many of you know the new Ipswich Central Library opened in Nicholas Street Precinct back in early December. We have a fantastic new training room in the library which is hosting interesting tech sessions, from Be Connected for over 50s to Tech Tips for Digital Help and tomorrow afternoon from 1.30 I think you'll find me in the training room so if you have any questions about how to navigate the Picture Ipswich website. Tomorrow we are also doing our first in a series of repeat screenings of some of our favorite Chasing Our Past at Home webinars. So that'll be in the training room tomorrow from 1.30 and you will also find me Wednesday mornings in the Ipswich History Room so I will be there to answer any of your Picture Ipswich questions and you can follow the Ipswich Libraries website for more information. So thank you everybody and thank you Margaret for joining us tonight and we wish you all a really good evening and hope to see you again on the 30th of March. Thank you.