Albert William Crick
Born: 28 February 1903, West Ham, London, UK
Died: 25 June 198X, Yarraville West, Victoria, Australia
Evelyn Frederickson
Born: 1 September 1916 or 1919
Died: 199X, Frankston, Victoria, Australia
Children
Lyndon Crick: born 19XX
Albert William Crick
I suspect my dad was a bit if a rascal as a lad, I remember him telling me that his father used to follow him to school to make sure he got there. In any case, he must not have attended often enough as his army service record tells us that he did not have his certificate to enter secondary school.
I suspect as a consequence of moving around the country a fair bit, my mum didn't have much in the way of education either. That may have been why they were both very keen for me to get the best education I could - I'm pretty sure I was the first person in our side of the family to get a university degree, and that was in no small part thanks to the encouragement and sacrifice of my parents.
In any case, my dad was out in the workforce pretty soon.
Details XXXXXX
Dad was conscripted into the army in 1942. He never said much about his service in WWII, just saying that he’d spent a bit of time in Queensland and had been shipped to the South Pacific just in time to see the Japanese surrender and to be shipped home again for demobilisation.
His army record fills in a few details: XXXXXXXX
While dad had a quick temper, he was generally a passive, quiet, sober man about 5’3” who’s most aggressive act was, when angry, to blurt out ‘Oh, confound it.' It is really hard to imagine him as a soldier at all. However, on his enlistment papers he noted that he had six years military service from 192X to 192X - as he was working at this time, I assume he was in the Citizen Military Forces, something like today's Army Reserve. There's a photo he left behind of a group of fresh faced young men in uniform in a camp. I thought it was from his WWII days, but then I turned it over one day and saw the inscription 'At camp 1923.' I wonder if his dad joined him up to instill some disipline? I just cannot see dad doing it of his own accord...
Dad, top right, 'at camp March 1923'
Cars were my dad’s passion and he owned a long line of somewhat eccentric cars over his lifetime. Not that he loved driving particularly, I think he really just loved tinkering with the car, whether it needed it or not. Our big outing on Sundays to my grandparents in Carrum inevitably ended up with dad under the bonnet there, at my grandfather’s in Carnegie on the way or both. In any case, a large part of his recreation time was put into the car.
The car I first remember was a Durante, it must have been ancient even in the fifties. I’m sure it was made in the thirties as it had running boards and a vulcanised canvas top with Perspex side windows. It had no indicators and dad had to make hand signals when stopping or turning. We must have been quite a sight tootalling along at dad’s usual slow speed being passed by the latest Ford Customline or Holden FJ.
I remember once coming home through Port Melbourne in the Durante and getting caught up in the cars coming into Melbourne from the famous around Australia Redex car trial. The spectators thought we were in the trial and cheered loudly until we managed to extricate ourselves from the parade. Mum laughed and laughed, but dad got quite grumpy, 'confounded fools,' he said, strong language for dad!
It was our practice to go to my maternal grandparent's place in Carrum every Sunday or second Sunday. Once we arrived, mum and dad would have a cup of tea and as mum settled in to chat the afternoon away, dad drank his tea as quickly as possible and headed to the car to adjust the carby or something else. Often we'd been to my paternal grandfather's place on the way through and dad and his brother Jack had already fiddled with the car (see here for the results of this).
Then there was the Sunday he turned up at our place in Frankston with a different car to the week before. Puzzled, I asked dad what had happened to the old car. 'Damn fool,' mum said as she passed me by. Turned out dad, in his tinkering, had disconnected the old car's oil warning light because it kept coming on. Needless to say, the car had subsequently run out of oil and the motor had siezed and burst into flames leaving them stranded on Melbourne's busy Westgate Bridge!
My dad passed in 1984, he died of a heart attack while I was in Sydney on business. I didn't find out until I got to Melbourne the next morning. When I came home to our house in Frankston, mum was just sitting there quietly. As I put my arms around her, she just said quietly, 'He's gone, Lyn, he's gone'. Broke me up then, still does now.
The Writing Box
My dad left this writing box, I don't know when and how he came by it, perhaps from his parents? It's full of the oddest, but most intriguing things. Income tax returns going back to the 1920s, papers about the purchase of our house in Yarraville West, receipts for the purchase in the 1920s of a motor bike and a crystal radio, army documents and so on. A little snapshot of a life.
Evelyn Crick
The date and circumstances of my mother's birth are, at present, something of a mystery.
My mum certainly believed that she was born in 1919, though one of my aunts told me years ago that it was really 1916. Her marriage certificate and my birth certificate both record her birth as 1919.
I'd assumed that she said 1919 on the marriage certificate to give the impression she was younger...dad had also given himself a little age makeover, giving his birth date as 19XX, making himself X years younger.
I knew that, in either case, my mother had been born before my grandparents were married on 1 October 1919. Their next child, Clifford, arrived on 15 July 1920, nine months later.
Then I got a hold of my grandfather's file regarding his naturalization. Leafing through it, I was interested to see letters in his own handwriting to the Commonwealth government applying to become an Australian citizen. Then, I came to his 1920 statutory declaration in support of his application. The last question was how many children do you have and who are they. His answer? 'One child, Clifford Ernest, aged four months'.
At first I was bewildered, where was my mother? Then the shock hit me, Eric Fredrickson may not be my grandfather. If mum was born 1 September 1919, it was possible for my grandmother to fall pregnant six odd weeks later. But then why would my grandfather say late in 1920 that he had only one child? He had no reason to lie to the authorities, quite the opposite, I would have thought.
Then again, if mum was born in 1916, he certainly couldn't have been her father as he didn't arrive in the country until 1917.
So, the man I thought of as my grandfather for all those years possibly wasn't. At this time, however, I'm still thinking he was, though the circumstances are clearly not clear! I guess the final solution waits me getting mum's birth certificate.
In any case, her birth must have caused some consternation in my grandmother's family, both sides being pretty strict Methodists. One can only imagine the scenes in the family home.
No matter what the circumstances were, my mother seems to have had a childhood of moving around. At some point, according to my mother, her father got work on the railway being built in Gippsland. She told of living in a tent out in the bush and walking miles in the bush barefooted. Once, she found a snake under her bed. It seems also that she used to sleepwalk as she said her father used to put a trough of water next to her bed to wake her up if she went to sleepwalk.
I don't know how mum and dad met. Dad was posted to Mt Martha during the early part of his stint with the army. Mt Martha is relatively close to Carrum, so it's possible they met during this period. On the other hand, dad, my grandfather and presumably my uncles owned land in Frankston around 19XX so perhaps they had some connection with the Frankston/Carrum area, maybe spending summer holidays there?
Dad certainly knew mum before he was posted elsewhere in Australia and then to the south Pacific as he wrote letters to mum from that period - sadly Mum destroyed them when Dad died. Mum was working as a nurse aide at that time (proof?).
They married in 1946 in the Methodist church in Carrum - it's still there, but no longer a church and much altered - and set up home at 704 Point Nepean Road, Carrum. A little while later, they bought a house in Yarraville West, a working class suburb in the west of Melbourne in 1947 and lived there until Dad died.
I was born within a few years of them marrying. I gather my birth was difficult and left Mum unable or unwilling to have more children - hence I remained an only child and consequently was very spoilt. Mum and I sepnt a lot of time together because, as was the custom of the time, she didn't have paid employment. She worked for a while helping a neighbour bottle and label distilled water, but that was the extent of it.
Driving lesson story
Growing Up at 15 Lorne Street
My mum and dad bought the house at 15 Lorne Street, Yarraville West in 194X. The house is in the working class western suburbs of Melbourne - a long way from where they were brought up in the Eastern and South-Eastern suburbs of Melbourne.
Unintentionally, this seemed to make a divide between us and the rest of our relatives, especially on mum's side. They all lived in close proximity to each other in the Carrum area and saw a lot of each other, each inedividual family being intertwined with the others. At best, we saw them once a week or fortnight and on special occasions like Christmas. We just didn't seem to be part of it, at least that's how I felt.
This modest six room house at Lorne Street was our family home until dad died in the 1980s when mum moved to Frankston to live with Tammy, Nathan and I. I lived at Lorne Street until Tammy and I married in the mid-1970s.
You couldn't say the house had a real style, it was more or less a shoebox shape with a fairly high pitched roof. In my childhood it was painted a light brown. In the fashion of the day, it had a name 'Ercildoune' announced by a wooden sign on the front of the house.
The front door opened off the verandah onto a hallway that led straight down past two bedrooms and a living room to the kitchen. Off the kitchen was the bathroom, and, oddly, where the fridge was located. Originally the kitchen door was the back door leading out to the back yard and the laundry, the laundry being on your immediate left. However, at some stage, dad had built an extra room on the back, so the kitchen led into this room.
The front room of the house was mum and dad's room.
Growing up there in the fifties was so different to now - people used to live outside a lot more. On hot nights people used to sit out on their verandahs, talking to the neighbours as they passed by or watch the children play in the street. I think this outdoorness dropped off a lot when television arrived in 1956, but there were a lot of people who would haul the tv out onto their verandahs to watch at night. On really hot nights, some people would even sleep out on their verandahs.
As our house was the last in a dead end street, many games of cricket were played in front of it. Right through my teenage years there would be a game every day after school, with kids coming from far and wide to play. The games were played with a tennis ball for the most part, but I remember a period where someone had got a hold of a composite cricket ball without the cover and we used that. I think we gave that up when I missed breaking a neighbours window by a few inches, leaving a black mark for years on the window frame.
Quite a few traders visited the street. In the morning the 'milko' would deliver milk in bottles early in the morning using a horse and cart. The dairy was at the top of the next street, and I remember going and playing on the carts - no-one stopped us.
While people still had iceboxes rather than fridges, a man used to deliver blocks of ice also using a horse and cart. I can remember a bunch of us kids would hound him in summer to chip us off a sliver of ice to suck on. There was also a man who came around in a van selling millenery and, I think, a market gardener, also with a horse and cart.
