Alfreda Maria Holm, our maternal grandmother: the first seventeen years

We remember little of our maternal grandmother as a person. She was rather a remote figure, tall, elegant, well dressed but she appeared to us to have little interest in her grandchildren as individuals.
We have been able, after carefully listening to the tapes, to piece together a portrait of a very interesting woman, deprived of the further education she craved because of gender and circumstance.



Alfreda’s maternal grandparents, David and Martha Bell, emigrated to Melbourne from Belfast. Her mother, also Martha, known as Matty, was their second last child. Alfreda’s father, Roger emigrated about the same time from Denmark. He was a baker and Matty ran his baker’s shop in St Kilda where they lived during Alfreda’s childhood.
Our previous, post published on 18/11/15, entitled “Great, Great Grandparents" is full of detail about Alfreda’s grandparents.


Alfreda's St Kilda 2 copy
The few photos we have of Alfreda as a young woman, come from an unlabelled, unannotated photo album we found among our mother, Alice’s photo collection. I remember her showing it to us, but unfortunately, the only part of that conversation I remember is the fact that the childishly scrawled number on each photos were written by Alice, indicating the number of people in each photo. This might have been the first time I had contemplated the fact that my mother had once been a child.

Freda closeup copy
Alfreda Maria, dark and vivacious yearned for an education. This bewildered her family, as further education for its own sake, beyond that required for employment, was not known on either side of the family.



1906 style
Alfreda would have worn an outfit similar to this to school

As Alfreda’s parents could not afford private school education the only secondary school available in Victoria for her to continue her education after Grade 8 was the Melbourne Continuation School. Luckily, the Continuation School was established in 1905, just in time for Alfreda.
It is to her credit that this determined, fifteen year old girl living in Edwardian Melbourne was able to pursue her dream of further education and find an opening for herself. Handicapped by her gender and lack of interest from her family, she was successful, and loved competing with the boys for top marks in Mathematics classes. She would also have had to do cookery classes: considered an essential element in a girl’s education.

Cooking
At Melbourne Continuation School

The opening of the co-educational and secular Melbourne Continuation School marked the beginning of state secondary education in Victoria.
The site chosen for the school was at the top of Spring Street, now occupied by the Royal College of Surgeons.

exhibition buildings with model school
The building in the centre of this photo is the Continuation School. On the skyline is the Royal Exhibition Building.

In 1905 the Continuation School offered a two year teacher preparation course to pupils aged 14 years and above. It also provided tuition, enabling students to sit for university entrance exams. Unfortunately this was not an option for Alfreda and so, after two years further education, she began her teaching career.
In 1914, long after Alfreda had left, the old Continuation School became so overcrowded that a solution needed to be found. Consequently Melbourne Boys High was established for the boys and for the girls: MacRobertson’s Girls High School. Both of Alfreda’s daughters, Alice and Marge, were to attend this school for their secondary education.

Melbourne contin school

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Great Great Grandparents

Alice and Marge in 1990, as they sat with their cassette recorder, told as much as they knew about their grandparents and great grandparents.
Like many Australian families, ours is a story of migration to a new country. All four of our maternal great great grandparents were European: English, German, Danish and Irish.
These four migration stories happened between the 1850s and 1870s. Three of the migrants were our great great grandparents, and one was a great grandparent.

short family tree



COATES, ARRIVED VICTORIA 1860s




Coates was an English engineer who travelled with his wife to Australia in the 1860s. Their first names are not known.
The Barwon River is the large river than flows through Geelong. In the new colony, there were no iron works: the worked iron had to be imported from England, along with the experts to do the work.

Barwon Bridge
Barwon Bridge then
Barwon River bridge today
Barwon Bridge now

We don’t know whether Mr and Mrs Coates planned to do this job and then return to England, but they would have found a thriving, wealthy colony. Gold had been discovered in central Victoria just ten years earlier.

DAU, ARRIVED VICTORIA 1860s



Dau was a German farmer who arrived in Australia in the 1860s. He married a fifteen year old girl, of whom we know very little. Wandong is 70 Kilometres north of Melbourne. In the years the Daus lived there, there was a thriving timber industry and some gold mining. By 1880 there was a railway line from Melbourne.

Wandong 1890s


1880 timber company near Wandong
Timber yard at Wandong, 1880

HOLM, ARRIVED ADELAIDE 1872



Roger Holm: this one is our great grandparent, a baker, who himself arrived in Australia from Denmark via England in 1872.
Roger had been born in a part of Denmark called Schleswig-Holstein, that had been disputed territory for centuries. At the time when he was a child, Germany did not yet exist. It was still a whole lot of little countries. When Roger was twelve, Otto Von Bismarck’s army invaded Schleswig-Holstein.

Map Schleswig-Holstein
Map of Schleswig-Holstein

Otto_Fürst_von_Bismarck
Otto Von Bismarck
S:H place in German history

Canvas, Bismark wresting S:H from the Danes
Painting: Bismarck Wresting Schleswig Holstein From The Danes

BELL, ARRIVED VICTORIA 1850s



David and Martha Bell was an Irish flax farmer, who arrived in Australia with his wife Martha (born Martha Elvidge) in the 1850s. Belfast was a prosperous modern city at that time.

Belfast history
Belfast about 1850


The area had become a specialist for farming and processing flax, which was woven into linen, used among other things for ships’ sails.

Flax farming Belfast
Flax Farmers

Processing Flax
Processing flax

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