Margaret Holmes
1148
Child - World War I
Volunteer - World War II
Protester - Vietnam

Tape 1

01:00:41:15

Q: Thank you very much Margaret for agreeing to do this interview with us today. My first question is if you can give us an overview of your life to date so where you were born right through to say Vietnam.

A: Well I was born in 1909.

01:01:00:00
Now apparently my parents were married in 1906 and my father was a doctor and he worked as an X-ray man, one of the very early X-ray people in Sydney and he was working at Sydney hospital and he and my mother were apparently trying to have a child without any success for several years.

01:01:30:00
And one man said to him, one another doctor said to him one day, 'I think maybe that X-ray is doing something to you,' and they didn't know then of course X-ray work can affect the reproductive system and so he said, 'well I'll give it up then'. And he gave it up and they moved from Macquarie Street, where they lived then to Wahroonga where his father and mother later came and lived too.

01:02:00:00
And they bought a house there and very soon afterwards I was born and so you see it may well have been if he had gone on being a radiologist I never would have been here at all. I was born in 1909 at Wahroonga and I was the eldest of five children that they had ultimately. But by the time that war,

01:02:30:00
the First World War broke out there were the only the first three of us: myself first and then another sister, Tinsey and then Peter my elder brother. Now Peter was only 6 months old,

01:03:00:00
he was born in April 1914 so when war broke out he was only a few months old. Now my father had been in what was called the Australian Army Medical Corps [AAMC], it was a kind of, I think they must have had some kind of voluntary militia or something in those days. There was no compulsory military thing at all but he for many years

01:03:30:00
really had been in the AAMC so when war broke out he volunteered. You know that all soldiers in the First World War were volunteers, there was no conscription, you know that don't you? So my father then volunteered and he was sent overseas with the 1st Australian General Hospital

01:04:00:00
in December 1914. Now they thought they were going to France actually. Do you want to me to say anything about the photos and things from that time? I've forgotten now you see what we said, the photo of my father saying goodbye to Peter for instance?

Q: Absolutely, if you've got any memories of him saying goodbye?

01:04:30:00

A: Oh yes, I've got memories of him up coming home and saying goodbye with his uniform, this terrific uniform, with a little, the hat with the side up, the way the Anzacs had. Yes, I've got this photo.

Q: Maybe just describe and then later on we can photograph it.

A: Well what I've got is this photo of Dad holding Peter, this little six months old baby up in his arms. I can just see him there in the garden outside our place


01:05:00:00
and then of course he went in the Kiara, the hospital ship of which I have a great many photos also of him loading up the ambulances getting loaded on and all that. And I also have a lot of letters from Dad written on that trip showing the kind of high jinx they went on with because of course that hospital ship had women, you see. They had women, the nurses,

01:05:30:00
the nursing staff were also on that ship so unlike other troop ships they had a lot of fun and games with the nurses and fancy dress dances and all that kind of thing, which just seemed so extraordinary on a troop ship, a hospital ship going to a war. Anyhow my mother decided that she should go to England

01:06:00:00
and take us three children, and our nurse girl and set up a nice little home for my father to come to because of course they thought that the hospital was going to France or to England to look after the wounded in the French campaign. This was long before Gallipoli, you see? We didn't know anything about Winston Churchill's bright idea of getting

01:06:30:00
at Germany through the tender under belly of Europe like he wanted to through Turkey. Of course Turkey we were at war with too. Anyhow my mother there upon set out in January 1915 on a ship called the Demosthenes. That was one of the

01:07:00:00
Aberdeen, yes the Aberdeen Line and she took with her on this ship us three kids, me 5, nearly 6, my sister just 4, just 3 rather and my little brother about 8 months old plus our nurse girl, a young woman called Amy plus

01:07:30:00
Mum's sister just for the trip, just to have a little trip and off we set in this boat the Demosthenes and we went via the Cape. Now Dad's boat the Kiara had gone through the Suez Canal and was to go to England through the Suez Canal but when Mum got to Cape Town there was word from Dad there that they were being stopped in Egypt.

01:08:00:00
Of course this was in preparation for Gallipoli. Nobody knew about Gallipoli then, this was December, January 1915 you see. Well it was all very hush-hush about Gallipoli. There was poor Mum not knowing if whether she went on, she couldn't go from South Africa up to Egypt that way. And she would have to go on to England

01:08:30:00
and try and get to Dad to Egypt, so she went on in the ship. Well of course by that time when we got up further up the coast we started to hear about U-boats. They were the submarines, you know about U-boats? These submarines the Germans had that were going around and starting to attack civilian boats

01:09:00:00
or boats bringing goods from America etcetera. Well by the time we got right up past Tenerife, that's an island out in the Atlantic, U-boats were really getting very bad and when we got right up into the Channel, because we were going to Portsmouth

01:09:30:00
we started having boat drill in case we were submarined, torpedoed. Now there was my poor mother with these 3 children but she had, there were a whole lot of civilians on it, of course there was nothing but civilians on this boat, lots and lots of married couples and men going to England and people just going to England for a trip really, going home as we used to say, for a trip. And my mother,

01:10:00:00
three men offered my mother that they each one would have one of us children if the boat was struck. That one would have me, one would have my sister Tinsey and one would have my brother Peter and she wasn't to be concerned about trying to get the children onto the boat. We used to have this life boat drill. The awful siren would go off, this terrible,

01:10:30:00
I can still hear this screeching siren, very high pitch, you know terrible siren, no, not high pitched, very low pitched I think, can't remember now. Anyway very ear piercing and as soon as you heard that you had to rush to your boat. You each had a specified boat. So I can remember this horrible feeling when this thing went off and I have this photo,


01:11:00:00
what are we doing about the photo now? I've forgotten. This photo of my brother, not me, held by Mr Seers. He must have been the one who was going to take Peter in the event of a catastrophe and Peter has got his face all screwed up like this and you can just imagine this terrible shrill whistle of course. And then the last night of all when we were on the boat we had to sleep in all our clothes

01:11:30:00
in case the boat went down. I can remember this nurse girl, Amy, I had little button up boots that I used to wear, I can still remember here buttoning up these boots with a little button hook and saying, 'I don't want to go to bed with boots on,' and she was saying, 'Well you have to', doing up the buttons very angrily and getting into the bunk

01:12:00:00
with all his clothes on. That is about all I can remember about that trip but then Mum took a flat in Leinster Square, that's one of the squares in England, she took this thing and then there came all these letters back and forth from Egypt to Mum, from Dad to Mum and Dad still didn't really know whether he was going to be staying in Egypt or not.

01:12:30:00
They really didn't know, they didn't know about Gallipoli yet. And they thought they were staying there for some reason but they didn't know what. And he still talked as thought he might be going to come to England but at last it seemed pretty evident that they were going to stay in Egypt and then Mum said, 'well I think we'd better come over to Egypt and join you there'. So she went to work to try and get us

01:13:00:00
to go across Europe by train. Her sister by the way had now separated off and gone elsewhere but she still had the nurse girl and the three children and she was proposing to go across France by train from Naples and catch a boat from there to Port Said. Well she saw all sorts of people at the War Office and

01:13:30:00
did her level best to get on some train to go across. But they said to her, 'Look you can't do that, the trains could easily be commandeered by the French Army. Your train could be commandeered and you and the three children and the nurse girl could all be dumped out in the French countryside with no other means of transport and there you would be, what would you do?'

01:14:00:00
So they finally decided her that she had better take a boat, so she booked on a boat called the Warwickshire which was a Bibby Liner and it was sailing from that port up north there, Liverpool, so she had to get us all from London to Liverpool and then she had to get us on this other boat. And off we went on this other boat through the

01:14:30:00
Strait of Gibraltar and I can't remember much about that trip really except when we got to Marseilles I remember there was some officer on the boat, an Australian soldier, I can't think of his name now, anyhow his wife was with us too,

01:15:00:00
that's right. Oatley I think their name was, anyway doesn't matter. He asked Mum if he could take me up a funicular railway in Marseilles. They had some kind of funicular railway that went up a hill or up a big building or something and you saw a wonderful view of the port and the harbour and everything, so he took me on my own, just with him

01:15:30:00
up this. I had never been on one of these, a sort of, you sat in a chair, chairlift I suppose you would call it, yes, chairlift I think or it might have been a funicular railway. Anyhow when we got to the top there was a lookout and souvenirs and everything and he brought me a little brooch. It was in the shape of a French soldier's hat

01:16:00:00
called a kepi I think, K E P I, and it was this sort of shape, the kind of shape the French soldiers wore, and this little brooch had written on it, 'sorne kepi', this cap. It was what a French girl might have had but he bought me one of these and I had it for years but I don't know what's happened to it now. And we could look down and there away down there in the bay on the Mediterranean we could see the ship, the Warwickshire


01:16:30:00
so that was a very vivid memory but I can't remember anything else about that boat. Oh I might have mentioned, I should have mentioned when we were off Fremantle, on the way over I apparently got sunstroke. I can remember being terribly sick on the boat. I had a temperature of 102 for several days apparently and

01:17:00:00
the doctor on board seemed to think that maybe I'd have to be hospitalised when they got to Fremantle. So there was poor Mum thinking what on earth was she going to do if I had to be in hospital in Fremantle and the other children, was she to go ashore with everybody and stay in Perth or what? But I managed to not to get quite get, I gradually got better so they thought I would be

01:17:30:00
all right to go on. But I just remember that terrible heat, the awful heat and I suppose I did have sunstroke and very sick indeed. Oh well now when in London Mum took, had us in a boarding house I think it was in Leinster Square, not Leister, but Leinster.

01:18:00:00
Now in one of her letters she talks about there being ninety one steps to go up and down from the children's bedroom to the dining room so that every time the children had to be taken to a meal they had to go up and down these. Don't forget my brother Peter was then only just nearly a year old. He wasn't a year old, he was only just crawling

01:18:30:00
so it must have been a pretty appalling time because it was winter too. It was we got there in February I suppose. We left in January and we must have got there in February and that's right, Peter had his first birthday in April there. And then there was all this back and forth with Mum and Dad in Egypt. Gallipoli hadn't happened yet.

01:19:00:00
This is about February you see by now. Should she come or shouldn't she come? Until finally he said, 'Well look we are going to have to stay here, there's no doubt about it, so I think maybe you had better come,' and that is when they did come.

Q: Can I ask you how your mum maintained correspondence with your dad during that time?

A: Well it's quite extraordinary really, I have ever so many

01:19:30:00
of these letters that she wrote to him. I haven't got letters that he wrote back. I don't know why, she probably couldn't keep them but he kept all her letters and they keep on talking about her going to the bank. He used to send the letters to the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney which was our bank and she used to go just about every day she would go there to see if there were any letters from him.

01:20:00:00
I suppose they came on boats. They didn't have aeroplanes you see. They must have come back and forth on boats like this boat we went to Egypt on. It all just seems so primitive doesn't it compared to what you can do now? But they wrote to one another frequently, very frequently. I have letters from Mum, great long, long, long letters all about all

01:20:30:00
the relatives she'd been to see and that kind of thing. And one of my father's great uncle's was a doctor in London and she talked about going to him and having help from him, Doctor McThaden. All our family were doctors on both sides really. Now wait a minute, what am I at now? Meeting up with Dad, now you see that is a thing I

01:21:00:00
can't remember at all, actually being reunited with him. He had made friends with an English doctor who had a general practice in Cairo, had had for years, a Dr Madden which I often thought was a funny name but it would have been funnier if

01:21:30:00
he had been a mental patients doctor but Dr Madden, think of maddening, it seemed so funny. Anyhow this Dr Madden had a wife and family but the wife was back in England because the children were at school in England so he had this flat in a building called St David's Building right in the very heart of Cairo.
01:22:00:00
And my father somehow had got to know him and my father asked him, 'Would he be willing to let the flat to my mother and the family?' And he agreed to do this and he went, I don't know what they paid him I'm sure, but my mother, they may not have had to pay very much because my mother acted as a kind of housekeeper

01:22:30:00
for him and saw to the servants. They had two Arab men who were house servants and she had to supervise them and in fact he told her to ensure that they were very clean in the kitchen and that kind of thing. And that was all very until one day she went out in the kitchen and found the cook with his mouth full of water squirting this water

01:23:00:00
onto lettuce leaves to keep them nice and fresh for the salad that he was going to serve up. You see that was his idea of hygiene was squirting this water onto the lettuce. Well you can imagine Mum's reaction to that, must have been pretty strong.

Q: Can I ask you, just sorry to interrupt, how long did you spend in England before you then went to Egypt?

01:23:30:00

A: Oh yes, right, well we got there in February and Gallipoli was in April, wasn't it? Now we were there well before Gallipoli, we were in Egypt well before Gallipoli, that's March. Yes, we must have been in England

01:24:00:00
five weeks I suppose.

Q: And with the correspondence that your mother and father were having, did they only send letters to each other?

A: Yes, they had no other means of communication.

Q: Did your mother send anything else?

A: Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, I should mention that. One letter she mentions the things she had sent him from Harrods, the big store in London.

01:24:30:00
All the vegetables and fruit she had sent him so that he could have fresh fruit and she was hoping that they would have carried all right on the boat. See the boat would have taken a week or so to get there like our boat did. I suppose it took that long, it must have gone by sea, couldn't have gone any other way, no air.

01:25:00:00
Sending fruit and vegetables to your husband and all sorts of other things she sent him, all kinds of things he asked her for like a tobacco cutter to cut up tobacco with and she went all round London looking for this kind of tobacco cutter and sent him that back. And all sorts of little odds and ends form new socks and goodness knows what was in her letters.

Q: I just have to ask you a question too,

01:25:30:00
how would you describe your mum? Like what kind of woman was she?

A: I think my mother must have been a most terrifically strong woman, really strong. She had had a very sad life really. Her father died when she was four. Her brother Fred was only two, he was her younger brother and she had a good many older,

01:26:00:00
several older brothers. The brother next to her, older than her, died of typhoid when he was about ten or Mum was about ten and then by the time she was about fifteen, or twelve I think, her mother had died. So by the time she was twelve she had lost her father and mother and one brother and then by that time she was about

01:26:30:00
fourteen her eldest brother, who had sort taken over from his father and was by now about twenty two and had been their kind of main stay, he was drowned. He was drowned at Harbord and they used to go surfing at Harbord, very early in the piece, long before surfing had taken on, but they did. And he ran down to the beach after lunch and dived into the water

01:27:00:00
and was drowned. We don't know whether he was taken by a shark or just drowned but he died, so she had lost all that number of family and then she and the young brother, Fred, those two were brought up then by her mother's mother, Mrs Stobow and they lived in

01:27:30:00
Millers Point, so my mother had a very, very traumatic childhood really. And I think this grandmother was a very firm and strict Scots woman with very rigid ideas about behaviour and

01:28:00:00
how you should conduct yourself and all that and I don't think she was terribly warm and loving.

Q: So how did your mother and father eventually meet?

A: Oh well, yes, my mother was at Sydney Girls' High, I don't know how she used to get from Millers Point to Sydney Girls' High which in those days

01:28:30:00
was right in the city. Did you know that? Do you know where David Jones is? Well David Jones is on the site of the old Sydney Girls' High where my mother went. It moved out to Moore Park about 1917 I think and my mother took me out to see the new school. But Mum went to Sydney Girls' High

01:29:00:00
where there were a tremendous lot of extremely gifted women like Ethel Turner and Amy Ellen and Matt Lou, probably never heard of these people but there were lots and lots of the early women writers and doctors, people who went on to become doctors. Now my mother wanted, well she was to go for what was called the

01:29:30:00
Senior, I think it is called the Higher School Certificate now. It was called the Senior in those days but the year she was to go for the Senior she got a thing called sandy blight which I think is some infection in your eyes. I can't think of the proper name of it but it was

01:30:00:00
called sandy blight. Now she was told, or her grandmother was told if she didn't remain in a darkened room for many, many, many, many months and never use her eyes to read or to look at anything, she had a hope of not going blind but if she didn't do that she was pretty certain to go blind. With the result of instead of going for the leaving,

01:30:30:00
for the Senior, my mother had to spend months and months of that year in this dark room doing nothing. I don't know what she did to amuse herself and that stopped her going to University which she would have done because she was quite bright. Anyhow she was still very keen about medical matters and after a while she

01:31:00:00
became a member of a thing that was called the Sydney Medical Mission. Now I've never been able to find out quite what that was but it was a group of doctors and nurses and chemists and what do you call them? People that give out medicine?

Q: Pharmacists.

01:31:30:00

A: Pharmacists, pharmacists, thank you, who worked in Macquarie Street. Do you know that Macquarie Street then used to run right through Hyde Park? It was called Macquarie Street South. It came up to where Hyde Park is but Hyde Park wasn't there then, the street went right on and it went right on out past the,

01:32:00:00
well of course Central wasn't, I think Central was there by then. You know what I mean? Well anyhow the Medical Mission was in that part of Macquarie Street and my mother used to go there and by that time she was living at Paddington with her older sister who had got married by now and Mum was living with her, not with her grandmother.

01:32:30:00
So she used to go this place called the Sydney Medical Mission and there were women doctors there and Mum used to give out medicines and weigh out pills and that kind of thing although though she was not trained as a pharmacist. I suppose it was fairly unskilled and Mum was quite intelligent enough to do it and

01:33:00:00
she used to work there as a volunteer.

Q: Margaret, I'm sorry to interrupt you, just be careful with the microphone as it's very delicate?

A: Oh sorry.

Q: Sorry, but it will pick up the sound of your hand.

A: Sorry, I forgot about that.

Q: That's okay.

A: Thank you, yes, well then were doctors who gave their time voluntarily there, among whom was this young doctor, W.H. Reed you see.

01:33:30:00
Well there were quite a few women doctors there. Dr Julie Thomas was one name I remember but Mum knew quite a few of these early women doctors and my mother by this time had decided that she really did want to so do medicine and she would go

01:34:00:00
to Edinburgh and do medicine at Edinburgh for some reason or other, I don't know why. And the story is that she had actually booked her passage to go to Edinburgh when all of a sudden this man, Dr W.H. Reed, proposed to her and she accepted him.

01:34:30:00
So they became engaged and she cancelled her passage to Scotland and instead of that they got engaged and then in 1906 they got married. And then they lived in Macquarie Street because my father, as I said, was working at Sydney Hospital and they lived at 219 Macquarie Street

01:35:00:00
as it was then. It was in a terrace house just across the road from the hospital. I've got photos of that house where they lived and Dad had a consulting room too. He used to see patients privately as well as free work of course at the hospital, they were voluntary workers at the hospital.

01:35:30:00
Well yes, I was trying to tell you about why Mum was such a strong powerful woman. I can't tell really.

Q: When did your mum and dad get married?

A: Oh they got married at Hunters Hill at the Anglican Church there, because my mother's sister, my Aunt Trixie my mother's older sister, who had come between the two brothers who

01:36:00:00
had died, Uncle Harry at the top of the line, then my mother's sister Trixie, Beatrice and then Robert and then Mum. Now Mum had left her grandmother's house and gone to live with Aunt Trixie in Glenmore Road, Paddington because my sister was by then married to a clergyman,

01:36:30:00
the Rev Edward Owen, and he was the Rector of whatever church it was in Paddington, I've forgotten the name. While my mother was there, my mother was very musical and she could play the organ and while she was there she used to play the organ in the church and I have a nice little testimonial from the musical people there.

01:37:00:00
So that's where she was living while she was coming in to work at the Medical Mission.

Q: Now just as a?

A: Now, wait a sec, sorry I'll just go on with that, the Owens though, the Reverend Edward Owen was moved from Paddington to Hunters Hill to All Saints Hunters Hill and in 1900 I think it was and my mother then

01:37:30:00
was living with them there and so that's why they were married, Mum and Dad were married at All Saints Hunters Hill by my mother's brother in law.

Q: Just as a question about your mum and dad, you have mentioned and told us some things about your dum going on this ship to England and then to Egypt with yourself and your brother and sister,

01:38:00:00
was that an unusual thing for a woman o do that or did your parents have a very special relationship?

A: Well I think it was an extremely unusual thing. I don't remember ever hearing of any other family that got transported like that. Certainly I don't think we knew any people. There may have been others that I know not of but I think that

01:38:30:00
when I read these letters from my mother to my father they are really so full of passion and love there. It has been a most extraordinary thing to read now. They really were terrifically in love with one another, there is no doubt about it.

01:39:00:00
And of course they were both pretty strong personalities I suppose in different ways but they had the same, I think they had the same kind of religious feelings. They were both very, yes, they were really religiously minded

01:39:30:00
they believed very much in God and that God would look after them and all this time of thing, very Anglican manner. I could tell you a great deal about their troubles, about the clergy at Wahroonga, but I'd better not get into that.

Q: Well we're right at the end of this tape so we might swap over and get a bit more detail. How are you feeling Margaret?

A: Oh I feel alright.


Margaret Holmes
1148
Tape 2

02:00:43:22

Q: So was it a sort of risky thing for your mum taking three kids on a ship when a war was being?

A: Was it a what thing?

Q: Was it a risky thing?

A: Risky? Well don't forget that there weren't the,

02:01:00:00
the U-boat campaign or whatever they call it hadn't started then. There hadn't been any torpedoing going on of civilian vessels when she set out, don't forget. That only started while we were actually on the ship. Do you know when the Lusitania was sunk?

02:01:30:00
I don't either but it was one of the first civilian boats that was torpedoed, which was probably about that time. I am sure she wouldn't, at least I'm pretty sure she would not have undertaken that or Dad wouldn't have let her undertake that if this U-boat campaign had already been in full swing.

02:02:00:00
It would have been altogether too dangerous so I don't think there was any fear of that kind of thing and of course they had no aeroplanes, nobody was going to come along in a plane and drop a bomb on your boat. There was none of the kind of high tech stuff they have nowadays.

Q: What contact did you have with the war when you arrived in Egypt?

02:02:30:00

A: Oh well, you see my father was connected with the, what was it called? Oh the General Hospital that was set up there. Now he had first of all been in charge of setting up a tent hospital

02:03:00:00
at a place called Mena out near the Pyramids, but by the time, he was actually in charge of setting that up and I've got a lot of photos of that but by the time we got there he had come back into Cairo itself and was attached to what was called Gazira. There was an enormous big hotel there

02:03:30:00
called the Gazira Palace Hotel and that had been taken over or given over or I don't know how they got hold of it, to be a hospital. Now that was to receive the wounded from the Gallipoli campaign and so

02:04:00:00
I have photos of the Gallipoli, the first troops off loaded there and taken into that hospital. Now that Gazira Palace Hotel, where they had the hospital it also had a beautiful park attached to it, in which we children could go and play so I've got several

02:04:30:00
photos of us playing in the grounds of the Gazira Palace. And what I can remember of about actually seeing people there I can remember, see my mother used to go frequently to visit wounded and taking them little comforts and things and I do remember

02:05:00:00
several times Mum taking me along too. Now of course, mind you, I'm sure I would have only seen pretty well men. They wouldn't have been taking a little girl in to see really badly wounded men or men that were very ill or suffering a great deal, I am sure because I can

02:05:30:00
only remember these jokey kind of Australian fellows who used to give me their cigarette cards. Have you ever heard of cigarette cards? Oh dear, how ancient I am. It's terrible, I'm sorry. You see cigarettes came in little packages and

02:06:00:00
every packet had a cigarette card and it was a great thing among kids to collect cigarette cards, the way they used to collect match box tops, you've never done that either? Well that was another thing kids used to collect but I used to collect cigarette cards and these soldiers would save their cigarette cards out of their packet of cigarettes they'd been given and keep the cigarette card and then when I

02:06:30:00
came along they would give them to me and I had a most wonderful collection of cigarette cards. I had a book, like a photo album kind of book full of these cigarette cards. Every packet they would have a series, a kind of series like it would be the Generals of the war and then there'd be photos of different Generals and that would be that collection and then there would be another lot that would be say flags of

02:07:00:00
the allies or something, so that is the only real contact I had with wounded people really. But I had quite a lot of contact with Dad's officer friends. Actually my father had several relatives of his who were also,

02:07:30:00
our family I think I mentioned was so full of doctors. In Egypt he had his uncle Dr George Reed his father's brother, his younger brother, he was a major there, or captain, major and then he also had his my father's father was a doctor and his sister had married a Dr George Beaston, Joe Beaston,

02:08:00:00
from Newcastle. Now he too was in Egypt. He wrote me a most marvellous letter. I used to be called the best child. Now it is terrible for a child to be called the best child, you know that's really shocking, a dreadful thing of my parents to have done but they used to keep referring to me as the best child. It is no wonder my sister was jealous of me

02:08:30:00
but Uncle Joe used to call me BC which stood for best child and I've got a wonderful letter that he wrote to me when I got to Egypt that about how glad I must be to be returning to my birth place, BC birth place, and talking about me being able to look in the museum and see my contemporaries, the mummies, BC you know. And talking about

02:09:00:00
Joseph and he hoped I had been able to save Joseph from having his coat stolen and all that kind thing. That was Uncle Joe. He was actually on Lemnos, in a field ambulance that treated the wounded men when they first came off from Gallipoli some of them were taken to Lemnos. Do you know Lemnos? A little island in the Aegean

02:09:30:00
there where the Australians had set up a field ambulance. Uncle Joe was in that. Now I've got off track. Oh yes, my father's friends, that's right, well as well as that of course there were lots of other doctors in the army that he was friendly with. Now these doctors had rented a boat on the Nile.

02:10:00:00
It was called a darhabeer and it was moored beside the Nile and I can remember going down onto that boat and we would have lunch there if they had some time off, or they would go just go down there and relax and get away from the heat. There was a nice breeze coming off the Nile and it was like a little yacht really I suppose and on shore they had

02:10:30:00
a steep bank that you had to walk down to get onto this boat, and on the bank there was a thing called a shadoof. Now that was one of these water-lifting devices and you could see this Arab gardener they paid to look after the bank where

02:11:00:00
their boat was moored and have a garden growing there. And this shadoof let something down in the water and then the man pulls on it and it comes up and pours the water out, you know the kind of thing I mean, like this? Very primitive, they had them there for thousands and thousand of years, just the same sort of thing so I can remember

02:11:30:00
watching this chappie watering the garden there and then having fun on the boat. You can imagine these off duty medical officers all having a good time playing with these little kids and so on. It was quite good and then there were lots of other times that we went to things. I have a photo of our trip to the barrage.

02:12:00:00
Now the barrage was further down the Nile. I can't quite understand what it was it was, it was some sort of dam across the Nile but I don't really know what it did but it must have had something to do with the Nile flooding or something. It was called the barrage and you could go down there and have picnics and things like that and I've got a photo

02:12:30:00
of myself on a donkey for instance. I must have been having a donkey ride there and then another photo of myself with one of Dad's medical officer friend. We've exchanged hats for instance and he is wearing my little sun hat and I am wearing his pith helmet, that kind of thing so we obviously had quite a lot of fun with these

02:13:00:00
people and there is Mum watching a cricket match. You know it just sort of seems so incredible that there was all this terrible carnage going on but the civilian life is somehow there.

Q: Did you ever visit Lemnos?

A: Oh no, oh no, nobody would have been allowed to visit Lemnos I'm sure.

Q: Just one moment.
(tape stops)

02:13:30:00

A: Yes well, Uncle Fred he was very, very fond of my father. He really thought of him as a brother but he had no brothers. See the other two had died and Dad was very fond of Uncle Fred too and one day he tried to take him to lunch in Cairo

02:14:00:00
on the wharf and wanted to take him into a swanky hotel there and was refused because Uncle Fred was a non commissioned officer. He was a private and my father was a major by then I think, major, yes, but he was refused. That hotel didn't accept

02:14:30:00
non commissioned people, only officers could come so my father said, 'Very well then, if you won't take my brother-in-law to lunch here, then I certainly won't lunch here,' and they turned around and went off and found some other joint. But you know it just shows the kind, that separation especially in the British Army. Could you cut that off just for a minute?
(tape stops).

02:15:00:00

Q: Actually I was going to ask you why you were called best child?

A: Well I'm not quite sure. I think it may partly have been because I was the first grandchild of my father's parents. He was the eldest son and I was the first grandchild

02:15:30:00
and they had this long wait when they though he wasn't going to have any children, three years so that it must have been very exciting when they did have a child. But I think I may have been a very precocious child too, very precocious, and quite bright and




02:16:00:00
observant and I mean when I read these letters from my mother to my father about the children, all the time she is telling him about my clever little sayings or my remembrances or my way of fixing things. And my poor sister is always something about what she has done wrong or how naughty she has been or how she had pulled the other children's hair and it's just so terrible really to think of it

02:16:30:00
that one child would be so favoured over another and this best child business. Some of these letters from my father, 'the best child that was ever was' and this kind of thing, I don't know how I survived it really. I probably haven't, I mean I must have been stuck up. Best child, it wasn't only my parents that called me that,

02:17:00:00
this old Uncle and other relatives always called me best child. It's terrible to do to a child, isn't it?

Q: You also mentioned before that people would refer to going back to England as going home?

A: Oh yes, we always talked about going home.

Q: How patriotic were people to England back then?

A: What?

Q: How patriotic were people about England back then?

A: Oh terrifically, you were part of the British Empire. You weren't

02:17:30:00
an individual Australian nation. There was no Australian nation then, you were British and even at home there we had, this was after my father had come home of course, we had on the door of the toilet, the earth closet toilet, we had a great huge

02:18:00:00
Union Jack on a poster and it said, 'It's is your flag, fight for it, work for it'. Well you sat there and looking at this thing and we were British. Australians, you didn't seem to think of yourself as an Australian. You thought of yourself as British. I think that was pretty usual and they always used to talk

02:18:30:00
about going home and writing home, 'We must write home'. My aunt used to write home every Sunday, she wrote home to relatives in Ireland. Ireland of course was the same thing and of course the whole of Ireland was part of England then, part of the UK.

Q: Just leaping forward a slight bit but we will come back to World War I,

02:19:00:00
did, or had any attitudes changed about England when the Second World War was declared, can you remember?

A: About England?

Q: How patriotic were people when the Second World War was declared?

A: How what?

Q: How patriotic were people to England when the Second World War was declared?

A: Well you see the Second World War

02:19:30:00
was an anti-Nazi war. I think people here were very anti-Nazi rather than anti-German and I think we were much more our own people by then really but I can't really recall felling,

02:20:00:00
well of course I was a pacifist by that time so I didn't like the war anyway. You don't want me to go into this matter of the different attitude to Germany do you?

Q: Yes, what was the attitude towards Germany during the First World War?

A: Yes, well right-o, now the attitude to Germany during the First World War was of extreme hatred and detestation

02:20:30:00
of the Hun. They were the Huns and you just couldn't bear them, they were awful people. They used to throw Belgium children up in the air and catch them on their bayonets and all the horrors they did and the whole attitude of the whole populous as far as I was concerned was of utter loathing for a small matter. When I went

02:21:00:00
to school at the end of 1915 when I was just getting on for seven, I had already learnt how to knit but I had been taught how to knit in the continental way. Do you know the continental way? Well you do it with this sort of movement whereas our way of knitting is like this, where you move your right hand. The other way you move your left hand, it's a much better way of knitting really. Well when I went to school

02:21:30:00
I started doing some knitting like this and the other girls all said to me, 'Oh, don't knit that way, that is the German way to knit', it was the continental way really, well it was German way too. 'You can't knit that way, you've got to knit this way, this is the Belgium way', a tiny little episode like that. People killed their dachshunds because

02:22:00:00
they were German dogs and people changed their names, all sorts of country, Holbrook for instance, do you know Holbrook down near south of New South Wales, Holbrook, near Albury? Well what, it sits there and it's quite a big town now. Well it used to be called Germantown because there were a lot of German settlers there well in the First World War that got

02:22:30:00
changed that got changed to Holbrook and all over the place names were changed and people's names were changed. People called, yes we had a teacher at school whose name was Mrs Greenwood. Now it was rumoured about that she had her name changed

02:23:00:00
from Neiderbraun, which is the German for Greenwood and she wasn't really Mrs Greenwood at all. Dozens of children, or I shouldn't say dozens, quite a few children at school had their names changed. Some friends of my mother whose name was Neitenstein

02:23:30:00
it was suggested to them that they should change their name and this man Neitenstein he said, 'no, I am not going to change my name, that is the name my father and grandfather and I am not going to change it. I am not a German now, I have been in Australia and I was born here and I have lived here all my life and I am going to go on being called Neitenstein' and he did.

02:24:00:00
But I think probably most people, for instance the Selbys, oh you wouldn't have heard of the Selbys. They were a big pharmaceutical company here called Selby, now their name had been Silverberg and during the First World War they changed that name to Selby. I could go on thinking of others but I don't and up the North Shore line we were




02:24:30:00
told of someone, we didn't know him, a man who had actually taken an axe and cut up his Beckstein piano because it was German. Well I mean it is sort of now, it just thinks unthinkable of people behaving in that manner but do you want me to tell you about why I think it happened differently in the Second World War?

02:25:00:00
I think the main reason was because of the Nazi persecution of Jews that happened during the 1930's, all the terrible way they treated the Jews. Now a great many Jews refugees had come out here, ever so many came. I was living, by 1934

02:25:30:00
I had come to live in Mosman with my husband. We were married in 1933 and we were living in Mosman and Mosman happened to be a place where a great many of these Jewish refugees came and settled actually. Now you see well they weren't only Jewish, I shouldn't say Jewish refugees, they were refugees from Hitler. Some of them were non-Jewish Germans who couldn't stand Hitler

02:26:00:00
and his Nazism and they had left the country, but there were simply just innumerable people here. You will have heard of Sir Gus Nossal? Haven't you? He was 'Australian of the Year' a few years ago. N O S S A L, now he came to Mosman

02:26:30:00
as a twelve year old boy escaping with his parents form German. They settled in Mosman he went on and became as I say a very well known scientist. It's a wonder you don't remember that name, a very prominent person but they didn't change their name and none of these other people that came here changed their name.

02:27:00:00
We knew dozens of them and people therefore knew you see that there weren't only awful Germans but there were lots of good Germans too and I am sure that made all the difference in the world because we did not have that kind of hate feeling. Mind you we had it towards the Japs. I think there was a lot of hate campaign going on in the Second World War about the

02:27:30:00
Japs being derided as being slanty-eyed, as being monstrous sort of people but not towards the Germans but that is my theory about the region. I am very thankful that we didn't have that.

Q: That's really interesting. Just on a slight diversion, you mentioned school earlier and the knitting, and the differences between the knitting,

02:28:00:00
what other things, what other subjects did you do at school?

A: Oh surely you know the kind of things you do at school? English, history, French, Latin, later on French and Latin and botany was the only science we did. I went to Abbotsleigh, that's at Wahroonga. Botany was the only science we had. We had maths one and

02:28:30:00
maths two. French was the only foreign language you could take, couldn't take German. I said Latin, didn't I?

Q: What kind of school was Abbotsleigh like in those days?

A: Oh well of course it was very different from what it is now, I assure you, it was very different. It was much simpler

02:29:00:00
and of course much smaller. The junior school where I started was a little cottage, demolished now of course. It was a little cottage which became the place where sick boarders would be put if there was an epidemic


02:29:30:00
of any kind. The junior school got cleared out and it was made into a little hospital for the sick boarders. We had chicken pox epidemic or a flu epidemic or something then we would all have to go elsewhere into other rooms and the borders would be put down there and it had a little kitchen and it had a little bathroom and a little

02:30:00:00
locker room and so on. It was quite a self contained little building that was the junior school, well that's where I started in 1915 at the end of the year I was in elementary class and then I was there for the whole of the next year in the same class because I had missed the first, it was four terms then. In the flu epidemic

02:30:30:00
it came after the war. After that the schools were all shut during that and after it stopped the schools went to having three terms instead of four, did you know that? But now they have gone back I believe to having four again. So the first part of my school life there were four terms and then there were three terms.

02:31:00:00
I was there for eleven years altogether. Now you were asking me what it was like, well of course it was so small. They had boarders, they had a couple of boarding houses. One was across the Pacific Highway from the main building. It was called Walumbin and then next door to it was another one, between

02:31:30:00
Abbotsleigh and the tank, you know that great big tank on the hill there? You haven't been to Wahroonga, up the Pacific Highway? No, well never mind, there's a great water tank there that was there when I was at school and still there. It serves to give pressure to water. Wahroonga is the highest point on the line and this tank was built to give pressure, water pressure

02:32:00:00
to the inhabitants of Wahroonga really. It's still there. Well the whole school had prayers every morning, the whole school. We didn't have any of that great huge amount of building there that is there now. We all just met in one building in the hall and had prayers every morning, the whole school together.

02:32:30:00
Now that will show you how small it was. And then that big hall was really in two classes, one at one end and one at the other facing opposite directions which was a bit awful and then we used to march down to the playing fields which were right away, now you don't know that area at all but if you keep on going up the Pacific Highway you come

02:33:00:00
to the part where the main road now goes off to the right up north, to go up north. I should be pointing in that direction. Well just opposite where that is now was where our playing fields were. It was quite a long walk form the school but we used to walk down there. Every Wednesday afternoon was sports day.

02:33:30:00
I think the boarders probably used to go there every afternoon after school, quite a few. We had tennis courts and a cricket pitch. We played cricket. Cricket was our game and netball and tennis but the whole school could go there on one day, the whole school. Well I mean nowadays there must be thousands of girls at that school

02:34:00:00

Q: How well did you go at the school academically?

A: Oh I did very well. I really got a lot of prizes and came top quite a lot and I was very ambitious and wanted to come top and wanted to do well. Maths was my downfall. I couldn't do maths, have never been able to and can't still but I was quite good at

02:34:30:00
English and history and Latin and French, I wasn't too bad at them. I was very, very ambitious and wanting to be top and used to have rivals in every class. I think I had a rival, will you be top or will I be top, that sort of thing and of course my father was always so terribly proud of me and





02:35:00:00
when Abbotsleigh stopped being a private school it was Miss Murray's private school. In those days quite a few women had schools that they owned. Miss Bailey at Ascombe that was her school. She founded it and she owned it. Miss West down at Frencham, that was her school, and they put their money into those schools.

02:35:30:00
They built them, they did all the business side of the school. Miss Fidler at Ravenswood, that was her school. They were their school. Abbotsleigh was Miss Murray's school but when she gave up due to her increasing rheumatoid arthritis actually. She gave up the school,

02:36:00:00
it must have been at the end of 1923 when I was in my third last year, yes that's right. She sold it to the Church of England, Anglican I should say now but it was called the Church of England then. Now the Church of England then and still owns

02:36:30:00
the school and my father was one of the people on the School Council from the beginning really. Well what I was going to say was he had this horrible naughty habit when he

02:37:00:00
was on the Council and at the break up at the end of the year, the Council were all sitting on the platform while the prize giving went on and any time my name came up to come up and get up a prize, Dad would shout out, 'Well done Margaret Reed'. You can just imagine my embarrassment

02:37:30:00
and horror at this and I knew it was going to happen too. I was always waiting there sitting for this terrible shout to come out. Yes, I got quite a few prizes. I had a great rival though, I had a great rival who was very really much cleverer than me called Thurls Thomas. It used to be so exciting when the exam results would come out you would be rushing to see if you come top or if Thurls had come top.

02:38:00:00
Oh it was terribly, it was terribly keen to have to succeed all the time.

Q: You mentioned you were ambitious as well, what did you want to do when you finished school?

A: Oh yes, well right, I wanted to go to the uni of course, the university, that was the ambition and I did. I got an exhibition.

02:38:30:00
I don't think you have them now but in those days there were things called exhibitions which gave you, there was only the one university then, Sydney Uni and it gave I think it was two hundred exhibitions every year to the top two hundred pupils who sat for the Leaving Certificate. And I

02:39:00:00
got an exhibition that meant that you didn't get any money for it, it wasn't a scholarship but it was just a thing that gave you free tuition at the University. Other people must have had to pay fees I suppose. I don't know how that was done then but anyway I could get my University degree without paying any money.

02:39:30:00
Well my father let me be at the Women's College. I was in residence there. I started off in residence at the Women's College and doing Arts and I did the sorts of subjects I had been doing at school, English and Latin and history and I also did economics,

02:40:00:00
because I thought I should be doing something about economics. Finished the year knowing less than I knew before I started and have never known anything about it ever since but anyway I did that first year.

Q: Might have to stop you there because we're at the end of this tape. We'll quickly change and then we'll continue on.


Margaret Holmes
1148
Tape 3

03:00:43:14

Q: You were telling us about Sydney University, what was it like in those days?

A: Yes, well of course it was very much smaller. All those

03:01:00:00
buildings that are now there back towards City Road, I can't think of the names of them now, when you go in off City Road you pass on the right quite a number of large, huge buildings well none of those were there. Neither were there any on the left, it was only just a little lodge house there, tiny little thing like that one down at the bottom.

03:01:30:00
Then you came to the medical school, that was the first building you came, to the old med school. Now I don't know what has happened to that, that's still there, whether it is still the old med school I don't know and then you had a little road went in and then you came to the main building and then on the far end of the other

03:02:00:00
main building you had Science Road going in. And on the other side of Science Road, a little way down, you had the Botany School and then you had the Union steps going down to the Parramatta Road and on the other side of the Union steps you had the Union Building.

03:02:30:00
Now you see when I was there women weren't allowed to go into the Union building at all. There was a Union refectory further down Science Road you could go in there if you were taken by a man but you couldn't go in there by yourself. And then you came to the Zoology School and then you came into the entrance to Parramatta Road,

03:03:00:00
roadway entrance and then you came to the Vet Science school, which was quite a small building then. Now from that road there, that entrance there, a road went right across to Carillon Avenue, do you know Carillon Avenue? And along that road you came to the Teachers' College and I don't know whether it's still there or not and then after the Teachers' College you came to the Women's Hockey

03:03:30:00
Square, on your left and then you came to the new Physics building. It was called the new Physics building because it had only just been finished and it was a long building that went right along that hockey square and at the northern end or the upper end of the Women's Hockey Square there was the back of the Medical School. I hope I'm describing this. I can draw it on drawing for you but

03:04:00:00
it is hard to describe it. It was the rear of the Medical School that went right through there, what was called now the old medical school then. Then you went on this long road and it turned a bit and you came to Wesley College and that was one of the men's residential colleges and between it and the Carillon Avenue

03:04:30:00
was the Women's College and so is where the Women's College still is. Although it too has been immensely, it's about four times the size, at least four times as big as when I was there but the part I was in is still there, the main frontage.

Q: Sorry to interrupt you, you mentioned before that you actually boarded at in residence at Sydney

03:05:00:00
but you were living quite close to the Uni, but was it difficult to get to transport from where you lived?

A: When I left school my father gave me a car. He gave me a baby Austin, the first car I ever had. I could drive when I was fourteen but it was the first time I had a car. I was eighteen by this time and I had this little baby Austin.

03:05:30:00
Now at that time the Women's College principal was the only person in the women's college who had a car, not one girl had a car until I came and I asked if I could have permission to put my little tiny car in her garage, which was under the house beside her great big

03:06:00:00
magnificent car and she let me. Well now because I had the car I used to go home every weekend. Most girls stayed in college all weekend but I didn't. I used to drive home at weekends either on Friday afternoon or Saturday morning so the whole time I was at College, four years altogether, I hardly ever spent a weekend in College.

03:06:30:00
That's the first thing, now you asked about how long it would have taken me to get from Wahroonga, I can't imagine how long it would have taken me by public transport. You see I would have had to, the Bridge wasn't built then don't forget. I would have had to take the train down to Milson's Point and then get a ferry across and then get a tram to go up to the University. No doubtless there were lots of students who were doing that but

03:07:00:00
I suppose my parents may have thought it would be too much travelling every day to do that. It would have been terrible, really would have been awful. That may be why they let me be at the Women's College.

Q: So what was the little Austin like, the car?

A: It was a tiny little wee car, quite small, almost like a kids car. It only had two seats

03:07:30:00
and you could only have two people in it, one each side. It had the kind of hood that you put down and up and it wasn't very big at all. I used to drive across to the University via De Burgh's Bridge that goes over Lane Cove and then across the Gladesville Bridge and then all down Parramatta Road to get to College. I

03:08:00:00
can't remember how long it took me but it couldn't have taken me very long. A lot of it was through a very unbuilt up areas and my father said I should have a revolver with me in the car so he gave me this revolver which I used to keep in the pocket of the car. I hadn't a clue about what to do with the darn thing. He said, 'if anybody holds you up just pick up the revolver and point it at them and they will go off,'

03:08:30:00
so that was the idea.

Q: Did he teach you how to shoot the revolver?

A: What?

Q: Did he teach you how to use the revolver?

A: Oh he just told me you just pull the trigger like that but it didn't have any bullets in it. I think it was just for show.

Q: And what were the roads like?

A: I can't remember them being all that bad. Of course on the other, oh they may have been pretty bad. Of course when my father was driving, my father used to drive down

03:09:00:00
Lane Cove Road, you see I've left out all this. To get to George's Heights where he worked up here after the war, not after the war, during the war when he came back from Egypt he was in charge of that George's Heights Hospital but he lived at home at Wahroonga and he used to drive down the Lane Cove Road, as it was called then, every day. The Lane Cove Road was

03:09:30:00
so full of pot holes that Dad had a Dodge, a car called a Dodge, he had big iron bars put in the back seat on the floor of the back seat of the Dodge to hold it down when he hit the pot holes because other wise he would the car would jump up so much that he was afraid he would be jumped off the wheel and he wouldn't be able to

03:10:00:00
control the car. That was the main road up the North Shore, the Lane Cove Road was so bad and full of potholes. Well of course by the time I was going to College which was 1927 I started there, I expect the roads were a lot better but I don't think they would have been all that good.

Q: You mentioned the exhibition, the two hundred spots or

03:10:30:00
places that were awarded to people to come to University, were they for women and for men?

A: Oh yes, they were just for the top two hundred students, no differentiation.

Q: Was it unusual for women in those days to go to University?

A: I don't know how unusual it was really. You see at the Women's College

03:11:00:00
we had a lot of girls who had come from High Schools but we also had quite a lot of girls who had come from private schools possibly because poorer people would have had girls at high schools and wouldn't have been able to afford the college fees. I never sort of thought about it very

03:11:30:00
much. I know there were both girls there but I couldn't tell you what proportion.

Q: So you couldn't tell me the ratio of men to women?

A: Oh yes, I can tell you that kind of ratio, at least in the medical profession I can because I haven't got onto where I gave up Arts and started Medicine, have I? Well when I did that, I did Arts, I

03:12:00:00
should go back and say I did Arts for two years and at the end of that time I thought, 'What on earth am I dong this for? What is the point? What am I going to do when I finish this? I don't want to be a teacher, what else can I be? There is nothing I could think of what I want to do and really what I want to do is medicine'. So I talked to my father about it and asked him and he said well it means I will be able to

03:12:30:00
to transfer my exhibition. You could have the exhibition for six years if you did medicine so I said I have had two years of the exhibition so I said I could have four years of medicine for nothing but he would have to pay for two more years as there was six years. And I said, 'There is College too'. He had to pay for that and he said I could do it so I transferred then into medicine.

03:13:00:00
So in third year instead of doing my final year of the arts course I did my first year of medicine and in that year there were a hundred students of whom seven were women. Now my granddaughter, a granddaughter of mine, did medicine at Newcastle Uni some years ago now


03:13:30:00
and there were more women than men in her medical year, so that will show you the difference. Very few women were doing medicine. In the other faculties there was a women with my daughter at college a generation later, and not this daughter, but another daughter, and that woman did engineering and

03:14:00:00
she was the first woman student to do engineering. In my year there were was nobody doing vet science, no women doing vet science and engineering, no women did that until that one woman later so

03:14:30:00
it was really very much, there were many more men around than women. In Arts I think it was probably pretty fairly evenly numbered I think the classes I went to. The lectures I went to in Arts were pretty evenly divided.

Q: So what kinds of people did you meet when you were at Sydney Uni?

03:15:00:00

A: Oh well you see I had really lived a very cloistered kind of life till then. I really hadn't had any kind of social life really. I wasn't. I had been a Girl Guide and I had done that away from school and I liked being a Girl Guide

03:15:30:00
but I hadn't mixed socially with people very much at all, neither boys or girls. I just knew my school friends and the guides and so on but you see when you went to Uni you were all of a sudden thrown into this very, very heterogeneous group of people. I mean I had never known any girls who went to high school for instance

03:16:00:00
at all. I had hardly known any girls who went to any other school than Ashleigh and yet here I was in the middle of this, especially at College, meeting so many different people from so many different backgrounds it was quite wonderful and mind blowing really. I wasn't very happy with regard to the

03:16:30:00
other sex. I really was terrified of boys. I didn't know what to do with them and how to handle them. See I had two young brothers but they were just little boys that I bossed around. They weren't peers as it were. I was really very terrified and I couldn't bring myself. Other girls used to ring up boys, men, I should say men, you didn't call them boys, men

03:17:00:00
from other colleges and ask them to come around for the dance or what we called hops, little informal dances we had at every term but I couldn't bring myself. I didn't feel I knew anybody well enough to do that and I had to get my mother to find a distant cousin or something to come and be my partner at the first formal dance. And then I came out

03:17:30:00
at a ball, at a Settlement Ball that was held in the Great Hall and I didn't know anyone to ask as my partner and my mother finally found some local Wahroonga lad whom I had played with him as a child and she asked him would he be my partner at that the ball. I was so timid and so insecure and frightened and terrified and jittery.

03:18:00:00
But then in my second year, are we getting off track? In my second year I got into the Student Christian Movement. It was called the Christian Union in those days. Funnily enough a girl I had been a friend with at Wahroonga called Lucy Waite, I had been a childhood friend of hers.

03:18:30:00
She was a bit older than me. Now she was at College too and she was the person who really got me to come to some Student Christian Movement thing, a conference it was, in the second year at Easter and that is where I really had my whole life changed and altered because you see once you got

03:19:00:00
into that particular organisation or group all of a sudden you found yourself on exactly the same footing as all these young men. Nobody was behaving in any kind of frightening way or any kind of disturbing way. You




03:19:30:00
were just friends, they really were friends. You could be friends with everybody without any kind of connotation of any kind of partnership of any sort. I don't think I ever saw any kissing or hugging or even walking arm in arm between the sexes in the CU but you had the most marvellous friends.

03:20:00:00
You could have, for the first time I was able to make friends with young men without having to be bothered about whether they were going to kiss me or hug me or whatever they were going to do with me but I suppose it had always been seething around in the back of my mind and making me feel that I didn't want to enter into this strange world of grown up-ness.

03:20:30:00
But this wonderful place, this wonderful organisation where look honestly I have had friends that I made there all my life, they were men and women, without ever having had to have any kind of sex attitude or feelings as far as I know coming into it. You would really be friends on that upper level which I think is terrific really.

03:21:00:00
Anyway that is where I met my husband also, which of course other things did come into. I don't say that they didn't come in on all sorts of occasions as plenty of these CU friends got married to each other but I mean while we were there at conferences and so on we would have meetings and working out what to do, it didn't seem to enter into it.

Q: Was it just a social club, the Union?

03:21:30:00

A: No, no, it wasn't a social club at all. It wasn't a social club. It was a, trying to find what life was all about, why were you here, what were you doing, what we were going to do, what was wrong with the world, what was right with the world, if it was wrong what could you do to help make it a bit better and what was the right thing to do.

03:22:00:00
I mean that's where you learnt all about socialism, and that sort of thing and a terrific lot of work on social issues that were coming up because the Depression was coming along, starting to come then and then of course later on all this rise of Hitler and everything else was happening. I can't think what to call it. It certainly wasn't a

03:22:30:00
social club. We didn't have parties or anything like that. We had meetings and lectures and conferences and wrote very learned articles in papers and that sort of thing. It was a very serious minded lot of people I can tell you, very serious minded but at the same time we had a terrific lot of fun, just

03:23:00:00
fun and somehow jollity and I can't explain it exactly.

Q: What kinds of Christian denominations were mainly in the group?

A: Everything, everything and agnostic people weren't quite sure what they were about were in it. The only thing you had to believe was that

03:23:30:00
that Jesus was really the supreme revelation of God, that was what you had to believe. You didn't have to believe a lot about the saving blood or any of that sort of thing like the other religious thing which was the Evangelical Union which is now I believe has completely taken over from the Student Christian Movement and you have to believe this, that and the other, and if you don't, you're out. We weren't

03:24:00:00
like that at all. It was altogether a very almost agnostic, no it wasn't agnostic. You had to believe there was a God, I think you had to believe there was God and you had to believe that there had been lots and lots and lots of revelations of God and others were very, very good indeed and you would study these others and learn about them but



03:24:30:00
we really did think that Jesus had put forward the best revelation. Yes, that was the only thing you had to say. You didn't have to believe any creeds or anything like that.

Q: Was there any tensions between Christian denominations?

A: No, not in the SCM there wasn't. We had lots of Methodists, we didn't have

03:25:00:00
that many Anglicans actually although we did a fair few. We had Methodists and Congregationalists. The Congregationalists, Methodists and Presbyterian have all joined together and they are the Uniting Church but there was no Uniting Church then. We had some Presbyterians.

03:25:30:00
But I can't think what preponderated. It varied a bit sometimes, no, I can't put an answer to that. My friends who were in it, well Tag and his brother were both in it and they were both Anglicans like I was but lots of my best friends were Methodists or Congregationalists or

03:26:00:00
it didn't seem to worry us. We were interested in something else other than denominationalism. And of course there was the Free Thought Movement at the University at that time and that is where the people who went who were really atheists, who didn't believe any of this rubbish that these people go on about. And Professor

03:26:30:00
John Anderson was the great guru for them and a lot of people I knew were in the Free Thought Society and they thought the people in the SCU, the Student Christian Union Movement were quite poor little creatures who couldn't get along without belief in some supernatural being or something.

Q: Were there any Catholics in the Christian Movement?

A: Oh well now, the Catholics had, no, no. We didn't have any Catholics.

03:27:00:00
The Catholics had another, I can't think what it was called.

Q: The John Newman Society?

A: That's right, the Newman Society, the Newman Society they had and they didn't come to any of our conferences and we didn't go to any of theirs. We didn't have any communication with them.

Q: Were there tensions or differences that were clear between the Anglican, Presbyterian etcetera

03:27:30:00
and the Catholics within the University?

A: I didn't notice it, I don't think so.

Q: But people wouldn't associate necessarily with each other?

A: Look I can't really tell you that I don't think. I can't remember any incidents of an active. The people that

03:28:00:00
started to come in before I left in the last couple of years at Uni were the Evangelical Union people. Now when they started to come in there was quite a bit of tension I suppose you'd say between the people who belonged to that and the people who belonged to the Christian Union because you see they had this

03:28:30:00
very rigid kind of approach to religion and you had to believe certain things and they didn't like us and I don't think we liked them very much. And of course I think I just said didn't I that they seemed to have entirely taken over now, at least in Sydney.

Q: What their response to the groups like the, did you say the Free Thought?

A: The Free Thought Society.

03:29:00:00
Oh well we at one stage the Christian Union put on a public meeting or seminar of some kind in which we had challenged the Free Thought Society to a debate and the person we got to take our side was a man who was Professor Bailey. He was

03:29:30:00
from Melbourne University. You see we used to have these inter-state conferences where you got to know people, you went to the other State and you got to know people from the other universities, which was terrific. But this marvellous man Professor Bailey he agreed to come up here and debate with whoever was the person for the Free Thought Society, it might have been John Anderson, I've really forgotten who it was. We had this public debate

03:30:00:00
in the Union Hall and put it on that Professor Bailey was going to put the Christian Union point of view and this other man would put the Free Thought point of view so we had this sort of public confrontational, not exactly, I shouldn't say confrontation, discussion, I would say, discussion. That was I think the only time we had such a public thing as that but hey were whittling all the time at people and we were whittling away at

03:30:30:00
the freshers welcome every year. All the different organisations would get up and tell the freshers about their particular interests and say we would like you to join us and we would get up and give ours and the free thought people would get up and give theirs. You would see some little freshers rushing off in one direction and some rushing off in another direction.

03:31:00:00
We were all so small compared to what it is now. You could get the whole lot together more or less. Well that's not quite true.

Q: So how did you enjoy the difference between Arts and Medicine?

A: Oh it was wonderful. I was so thankful I did it.

03:31:30:00
I really was so bored with that Arts course. I really, having in English One having to do all this old Chaucer kind of English and having this lecturer get up and read bits of Chaucer in the way Chaucer would have spoken it and I just got bored stiff with it. I really couldn't stand it and then Latin wasn't very interesting. I did

03:32:00:00
geography as a sideline in the second year because I was interested in that and we had Professor Griffith Taylor and he was marvellous but in Medicine I was doing the things I really was interested in doing, so it was very different really. Much harder work mind you because I had to do physics for instance.

03:32:30:00
In Med One you had to do Physics One and it was at the level of the next year after the Leaving Certificate physics. Now I had never done physics in my life, never, so there was I a fresher in medicine having to do physics

03:33:00:00
at Leaving Certificate standard with all these men of course, all these boys had all done physics for perhaps five years at high School and the girls who were in my year who had been at high school they too had done physics but I came from a private school that had never done physics. What got me through physics was having a very good tutor

03:33:30:00
at the Women's College who was actually one of the lecturers in the Physics Department, Phyllis Nichol. She was living in College and she was the tutor, then College tutor in physics and now she got me through Physics One I can tell you. Chemistry was pretty terrible for me too because there again I had never done

03:34:00:00
and chemistry. Well we had a tutor for chemistry too that helped me a lot.

Q: So in that kind of situation where you have got a very large difference between the numbers of girls and boys, well sorry, men and women, what actually was the kind of interaction between the sexes in the Med course?

A: Well to begin with

03:34:30:00
we had a Women's Room in the Med School, way down in the bottom part, just one, probably about the size of this, that was for women students. Now mainly it was occupied by massage students. There were quite a few girls doing massage and

03:35:00:00
that is where we had to keep our white coats when we dissecting and so on, when we weren't dissecting I mean. But that was our only, and toilets of course and a wash basins and things and that was the only thing the women had in the whole of that Med School and we had to keep there, we had to be there if we weren't at a lecture or in the dissecting room. The men could go anywhere they liked all over the whole place but

03:35:30:00
apparently we were supposed to stay in our quarters. Now that was pretty awful, wasn't it? We did manage, I've forgotten what we did, we did ask for something extra. I've forgotten what, maybe for a little bit more room I think it was, to have a little bit more room, a bit more room than usual. But you see in my husband's year, he was three or four years ahead of me,

03:36:00:00
there were only four women. I can't remember and his brother did medicine too. He was about two years ahead of me. My husband must have been four years ahead of me I think. In my husband's brother's year there might have been half a dozen and in my year I think I said there were only six or

03:36:30:00
seven. Somebody else came in from another state, somebody came from Queensland in my second year and joined us, and that was all.

Q: Just as a slight diversion, when you were at Sydney Uni these were during the Depression years?

A: Oh well to begin with 1927, I don't think that the

03:37:00:00
Depression had really started then. No, I don't think so. I think it started more around about 1929 we began to feel it more. Of course one thing we did know about was how the war had affected people in Europe.

03:37:30:00
In my second year we started up an organisation called, a chapter or a branch or what ever you called it of a thing called the International Student's Service. Now that was a thing that had been set up in Europe to deal with helping university students

03:38:00:00
who'd been unsettled by the First World War or to help return soldiers in all the different countries, not just our allies but enemy countries as well. It was very international. Now someone came out from England who had been working with that and they told us about this organisation so we set up this, that must have

03:38:30:00
been the second year I think, the International Students Service, the ISS it was called, and we worked to raise funds. We had little functions and raised only to give these people to help the students in Europe who were suffering but that was suffering from the effects of the war rather than the Depression I think.

03:39:00:00
Now I'm trying to think when we started to feel the Depression. Of course by the time, I suppose it really wouldn't have been until about the 1930's we started to feel much of it here. I'm not very good on dates.

Q: That's okay and when you say you started to feel the Depression, how did it manifest itself?

A: Well I

03:39:30:00
think there was a lot of, just lack of money that people had. I mean students that had to do on very little money. Friends of mine that whose parents might, or whose father rather usually would not been able to support them, had to take after hours jobs

03:40:00:00
for instance to earn a bit of money. I remember there was one woman at the college with me who was doing massage and she wanted to do medicine but she hadn't enough money, so she took up massage and she used to work after in the evenings. See we used to have shops open in the evenings in those days,

03:40:30:00
at least on Friday evening the shops all stayed open and she used to work in David Jones in the shoe department every Friday evening to earn enough money. And a lot of other people I knew they took after hours work to raise some more money for their needs. I was in a very fortunate position in having parent's who could afford,

03:41:00:00
well we weren't an extravagant kind of family but we always seemed to have enough money to do all the things we needed to do or wanted to do.

Q: I might just get you to hold that thought as we're right on the very end of this tape, is that alright?


Margaret Holmes
1148
Tape 4

04:00:41:18

Q: Well Margaret, let's begin, share with me the memories of Uncle Fred?

A: Oh well, Uncle Fred was my mother's younger brother as I mentioned and before the war he was working

04:01:00:00
on a property up near Lismore, Casino rather, with an aunt and uncle of his who managed a property up there for Dalgety. Now we didn't really see Uncle Fred at that time because he was up there most of the time so that by the time he went to the war I didn't really know him very well. But of course when he was in Egypt, when we were all in

04:01:30:00
Egypt we saw quite a bit of Uncle Fred because he was there at the same time. And I can just remember him as a nice big uncle. I can't say I have any vivid memory of Uncle Fred but he evidently liked us children very much and really he loved my mother very dearly. In fact when

04:02:00:00
some man said to him, 'Haven't you got yourself a sweetheart yet Fred?' He said, 'Rene is my sweetheart', Rene being my mother, 'Rene is my sweetheart' and he thought of her really as his sweetheart I'm sure. My father he thought of him as his brother as he had no brothers left so that they were very close to each other really.

04:02:30:00
When he went to France he stayed in Egypt, when my father came back form Egypt, Uncle Fred stayed there and then the unit that he was in the First Field Ambulance, he was a stretcher bearer. They were sent on to France and he then, his unit took part in the Battle of Pozieres, have you ever heard of that battle? That

04:03:00:00
there were two battles at Pozieres and he was in the first battle of Pozieres and I have quite a few letters that he, well he used to write letters to us kids back in Cairo or when we came back here rather. Wouldn't have been when he was still in Cairo, telling us all sorts of funny little things about

04:03:30:00
the French there and the aeroplanes like dragon flies in the sky and I can read you out a whole lot of those. A friend of mine has transcribed them for me from his original letters that my mother had kept. But he must have been a very nice man I think really and as I say he was a stretcher bearer and in the first Battle of Pozieres he

04:04:00:00
apparently behaved very courageously and was awarded the Military Medal for that. That was presented to him by General Birdwood who was his Australian Commander but then immediately before that, before he was presented with it he had been elevated from being a private to being a second lieutenant

04:04:30:00
so by the time he got the military medal presented to him he was a second lieutenant. And then he got some leave because of his actions and he was granted ten days leave and he went to Ireland, where a cousin of my mother's who took him, who was a colonel actually, Colonel Barney Somerville. He took Fred with him

04:05:00:00
and he had a lovely trip to Ireland then they went back to France and then of course along came the second battle of Pozieres and this time Uncle Fred was killed. He was killed actually while, by now of course he wasn't a stretcher bearer any more I suppose but he was trying to help some other wounded person in 'no mans land' when

04:05:30:00
another shell burst or whatever and the two of them were both killed immediately. This cousin of my mother's, Barney Somerville, he wrote about all this to my mother and for a long time though, for weeks on end, she really didn't know if he was alive or dead, because they had not been able to collect up these bodies.

04:06:00:00
It was terrible to think of it the way these bodies were left lying because nobody could go and collect them, because of the bombs bursting all the time and not much point to bring in a dead body if you are likely to be killed yourself. It really must have been horrific that western front, you can hardly imagine what it must be like.

Q: You mentioned earlier that your dad was running the

04:06:30:00
hospital here at George's Heights?

A: That's right, well when he came back with the troop ship that he came back on, I'm not too sure of the name of it. Whether it was the Kiara that he came back on I really don't remember, but at any rate this hospital up here had been set up in order to receive back the wounded from Gallipoli, that was the purpose of

04:07:00:00
all those buildings that were up there. Do you know they're sort of over the hill a bit, down towards that way and my father was put in charge of that. He was the OC [Officer Commanding] and he was made a colonel then, he'd been a major before, a lieutenant colonel I suppose he was and that would have been the end of 1917 I suppose, would it? I'm getting muddled up now.


04:07:30:00
Oh well never mind, whenever it was that they came there he went there and then I've got a whole lot of photos up there and some of the photos are showing buildings that he was in are still there, they're still there falling apart. It's rather interesting to go up and have a look around up there, which I've done.

04:08:00:00
But he must have been there for several years, I'm not sure what. Do you know the officers' mess up there? Wonderful building looking out to the south, marvellous building, well that is where they gave him a farewell function when he left. He got a beautiful coffee service given to him

04:08:30:00
which he gave me for a wedding present so I still have the coffee service that he gave me.

Q: Did your dad return to normal medical practice?

A: No, no, no, he never returned to medical practice at all. I don't quite know why. He is alleged to have said that so many other

04:09:00:00
younger doctors had set up practices during his absence and certainly there were several doctors around, that he didn't really think it would be fair for him to come back and set up again because he had felt that he'd been apparently quite a popular local doctor, the only one in Wahroonga and he,

04:09:30:00
I suppose he thought the patients might want to come back to him and would come away from all these the younger men. How altruistic this was, or how much that he really didn't require the income from a medical practice I really can't say and the truth is that my grandfather, his father,

04:10:00:00
was really apparently an extremely wealthy man who had something to do with the Cobalt Copper Mine. He was a doctor too actually but he had practiced in Singleton and he had something to do with opening up of the Cobalt Copper Mine and helping people get going there and he had a lot of money and shares in it and so on,

04:10:30:00
which he distributed among his children and so on and a lot of other entrepreneurial kind of, the woollen mills, Victoria so that really we were apparently comfortably enough off for Dad not to have to earn his living and of course able to give me my car when I left school and that kind of thing. He must have had quite some money because

04:11:00:00
they really lived I think in a very modest manner. My parents were never throwing money around or being extravagant. Mum was particularly careful with money and always making sure we didn't, and we were never allowed to borrow money and we were never allowed to spend more than we had and we were never allowed to put anything down on credit or add up. We had to

04:11:30:12
pay cash for anything we bought, that sort of thing. They were very strict about money and not being, I can't think of the word really. But what Dad did do though was to devote himself to all sorts of public work,

04:12:00:00
like being on various, running, helping to run the orphanage or children's home I should call it at Normanhurst and being on the Council, the Ku-ring-gai Council. He was a councillor for a good few years and he used to go out and really taking a very active part, not like some

04:12:30:00
councillors but taking a real interest in all the works that were going on. And then Abbotsleigh, when he became on the Abbotsleigh Council he organised and supervised the whole layout of the Abbotsleigh playing fields that the school put in which are an extraordinary collection of wonderful

04:13:00:00
courts and everything up there, all done away with the old playing fields that we used to have to walk to. Now they just walk across the grounds to it. Well Dad actually sort of personally supervised all that and used to be up there making sure the men were doing the right thing. I can't tell you what else he was in, all sorts of things, so he was always a fully occupied man but not in the medical profession

04:13:30:00
any more.

Q: So what you're saying to me is that he didn't continue on as a doctor for the reasons of what he had seen in the war?

A: Oh no, I didn't say that, I didn't tell you, no, no, I don't think that at all. I wouldn't imagine that would influence him. I think he was only glad that he'd been able to do things for people and help them there. I don't think that

04:14:00:00
made him turn against it. He certainly wasn't against war as such.

Q: Can I ask, I think on the way home on a ship you got the measles?

A: Oh no, that's not right, on the way there I got sunstroke. Did I get measles on the way home?

04:14:30:00

Q: I hate to say I wasn't there.

A: I was but I can't remember getting measles. You're not getting muddle up with the sunstroke on the way there?

Q: Well it may be so. The League of Nations at School?

A: Oh yes, yes, the League of Nations, we had a very good history teacher at school, a very fine, wonderful history teacher and she was very interested in the League of

04:15:00:00
Nations and she started up or formed or got formed a League of Nations Union at school. Schools used to have these League of Nations and you have a little button you would wear that had LN on it or some little device or other and you put the League of Nation Union you proudly put that on. And then we used to have debates

04:15:30:00
in that union or that society or whatever you would call it. Different people were allocated different roles to be such and such a country or such and such a country and debate the way the League of Nations did. Oh yes, we were very internationally minded.

Q: With the girls at school were there many girls from different countries or were they

04:16:00:00
mainly just white Anglo Saxons?

A: Oh very, very few, hardly any, hardly anybody but Australians were there. There was one, it was a family called Halberg who had come from Denmark but those girls were just like any other girls, they didn't have any

04:16:30:00
Danish eccentricities or interesting things. There were one or two girls whose fathers were German but they didn't seem to be any different from us and there were no people of any other kind of races ever. In fact I think probably the only person I had ever seen




04:17:00:00
who wasn't an Anglo person was the Chinese greengrocer who used to come round with two baskets over his shoulder and bring in the fruit and vegetables for Mum to say what she would buy. I think that was the only non-Anglo person I had ever set eyes on in my life and then I went to College there was one girl there whose name was Mary

04:17:30:00
Chong and she had a Chinese father. She didn't look Chinese I think she took more after her mother I think. I don't remember any person of any Asian or African or any other Polynesian, nothing, they just weren't there, they weren't in the community.

04:18:00:00

Q: Now travelling forward to where Claire [interviewer] was asking questions about university, can you tell me about the meeting of your husband?

A: Oh yes, well that happened at the first conference of the Christian Union that I went to, which was in Easter of my second year which was 1928. Now the first time I saw

04:18:30:00
him we went a lot of us had been out for a long walk and it was up at Kurrajong Heights. Do you know Kurrajong Heights? Oh it's up the mountains, not on the main part but further north. You don't know about Kurrajong Heights? You ought to go up there, it's lovely. Anyway we had all been out for this long walk and I was walking up this hill to the house,

04:19:00:00
the boarding house we had taken and there were these two lads in front of me, these two young men and they were walking along one with the arm around the other shoulder and I had two brothers and my two brothers had never got on together ever, that I could think of. They were totally different people,

04:19:30:00
different characters, different everything about them and I think they both hated each other. They were always quarrelling and fighting and squabbling and someone said, 'Those are the Holmes brothers, those two'., 'Two brothers, two brothers that like each other', now that was my very first sight of them. I really became

04:20:00:00
quite interested in the younger brother who was Ray and for a couple of years Ray and I were more friendly with each other but then I began to think, ' Really like Tag better than Ray, I really do,' and I sort of tried to get out of this. There was nothing very heavy going on but Ray and I were just the two that people thought of, you'd

04:20:30:00
go out for walks with and whatever, so I was very thankful when he had an eye to some other girl at a different conference this time. And I even wrote in my diary, 'Thank goodness Ray seems to be taking an interest in J. Thank goodness because of you know who', which of course was Tag. I've still got that diary somewhere and then

04:21:00:00
I was able to concentrate that I decided I really did like best. So then we went from there and got very fond of each other.

Q: Was he though taking an interest in you?

A: I suppose he was. He must have been,

04:21:30:00
he must have been taking some interest.

Q: And what sort of things in respect to courtship would you do together?

A: Well one of the things we used together, oh yes, when he was going for his final exam, yes that's right. At that time he wrote me a most terrific letter that I nearly had a fit over about

04:22:00:00
telling me how he couldn't sleep and he couldn't work because he was all the time of thinking of me kind of thing, which blew my mind of course. And after that confession actually he failed in his last year's exam. He'd had always done very well all the way through but this time he failed and I am sure it was because of this trauma going on and

04:22:30:00
he had to sit for a post then. The first time in his whole medical, six years it was then, the first time he had a post was that time when he went for the finals and he only had one post but he got through it of course. But you see while he was studying for his last year he and I used to be going out at night and walking for miles all round Newtown and right down Glebe

04:23:00:00
Point and to Annandale we walked and right down to White Bay, miles and miles we used to go walking, all evening sort of thing when he probably should have been studying that is mainly what we did our courting in I suppose, gradually got on a bit more.

Q: And how did his brother respond to this?

A: That didn't matter

04:23:30:00
because he had got fond of somebody else, that didn't matter. I was a very great friend of his but he didn't mind Tag and me getting together. They were both residents in St Paul's College which was just next door to Women's.

Q: So how long was the courtship to the point of

04:24:00:00
him proposing to you?

A: Oh really, do you want to know that? I don't know that I can even tell you. I know it took some, look I don't remember when he proposed to me. I know I just had to just more or less make him, I mean egg him on, say, 'Look here really, are we serious or aren't we?

04:24:30:00
And if we are why don't you propose to me?' and so on.

Q: The reason I asked because his proposal did affect your future as far as your studying goes?

A: Of course it did, it meant I gave up medicine, yes. We got engaged, actually engaged, he gave me an engagement ring, which by the way he gave me by throwing it across

04:25:00:00
a dining table at my home where he had come, he was through by then and he was a resident at North Shore by that time and he had come up to Wahroonga to have dinner with us. We were having dinner and I was at one side of the table and he was at the other and he threw a box to me across the table and when I opened it up there was my engagement ring in it.

Q: He was a bit of a romantic then?




04:25:30:00

A: Well of course he'd already asked Dad if he could have me and so on, that had already been done but the actual giving of the engagement ring that is how that took place.

Q: Tell us about how he asked your father for your hand?

A: Oh yes, yes, when he came to ask Dad for my hand which they used to do in those days, he went into Dad's room which we always called the surgery, although Dad still

04:26:00:00
wasn't still using it as such and of course Dad knew perfectly well what he had come for but Dad wouldn't give him any leeway at all and he just said to him, 'Yes Tag, yes, yes what, you want to see me do you?' Poor Tag said, 'Yes I do.', 'What was it about? What was it about?'

04:26:30:00
Just teasing the poor wretch while Mum and I were waiting outside trembling and shaking.

Q: Of course your dad was going to say yes I take it?

A: Of course.

Q: And of course no matter how the ring was delivered you were going to say yes? So how did this therefore proposal affect your desire to become a doctor?

A: Of course, of course I knew that soon as I knew that

04:27:00:00
we were really in love with each other, I thought, 'I can't go on.' It means we couldn't have got married, you weren't allowed to. One man in Tag's year got married while he was in residence but he and his wife had to pretend they weren't married because if he'd been known to be married

04:27:30:00
he wouldn't have been able to continue as a resident. So you see they had these strict rules about nurses marrying and about doctors marrying and if they did they weren't there any more. So I knew, well I was only in third year and I would have had six years then medicine and then there was a year of residence, so it would have been four years before we could be married.

04:28:00:00
Well we both thought that was ridiculous. Anyhow I think I wa