Fay Berry’s Story – Chapter 12 – My dear Dad, Maynard O’Connor Snr’s story – , Part 2

Maynard’s Dad could turn his hand to any work.  He established an ice making plant with the Pinnaroo Hotel, the candle and soap factory and at one stage he carted all the limestone for the rebuilding of the commercial hotel which is now called ‘the Golden Grain’ Hotel.  He could turn his hand to house building as well.  He was very good with tools. Of course the houses in those days were only made of wood and iron and not of brick.  He also became expert at making harness for horses.  He used to sew them by hand out of leather, collars and saddles and such.  He used to make up his own sewing thread which was hemp which he used to treat with bees’ wax.  He was also expert at splicing rope.

 

In 1916 Maynard was 7 years old.  He should have started school at age 5 or 6 but because the family lived out at ‘Bull Oaks’ at this time, he didn’t get to start school until he was 7 years old. After Harfield died, Charles O’Connor, Maynard’s father was working on a windmill at Neil O’Loughlan’s place and he fell off a platform which was 30 ft above ground. He sustained a compound fracture of his right thigh and the bone stuck out of his leg and was ‘hammered’ into the ground. There happened to be a returned soldier there who had just come back from the war and he had some bandages and he bandaged Charles’ leg. They took Charles into the town to the doctor, but there was nothing they could do for him there so next morning he was put on a train and taken to the Adelaide hospital.

 

This train was what was called a ‘mixed train’ which took freight and passengers from Pinnaroo to Tailem Bend. The trip took 12 hours if the train ran on time. Dad lay on a camp stretcher in the guard’s van and Emily-Jane, Dad’s Mum, sat on a box beside him all the way. Charles was eleven months in the Adelaide hospital. During this time, back up in Pinnaroo the family did anything they could to earn money.  There was no dole or social security or social services in those days, so Maynard’s mum took in washing and domestic work.  Those who could find work did domestic work in the hotels.

 

Charles got no compensation for that accident and when he came home he had one leg which was four inches shorter than the other one and his leg was completely stiff. He was on crutches for a long, long time and was crippled for the rest of his life. He eventually got so that he could move around just using a walking stick but then he took to the drink which made life very hard for the whole family. Maynard said that ‘Dad used to beat Mum up occasionally and that emotionally it was hard all round.’ Emily-Jane was a Methodist when she married Charles but turned Catholic, and it was she, not Charles, who saw that the family went to Church.

 

Dad said: ‘The only time I can ever remember my father Charles going into the Catholic Church was when my brother Arthur was killed. This was also in 1916 when Arthur was 12 years old and it was during the Xmas holidays. He was working at the blacksmith shop at Koch and Sharrod’s and in those days they used to get petrol in 45 gall tins and they had a 200 gallon tank sunk in the ground in which they used to store the petrol. Pay day was on Saturday in those days because it was a 6 day week of 48 hours.  Mr Sharrod said ‘I’ll go to the bank and get the pay and when I come back we will clean the petrol tank out.’ Arthur being young and keen decided he would get the job started whilst Mr Sharrod was away. When he got into the tank, some of the petrol tins had leaked and the tank was full of fumes. The fumes overcame him and when Mr Sharrod returned he found him dead from asphyxiation. It was a tragedy for the family and once again, there was no compensation.

 

‘Mum was very upset and she was one of those women who were inclined to want to ‘put on a good show.’  Mum howled and moaned and when we went to church you could hear Mum’s singing all over the Church, and she didn’t have a very wonderful voice either. Once there was a priest who came out from Adelaide to put on what they called a ‘special week.’  One night his description of the Devil and Satan and his powers was such that people were almost too afraid to go out into the dark to go home.

 

After he had done all that they passed the collection plate around and Dick McKenzie, who liked everybody to know what he was doing, in p reparation for the collection, had gone to the bank and got a brand new pound note. While the collection plate was being passed around, he screwed up this note, and you could hear it all round the church, letting people know what he was putting in.

 

Dick McKenzie did have some good points, because every two years, Worth’s circus used to come through from Victoria to South Australia and they would have to change trains at Pinnaroo and they always put on a show at Pinnaroo. One year, on the night that they came through the Circus doubled its prices for admission. Dick McKenzie got a box and stood on it and urged the crowd not to pay the new price. He eventually won the day and they reduced the price back to what it was the previous year. One thing that Dick was, he was a great orator. At the same time I think he was the biggest rogue you could run into.

 

‘Dad used to have a winnower for cleaning wheat and Dick would come around to see Dad to get him to come out to clean his wheat. Dick would spend hours trying to beat dad down in price to get the job done cheap. Eventually Dick got into Parliament. My opinion was that he always used to look after Dick McKenzie.’

 

1918 Maynard was 9 years old and Dolly Doolan (O’Connor) was born.  ‘This was probably the year of the mouse plague. I can remember the mouse plague at Pinnaroo. In those days they used to stack the wheat in bags in put them in stacks.  The mice used to eat holes in the bags and then the wheat would run out and eventually the whole stack would collapse in one great big mess and the stench was terrible. One effect was that the school children broke out into sores, caused by contamination from the mice. I can remember how they used to try and trap the mice. The wheat stacks had ‘mouse proofing’ right around the stack, sheets of galvanised iron made into a fence about 2 ft high with part of the iron buried in the ground so that they could not dig underneath. But there were so many of them that they still managed to get in somehow. They also used to dig holes in the ground and   put kerosene tins in the holes and half fill them with water so that when the mice fell in they would drown. It worked but didn’t cure the problem.  In the morning all the tins would be full of dead mice but it didn’t seem to diminish the numbers. It was pretty devastating. The wheat was spoiled and it was no good for human consumption. They used it for stock feed.

 

They had the same problem down at Port Adelaide and that’s where Bro Jim Mansfield made his first lot of money. He bought the rights to clean up the wheat yards at Port Adelaide after the mice had been there. He cleaned it all up and sold it I don’t know where. He got rid of it and made a lot of money out of it. That is really what started him off. Previously the Mansfield’s were quite poor. Jim Mansfield started out as a grocer and he used to do his deliveries with a horse and cart. Sis Mansfield told me that she was never as happy as when they bought their first house which was a little semi-attached house.

 

When I was a kid, Dad used to cut my hair with the clippers. He cut it all off. They used to call me baldy. He did it because it was the easiest thing to do. I got a peaked cap and after that they used to call me conductor O’Connor. They used to tease the hell out of me when I was a kid. I was introverted and too shy to ignore it. I had one fight. I remember going over to the show grounds to have a fight with somebody. I don’t remember whether it was Les Phillips or Billy Pruice, though Les Phillips might have been on my side. We had a bit of a scrap but ended up friends.

 

School started at 9 o’clock, and used to go till four. In the winter time we used to play football on the school grounds and I was always the umpire. I was elected umpire and that was that. These were all my school mates, the Edward boys, Ray and Ken, Les Philips, Ivan Wakefield, Les Sheldon, Bert Bailey and various others. The Edwards boys were always the envy of a lot of us kids because their mother used to pack them a beautiful lunch and there was so much of it that they used to share it around with various mates. They were farmers and seemed to be doing all right. There was always a bit of a scramble to sit next to the Edwards boys at morning recess time. Our food was plainer than theirs because we were very hard up in those days.

 

1919 This was the year Benito Mussolini broke with the Socialist party and founded his own Fasci del Commatimento (Fascist) party in Italy.

This was also the year that Jean Williams was born and she was to become Maynard’s wife.

‘Dad at one stage became a wheat agent, buying wheat and he used to buy wheat at Panitya which is just over the border in Victoria and because he was a cripple, they got special permission for me to be absent from school for the first six weeks of each school year for the last two or three years of my school life. This proved to be a great handicap for my education. In one year after Mr Harfield died there was a new headmaster came to the school, and he used to blow a whistle for drill, to signify what he wanted us to do. Because I’d lost that first six weeks, in the drill session I would not know which way to go or what to do when he blew the whistle.  We used to drive a horse and dray out to Panitya, 5 miles, and I used to lead the horse in the whip, which is a system for taking the bags of wheat up onto the stacks so that the stack got higher and higher. I would do that all day long in the heat of summer and have to drive home the five miles after that, six days a week.

 

 

When we lived in the town we walked to and from school. It was not very far, no more than a quarter of a mile at times, depending on where we lived.  At home I slept in my bedroom with one grey blanket and one sheet underneath it that was all. The rest of our blankets were wheat bags sewn together. The illumination was candles in the bedroom and oil lamps in the dining room. There were all wood fires and we had to go out and cart wood with a horse and cart. Dad was pretty good at butchering meat and we used to go out to a farm and buy a sheep and bring it home and kill it and dress it. Occasionally we would have a pig. We used to salt it and Dad would sometimes make bacon out of it. Occasionally we would go out to a farm and help the farmer kill a bullock and we would get some of the meat for our help.

 

Mum cooked very plain cooking. Every Friday night we didn’t have meat and nearly every Friday it was tinned Salmon and whatever else went with it. In those days we believed that if you ate meat on Friday you would have a mortal sin on your soul. If you died without going to confession you would go straight to hell. That was the teaching of the Church. If you didn’t go to Church at least once a year, that would be a mortal sin too. I remember going to Church once and the sermon was on ‘Seek and ye shall find. Knock and it shall be opened unto you’ and Frank O’Laughlan, after he came out of Church said ‘I wonder if I went down to Pat Ryan and knocked on his door whether he would open up to me.’ Pat Ryan had one of the hotels and it was Sunday!

 

1920 Maynard 12 years old and this was the year he was confirmed in the Catholic Church. It was also the year the Nazi Party was organised in Germany.

 

1921 to 1923.  When the school inspector used to come up to Pinnaroo on a couple of occasions, Dad got the contract to take the inspector to the various schools. There was Shandos in the West, Yarraville in the North and Rosey Pine in the South and I used to drive the inspector out in a horse and sulkey, and I would on those days, sit in my grade in the particular school we were at. I was 14 in February the year I left school and I left school in May that year. I never ever got my qualifying certificate which was the final exam in primary school.

So that was the extent of my education. I think most of my education since has come from the knowledge of the truth and the association with the brothers and sisters in the meeting and experience. I think this brings a certain amount of refinement too. Maynard left school when he was 14 in 1923.

 

My sisters worked in domestic work most of the time until they got married. Connie used to work for the Parrs. They were bakers, and  Mrs Parr ran the baker’s shop.  Dorrie married a bloke called Bob Hood. He was a porter in the railways. Florrie married a man called Henry Obst, and he was a very good footballer and he was a short fat chap and they used to call him Cupie. Eventually he got killed in a shunting accident at Tailem Bend. Florrie then married John Gordon. He eventually died before she did and she died of cancer. Charles was the eldest brother. We used to call him Jonnie. He eventually died of a venereal disease through riotous living – He was a blacksmith and he was only 33 when he died. Arthur as I have said previously was killed when he was 12.  Then Connie and she used to work in domestic work on farms and she met and married Bert Simon and at one stage they went across to Tarcoola and they build 20 miles of the dog-proof fence. They eventually settled at Naracoorte. Bert was gassed in World War 1 and he worked in the railways at Naracoorte and eventually died. Connie would have been widowed for about 15 years before she died in 1989 at age 86.  To be continued.

 

The O’Connor family

The O’Connor Family