Fay Berry’s Story – Chapter 8 -THE BACKGROUND TO THE DANGERFIELD CLAN

Maynard O’Connor was not much interested in the Dangerfield history. The reason of course (though he never told us the reason, but we all worked it out over time) was that he was a little bitter at the ‘treatment’ he had received when he, a poor Catholic O’Connor, had wanted to marry Jean Williams (Dangerfield) a Protestant and from a higher ‘social class’ to the O’Connor’s.  Australia doesn’t and didn’t have much ‘class consciousnesses’ but in Dad’s case he felt the differences on a number of different levels, both religious and economic. Maynard had of course become a CD after Grandma Williams (Dangerfield) died so she never knew that her darling daughter had married Maynard O’Connor.  I wonder how her attitude to her son-in-law would have changed if she had known that he would become a CD?

Jean and Maynard settled in Adelaide, Maynard was baptised and began to attend the Halifax Street Adelaide meeting.  By doing this our family was in weekly contact, at least by sight, with many of the Dangerfield clan.  It could have been possible for us kids to grow up in the company of lots of our cousins, but because of dad’s attitude, it took me many years to even know that the Dangerfield’s were cousins. I actually remember the time when this knowledge ‘hit me.’ I was at a kitchen evening and all the YP were sitting around the hall watching the activities in the centre of the floor. One of the games required partners and my cousin Roger Gore (his mother was Ev Dangerfield) came and asked me to partner him.  I don’t remember what the game was but it was a hectic rough and tumble sort of game and I was good at it and so was Roger.  Whatever it was, we won and when I went to sit down it occurred to me, ‘He is my COUSIN!’ and I sat there for a full ten minutes trying to absorb what that meant to me.

Because dad had angst towards the Dangerfield’s, it had an effect on the photographs we had at home. My brothers being avid photographers, we had boxes of negatives and prints.  Mum was also the repository of the ‘family photos.’  I remember in our home at 12 Kenilworth Road Parkside there was a beautiful oval picture frame, right in the centre of the room and above the fireplace, and in it was a photo of my mother as a girl of about 7 or 8 years old.  She was so starched in her beautiful lacy clothes, made by Maud Dangerfield (of course) that she could hardly put her hands down to her sides.  There was also a beautiful, beautiful, expensive album of photos of the Dangerfield family. I LOVED that album and I treasured it.  Trouble is, so did Mum, and she was always trying to get it back from me, and we had this on-going battle.  She would take the album, I would retrieve it.

Eventually I gave up and Mum kept the album.  But Dad? Well he was not interested in these precious photos. They probably ended up in a box in the shed or some such and so one day I asked Mum could I look at the photos and they were not to be found.  I was quite devastated.  I don’t think Mum and I spoke for a day or so.  I wish there was some machine like today’s scanners that could take my memories and print out photographs from them. (If my inventor brother was still alive I would ask him to ‘find a way.’)  My point out of all this is that it wasn’t until years later, some few years before Dad died that he became ‘history conscious’ and then he found and assembled all the photos he could find.  Somewhere along the way his attitude to the Dangerfield’s had melted away. My dear Dad also wrote as much of his memories as he could down and gave the family copies.  They too are somewhere in my files to be recovered and stored.

Since then I have got to know and become good friends with many of the Dangerfield’s such as Carol and Adrian Dangerfield and Lucy Dangerfield, Heather and Rick Pillion, Trevor and Alison Gore and the rest of the Gore brothers and wives, Rex and Di Dangerfield, Carol Brown and Chris and Alex Crawford and stacks of other Dangerfield’s, too many to number.  In fact something I learned early on was this, that since our ‘Ancestor’ Dangerfield skipped ship in Adelaide in (year unknown to me) Australia there have been no other Dangerfield’s who have come to OZ apart from him and so EVERY Dangerfield whose name is in a telephone directory in Australia is in some way or another a relative of all the other Dangerfield’s in Australia.  This can NOT be said about the O’Connor’s.  Lots of the branches of the O’Connor family tree came out from Ireland and they have spread like rabbits ever since.

Well, I can see that I haven’t even started to write about the history of the Dangerfield’s.  This is just a background to the background of the Dangerfield Clan.

Adrian Dangerfield and Deb Hurn (my daughter) and descendant of Maud Williams (Dangerfield). Photo taken at Rex and Di Dangerfields home 2011.