Submitted by Jane Kirby, Melbourn u3a
In 1951, when I was five years old my parents told my sister and I that we were going to live in Australia, where this was we did not know and we weren’t shown a map to tell us more. My father wanted better job opportunities and my mother thought we would have a better education.
Tickets were paid for using the savings I had regularly taken to school at the beginning of every week to buy savings stamps showing portraits of the infant Prince Charles and Princess Anne. My mother took us for health checks to Australia House in the Strand in London. Once we had been cleared and accepted as immigrants and my father had had an interview and been given a job we were vaccinated against smallpox.
Packing and the dispersal of unwanted household items began. My parents had been told that some electrical items could not be taken but it turned out that some things eg the iron could have been used.
I started a new term at school but by the end of September we had left our prefab in West London and were staying with grandparents near Leicester. The day came when the big, black village taxi drew up at the front door and we all piled in. A lot of the neighbours who had know my mother all her life turned out to wave goodbye and Lizzie Biggs who had a sweet shop nearby gave us several tubes of Rowntree’s Fruit Gums.
We left my grandmother crying on Leicester station to be met by another tearful grandmother who waved us goodbye as the Boat Train left Liverpool Street Station. We were never to see this grandmother again and at the time there were no thoughts of being able to return to the UK for a holiday as air flights and sea journeys were both long and expensive.
The Boat Train headed for Tilbury Docks and en route my mother held a baby for a young mother while she prepared a feed for it. This woman was going out to Sydney to be reunited with her husband who had travelled out in advance.
The ship, the SS Ranchi, had been used as a troop carrier during the war and there were still large communal cabins for ten people with women and young children together and men and older boys in others. I had an upper bunk above a small boy while my sister and mother shared another. I only have a vague memory of the others in the cabin although there must have been several women from one family that included the grandmother. Washing facilities were communal and baths could only be taken with the permission of the Bath Steward. Cold bathwater was sea water.
SS Ranchi
The voyage began passing the White Cliffs of Dover and the Isle of Wight and eventually we reached the Mediterranean and our first port of call, Ceuta, a Spanish town in North Africa. The weather got warmer as we sailed along the Mediterranean. There were school lessons for children on board possibly given by teachers who were also passengers but they kept us in the habit of learning on what was to be a seven week voyage.
Port Said at the mouth of the Suez Canal was exciting. We arrived when it was dark and weighed anchor in the harbour, there was a lot of noise and different smells and small boats crammed round loaded with Egyptian souvenirs, leather items, baskets of all sizes and many things woven from cotton and wool. We were taken ashore on small boats and left to wander through small crowded streets full of stalls and more noise and new smells. It was exciting as we were able to walk around in the dark and have so many new experiences. The grandmother in our cabin decided that she didn’t wasn’t to go ashore but that she would sit guard by the porthole armed with the long handle of a warming pan my mother had decided she could not be without. By the next morning we had started out journey down the Suez Canal.
The banks of the canal were sandy and we could see local people going about their daily lives. Unfortunately our ship had arrived too late to join a convoy and we became stuck, presumably on a sandbank. We were there for a week before we could be dragged off, water became very scarce and we were strictly rationed. One day my mother used a small glass of water with liberal doses of Dettol to wash my sister, herself and me. Very sadly the baby who my mother had held on the Boat Train died as it’s mother had not been able to sterlise feeding bottles, she left the ship and I hope was able to join her husband as soon as possible.
Once we left the canal we stopped in Aden, then a British Protectorate, and on to Colombo, capital of the then Ceylon now Sri Lanka. We visited the zoo followed by a visit to the beach at Mount Lavinia. Mum hadn’t packed swimsuits so my sister and I skinny dipped in the warm Indian Ocean until my mother realised that there could be sharks nearby and we had to make a very quick exit.
Once we had left Colombo there was a long voyage across the Indian Ocean. On board there were deck games to play as well as table tennis or just walking round the deck. We crossed the Equator and a visit from King Neptune, involved lots of cold porridge and dunking in the pool for those brave enough to take part. My parents got to know other immigrants but, apart from one couple who we met up with once, we were all to go in different directions once we had landed.
Our first experience of Australia was Freemantle and a visit to nearby Perth. The next port of call was Melbourne where a business contact of a relative of mum showed us around the city including a visit to Cook’s cottage in a big park.
Sydney Harbour Bridge
From there we continued to Sydney through the amazing sight of the Harbour and Harbour Bridge. At that time the site of the Opera House was occupied by the tram depot and Circular Quay was totally different to what you see now. We docked on the far side of the Bridge where my father’s uncle had planned to meet us as we landed. Unfortunately this meeting didn’t happen and we were taken straight to the flat in a Sydney suburb that my father’s new employees had furnished form us to rent.
So began our new life, my mother enjoyed not having to queue for rationed food and to be able to buy as much sugar and butter as she wanted. We got to know my great uncle and aunt and their family and my mother had a second cousin and her husband living near Sydney Harbour who we met often. We made friends at school, which was very old fashioned compared to the one I’d been at in England, and in the local Congregational church we attended. Sadly Mum soon decided that Australian life wasn’t for her and began to save to return ‘home’ which we did four years later.