Woodbines
Adah Beattie was born in Gravesend, Kent, in early-1852, and came to Western Australia as an infant with her parents William, a Scottish tailor, and his English wife Jane nee Clark, and two siblings. The family left England on the sailing ship Clara as part of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission scheme. Sadly, Adah’s older sister Beatrice (3) died enroute, before the ship docked at Fremantle on 3 September 1853.
The Beatties first went to York but were soon down in Perth where Ada’s sister Sarah was born in 1855, and where William soon set up shop as a tailor.
As a young woman Adah became a school teacher and was assigned to Perth’s Protestant Orphanage on Adelaide Terrace, near the Causeway, which was opened by Bishop Hale on 1 June 1868. Initially Adah taught the nine destitute orphans soon in residence but, within a year, there were 17 under her instruction. Their learning habits were closely observed by the church, and high praise for Adah’s diligence duly noted in newspapers.
On 24 May 1871 in St George’s Cathedral, Adah (19) married York-born painter, glazier, and home decorator Benjamin Kenworthy (24). His parents, Joseph and Ann, had arrived on the Trusty in December 1842 as part of the Australind settlement scheme.
Adah and Benjamin first lived in Perth where Ada’s mother Jane died after a short, painful illness in October 1871. The next year, Adah and Benjamin’s son Herbert3 was born. In 1873 Benjamin took up the license for the Prince of Wales Inn in Mahogany Creek (now the Mahogany Creek Inn) where two daughters were born – Edith (1874), and Gertrude (1876).
In around 1878 Benjamin gave up being a publican and moved down to Henry Street, Fremantle. There, he returned to his trade and opened premises in High Street, offering services as a plumber, painter, glazier [wall]paper-hanger, and house decorator. Six more children were born over the next dozen years in Fremantle, including Grace (1879), Benjamin (1881), Edward (1884), Leonard (1886), Ada (1889) and Ivy (1891). The family’s devotion to the Anglican Church continued and, in time, all attended Sunday School at St John’s Anglican Church, Fremantle.
In 1885 Benjamin moved his business from Fremantle to Perth, opposite the Shamrock (later Savoy) Hotel on Hay Street. He often subcontracted other painters and plasterers for his various jobs in Fremantle, Perth, and on Rottnest, but financial difficulties proved problematic and, in February 1886, he was pronounced bankrupt.
Adah and Benjamin then moved to Swan Street, North Fremantle, near the harbour. With no Anglican Church nearby, they campaigned for, and are mentioned in newspapers as founders of St Mary’s Anglican Church, around 1km to the north. The foundation stone was laid by Bishop Charles Riley in March 1895, in one of his first deeds after arriving in WA a few weeks before. The church opened in September 1895.
In April 1896, aged just 48, Benjamin suffered a massive stroke causing paralysis. He succumbed a few days later, on 13 April, and was buried at Fremantle Cemetery.
Adah’s oldest son, Herbert, had married in 1893, but she still had eight children in her care, ranging in age from four to 18. In 1897 Gertrude married, followed in 1899 by Edith.
On 9 February 1898, Adah secured a block of land on Johnston Street, on the south western edge of the new subdivision of Peppermint Grove. She sat on it for six years before contracting Fremantle architect Ronald Oldham6 to design her home. The West Australian of 13 June 1904 carried an invitation to tender for his design for a stone and brick residence.
The building of Adah’s simple colonial stone bungalow, with brick quoining and bullnosed verandah, began later that year. In 1905 she moved from Swan Street to her Johnston Street home, which she named Woodbines; a common name for the fragrant, twining, European honeysuckle Lonicera periclymenum.8 Still likely living at home were up to six of her younger children: Grace (26), Cecil (23), Edward (21), Leonard (18), Ada (16) and Ivy (14).
Adah died at Woodbines on 9 March 1917. Aged 65, she had raised her family and, by that time, had 20 grandchildren from her five married children. Described as an ‘Old Colonist’, she was buried at Karrakatta Cemetery and left her estate of £799 (around $19,000 today) to middle son Edward (33), who was still living at Woodbines with sisters Grace (38), Ada (28), and Ivy (26).10 Four of the trees still in the garden today, which provide a home to many, many birds, date from Adah’s time at Woodbines.
Ivy married in 1918, Ada in 1920, Edward in 1922, and Grace in 1926. Edward remained living at Woodbines with his wife Vera nee John, until early 1934, when it was offered for sale in The West Australian of 20 April 1934 by public auction on 24 April. Described as a “comfortable Cottesloe … Brick and Stone House, containing 5 rooms and kitchen, with detached WB washhouse with copper and troughs, WB stables and workshop, with concrete floor, and asbestos garage. Grounds are laid down lawns and concrete paths.”
The ad explained the property was close to the Perth-Fremantle road and offered terms of an existing mortgage of £400 could remain, with the balance in cash.
It does not appear Woodbines sold at auction, as it seems to have been rented to a series of tenants over the next few years. The first was severely ailing Boer War veteran and respected shipping identity Charles Dalton, who moved in from his East Fremantle home in May, and died in the home in June.
In late 1934, British civil engineer and WWI veteran Gideon Tubman and his wife Mary, a nursing matron, moved in. Then in 1936, aged 51, Gideon gave up engineering, and he and Mary moved into the Perth Library and Museum Quarters as caretakers.
The next tenant and owner was Lillian May von der Heyde (anglicised to Hyde during WWII).
Lillian Midgley on wedding day to Friederich Van Der Heyde, 1909
Courtesy her great, great granddaughter, Ashleigh Douglas.
Born Lillian Midgley, she had married German national margarine manufacturer Friederich Wilhelm Albertus Von Der Heyde in 1909. They lived in Fremantle proper, as well as in North and East Fremantle, and had five children over the next seven years: Ivy (1909), Helen (1911), Frieda (1913), Dorothy (1915), and Friederich Jnr (1916), whose name was later anglicised to Frederick – but he was better known as Derryck.
The advent of WWI and associated anti-German sentiment caused the beginning of the Von Der Heyde’s financial troubles, and Friederich was declared bankrupt in 1925. The world slid into the Great Depression at the end of 1929, the effects of which rippled through to Australia in 1930. In the early 1930s older daughters Ivy and Helen took up nursing at the Wahroonga Sanitorium in NSW; better known as the Sydney Adventist Hospital or ‘The San’. Frieda became an accountant, Frederick became a linotype operator and, in 1937, youngest daughter Dorothy married Ronald Knott in Fremantle.
Early the same year, Lillian purportedly told her husband she’d sold their home in Point Walter Road, Bicton, and he would have to find somewhere else to live. She moved in to Johnston Street with Freida (25) and Derryck (22).
Lillian bought the Johnston Street house from Edward Kenworthy in March 1941.12 In July 1947 Friederich divorced her for desertion and, that October, Lillian sold the home to English post-war migrant Muriel Constance Elsie Williams who lived there with her second husband, Derek, and their children for the next half-dozen years.
In 1953, the home was bought by engineer Arthur Thomson and his wife, Joan, who taught Science at St Hilda’s, who owned the home for the next 35 years.13 During that time they modified the home four times, though none of the changes altered the four front rooms of the original cottage. They built a brick laundry, bathroom and workshop to replace the original weatherboard stables and workshop, added three rooms to the rear and added a carport on the south-west corner.
Friederich ‘Derryck’ Van Der Heyde on enlistment during WWII, c1940.
Courtesy National Archives of Australia.
With ‘old’, then, not valued as ‘heritage’ is today, the Thomsons sought to modernise their home. They removed the verandah, painted the original limestone white, and replaced the corrugated iron roof with bright blue tiles. They also removed the original, wooden front windows and replaced them with larger aluminium-framed windows, which unfortunately destroyed the original brick quoining around them.
In 1988, with Arthur in his late 80s and Joan in her mid-70s, the home was described as ‘almost derelict’. It was advertised for sale, for demolition, and the Thomsons retired down to Waikiki.
It was fortunate the buyers of this home, who still own it now, had just returned from several years in Sydney, where they had renovated an 1898 home in Hunters Hill. Thankfully they saw the beauty in this decrepit old house when it was at its worst, and set about saving it. In their words:
“We decided to renovate 11 Johnston Street in the style of the stone cottages built by the French stonemasons in Hunters Hill in the 1850s, with wide wraparound verandahs, and French doors leading onto them. We were able to bring a lot of old building material from Sydney, including doors and fireplaces. The new return verandah to three sides, including posts and fretwork, came from the demolition of a grand old house in Cottesloe, as did some of the French doors. Others we had made to match, in Perth. The front door with its beautiful stained glass, a feature of the house, we brought over from Balmain, Sydney. The front fence came from Melbourne. We had the white painted, stone front wall stripped, only to find that the brick quoining around the front door, windows, and corners of the house had been partly destroyed in a previous renovation. This decorative effect, so typical of stone cottages in Peppermint Grove, had to be rendered over, in the Hunters Hill style.”
In 1988, they added a skillion-roofed wing to the north-west, which included bedrooms, a bathroom and laundry. On the north-eastern corner they built an ensuite bathroom. Over the years they have demolished the Thomsons’ old workshop/garage, and replaced it; added a bay window to the dining room in 1996; a study in the rear wing in 1998; widened the bay window in the meals area in 2001, and carried out other minor improvements.
Friederich ‘Derryck’ Van Der Heyde working as a linotype operator, c1940.
Courtesy his great grand niece, Ashleigh Douglas.
The current owners have successfully brought this beautiful old home into the 21st century and look forward to living here for many years to come.
By Shannon Shannon Lovelady, PLC Archivist, Writer, and Historian