Family history

1 Comment Posted on by dapperdaveanddinkydi Cruising, Family history, Interesting stuff, Travel

Frank Couch, The Titanic and Southhampton’l

My maternal great grandparents migrated from Port Isaac in Cornwall (Port Wen of Doc Martin fame) to Melbourne Australia in 1862. Elizabeth Couch and Isaac Hawker had just newly married and had a baby son when they boarded The Accrington. They had worked as farm labourers at Roscarrock farm but all the males in Elizabeth’s family were fishermen, mariners or master mariners.

Elizabeth’s father was Francis Couch and her brother, Francis had a son, Frank Couch, making Frank my first cousin three times removed. Sorry, that became a little complicated. Anyhow, I claim him. He was born in 1884 but he died in 1912. That’s right. He was Able Seaman Couch which means he was an experienced sailor, as you would expect growing up in Port Isaac with his background, and he was in a lifeboat of The Titanic. The lifeboat sank, he died and is buried in Halifax, Canada.

Hence I’m interested in all things Titanic.

In Southampton, there is a both a park and a museum dedicated to The Titanic.

David didn’t want to explore and I thought the museum would be closed on Good Friday. We even had breakfast in the hotel because we thought everything would be closed. Anyway, I asked at the desk where the park was and the guy sent me off around the corner and up the main road. I don’t know if I misunderstood his accent or what but I ended up walking through a footpath of weeds which included nettles trying to grab me.

A couple of ladies who were at reception had said to head for the old church tower so I retraced my steps and headed for the tower. Thankfully it was at the museum.

To my surprise, Sea City Museum was open so in I went. I found Frank’s name on the list of crew. I had a quick walk through and took a heap of photos. (We are currently moored off St Peter’s Port and the internet is weak at the moment so I can’t seem to load photos. I’ll post them later.)

I then wandered through the old town which was lovely. All the shops were open and it was market day. With four ships in port, I guess they couldn’t afford not to open. I mislaid myself at that stage but eventually found David at the Ibis

Then we checked out and caught an Uber to the Gate 10 where we boarded the Oceania Marina, our favourite ship for our fourteen night cruise to Barcelona.

We’ve had a lovely first night – great dinner & a very enjoyable performance by one of the ship’s entertainers singing and dancing to some of the tunes from musical movies.

Shortly we will ride the tender across to explore St Peter’s Port. I’m looking forward to it.

7 Comments Posted on by dapperdaveanddinkydi Family history, Food, Interesting stuff

The secrets of The Marais, the old Jewish Quarter

We’ve wandered the old Jewish quarters of quite a few European cities and we always find them interesting. Today we did a walking tour with a young man named Emmanuel who grew up in a Jewish Family but is not a practicing Jew. His grandparents managed to escape Paris to America in 1942 because he was a physicist. Emanuel is a film maker & photographer and he personalised the tour by talking about specific people. It was very interesting.

Firstly we noticed the beautiful cakes in the window of the shop where we met. There a family from San Francisco joined us for the tour. We returned to this shop at the end of the tour to catch our metro but, of course, we took home some goodies to have with our cup of tea when we got home.

There are many beautiful old buildings in this area. Originally Dukes & wealthy people lived in them but during the revolution many escaped or were killed, leaving their homes empty and they became neglected and dilapidated making them cheap to rent. Jews migrating from Eastern Europe came to France as it had a policy of freedom of religion and they took up residence here.

The plaque above is a Memorial to the family who lived in this house in 1942 but were deported and exterminated because they were Jewish.

We were permitted to enter this synagogue which was used by Jewish people during World War II when they were not allowed to worship under the Occupation of the Nazis. It was a secret synagogue and is still used today. A young man was there studying the Torah.

It was lunch time and there were long queues at some shops which all sold kosher food.

During the occupation this was a Jewish school but the students were not taught any traditional Jewish learnings. One of the teachers was Joseph Migneret who assisted 252 of his pupils to escape from the Nazis and this plaque honours him. I think that number is right but I could be wrong.

The street below had its name changed to honour non Jewish French citizens who assisted Jews to escape the Holocaust and did this without any prospect of payment. As you can see there are many names on the wall of the street which honours them. It is the Street of The Just.

Emmanuel had planned to finish the tour at Notre Dame but all the streets are closed off. I imagine this is to allow investigation of the fire and to begin the clean up and rescue of whatever can be saved. David and I went as close as we could to get the following photo

And I’m very happy to report that I found a very delicious, traditional onion soup and now I feel we can leave Paris happy tomorrow. We’ve been to Giverny to see those spectacular gardens of Monet. We’ve seen his wonderful work in Musée de L’Orangerie and his work as well as that of the other impressionists in the Museé D’Orsay and at the Foundation Louis Vuitton. We’ve had our incredible day in the Somme with Myriam discovering the story of our family members who fought in WWI.

We’ve bought and eaten delicious food from the markets and restaurants. We’ve wandered some interesting streets and laneways. We’ve loved our cute little apartment and tomorrow it is time to move on. Will we ever return to Paris? Who knows. But I can tell you that I love Paris in the Spring time – in fact anytime!

2 Comments Posted on by dapperdaveanddinkydi Family history

Cruising with Oceania Cruises

We love cruising with Oceania! The food is amazing and the crews are so helpful and so friendly – always up for a joke – and they call you by name which is just so nice.

We have cruised on three of their beautiful ships, the Regatta and the Sirena (two of the smaller ones taking 684 passengers) and the Marina which can take 1250 passengers and has 750 crew to take care of you.

Our first Oceania experience was cruising the Baltic on the Marina in 2016. Previous to this, we had done several river cruises and cruised the Mediterranean on the Queen Elizabeth in 2012. We wanted to cruise the Baltic and we were looking for a cruise that visited the ports of Riga in Latvia and Klapedia in Lithuania because David’s family migrated to Australia from that area around 1888. How lucky were we that the ship we found on that route was the Marina? We had a wonderful time. The crew were so much fun and they made us feel that they were enjoying the cruise as much as we were.

In February 2017 we cruised on the Sirena from Papeete in Tahiti to Sydney in Australia. Unfortunately we encountered some unpleasant weather but the crew were very helpful and we thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the cruise.

Last year, our cruise to Alaska on Regatta ended very prematurely because I became ill and was taken off the ship at Ketchikan & flown by air ambulance to Bellingham in Washington State. The lovely doctor and nurse on the ship looked after me so well as did all of the medical staff and ambulance staff that took care of me. Even the passengers on the ship were amazing. I was bleeding internally and may have needed a blood transfusion so the doctor put out a call for passengers prepared to give the right type of blood to come to the surgery and, even though it was 9:30 on a Friday night, many people came and donated their blood. I found this very humbling. If you read this blog and you were one of those people, I thank you very sincerely.

You’ve probably heard or seen Oceania’s claim to “The Finest Cuisine at Sea” and you may be wondering if it’s true. Well, as I mentioned earlier most of our ocean cruises have been with Oceania so we can’t really confirm the truth of that claim. But what we can tell you is that we love the food and the total dining experience. We love that there is no extra charge for eating in the speciality restaurants. We love that we can go on line a few weeks before a cruise and book our nights in those speciality restaurants. We love that you can have breakfast, lunch and dinner in the Grand Dining Room any time you please during the hours it is open. We love that you can sit anywhere and choose to share your table with friends or with strangers or sit by yourselves and have a romantic dinner for two. We love that they cater to people with particular dietary needs without fuss.

Lobster in Polo Grill
Dessert in Red Ginger

Unless we have an early excursion, we love to have a long leisurely breakfast in the Grand Dining Room where David loves to order the grilled lamb chops. We love the grilled lobster served in the Polo Grill. What I really love is anything on the menu in Red Ginger, the Asian Restaurant. The decor is red and black and the food is simply amazing. That’s my favourite! We tend to have lunch in the Waves Grill so that we can have a smaller snack rather than a big meal but there are so many delicious choices in the buffet that we do still have a larger lunch that we planned. This is why we have never made it to afternoon tea which is highly recommended by others. On Oceania, Barista’s serves great Illy flat whites and all tea, coffee and soft drinks are included.

On 19th April we will be back on the Marina for a 14 day cruise from Southhampton to Barcelona. We’ve booked our restaurants and sorted out our port days and are counting the days – but before that we have seven lovely days in Paris. How lucky are we?

9 Comments Posted on by dapperdaveanddinkydi 50s & 60s, Family history, Food

Christmas Holidays at Donnybrook Queensland in the 1950s

The long summer holidays began here in Queensland this weekend and we heralded it with a traditional game of cricket, a swim in the pool and a BBQ in the backyard at the home of my daughter and her husband and three kids.  It was a wonderful evening!

It made me think of my Christmas holidays when I was a child.  I grew up as an only child of parents who were mostly running their own small businesses in very small towns.  Between 1957 and 1962 we lived in a small fishing village called Donnybrook about 20kms east of Caboolture which is about 60km north of Brisbane.  The business was multi-faceted.  We had one of the two corner stores and an unofficial post office and Dad was fishing and crabbing professionally.  We also had a fleet of boats for hire: 12 boats with inboard motors (as opposed to the outboard motors of today), 30 dinghies and one large motor launch for towing the dinghies out into the bay when fishing clubs hired them.

My Dad, Bert RICHARDSON at Donnybrook

As I remember there were only about nine houses that were permanently occupied and probably about another dozen that were holiday homes.  So there were only about 13 kids who lived there and caught the old red truck to school in Caboolture each school day. I was pretty much a loner. I loved to read, loved doing maths, loved to row a dinghy out into the middle of the channel and fish.  On weekends I would help serve in the shop and would have to clean the boats after they were returned by our customers. Mum couldn’t drive and Dad was always busy so there was never an opportunity to do any after school activities. I guess it was a pretty lonely existence.

But everything changed in the school holidays, especially in the long summer holidays.  The park area became a city of tents and there were kids everywhere.  Most brought their bikes and we formed an unofficial bike club and we would ride and ride.  Of course, there were more customers to serve and more boats to clean.  How many lollies would I have sold?  They were all displayed in tall glass bottles and you’d open the bottle and count the lollies into little white paper bags.  This was before the days of decimal currency and kids could get so many lollies for threepence or sixpence.  You could buy three conversation lollies and three raspberries and three chico babies all for threepence (about two or three cents).  Those delicious bags of sherbet with a liquorice straw would be another threepence.  I was never allowed to help myself to the lollies but had to buy them out of my pocket money of a shilling a week (about 10 cents).

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is ALLEY-Dianne-FAy-Bike-Club-Donnybrook.jpg
Some bike club members.  I’m the one in the hat!
My little foxie Pete was a bike club member too!

We didn’t have electricity at Donnybrook but we had our own generator beside the house.  We would have to keep it running to keep the icecreams frozen.  These weren’t delivered in refrigerated trucks but rather Dad would drive to Brisbane in our ute and visit the Pauls Icecream Factory beside the Brisbane River where he would buy little single  serve buckets of icecream to sell in the shop.  Pauls would pack them in dry ice in a green cylindrical shaped container about a metre tall and about 50cm in diameter. 

Of course, there were no powered tent sites so campers used kerosene lamps and they needed ice for their eskies.  Ice would be delivered to our shop in blocks about 80cm by 80cm and 12cm deep in brown hessian bags. The campers would have ordered their ice from us and we would deliver it to their tent by wheelbarrow.

The boats would often break down and Dad would have to fix them.  I remember our oven in the big slow combustion stove often being filled, not with cakes or roast dinners but with carburettors from the boats. They’d get wet and wouldn’t work again until they’d been properly dried out in the oven.  On a hot summer’s day, in a small fibro house with the fire raging in the stove it became very hot and unpleasant.

Each Sunday during the holidays, the Methodist Church would come to visit and would run a Sunday School Service under the big old trees.  All the kids used to attend as it was a bit of entertainment –didn’t matter if you were Methodist or not, religious or not.  They told good stories and we all sang along to the piano accordion.  I can remember belting out “  Jesus loves me, this I know…….”.

Up on the hill lived three generations of the one fishing family in four homes surrounded by big old mango trees.  They weren’t any of the fancy new tasty varieties – just the plain old stringy ones but they bore masses of fruit and we thought they were delicious. Every year, I would push the wheelbarrow up the hill a few times and pick up mangoes from the ground until the barrow was full.  Then I’d push it home, peel a few, run the bath and climb into it and devour the mangoes.  Yum!  I’m salivating at the thought of it. Then Dad would make the most delicious mango chutney from the rest.

One of my favourite jobs was helping Dad to empty the crabpots.  He’d have them scattered through the creeks in locations where he thought there were plenty of crabs.  We’d be up and out on the water in one of the inboards by daylight. Sunrise over the water was always beautiful.  I’d steer the boat alongside the pots, Dad would pull the pot in, empty out the crabs, put his foot on the back of each one in turn and tie its claws into its body and put in a wet hessian bag.  When all the crabs were restrained he would rebait the pot with beef bones and toss it back in.  I loved eating the catch, too!  If I had one meal left and could choose what to eat, it would definitely be mud crab on bread and butter, as chilli crab,…… any way really!

I love the ocean and loved living near the sea.  I think this was the favourite part of my childhood.  My Mum, that is my Adopted Mum hated it but I loved it. I still do and really enjoy living in Lota, Brisbane just 500 metres from Moreton Bay.  I wonder if this is a throwback to my Couch ancestors who were Master Mariners and fisherman in Port Isaac in Cornwall?   I reckon it is!

         

 

2 Comments Posted on by dapperdaveanddinkydi Family history

Enjoying our couple of weeks in Melbourne

Surprise! Surprise! It’s all been about the delicious food & coffees, of course. We are staying in an Airbnb on the 21st floor of an apartment block in South Melbourne. It’s very comfortable & has most things we need including a very very comfortable bed & it’s very quiet.

Across the road is a wonderful eatery/cake shop, Crux & Co, which we have visited a few times. This is my sweet potato & zucchini fritter which I had for breakfast yesterday.

After that I walked in the lovely botanical gardens just near here for a couple of hours with my lovely niece Chris.

This morning we went to the Immigration Museum which has very interesting displays of the various waves of migrants who have come to Australia. We then wandered around Southbank & had lunch at The Atlantic.

The seafood was lovely but I lashed out & had their pecan pie with pumpkin & mandarin for dessert. I wished I could have licked the plate. I think it was the best dessert I’ve ever eaten. Wow!

Crown Casino is amazing. The decor is all glitter but there were so many people gambling away their hard won cash. There must be thousands of poker machine & there were lots of croupiers looking bored to tears waiting for suckers to come along to lose their money.

During the week we caught the tram down to St Kilda &, of course we had coffee & cake in one of the famous Acland Street cake shops. (We love the trams. It’s so easy to get around with our 7 day MYKI pass.).

Another day we visited the Melbourne zoo which I found a little disappointing

We love the Queen Vic markets & went there to stock up on Friday. Fortunately it’s on our tram line as we had lots to carry home.

We still have another week of exploring. We’re looking forward to that!

Leave a comment Posted on by dapperdaveanddinkydi Family history

Safely home again

It was certainly an eventful trip& we are very pleased to be home as usual but we do have some regrets that our beautiful cruise never really got underway & we totally missed our Rocky Mountaineer journey.

However we are very grateful for the wonderful medical assistance we received everywhere. It could not have been better

We really enjoyed our week in San Francisco & we loved the time we had with the family on Vancouver Island. Kay & Ben are great people & our time there was our highlight of the trip. The beauty of the mountains, forests & waterways of the areas around Bellingham & on Vancouver Island will stay with us forever. I loved it!

1 Comment Posted on by dapperdaveanddinkydi Family history

Quick look around Victoria & a lovely family bbq & so very sad to say goodbye.

Yesterday Ben & Kay gave us a whistle stop tour of Victoria itself before we went to the home of my cousin Jane & her husband Don for a family BBQ. All of the Victoria family were there but I was sad to miss the Tofino crew. We had fish & chips for lunch at Barbs on Fishermen’s Wharf which is something you have to do along with visit the Gardens so we did that well.

Here’s some pics of the day:

o

We are in the lounge at Vancouver Airport now after a bus, ferry, bus ride from Victoria. It will be a log trip home but hopefully an uneventful one.

It was sad to say goodbye to Kay & Ben but we are really looking forward to seeing them in Brisbane early next year.