They sailed from England in the New Zealand vessel
Tienui around the Cape of Good Hope. It was a long and difficult voyage.
They sailed up the Derwant River in Hobart, Tasmania beofre the final
leg of the voyage to New Zealand and realized they could go no further.
They disembarked and made Tasmania their home, starting the Tasmanian
branch of the Brinsmead family.
This page and those linked to it will describe
Victor and Elizabeth's life and the growth of their family. Thanks go to
Joan Brown for much of the information set out in this account.
Victor and Elizabeth Brinsmead's descendents
Victor Brinsmead was born in St. Pancras, London
in 1887. At the time his father was working for John Brinsmead and Sons
at their piano factory in London. We do not know a lot about his life
before leaving for Australia. At one point he studied law. He also
learned the baker's trade, perhaps from his brother Frank who ran a
bakery in London. Victor went to sea as a baker at sea, working on
a transatlantic cable-laying ship.
So far we have been unable to find the marriage
record, but in about 1908 he married Elizabeth Cook and started a
family. The first two children were born in England. Elizabeth came from
Yorkshire and apparently had two brothers. Family legend is that she was
connected to the same family as James Cook. She was born a mere one
pound and remained a small trim person of under five feet all her life.
Her son Reg used to teaze her, taking advantage of her size and lifting
her up onto the kitchen cupboard until she would shout to be put back
down. She had short jet black hair.
In 1913 the young family left for New Zealand to
join Frank but stopped in Hobart. They spent the first night at
Inglehall in downtown Hobart, now owned by the National Trust in the
downtown Hobart. Their early addresses in Hobart, according to the
directories were:
- 1914 Harold Street, Cascades
- 1915-1916 Store, 41 Adelaide Street
- 1917-1918 14 Napolean Road, Battery Point
- 1919-1921 46 Scott Street, New Town
They
also lived on Smith Street, North Hobart.
Victor worked as a baker and pastry cook with the
Haywoods' Biscuit factory. He travelled a lot with the bakery trade
around the state and judges cakes for the Royal Hobart Show. The picture
is of a miniature cake he made and iced for a raffle in support of a
hospital in Northern Tasmania - a replica of the hospital itself made 62
years ago and still kept as a prized possession by his son Mickey.
After 15 years with the bakery, Victor decided to
go into business on his own behalf and opened a shop in the building
once occupied by the oddly named hotel "Help me into the World"
on Liverpool Street. He ran the business through the depression years,
maintaining a good business despite helping out and forgiving the bills
of those down on their luck in those tough times. After developing a
hernia lifting bags of flour, Victor decided to sell the business to
Flakemans who carried it on for many years. During the war years he
worked for Tanner's Bakery in Kingston.
The family's next move was to Blackman's Bay,
where they bought a lot of land. After that, the moved to Mount Nelson
which at the time still involved a frontier existence. At that time only
five or six families lived there. Victor built a stone cottage there and
built a road connecting it to the Nelson Road intersection. The house
burnt down in the 1967 bushfires.
Brother Frank Hearn Brinsmead and his wife Queenie
(Fanny Nichols Dench) visited with Victor and his family
several times. This picture, taken at Mount Nelson, Tasmania
in 1930 includes, top row left to right: Elizabeth and
Victor Brinsmead, their daughter Ellenor (Nellie) and
Frank and Queenie Brinsmead from New Zealand, bottem row
left to right: Victor and elizabeth's children Douglas,
Alfred Ernest (Mickey) and Florrie.
|
Reg Brinsmead owned the first car on Mount Nelson. This car
was used for all manner of things including driving his dad
places, his business as a refrigeration engineer and as the
local ambulance. It was on one of these ambulance runs into the
Royal Hobart Hospital that Reg met his future wife Irene
Hepburn. Reg Brinsmead is on the far left and his father Victor
Brinsmead on the far right of this picture taken in 1930 at
Mount Nelson. |
