Guy Martin Ward
Ship name / Flight number: SS Otranto
Arrival date: 26/03/1957
I was born on 11 January, 1939 in Dartford, Kent. I’m not sure how my parents met as my mother, Ivy, worked as a telephonist on a switchboard, in Holborn, London and my father lived and worked in Erith, Kent. Perhaps the connection was through Fraser and Chalmers Engineering Company, as both my grandfathers worked for them – one in Erith, and the other in South Africa. My father, Jack, did an apprenticeship in metallurgy with Fraser and Chalmers. They offered him a job in Borneo, but he wasn’t keen on going there, so he took up farming instead.
In 1938, my father leased some land from J Parish & Co, the owners of Erith loam quarry. He built a mushroom farm on the high side of the quarry, on Carlton Road. The mushrooms were grown in raised beds and I worked there on weekends and holidays. My father employed a manager when we went to South Africa.
When I was seven years old, and my younger sisters, Ruth and Naomi, were about 5 and 3 years old respectively, my family moved to South Africa. My mother’s parents and siblings were living in Johannesburg and my mother wanted to see them again. I was sent to a boarding school for two years and I hated it. I couldn’t speak Afrikaans, so I couldn’t communicate with anyone and I ran away once. My education suffered.
I’ll never forget seeing how the white South Africans treated the black people. Apartheid was in full swing whilst I was there in 1946-48. Two buses would pull up – one for the black people and one for the whites – the bus for the white people would be half empty, while the black people were trying to cram into an over-crowded bus. It was so unfair.
On our return from South Africa, I went to Northumberland Heath Secondary school for three years. My father purchased land at 312 Brook Street, Erith, not far from the other mushroom farm, specifically so he could implement the “rapid composting method”. He applied his scientific brain to the process of cultivating mushrooms and was able to significantly shorten the growing period by cultivating mushroom compost and growing them in used fish trays instead of beds. The trays were 1.00 x 0.61 x 0.15 metres, and came to the London fish market from Denmark full of fish. My father purchased the empty trays from the London fish market, filled them with his mushroom compost, then transported them and sold them to Mowlems market gardeners at Lower Belvedere, who were now the owners of the trays containing the un-grown mushrooms.
When the River Thames flooded on 1 February 1953, this caused huge financial losses to many people – we lost everything. My family moved to Riverdale Road and when I finished school, I went to work at the loam quarry in Erith instead of my father’s farm. The loam sand was used in moulds for casting steel. I couldn’t see a future for myself in England and I felt that Britain’s class differences were going to hold me back.
One day, my father showed me a big article in the newspaper about young men going to Australia with the Big Brother Movement. I showed it to my mate, Clem Cooper, and we were both interested. I was nervous when I had my interview at Australia House, as I knew that my school results were not of a high standard. However, I passed the interview, but had to have a few teeth removed to pass my medical test. Clem was also accepted and I was glad of his company. I said goodbye to my parents at the front door of my house then caught a bus and two trains to Tilbury Docks in January 1957. We sailed on the SS Otranto with 23 other ‘Little Brothers’ on what would be her last trip. I turned 18 years old during our 40-day voyage to Australia.
We started the journey with a strict routine of exercises on the top deck every morning. After a few days, our two escort officers, Mr C T Pleak and Mr B Mainsbridge, decided that it would be better for us to keep fit learning to waltz and polka, so they offered dancing lessons instead. Without the pleasure of learning with young ladies, this was less appealing, so in the end, we just opted for quoits, soccer or cricket. I was reserved and withdrawn, and Mr Pleak took me aside and helped me to get along with the other young men. I am grateful to him and I wish I’d thanked him for it.
We docked in Capetown for two days, and my father had contacted an aunt who lived there, who met me at the port and took me back to her place. When we got to Fremantle, a group of elderly ladies took us on a bus tour of Perth and the gardens. I remember sailing under the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and wondering if the mast of the SS Otranto would fit. We docked at Pyrmont and were met by customs officials. The BBM officials made us feel welcome and I went with a group to the hostel at Homebush, and not the training farm. We were given a few days to explore Sydney, which reminded me of London. I had a big milkshake for the first time in my life.
I wanted to get a job working with heavy equipment and machinery, but there were no jobs like that available. Instead, I collected waste lead at the H.A. Viles Printing Company for six weeks so that it could be melted and re-used. When that job finished, I went to see Mr Mansell at the BBM head office with the hope that he could help me find suitable employment. He asked if I’d be interested in working with farming machinery and offered me a job on a wheat and sheep farm in Rand, a tiny place near the border with Victoria. I said that I didn’t know anything about large scale farming, but he said it would be OK to lie about this! He bought me a train ticket to Albury and this city kid was off to the bush. When I arrived in Albury, I had to get a ride on the mail delivery truck to the farm. We spent hours driving on dirt roads to isolated properties, and I thought ‘where the dickens am I going?!’ Eventually I was dropped at the farm gate and met the owner, Mr Edgar Pickles.
Working with Mr Pickles was wonderful. I learnt to drive and repair bulldozers, trucks, and other farm machinery. I was in my glory in his sheds. I had to do a bit of farming too, even though I had no experience with sheep or cattle.
I was a bit homesick. One day I left the farm with my suitcase and started walking up the road. I’d gone about one and a half miles when a vehicle pulled up and a man leaned out and asked me where I was going and if I needed a lift. I said I didn’t know where I was going, so he took me back to the farm.
I felt isolated on the farm until I bought a motorbike on hire purchase. Then I could take off every Friday night and ride for about 30 minutes over rough roads into Corowa. I’d meet up with about 12 other Little Brothers who worked on properties in the area. We tried to get a soccer team going, so we could play the Aussie farmworkers, but it didn’t last.
Mr Pickles was tough, but fair. He expected a lot of me, but he also taught me a lot. I found out much later that he was a Squadron Leader in the RAAF Bomber Command during World War II and was awarded the DFC (Distinguished Flying Cross) not once, but twice. When he was absent from the farm, he’d leave me instructions on what to do each day – he was very organised. He had his own airplane and one of my jobs was to clear all the cattle from the runway when he was coming in to land. Another job was driving a semi-trailer loaded with stock that were on agistment near Nyngan, 530km back to Rand. Mr Pickles would fatten them up in his paddocks in Rand and then we’d load them back onto the semi-trailer and take them to the sale yards in Shepparton. I didn’t have a license for driving semi-trailers but no one cared or asked!
I worked for Mr Pickles for a year, until he moved to a bigger property near Deniliquin. I spent the next six months at ‘Glencoe’, another wheat and sheep farm, this time in Corowa. Through writing sporadically to my mother, I realised that I was disillusioned with animal farming. It felt cruel to raise animals just to kill them for their meat. If you’ve ever had to put an animal down, you’ll know how distressing it can be. Before I arrived in Australia, the nastiest thing I’d done was to shoot a sparrow with my catapult.
In December 1958 I decided that it was time to leave farming, so I loaded my belongings onto my motorbike and went back to Sydney. I had an aunt who lived in Northmead and I boarded with her for a while. I left on good terms with Edgar Pickles and we visited each other and kept in touch until he died in 2019.
In Sydney I found a job with at an experimental poultry station for six months. My job was to collect the eggs from different species of chickens and record them so the scientists could study laying habits, diseases etc. While I was working there, my mother passed away in February 1959. I knew she’d been unwell, but she hadn’t mentioned her health much in her letters. I did get a telegram from my father saying that my mother was dying, but she died two days later, before I could organise a flight back to England.
As a result of her death, my father and sisters decided that they wanted to migrate to Australia. My aunt sponsored them and they arrived by sea, on board the MV Fairsea in June 1959 and came to live with us. After he’d been here a week, my father asked me: ‘how much money have you got in the bank, son? Do you own your motorbike?’ When I answered ‘no’ to both questions, he wanted to know what the hell I had been doing!
Both my father and grandfather had advised me to buy land as soon as I had a bit of money. This is what my father did – within a month of arriving in Australia, he bought five acres from my aunt, Mrs Roberts, which was next to her house. It was originally a dairy farm and we moved into the old shed that was still there. It was meant to be a temporary home while my father built something better, but we lived there for nearly three years.
In the meantime, I got a better job with the Triangle Steel Company, which was a welding company based in Villawood. I decided that I liked this sort of work, so I enrolled in Granville Technical College and over the next two years I studied for my welding certificate for two nights each week.
In February 1960, I took a job with Letourneau Westinghouse, which made mining equipment from their factory in Rydalmere. About a year later, I went to work for a mobile welding contractor, Mr Glaser. He supplied welders for the bridge over Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra and the bridge over the Hunter River in Maitland, NSW.
While I was working there, I decided that I would build my own welding machine, which I did using a 250 BT Lincoln generator coupled to a two-cylinder Wisconsin engine. This was located on my father’s land in Northmead – but not for long!
On 3 February 1962, I married Mary, a local girl, and we bought a block of land at Northmead from my father and a caravan and moved in together. I moved my welding machine there and set up my own business ‘Ward for Welding’. I was now working for myself and we were building a house for our growing family. Our daughter, Ivy May, was born in 1962; followed by Deborah Mary in 1965; and Guy John in 1968. Just before our son was born, I was given notice by Parramatta City Council that I must cease conducting an industrial business on residential land, so I bought land in an industrial zone in Riverstone and moved my business there.
In 1985, Mary and I had our second holiday on King Island, Tasmania. I had a cousin who lived there and we really liked the beauty and tranquillity and thought it would suit us well when we retired. We bought 15 acres on the east coast and moved there in 1993. I also moved my business there, shipping 30 tonnes of equipment across Bass Strait. Over the next ten years, I slowly eased out of the business until in 2003, I sold it to my son. He now runs ‘Ward for Welding’ on King Island and I help him out when it’s busy. After 40 years of running my own business, I was happy to hand over the reins to him.
By 2003, Mary and I had built our own house on King Island. It has a strong steel frame to withstand the gale-force winds that blow across the island. In 2004, our daughter Ivy organised a surprise party for my 65th birthday. There are only 1800 residents on King Island, and it felt like they were all in the venue when I arrived. I was overwhelmed. Quite a number of Little Brothers were sent to King Island to work on the dairy farms over the years, and most farmers on the island remember them fondly as it was hard to get good workers. Eddy Steele, a long-time director of the BBM and his wife, Pat flew over for my birthday party. I served on the board of the BBM while I was still working in Sydney in the 1990s.
In 2005, Mary, Ivy and I went back to England. I showed them the spot where the mushroom farm and our house had been. All of the buildings were gone, including our house, but there was one rose bush left that my mother had planted. Erith had changed so much, and not for the better, in my opinion.
It has been a privilege to be a Little Brother. I still keep in touch with Clem, who sailed with me on the SS Otranto. I would not have had the same opportunities in England, because I didn’t go to the ‘right’ school or have the ‘right’ family connections. Social class doesn’t matter as much in Australia. I’m lucky that two of our children – Ivy and Guy – live on adjacent properties on King Island and that our daughter Deborah is happy living in Queensland. I do not, for one minute, regret being a Little Brother and coming to Australia.