Henrietta Bean, nee POWERS

SLWA:

HENRIETTA BEAN WHO LIVED IN THE FREMANTLE ROUNDHOUSE - PART ONE

The following interview with Henrietta Stella Bean was recorded in 1975.

Eighty-eight years ago, I was born Henrietta Powers.

I lived a very secluded and pleasant life with my grandparents in Victoria until I was seven years old. They had servants and I was spoilt. But when I came to Western Australia, I was a stranger to all members of my family and became more or less their servant. It was a shock.

We lived in Lord Street, Fremantle in a terrace house until my father joined the police force. As there were no police quarters large enough to accommodate our family of ten children, we were permitted to move into the Roundhouse which was empty at the time.

I can remember the Roundhouse very clearly.

The front door was double and painted red. Once it was bolted on the inside no one could open it from the outside. It opened into a large dining room with lino on the floor. Upstairs there were enough bedrooms for the ten of us.

The courtyard off the kitchen consisted of large flagstones and all around the yard in a circle were ten cells.

Two cells were full of rubbish and the cats would get in there to catch rats.

One cell was used to store our toys and the one next door was our playroom.

Another cell was occupied by my grandfather who lived with us and next to that my father kept his tools, and as he was good at carpentry, the finished work was kept in the cell next to that.

One cell was used as a smoke room where we smoked fish. I remember we girls would also often slip out underneath the Roundhouse archway to buy fish at threepence a dozen, herring, and mullet, from the fishing boats as they came in. Then father would smoke them.

We kept our ducks in another cell. We always kept ducks as we preferred duck eggs to hen eggs. We would have fun letting them out when we flooded the yard. We'd fill bags with sand and put them over the drain so no water could get through. Then we'd turn on the taps until the water was deep and we'd take off our shoes and stockings, and paddle.

The ducks loved it and so did we.

We used to go down to the ships when they were in the harbour. One captain used to would invite my father, mother, my elder sister, and myself down of an evening. He would have parties on board for the people going on a journey, mostly to the Northwest.

One night I can remember him asking different ladies to sing and they wouldn't because they'd left their music at home. We were all sitting looking at each other and at last, the captain said to my mother:

"Mrs. Power you're the mother of a big family I'm sure you can give us something."

To which my mother replied "I'm sorry I haven't any music with me. The only thing we play at home is hymns."

"Well Mrs. Powers" beamed the captain, "that's one of my favourite music forms."

The captain found the Sankey Sacred Songs Book and I can see him now, walking into the salon with it, taking my mother's arm and walking her to the piano. Oh, what a voice he had, you could hear him above everyone else.

We would play on the beaches and Fremantle foreshore, but I would never swim or even paddle or even go near the water. This was because when my younger sister had typhoid fever and I had to nurse her, which involved every night at six o'clock, taking everything that came out from inside her in a bucket and emptying it into the sea.

I'm of a sensitive nature and throwing the buckets of slops into the sea started me thinking about all the other rubbish being thrown in. So I never put my foot in the water after that, not even to paddle. My sister on the other hand became a champion swimmer.

I started going to a State School when I was eight years old. I had a great big "Pommy" woman for a teacher. She had a ruler about a quarter of an inch thick and she was pretty rough. I was nervous and shy. I still have a lump where she smashed me on the head once and no hair will grow on it.

Mother took me straight up to the Head of the Education Department in Perth but all he said was "Take her home she must have deserved it, or she wouldn't have got it". So, my mother took us away from the school and paid for us to go to St Joseph Convent nearby.

I liked it very much at St Josephs. There was a park nearby where we'd eat lunch and play. The park was near the mental asylum and one day we saw somebody jumping over the asylum wall! The sisters ran out to us and took us quickly back to the school.

Stay tuned for PART ONE.

SOURCE - [Interview with Henrietta Stella Bean] [sound recording] / [interviewed by Jean Teasdale].

Bean, Henrietta Stella, 1889-?

Oral History | 1975.

Available at 2nd Floor Oral History Stack (Call number: OH73 Audio (Access) 1 cassette) plus 3 more

References and Links

SLWA (in Facebook).

Freotopia

This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 12 January, 2024 and hosted at freotopia.org/people/beanhenrietta.html (it was last updated on 12 January, 2024), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.