Jack Pidgeon Archives - Pidgeon Post

Wep and Jess setting off for Kosciuszko on their honeymoon; 24 Aug-7 Sep 1933

Jan 1944

Darling,

If anything should happen to me I’d like you to do a few things that while I was here I didn’t seem to be able (or for that matter, had no point in saying) to tell. Or ask, of you.

Above all, I don’t want you to blow the old top! I expect you to be upset – that is human enough.

But these are the things I want you to do. I couldn’t tell you them – it would sound all so silly and melodramatic.

Go for a trip or something. Don’t hang around the house we lived in. Wipe all the half-wits you and I know are half-wits. Get rid of Molly¹. And for Christ’s sake don’t finish up the widow Vi². Get married.

Don’t panic. You’ll be getting more money than even you know what to do with. What with office compensation, my insurance, remains of my mother’s property³, and your own people’s estate, you will be worth about £5,000. You don’t have to let a cheap hick get hold of you. I would hate the guts of that. Don’t sell your mother’s house.⁴ Don’t sell my property. Lend £1,000 to Jack⁵ at 5% – he could use it. All in all you should be able to get about £5 to £6 per week without doing a tap.

Please always be a little bit in love with me. Within my pretty lousy way I have loved you. Unspectacularly maybe – but there has been no other.

Please don’t lose that little baby.⁶ Perhaps I’m sloppy – but I’d like to leave something behind to justify the old existence.

I love you – at times, wildly, deliriously, and without reason. I have loved you.

Too bad I think that there is nothing after all this. I’d have liked to have seen you.

Snugglepot Bill

[This letter was probably never revealed to Jess till later. It may have been in a sealed envelope, or it may have been given to an associate to give to her in case Bill was killed whilst overseas.]

Note: Bill left for Townsville on 9 January 1944 (Ref: DVA File No. X336636)

Jess Pidgeon with Geoff and Molly Turton as Wep and Jess prepare to set off on their honeymoon to Kosciuszko; 24 Aug-7 Sep 1933

Vi Cadd, Bill Pidgeon and Jess Pidgeon and unidentified at what is probably the 1939 Artists’ Ball held at the Trocadero, 14 Apr 1939. Note – Wep is wearing one of Jess’s dresses.

1931; L-R: Wep’s brother Jack and his fiancee Verona Chadwick, Thirza Pidgeon (Wep’s mother) and Wep (Bill Pidgeon) in Wep’s 1928 Chrysler 75 Roadster

Graham Richard Pidgeon, three days old; July 4, 1944

Jessie Ann Pidgeon (nee Graham) circa Aug. 1944, sitting on the front steps of home at 85 Northwood Road;

Little Wep by Wep; The Australian Women’s Weekly, July 21, 1945

Notes:

1
Molly (nee Evans) was married to Bill’s Best Man, Geoff Turton (aka Petrov) a fellow artist at The Australian Women’s Weekly. Molly and Geoff were extremely close friends with Bill and Jess but she had a problem with drink which ultimately led to her marriage failing. Clearly Wep could forseee that Molly, sadly, presented a poor influence on Jess
2
Violet May Cadd (nee Allmark) (1905-1984) was probably Jess’s best friend. Vi married Robert A. Cadd in 1928. He committed suicide in 1931 and Vi never remarried. She lived with her father a few houses up the road from Bill and Jess in Bellevue Hill at the time of their marriage. Vi was Godmother to both of Bill Pidgeon’s sons, Graham and Peter. She was known as Aunty Vi and was a regular visitor especially at Christmas time.
3
Bill’s mother Thirza Jessie (nee White) died of cancer in 1941
4
Jess was an only child. She was born in 1908, 17 years after her parents George Alexander Graham and Mary Jane Wray married in 1891. George died 14 Jan 1945 when Wep was setting off on another trip and her mother Mary Jane died at Wep’s home a year after Jess in December 1953.
5
Bill’s older brother John Frederick Pidgeon (1904-1972)
6
Graham Richard Pidgeon was born July 1, 1944

You, that is if you were under forty and were a guest at my grandfather’s table, were not allowed to laugh outright or for that matter, even giggle. If you were under thirty you had to wear the mask of a sphinx no matter what clean clerical joke was cracked.

It always seemed a little odd to me that on the seventh day there had to less humanity in the house than there was on the other six. Not that is to say that there was much fun and games for the young from Monday at 1 am (if you were up) till Saturday 12 mid. during the week. It was just that if you felt like smiling on the sabbath you just daren’t.

Bill and Jack Pidgeon in the backyard of their home at 290 Glenmore Rd, Paddington, c.1915

Grandma who always wore a great collar which was distinguished by its height and purity of whale boned lace, always saw fit to give my brother a good clip under the ear whenever he passed. Why Jack never learnt to pass her underneath the table or beneath the throne she held court on is still beyond me. Not that Jack did anything very much. Being four years older than I, he couldn’t sense the danger of just being around. I suppose his Eton collar and the fact that he sang in the choir sort of gave him (falsely in his own view) an air of sanctity which Grandma always failed to discern.

The clips on the ear Jack always earned for the little things he might have done or even thought of doing, but never had the hardihood to do. For the things I would have liked to do Jack got two clips.

So it was that Jack always smothered up in a neutral corner when Grandma was around.

Grandpa was beyond all this. He just sat and ate and ate and bemoaned his lack of appetite.

His theatrical indifference to food never seemed to dim his awareness of what was going on or off the plates to the right and left of his august presence.

One dreadful 1^st Sunday before Pentecost our hired help foolishly skidded her meat and peas on his lap.

If this girl ever had a name, that is immaterial. Today she is probably wrestling under the name of Big Chief Thunderplate or another latin alias. Although young, she had an extraordinarily powerful jaw which was never really clean shaven. The mole, which on another face would be called a beauty spot. remained untrimmed.

A few weeks after she tipped her Sunday dinner on the lap she went completely to pieces & either stayed out on a tram or sat on a gas box till 10 pm.

[W.E. Pidgeon]

Tag: Jack Pidgeon

War Letters – New Guinea: 9 Jan 1944, Sydney; If anything should happen to me…

Notes:

Five Ways to Remember: Meals at Trelawny