The Daughter Who Never Married
Ada Australia Jeffries
1864–1956
The saddler’s seventh child, and the one who stayed single. She carried an ambulance certificate into a railway smash on the northern line in 1898 and had her photograph in the Sydney Mail for it; then she followed the Schoes to Perth, came home with them, and kept house beside her widowed sisters at Katoomba — and, at the last, near her brother William at the sea.
- Born
- Bathurst, New South Wales · 1864
- Died
- 1956 · death registered at Manly, New South Wales
- Lived
- about 92 years
Ada Australia Jeffries was born at Bathurst in 1864, the seventh of Archibald Joseph Jeffries’ eight children — the first of them to be given a wholly native flourish for a name.1 In their father’s will of 1902, read aloud to him because he was by then blind, the household legacies went to her married sisters and her one brother; Ada, unmarried and away, is not among the named beneficiaries.2 By the later 1890s she was living in Sydney, within reach of her eldest sister’s family, the Robenses, and had trained with the Civil Ambulance and Transport Brigade.3
That training was tested in April 1898. Travelling on a train on the northern line, Ada was in the carriage when a broken axle drove up through the floor and terribly crushed the foot and leg of a fellow passenger, who began to bleed to death. As a member of the Brigade’s Ladies’ E Company she gave him first aid on the spot and, the Sydney Mail wrote, “in all probability, saved the sufferer’s life.” The paper printed her photograph — a full-length studio portrait — above the story on 30 April 1898.3
Not long after, she went to Western Australia with her sister Martha and Martha’s husband, the printer James Schoe, and stayed near them for the better part of thirty years. The electoral rolls follow her across Perth — Raglan Road in North Perth in 1906, then First Avenue at Mount Lawley, the same street where the Schoes kept the house they called “Prospect” — always as “home duties,” and by 1925 as “domestic duties.”4 When the Schoes came back to New South Wales at the end of 1928, “Miss Jeffries (Mrs Schoe’s sister) who went with them” came home too.5 She settled with them at Katoomba, in the Lurline Street cottage “Manning Mills,” where the widowed Alice Green was also living — so that three of the saddler’s daughters kept the one house.6 Ada stayed on there through the 1930s; in 1933 she put her name down, with her brother William and sister Blanche, for the “Back to Bathurst” carnival, listed as “Miss Ada A. Jeffries (Katoomba).”7 After Martha’s death in 1937 she moved to the coast, to 46 Soldiers Avenue at Harbord, a short way from her brother William at Manly and her nephew Wilbur’s family at South Curl Curl; the rolls hold her there from 1943.8 She died in 1956, the death registered at Manly, aged about ninety-two. Like her sister Alice, she had lived almost a century and never — as far as the record shows — married.9
Miss Jeffries is the young Bathurst lady who was a passenger by the northern train the other day, when an accident enabled her to give a striking illustration of the value of ambulance training. When the broken axle smashed through the carriage floor it smashed terribly the foot and leg of a passenger. He was rapidly bleeding to death, when Miss Jeffries, who is a member of the Ladies’ E Company of the Civil Ambulance and Transport Brigade, rendered effective “first aid,” and thus, in all probability, saved the sufferer’s life.
The E Company
The Civil Ambulance and Transport Brigade was the volunteer body that grew into the Sydney ambulance service; its Ladies’ companies trained women in first aid at a time when that was still an unusual thing for a woman to hold a certificate in. Ada belonged to the E Company. The northern-line accident put her training to the plainest possible test — a compound injury, an arterial bleed, and no doctor within reach — and the Sydney Mail thought the result worth a portrait and a paragraph of its own.3
The photograph is the only likeness of her the family record holds: a young woman of about thirty-three, standing full-length in a pale dress and a broad hat, her hand on a parasol, against a studio background. She was living in Sydney then, where her eldest sister, Mary Rebecca Jane Robens, had raised a large family; of the Bathurst daughters, Ada was the one without a household of her own.3
West with the Schoes
When James Schoe took the Perth printing offer in 1896, his wife Martha went with him, and within a few years Ada had followed. She is on the Western Australian rolls from 1906: Raglan Road, North Perth — the street the Schoes were living in that year — and afterwards First Avenue, Mount Lawley, the same avenue as the Schoe house “Prospect” at Maylands.4 The entry never varies by more than a word: “Jeffries, Ada Australia … home duties,” and in 1925 “domestic duties,” which may mean she was keeping house for wages by then. She had no property, no occupation of her own in the trade sense, and no separate address from the sister she had come west with.
The arrangement held for over twenty years. When the Schoes decided to come home at the end of 1928 — “on their way back to the land of their birth,” the Bathurst paper said — Ada travelled back with them.5
Three sisters, and the coast
The returning party settled at Katoomba, on medical advice for James Schoe’s health, in a Lurline Street cottage called “Manning Mills.” James died there in 1932; Martha kept the house another five years; and for part of that time the widowed Alice Green was at the same address, so that the 1930s rolls put three of Archibald Jeffries’ daughters — Martha, Alice and Ada — at 138 Lurline Street together.6 In February 1933 Ada was among the small mountains-and-Manly group of the saddler’s children who wrote in for the “Back to Bathurst” carnival: “Miss Ada A. Jeffries (Katoomba),” alongside “William Archibald Jeffries (Manly)” and “Mrs Blanche A. Howard (nee Jeffries)” of Manly.7
Martha died in March 1937, and the Lurline Street household broke up. Ada moved down to the coast, to 46 Soldiers Avenue at Harbord, in the Manly district — near her brother William, who died at Manly in 1940, near her sister Blanche, and a few streets from her nephew Wilbur Bathurst Jeffries and his wife Mavis at South Curl Curl. The electoral rolls keep her at that address through 1943, 1946 and 1949.8 She died in 1956; the death was registered at Manly, giving her parents as Archibald Joseph and Mary Jane. She was about ninety-two.9
The Record
Sources & References
- 1
Birth registration, 1864
NSW BDM birth index — Ada A. Jeffries, 1864, registration district Bathurst, reg. no. 5050; father Archibald J. Jeffries, mother Mary J. The seventh of the eight Bathurst children; see the Jeffries entry above, reference 7, for the full sibling set. The middle name “Australia” is given in full on the later electoral rolls and on the 1956 death registration (reference 9).
- 2
Not named in the will, 1902
Will of Archibald Joseph Jeffries, dated 2 December 1902 (NSW Supreme Court probate no. 49723) — the specific legacies of clock, desk, oil painting, rifle-club cups, watch and chain, and the Keppel Street house are to the testator’s other children; Ada, then in Western Australia, takes no named bequest. Set out in full at the Jeffries entry, reference 19.
- 3
The northern-line rescue, 1898
Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser, 30 April 1898, p. 921, “Miss Ada Jeffries” — a half-tone full-length studio portrait above a paragraph describing her first aid to a passenger whose foot and leg were crushed when a broken axle came through the carriage floor of a train on the northern line, she being “a member of the Ladies’ E Company of the Civil Ambulance and Transport Brigade.” The Civil Ambulance and Transport Brigade, formed in Sydney in 1895, was the forerunner of the New South Wales ambulance service. That Ada was living in Sydney in this period is inferred from her Brigade membership there and from the presence of her eldest sister’s family, the Robenses, in the city.
- 4
Western Australian electoral rolls, 1906–1925
Commonwealth electoral rolls — “Jeffries, Ada Australia” (also spelled “Jefferies”): 1906, Raglan Road, North Perth (Division of Perth), home duties; 1915 and 1917, First Avenue, Mount Lawley (Subdivision of Maylands, Division of Fremantle), home duties; 1925, 23 First Avenue, Maylands (Division of Perth), domestic duties. The Schoes were on Raglan Road, North Perth in 1906 and at “Prospect,” First Avenue, Maylands by 1917 (see the Schoe entry, reference 9).
- 5
The return with the Schoes, 1928
National Advocate (Bathurst), 24 December 1928, “Personal” — “Mr and Mrs James Schoe … are on their way back to the land of their birth. Miss Jeffries (Mrs Schoe’s sister) who went with them, is also returning.” Also quoted at the Schoe entry, reference 12.
- 6
Katoomba electoral rolls, 1930–1937
Commonwealth electoral rolls, Subdivision of Katoomba (State district of Nepean) — “Jeffries, Ada Australia, 138 Lurline Street, Katoomba, home duties” on the rolls of 1930, 1932, 1934, 1935 and 1937. This was the cottage “Manning Mills” taken by James and Martha Schoe on their return (Schoe entry, reference 13); Martha Ann Schoe and Alice Emmaline Green are at the same address on the rolls of the same years (Schoe entry, reference 14; Green entry, reference 9).
- 7
“Back to Bathurst,” 1933
National Advocate (Bathurst), 7 February 1933, “Old Bathurstians from Abroad” — those who had notified acceptance for the “Back to Bathurst” carnival, including “Miss Ada A. Jeffries (Katoomba),” “William Archibald Jeffries (Manly)” and “Mrs. Blanche A. Howard (nee Jeffries)” of Manly. Also cited at the William entry, reference 12.
- 8
Harbord electoral rolls, 1943–1949
Commonwealth electoral rolls, Subdivision of Dee Why (Division of Warringah, later Mackellar; State district of Manly) — “Jeffries, Ada Australia, 46 Soldiers Avenue, Harbord, home duties,” 1943, 1946 and 1949. Her nephew Wilbur Bathurst Jeffries (William Archibald’s son) and his wife Mavis Kathleen are on the same rolls at Adams Street, South Curl Curl (see the William entry, reference 11); other Jeffries households appear nearby at Brookvale, not certainly identified.
- 9
Death registration, 1956
NSW BDM death index — Ada Australia Jeffries, reg. no. 10364/1956, registration district Manly; father Archibald Joseph, mother Mary Jane. Born 1864, she was about ninety-two. No marriage has been found for her: she is “Miss” or “home duties” on every record from 1898 to 1949, and her surname never changes.
- 10
Photograph
The 1898 Sydney Mail half-tone (reference 3) is the only known likeness of Ada Australia Jeffries, cropped here from the newspaper page.