ORAL HISTORY (TRANSCRIPT): JONES, EDITH MAY

Summary: Edith May Jones (nee Geddes/Stubbs) was born in Western Australia during the 1890s. Her father was born in SA and her mother in WA.In this interview she briefly discusses her childhood experiences in Subiaco, Kalgoorlie, and South Perth. Mrs Jones married Bowen Bourke Matthew Jones, son of Rowland and Elizabeth Jones, in 1913. She discusses her some of her experiences during World War One and explains how her stepfather enlisted to protect her husband and their young family. She also talks about the effect the depression had on her family of eight children, and how hard it was to raise a family on her husbands limited income. She was educated at St Johns and was the first pupil there under Sister Cecilia. She lived in Kalgoorlie as a teenager and distinctly remembers the natives coming around begging for food. She talks briefly about the house her family lived in and the reasons for their move back to Subiaco. She talks about her brief time in South Perth and her fondness for the Chinese immigrants who lived there, and the reasons why they left. She discusses how she came to meet her husband and the house they lived in when they got married. She talks about her father going to war and reason why her husband did not. She recalls the difficulty of raising a child during the war and how things had changed as the war ended.
A note on Edith May Jones’ family history: Born in Adelaide to William and Alice Geddes. After her father’s death in South Australia, her mother returned to Western Australia where she remarried Bartholomew Stubbs in 1897. In this interview, she calls both Stubbs and Geddes ‘father’.
Interviewee: Edith May Jones
Date of Interview: 7 June 1985
Interviewer: Tom Stannage
Transcriber: Unknown
Indexer: Shelley Campbell