SPECTACLE CASE

Advertising for Frost & Shipham vice Regal Opticians from c1910 - 1931. This style of glasses had some popularity from the 1890s through to the 1930s.
These glasses were donated to the museum by Ursula Skeet who grew up in Forrestdale in the early to mid-1900s with her family. It is highly likely that the glasses belong to either her parents or her maternal grandparents who also lived in the Forrestdale area during this time.
Lilian Ursula Skeet was born to Lillian Maude (nee Dumsday) and Alfred Tunbridge Skeet in 1919 at a maternity hospital at Highgate Hill. Ursula, as she was known as, was Lillian and Alfred's fifth and final child.
Ursula grew up on the family farm, which was located on the shores of Lake Jandakot (today Forrestdale Lake) in the locality of Forrestdale. Her father was one of the first British settlers to take up land in the region in 1885. Her mother came over from Melbourne with her parents, George and Laura and sister in 1892 before purchasing land in Forrestdale in 1908. Her parents married in February 1912.
Ursula helped out around the farm and when old enough helped her father run the Forrestdale Post Office, which was located in one of the front rooms at the family home. Her eldest brother Alfred was now running the farm, but Ursula was possibly looking after the chooks as she entered a number of eggs and chooks into the 1938 Byford Show where she won a number of first and second place awards not only for the eggs, Leghorn, Australorp and Orpington chickens but also for her separated cream.
When her father died in 1945, Ursula and her mother moved to Fourth Avenue in Kensington, and Ursula is recorded as working as an office clerk. Her sister Maude is living in neighbouring South Perth at this time.
By 1958, the family sold the Forrestdale farm as Alfred and his family had moved to Belmont where he is working now as an aircraft engineer.
Ursula loved to write and entered and won numerous creative writing competitions. In 1953 Ursula had two short stories published in the Western Mail, 'The Path of Mars' and 'A Name from the Past'. That same year Ursula was helping a local committee collect names or those who gave their lives in World War II and Korea who came from the Kensington, Collier district. The memorial was being organised by the Memorial Church of St Martin-in-the-Field in Kensington.
In 1962, Ursula was appointed as a Reviewer of Revenue for the National Parks Board of WA and the Zoological Gardens Board by the State Government. Her duties included doing the pay run, which meant delivering the wage packets, to staff at John Forrest National Park, Yanchep National Park and the Perth Zoo.
Following the death of her mother in 1967, Ursula moved to Alfred Cove.
In the early 1980s, Ursula met Royston Hunt and in 6 March 1984 they married.
Lilian Ursula Hunt (nee Skeet) passed away in 2006 aged 87 years.