Photo comes to light

There’ s no end to the surprises people find when they rummage through their collection of old photographs. Jane Hutton (nee Gillespie) recently had this experience when she found a photograph of her grandfather Captain Thomas Aubrey (1894-1973) and his older brother Will (1891-1966). The picture is in good condition even though perhaps 120 years old. Tom was 10 years old and Will 13 when their father was thrown out of a horse drawn sulky and killed. Their mother, Jessie McKindley Aubrey (nee Menzies), took the boys and their little sister Jessie aged 7 back to Maitland Road in Stockton together with her newborn son Bobby and provided for each one of them. Jane takes over the story from here. Aged 14, Tom went to sea to help support his widowed mother and younger siblings. This was facilitated by Captain Earnest Warner, his Uncle, who had married the eldest Menzies daughter. Apparently he arranged a job for Tom as a “deck boy” with a friend Captain Nicol. He also arranged for Tom to be treated as an apprentice which was unusual at the time as normally apprentices had to pay for their passage and, of course, Tom did not have that kind of backing. Shipwrecked on this first voyage on the Glasgow Barque “Fifeshire” only 19 days out from Newcastle he may have wondered if he had chosen the right career direction. (Newspaper reports can be found in Trove).

He then joined the Helen Denny, the “Forfarshire” followed by “The Crown of India” for a trip from Antwerp to San Francisco which they achieved in 119 days - around Cape Horn, South Africa/Cape Town and, back to Portland. There the Captain agreed to pay him off as he had done 3 years and wanted to get back to Sydney (on the “British Yeoman”) to study for his second mate’s certificate. He did this apparently at the Warners’ house in Parsley Bay, studying at their kitchen table surrounded by the tumultuous noise of a very large and very noisy family.

Tom then joined the Barquentine “Lindstol” as 2nd mate and made a return trip to New Zealand before joining the Barque Battle Abbey owned by the Mayor of San Francisco. 500 miles west of SFO the crew were forced to abandon this ship after the coal caught fire. But by this time, steam was starting to overtake sail, and Tom wrote in later years: “I am sail trained myself but left them in 1913 – or they left me”. He’d been around Cape Horn under sail 7 to 8 times and in later life belonged to very exclusive club or group called the Cape Horners.

Tom joined his first steamer in 1914 as 3rd mate and stayed with the company, Howard Smith, for close on 50 years. He sailed through both wars, often in convoys protecting troop ships and luckily came through unscathed.

Tom came ashore for the 15 or so years his children were growing up, still sending home quite a proportion of his pay to his mother monthly. From a deck boy at 14 he had gained his Masters and Extra Masters Certificates by 21 - a great achievement.

Tom Aubrey was well regarded at Howard Smith and 40 years after he started with them, in 1954, he was posted to the UK and Europe to supervise the building of 3 new ships for the company. The first ship was “SS Century” (4,200 tons) and the second “SS Burwah” (2,700 tons), both of these ships were built at a shipyard at Burntisland in Fife in Scotland. The third ship was built while they lived in Bremen (1956/7), the “SS Macedon” also of 2,700 tons and she was built by the Myer Werft shipyard in Papenburg, Germany. It was a highlight of their German stay that Peggy was invited to launch this third ship.

Tom retired in 1962 and enjoyed good health until he suffered a stroke in 1971. He was a fine, strong man, of great kindness and honesty. His ashes were scattered at sea off Townsville by his son, John Nicolson Aubrey on 13 November 1973. A memorial to the early seafarers of Sydney now stands by the Harbour in Sydney in the Rocks area…just near the last restaurant and opposite the Park Hyatt. The name of Captain Thomas Aubrey is included in the list of these early Australian seafarers, many of whom had careers in sail.