Slim: Frank, 1922-2012

By Angela Darlington

This is a biography taken from my family’s personal stories of my grandfather, his life and his childhood, growing up during the Great Depression in Australia. It also includes his stories from World War II, the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder on families and the individual, the changing attitudes of those who grew up during the Great Depression and fought in World War II and those whose labour efforts at the time helped win it, the attitudes of the baby boomers and the hippie movement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Apr 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669886501

Angela Darlington

Angela was born in 1983 in Melbourne, Australia. She suffered a traumatic head injury from a car accident at the age of five, recovering in the Melbourne Children’s Hospital. Angela and her mother moved to Adelaide, where she grew up in Christie Downs and Mitchell Park, South Australia. Angela attended Mitcham Girls High School, Adelaide TAFE College and Flinders University. She received a scholarship to intern and live in San Francisco, USA, in 2012. Angela has worked in the public service, education and private sectors and local music scene. Angela has one daughter, Charlotte, with her husband, Brendan.

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Copyright © 2022 by Angela Darlington.

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without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Rev. date: 06/20/2022

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Photographs

Chapter 1 Youth 1920–1930

Chapter 2 Jack

Chapter 3 Returning home

Chapter 4 Married Life

Chapter 5 The 1950s

Chapter 6 Major Economic Changes

Chapter 7 The Divorce

Chapter 8 The 1990s

Prime Minister Ben Chifley The War Is Over Victory Speech

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge my grandfather, Frank Darlington, for his personal story and his advance towards publication. Permission granted from John Knight to mention Ira Knight in this work. Thanks to Helen, Jeff and Yvonne (Bon) Darlington for their personal stories and contribution of anecdotes and information. Thank you also to James Thomas for his ideas and input. A big thank you to my mother, Helen; my husband, Brendan; and my daughter, Charlotte, for their encouragement and patience.

Special thanks to Dave Hudson for proofreading and editing.

PHOTOGRAPHS

The author wishes to thank Frank Darlington and Helen Darlington for allowing to reproduce photographs in this book.

CHAPTER ONE

Youth 1920–1930

My grandfather, Frank Darlington, sat down with me as an old man in his eighties a few years before he passed away. He enjoyed telling me many of his life stories, usually stories of what life was like for him in the Australian army and during his youth. He lived in an old, dilapidated house on a large block in Port Adelaide, a western suburb of Adelaide, where he had lived for many years. He enjoyed using his hands to work on old cars and fix engines, read, write, watch television, gamble and listen to the radio.

Frank Darlington was born on 3 May 1922 in Prospect, South Australia, and died on 31 May 2012 in Brighton, South Australia, at the age of ninety. He had a brother, Jack, who was four years older, born on 9 April 1918, also in Prospect. Frank’s surviving family did not know much about their uncle Jack as there were very few photographs of him.

As a child, I visited my grandfather regularly with my mother, Helen. Frank had a box of old toys that I would always play with. A couple of times I was bored with the usual toys and decided to play in his van. I accidentally turned the key to ignition and left it there. The next day, he found his car battery was dead, angrily rang up my mother and said, Don’t bring that fucking kid around again! However, my mother and I started seeing him again sometime later.

There was another time at my grandfather’s house when I went into his back room, lit all his candles and jumped on his waterbed. He was so infuriated, he disciplined me by pulling my ear, back to the box of toys in the lounge room. Sit down there and play with those damn toys! he yelled.

In later years when I was a teenager and an adult, I hung out with Frank on family outings at the local pub, where we had dirt cheap three-to five-dollar counter meals for lunch. I was much better behaved in my teen years. My mum mentioned that he had not used his stove to cook in nearly ten years. He would always question, Why would I bother cooking at home when I can go to the pub and get a meal for less than $10?

Frank dropped out of Brighton Primary School in Adelaide in grade seven at twelve years old to find a job to support his family. He was dux of the school; however, he received no further formal education beyond this. Frank lived with his brother, Jack; his mother, Ellen Charlotte; and his father, Charles Fred Frederick Darlington, in Lapthorne Street, Glenelg, South Australia, during The Great Depression of 1929, which lasted until 1939, the start of the Second World War. Frank and Jack’s parents were considered to be geriatric parents, both of which had come to Australia from England as economic migrants. Charles Frederick was forty-five years old when Frank was born, and Ellen was thirty-eight years old when she gave birth to Frank.

The house in Lapthorne Street had been built before World War I, which began in 1914. The laundry room, semi-detached at the back, was a prominent feature of the house. It had a clothes-drying machine called a mangle. A mangle was a hand-operated device with rollers for wringing laundry. My uncle Jeff, Helen’s younger brother, thought that if someone got their hand stuck in this mangle, they would be in real strife. There was a copper heater as well. To wash your clothes, you had to warm the water using the copper heater, throw your clothes in and stir them, and then to wring dry them, you would put them through the mangle. Ellen sold the house within a year of Fred’s death in 1962.

Glenelg is a seaside suburb in the southwest of Adelaide. During the 1920s, there were twenty-five houses with only two cars and one telephone in Lapthorne Street, where the family lived. The Great Depression began in 1929 and lasted until 1935 in Australia. In 1930, an amusement park called Luna Park opened in Glenelg to raise the spirits of the local people through those dark and troubled times. There was a Ferris wheel, kiosk, golf course and other rides attracting thousands of visitors every year. The concept was based on the success of the first Luna Park on Coney Island, New York, in 1903. US entrepreneur Herman Phillips, and others, brought the idea to Australia, opening Luna Park in Melbourne in 1912 and Luna Park Glenelg in Adelaide in 1930. The fun park continued to be popular during World War II and well into the 1950s and 1960s when new rides and attractions were added.

Following a decline in the number of visitors, Luna Park was relocated from Glenelg to Sydney in 1935, where it quickly became one of the city’s greatest tourist attractions for years to come. Glenelg was vastly different in 2020, with seaside mansions and apartments ranging from one-bedroom apartments to beachfront Victorian-style villas and houses. Property prices range from AU$230,000 to AU$2.6 million.

Frank’s father, Charles, or ‘Fred’ as he was known, never received welfare or rations during the 1930s; the era of The Great Depression when the consumer economy ground to a halt and the Wall Street crash of 1929 led to a worldwide economic recession. In the United States where the Depression was worst felt, industrial production between 1929 and 1933 fell by nearly forty-seven percent, gross domestic product declined by thirty percent and unemployment reached more than twenty percent. In Australia, the economy crashed in 1932, and unemployment reached as high as 32 percent. It took nearly a decade for the Australian economy to recover. The Australia of 1930 had a total population of approximately six million people. The population of Australia in 2021 by comparison is twenty-five million people.

Australia experienced high inflation from 1919 to 1920 and a severe recession until 1923. However, with the economy based on agricultural production, Australians found prosperity on the land. In the mid-1920s, as Australia’s rural economy began to recover, European countries affected by World War I did too. The United States, Canada and Argentina produced a large amount of agricultural exports. This created a global oversupply of Australia’s major exports: wheat, sheep and iron ore.

Frank and Jack’s mother, Ellen Battersby, migrated to Australia from England in 1909 when she was twenty-five years old, seeking new economic and personal opportunities. From around 1908, the British had been concerned with the possibility of an invasion by hostile powers in Europe. Arthur Balfour, the British Conservative Party Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, had modernised the military and defence from the early years of his reign. However, it was of great concern that, because of technological, military and strategic advancements, Britain might be invaded from both sea and air.

In 1908, practical designs for planes were drafted and built, something that had only been written about in science fiction novels. When air power began to make itself felt,