My very clever grandfather

My paternal grandfather, Ted Smith, was a pastry cook. The photo is of a wedding cake which he made and decorated  around 1905. It won 1st prize at the Wagga Wagga Show.

He married my grandmother in 1909 at the age of 34. They had two sons. His younger son was my father.

When Dad was 12 the great depression began (1929). During the depression people didn't have money to spend on the pastries and cakes that my grandfather made. In order to be able to continue to feed his family he started working as a cook during the shearing season on properties all over New South Wales. In the extra he is standing on the extreme right hand side. He is pictured here with a number of the shearers and station hands at one of the properties he worked on. This was in the early 1930s. He would have been in his mid to late fifties at the time. He sent money home to keep the family going.

The second extra was taken while he was away working at the shearing sheds. The note on the back of the photo shows that my grandmother sent it to him to show him how his two sons were growing. My father, on the left, and my uncle are in their impoverished back yard in inner-city Darlington (Sydney).

In the early 1940s my grandfather worked as the resident chef at a guest house, called Cooinoo, in Turramurra. It was here that he became ill in 1944 and died only a few weeks after his first grandchild, my brother, was born. My grandmother didn’t own a telephone and the only way she knew that he had become ill was because the lady who owned the guest house wrote a letter to tell her that he had had a fall and had been sent to a nursing home. He died five days after the letter was written. I have the original letter.

I was born about four years later so sadly never met him. I would love to have heard his stories.