Cheltenham
I was 26 when I left my work as a country parson to take up the prestigious position as the Minister of the Cheltenham Church of Christ Victoria. This Church had the reputation of being a very large and alive Church. But that was a mirage. The reality was quite different as this young country parson was soon to discover. The life of a suburban Minister has some real surprises.
The Church and our house were on the corner of Chesterville Road and Nepean Highway. This was a major intersection – the Nepean Highway was twelve lanes wide, just outside our house. There were thirty six traffic lights and one hundred thousand cars a day going by. Chesterville Road and Charman Road met at an intersection with the Nepean Highway and consequently the roar of traffic night and day in all directions surrounded our house built right on the corner. Next to the house on the top of the hill was the Church. It had the superior location of the whole area. The Church was a classical design with the white cement render painted a brilliant white. There was a high Church tower and from this tower you could see ten miles or more in every direction.
On the other side of the Nepean Highway was the community of Cheltenham. It had always been a sleepy village. For more than a hundred and ten years the big white Church with the tall tower on the top of the hill had stood like a sentinel over-looking the shops. There was a post office, library, the Cheltenham Arms Hotel, the market garden co-operative store that sold just about everything, a produce store, a hardware store – these stores being evidence of the kind of work that went on in the area – for Cheltenham was the vegetable growing garden of Melbourne. From the scores of farms nearby every kind of vegetable was grown for Melbourne’s rapidly increasing population. All the older members of the Cheltenham Church of Christ were market gardeners. We had some families in their fifth generation of growing vegetables on the same soil. The soil had been good to the people of Cheltenham and to the members of the Cheltenham Church of Christ.
The community of Cheltenham was not large. We had a police station, several banks, a solicitor’s office, a local doctor, dentist and undertaker. I was to come to know each of these people well over the next thirteen years. W.D. Rose & Son, the family Funeral Directors, was run by two of the sons of the son of W.D. Rose. They became my good friends and together we conducted more than a thousand funerals. The cemetery was a very important part of Cheltenham’s history and members from our Church were the members of the Trust that ran the cemetery.
There was a public school and a large orphanage run by the Methodist Church just opposite the Cheltenham Church of Christ. There were three other Churches in the community – a Methodist, a Presbyterian and the Church of England. The Church of England was the weakest of the three other Churches. Around the corner, in a side road, in a rather shabby modern building was a relatively new Roman Catholic Church.
The settlement of Cheltenham for most of its hundred and ten years had been primarily protestant but since the war there had been many immigrants come to work on the market gardens from southern Europe and consequently the Roman Catholic Church was built, like a late comer, on an inferior piece of ground, although the harried priests had more people to care for than any of the other Churches.
Cheltenham was not only a centre for Market Gardens but because of its rich sandy soil was known for its golf courses. There were thirteen golf courses including the Royal Victoria, the Melbourne and the Commonwealth, three of the finest courses in Australia. This sand belt area of golf courses and market gardens was my new parish. There were two other faces to the Parish. The northern part of the area bordering onto Moorabbin had become a light industrial area with thousands of small factories, mainly in the burgeoning new plastics field. Moorabbin was to become the largest centre of plastics manufacturing in Australia. On the southern boundary of the Parish there was the Moorabbin Airport which, like Bankstown in Sydney, was one of the busiest airports in the Commonwealth. The air traffic controllers at Moorabbin used to claim that theirs was the busiest airport in the Commonwealth but what they did not say was that most of the landings and take offs came from the hundreds of small aircraft carrying trainee pilots who went through thousands of “T&Gs” – touch and goes – as the pilots practiced landings. The air was always a-buzz with myriads of small aircraft going round and round in circles touching down on the air strips and taking off again like giant bees.
In the previous century there were two famous names associated with the Cheltenham Church of Christ. The first one was of enormous importance when I arrived. Mr. Valentine Woff was a legend in his own lifetime. Valentine Woff came from one of the market gardening families but had an incredible musical talent. I wish I had been able to interview him to discover how the son of a long line of vegetable growers managed to become Professor of Music at the Melbourne University and at the Melbourne Conservatorium.
He was a slightly built man, very lithe and slim but with an enormous shock of flowing white hair to the shoulders. When viewed from the back as he stood on a podium and conducted, that shock of white hair stood out on all sides and was quite distinctive. He was a composer of note, particularly of choral anthems and he believed in working with large choirs of hundreds of singers.
I remember him conducting a huge choir of perhaps two thousand singers at the World Convention of Churches of Christ in 1952. I was only a young teenager and I can remember waiting for hours for the doors of the Exhibition Building to be opened for a Sunday afternoon worship service. Over ten thousand people filled the Exhibition Building. A photograph taken at the time, of crowds stretching into the distance shows me as a very young boy in the third row. High up on the podium with his multitudinous choir dressed in black and white was Valentine Woff in evening suit and flowing white hair. The choir sang great hymns under his expert conducting and then when they were singing “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing” he turned round and with a great majestic sweep of arms brought the entire ten thousand strong congregation into the singing. He had absolute command over every voice. We hung onto the notes so long as his hand was lifted into the air and stopped immediately he dropped it. The men followed the part singing when his right hand conducted them and the women followed their special parts with his left hand. He was an incredible virtuoso.
The Cheltenham Church of Christ had the tremendous privilege of having him conduct the Church choir for half a century. Consequently the Church choir was practiced, well drilled, expert and large. Mr. Valentine Woff had died just prior to my coming to the Church but his tradition was living on within the Church Choir.
The other person of whom the Church ought to have been proud was never mentioned in the Church histories. Yet he was the most famous son of the Church and of the area. Harry Hawker is indeed one of whom all Australians should be proud. He was born in January 1889 in Cheltenham and grew up in the local Moorabbin School. He started as a teenager working for a firm of motor and bicycle agents, the Tarrant Motor Company – an early Australian Motor Company which eventually became the forerunner of General Motors Holden. In those days when motors were first appearing in the United Kingdom, Europe and America, Australia was up there with the rest of the motor producing countries. Harry Hawker soon knew everything that was to be known about motors.
In 1911 he saved enough money to get himself to England where he learned to fly. Because he knew motors well he very quickly became one of the world’s test pilots working with the Sopwith Aviation Company. He was an aviator, flying instructor and test pilot. Within his first year of arriving in Great Britain, in October 1912 he established a British endurance record that stood for years by making a flight which lasted eight and a half hours. The following year he set a British altitude record by reaching eleven and a half thousand feet. He then won an International prize for a series of six five-mile flights landing alternatively on land and water.
In 1913 the boy from Cheltenham Church of Christ began a sea plane flight which captivated the British press. He was to fly around Great Britain. On his third day engine trouble forced him to crash near Dublin and his flying companion was injured. But repairing the motor he travelled on flying more than one thousand miles in twenty one hours – a world record for a seaplane. Harry Hawker already had a number of world records and he was only 24.
He was not only an extraordinary pilot but Harry Hawker was a good designer. He designed the famous Sopwith Biplane, a small machine capable of incredible speed. He became the first pilot to fly at more than hundred miles per hour. He brought this plane to Australia in 1914 and gave successful exhibition flights around the nation. He was only 25 at the time.
When war broke out there was no Air Force but he joined the Royal Naval Air Service as their chief test pilot, testing more than two hundred and ninety five aircraft, making suggestions for their improvement as weapons of war.
The boy from the Cheltenham Sunday School in 1919 captured the imagine of the world when he tried to fly a single-engine Sopwith seaplane across the Atlantic. This was eight years before Charles Lindberg eventually made it successfully.
Harry Hawker took off from Newfoundland in March, 1919 but was blown off course by a huge gale. Soon he was a hundred and fifty miles south of his projected track when radiator trouble caused the engine to overheat. He successfully landed in heavy seas. Nothing was then heard of him for days and the world mourned his passing. By a miracle he had landed near a Danish tramp steamer.
He and his companion McKenzie Grieve were rescued aboard the tramp steamer but as the ship had no radio transmitter it was six days before they eventually made it to land. In the meantime the world press had carried the story that Hawker and Grieve had gone down in the sea and were given up for lost.
It was as if they had returned from the dead when eventually the news came that they were safe on board the Dutch tramp steamer. Even though they had failed to cross the Atlantic, both were rewarded for their heroism. King George V awarded them the Air Force Cross and the London Daily Mail gave them five thousand pounds – a huge amount in those days.
In 1920 Harry Hawker took up motor racing with amazing success. He who had been the first man to fly faster than a hundred miles an hour produced and drove a new streamlined racing car and became the first to break the hundred miles an hour barrier on land.
In an aerial derby in 1921 Harry Hawker’s plane caught fire and he was killed. He was 32 years of age.
The world of aviation mourned as did the people of Cheltenham and Moorabbin. Harry Hawker was an outstanding mechanic, pilot and racing driver. He was a pioneer of a new industry and his firm, the Hawker Engineering Company which took over the Sopwith Aviation Company for which he had earlier worked, continued after his death and later became part of the famous Hawker De Havilland British Aircraft Company.
Harry Hawker had come a long way from the market gardens of Cheltenham. However, the Church had never said much about him. Whereas Valentine Woff had made a contribution to the worship of God and to the preaching of the Gospel, Harry Hawker was regarded as an unusual young man with rather wild tendencies and an unhealthy interest in things that flew in the air. Indeed I was to be minister of the Church for a number of years before I ever heard the name of Harry Hawker.
In the Church of Christ at Cheltenham, the worship of God and the extension of the Kingdom were the important issues. Those unreliable, noisy flying machines, even in my day, were not of any significance when five generations of your family had earned their living from growing carrots and cabbages. I was part of the new generation and therefore saw Harry Hawker in a slightly different light: a wonderful Australian of whom this nation should be proud.
That night I spent some time in my study writing up my journal and looking out of the window at the never ending stream of cars stopping at the traffic lights at the corner of Nepean Highway and Chesterville Road, that wide intersection that was dominated by the lovely white Church with the high white tower, noting down in my journal the events of another day as a suburban minister.
GORDON MOYES