My Mother's Father

My mother’s father, Ted West, was a proud man – excessively proud of his parentage and at the same time ashamed of some of his relatives. He developed irrational hatred of things and people. But at the same time he was a weak man, easily lead by his wife, my grandmother.

Ted believed his family was special and indeed in some ways they were – in the distant past. His West ancestor, Thomas West, was convicted of stealing, sentenced to death, transported to Sydney as a convict in the First Fleet, pardoned by Governor Macquarie and given land to build a mill and did very well out of it. This information can be seen on the Powerhouse website, so is public knowledge. His son, Thomas Spencer West, brought up by a stepfather in England, migrated as a free settler and did very well as a builder, but never spoke to his father, which must have made things a trifle inconvenient in a small town like Sydney was in the early 1800s.

Thomas Spencer’s wife, Lucy Jennings, came from a family that had money, and some of her descendants, including some of the Wests, beggared themselves chasing after money left by an intestate Jennings relative in England. It was for some confidence tricksters quite a lucrative pastime to con anyone with a Jennings connection in Australia and America into believing that they had a chance of inheriting the Jennings fortune, long after it had been given to a Jennings nephew by the courts in England. Of course the same thing exists today in the spam from a bureaucrat in a poor state trying to get millions out without being detected: give me your bank account details or a sum of money to start me off etc.

Thomas Spencer’s son, Spencer, was a builder and did very well also. There are huge tracts of terrace houses in inner Sydney built by Spencer West. Indeed there is a West Street in Paddington named after him. My grandfather remembers his grandfather coming home and bouncing gold coin all over the table so it fell on the floor. There were times of plenty and famine, apparently, and when times were good the West family had servants and carriages and lived very well. My grandfather grew up with expectations which were never realised: by the time he was an adult the money had gone: Spencer’s son Edwin Spencer, Ted’s father, had dissipated the money in gambling and bad investments. Thus the saying of rich to poor in three generations held for this family.

Another claim to fame in the family history was the background of Spencer’s wife: Susan Parker. It has always been a family truism that Susan Parker was the daughter or granddaughter of a Rear-Admiral Parker and his American Indian wife. Indeed I did see a reference to the fact that an Admiral Parker married an Indian women; however when it came to tracing the genealogy of Susan (or Susannah) Parker I hit a dead end and could find no Rear-Admiral Parker to match up with the story. As well, the Susan Parker who married Spencer West was the child of William Thomas Parker of London England, and his wife Ann Webb, who married in Sydney in 1839. One can assume that at least one of them was a convict: not a palatable fact for my grandfather, who liked to wash such information under the carpet. In those days, having convict ancestors was not fashionable and was not mentioned.

At the same time my grandfather was heard to remark that his life would have been easier if the West men did not have the unfortunate habit of marrying black women: it made his time in Queensland during the war years difficult as he went black very quickly and look very aboriginal all of the time. The authorities in Queensland in the war (my grandfather was a carpenter and his trade “protected” and thus he did not go to war) tried at one point to not pay him his wage, as it was the custom at the time not to pay aboriginals for their work, only to give them board and food. Indeed he was very dark, and several photos of him as a young man will testify.

My grandfather worked for a lot of his life as a plasterer – making the moulded ceilings in houses and partly as a carpenter. He managed to always be in work and his family always had the necessities of life. Even in the depression years he had work.

He was a committed Mason, and attended Masonic meetings at least twice a week. My mother remembers her mother setting out his robes on his bed to wear to the ceremonies.

He was a quiet man in the house, not saying much, and not having much to do with the running of the house and the children. The memories my mother has passed on to me regarding my grandfather are of a man who was content to let his wife rule the roost, and I suppose just as well as she had a strong character and would have done so anyway. Despite this he held strong opinions on some subjects and could get heated if he was forced to. This was demonstrated when his daughter wanted to remarry.

The first photo shows Teddy West on the far left, aged 18, at Riverton. The second photo shows Ted on the front steps of the home at Mortdale with one of his children. The third photo shows Ted on the right with a friend, and the final photos is of Ted with his grandson Ron, in about the mid 1950s.