Name: Ethel Adeline Yates

Date of Birth: 4th December 1874

Birth Location: Halloway, Longdon, England

Maiden Name: Bleby

Age: 75 years

Date of Death: 9th July 1950

Death Location: Stirling Hospital, Bunbury, Western Australia

Date of Burial: 11th July 1950

Denomination: Anglican

Row/Grave: Anglican D Section. Row 3 Grave # 16

Grave Transcription:

In Loving Memory Of

ETHEL ADELINE YATES

Died 8 TH July 1950

And her beloved husband

JAMES MCKENZIE

Died 18 TH July 1959

Aged 90 Years

Fond Parents of

Les & Reg

Father: Henry William Bleby. Born 28th November 1831 in Lucea, Jamaica. Died 11th January 1917 at New Maldon, Surrey, England. Married 22nd June 1861 at Wesley College Chapel, Sheffield, England.

Mother: Ann Elizabeth Waddy. Born 22nd November 1831 in Northamptonshire, England. Died 29th September 1887 at Barnet, Middlesex, England. Married 22nd June 1861 at Wesley College Chapel, Sheffield, England.

Grandparents (father):

Henry Bleby. Born 16th March 1809 at Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, England. And Jane Leach. Born 1810. Died c1840 in Jamaica. Buriel 13th March 1840 at Bingley, York, England. Married 22nd February 1831 at All Saints Church, West Bromwich, Staffordshire, England.

Grandparents (mother):

Samuel Dousland Waddy. Born 5th August 1804 at Burton Upper Trent, Staffordshire, England. Died 7th November 1876 at Bristol, Gloucestershire, England. And Elizabeth Danks. Born 1805 at Wednesbury, Staffordshire, England. Died 28th October 1884 at Cookham, Berkshire, England.

Siblings:

Annie May Bleby. Born 18th December 1863 at Newington, Middlesex, England. Died 6th June 1939, Subiaco, Perth Western Australia.

Florence Ellen Bleby. Born 31st July 1865 at Stoke, Newington, London, England. Died 15th December 1933 at Camberwell, London, England.

Henry Leonard Bleby. Born 4th March 1867 at Holloway, England. Died 27th December 1942 at Barnstaple, Devon, England.

Agnes Rose Bleby. Born 31st October 1868 at Islington, Middlesex, England. Died 4th July 1941 at Barnstaple, Devon, England.

Edward Herbert Bleby. Born 15th December 1870 at Sandown, Isle of Wight, England. Died 2nd January 1943 at Adelaide, South Australia.

Spouse: James McKenzie Yates Born 11th August 1868 at Chimney Gully, Angaston, South Australia.  Died 18th July 1959 at Donnybrook Hospital, Donnybrook, Western Australia.

Children:

Doris Edith Ethel Yates. Born 11th August 1896 in Perth Western Australia. Died 2nd December 1896.
Aged 3 months.

Henry Lesley McKenzie Yates, Born 26th October 1898 at Guilford, Western Australia, Australia.  Died 1979

Reginald Bleby Yates, Born 29th March 1901 at Kirup, Western Australia, Australia. Died 27th April 1973
at Bunbury Regional Hospital, Bunbury, Western Australia.

Occupation: Home Duties, Teacher, Writer

Their Story

Ethel was the daughter of Henry William Bleby b. 1831 and Ann Elizabeth Waddy b. 1831. She was born at Halloway, London in England in 1874. She had three sisters and two brothers.

Ethel came to Adelaide, Australia with her father and siblings in 1891. Her father was a solicitor. He came to Australia after the death of his wife to lecture in law at Adelaide University. Ethel was 17 years old.

Her grandfather was Henry Bleby born 1809. He is a well-known Wesleyan Methodist Jamaican missionary and writer of many books about slavery in Jamaica. He was an abolitionist. His most well-known book is called The Death Struggles of Slavery. His books are still studied today because they are an historically important eye witness primary source material of the final days of slavery. He can be found on the internet.

Ethel’s Bleby family line is English but is originally from Normandy in France. The Bleby family line has been recorded back to 1645.

Ethel’s mother was Ann Elizabeth Waddy. Ann’s siblings included a number of Methodist ministers and writers. One was a QC and member of parliament. Their father Dr Samuel Dousland Waddy (1804–1876) was an English Wesleyan minister, writer and intellectual. He was known for his significant contributions to education and the Wesleyan Methodist movement. He was instrumental in establishing Wesley College, Sheffield, United Kingdom, a prestigious private school where he served as governor and chaplain. He also served as President of the Wesleyan Conference in 1859. He wrote several books and papers and a book has been written about him. His contributions are noted on the internet.

With Henry Bleby the missionary and Henry Bleby the solicitor on one side of her family and the Waddys on the other, both of Ethel’s family line bristle with Methodist ministers, lawyers, doctorates and intellectuals. Even her husband James McKenzie Yates was a qualified lawyer. She grew up in an intellectual environment.

Ethel’s father left Adelaide and returned to England after about 3 or 4 years in South Australia, but she stayed. She probably stayed because she had met and or married her husband James (Jim) Yates by that time. Ethel and Jim were married on 13 April 1895 in Port Germain, South Australia when she was 21 years old.

In the same year, 1895, she began a teaching career. In that year she was described by the South Australian Education Department as a ‘provisional teacher on probation’. She was appointed to a school at Caltowie, a small town about 30km’s inland from Port Pirie South Australia. Caltowie is also close to Gladstone in South Australia.

Jim’s family, the Yates family, were pioneers of South Australia. Jim’s grandparents had arrived from England in 1839. They were part of the early historic settlement of the Barossa Valley. That settlement was at Angaston. Angaston was named after George Fyfe Angas the English businessman and promoter who underwrote the settlement of the Barossa Valley settlement scheme. By the time of Ethel and Jim’s marriage Jim’s family had moved to Gladstone, SA. Ethel appears to have applied for an appointment to the Caltowie school to be close to the Yates family as Caltowie is close to Gladstone.

She and Jim moved to Western Australia the next year in 1896 during the 1890’s gold rush. Jim came to Western Australia without Ethel at first. He went to the Coolgardie goldfields and worked on a water distilling machine for several months. Ethel had probably remained behind in South Australia so she could complete her first full year of teaching. Perhaps her teaching degree required that she complete 12 months of practical work before her qualification could be recognised. Either way this confirms that she did have a qualification to teach. So, when she taught the local children in Capel, Western Australia on her own farm in later years, she was in fact qualified to do so. It was common for women in similar positions at the time to teach with no special training. However, Ethel was qualified. Qualified teachers were very highly regarded and respected in her day.

Perhaps Jim’s time on the goldfields was to kill time, a brief adventure before taking up his first appointment after his own graduation. It may be that the work he did later at a law office at Mundaring near Perth didn’t start till later. So, the goldfields work provided him with a job and a bit of an adventure while he waited for Ethel to finish her teaching requirements.

Their first child, Doris was born in Perth in 1896, about one year after their marriage. Unfortunately, Doris died while still less than one year old. Both Ethel and the baby had contracted scarlet fever. When Ethel’s fever eventually broke, and she recovered her senses she was devastated to learn that her baby had died. Ethel never recovered from the loss of her baby Doris and kept a set of Doris’s baby clothing for the rest of her life. The clothes remained in the family for eighty years and were not disposed of until her son Les’s affairs were tidied up after his passing many years later.

After Mundaring Ethel and Jim moved to Kirup, Western Australia in around 1900. Kirup is near Bridgetown, Western Australia. Their names appear on the electoral role in Kirup in 1903. But what were they doing there? Certainly, Kirup is extraordinarily beautiful. It is deep tall forest country but in those days it was extremely remote and undeveloped. Why would they go to a place like that? Three things were happening in Kirup around that time. Gold was discovered, the local railway line was extended allowing Kirup’s timber forests to be exploited and the town of Kirup was being planned out. But none of those things explain why a lawyer and a teacher would want to go and live there. Ethel was from London. The greatest city in the world back then. She could easily have gone back there. Her family still owned property at Islington in London’s CBD. Clearly there were no great career opportunities for teachers and lawyers in Kirup. Qualified teachers were very highly respected in those days. Both Jim and Ethel had the world at their feet.

Kirup didn’t even have a town. That suggests they lived some kind of pioneering existence. An odd place for Ethel, a woman born in London, well educated, a teacher and descendant of the intellectual, civically minded Bleby and Waddy families. Her background had prepared her for a place in a developed society of prominent social, elite artistic and intellectual circles. Instead, she and Jim chose a pioneering location in Kirup which was then an extremely remote town.

Why Kirup? Ethel was said to be very bright. She never recovered from the death of her daughter Doris. Perhaps she decided to ‘drop-out’ of the rat race. Her granddaughter Vi referred to Ethel as a vegetarian, sandshoe-wearing (no leather) Rosicrucian’. So dropping out or more correctly, seeking an alternative lifestyle is a real possible explanation. But then another of her granddaughters Beryl, said that Ethel had strongly held ‘Victorian style’ values. So who knows? Neither should be ruled out. A quick look at her biography is enough to confirm that she was nobody’s fool and she was ‘complicated’. There’s nothing wrong with that. Perhaps they chose remote Kirup and later equally remote rural Capel because Ethel was seeking an alternative. A lifestyle that she felt allowed her to be true to herself as she saw it.

Ethel had two sons, Henry (Les) and Reginald (Reg). Les had been born in Perth, Western Australia and christened in Guildford in 1898. Reg was born in 1901 in Kirup, Western Australia. The family stay in Kirup for three or four years.

Ethel’s son Les’s full name was Henry Lesley McKenzie Yates. The Henry had been taken from both Ethel’s father and grandfather’s names. Reg’s full name was Reginald Bleby Yates. The Bleby middle name being from Ethel’s side of the family.

In around 1904 or 1905 Ethel and Jim acquired a farm at Capel and moved there to live. The property (Wellington location 1003) was purchased under the Lend Lease scheme. That meant they leased the property at little or no cost. Then after a period of years were offered the opportunity to purchase the property at an attractively low price. The state government promoted the scheme widely throughout the state because it wanted to encourage settlers into selected areas and to open up the land. The farm would almost certainly have been virgin land. No house, no fences and no clearing. An immense task faced them. It was however well located on the banks of the Capel River and even today is highly regarded for the quality of a seam of soil which runs through much of it.

In addition to her farming duties, Ethel worked as a schoolteacher. She did not work for the government. Initially she taught in a local school called the Upper Capel School. Then later she simply set herself up independently and taught in a small one-room building on their farm.

She was also a writer. A serious professional writer. She wrote for national magazines like the Bulletin that focused on politics, arts, culture, and society. She wrote children’s stories. And she wrote short stories which she sold. She had contact with intellectuals around the world. It’s enough to say she was a very capable woman. Ethel also played and taught the piano.

The thing that distinguished Ethel was that she was obviously clever. Everybody who knew her wanted to point that out and cited her teaching and writing as a kind of proof. She came from two well-educated and clever families. Their stories of achievement reach back to include a considerable number of notable family members over several generations. These can be found on the internet.

Her father was a solicitor and university lecturer. One of her brothers was a doctor who lived in Canada. There was a QC and Member of Parliament, a missionary in Japan, an Archdeacon of Adelaide and on and on. Even subsequent generations of the Blebys can boast two generations of men who have who held the position of Attorney General of South Australia.

Bleby Women
Several of the women in Ethel’s ancestral line including Emily Rose Bleby were teachers and social reformers active in the British temperance movement. They were affiliated with various organizations including the British Women’s Temperance Association, Sons of Temperance, Independent Order of Good Templars, Band of Hope Union, and the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WWCTU). Like Ethel they were contributors to periodicals on temperance, politics and general subjects. A permanent memorial was publicly erected in Cape Town, South Africa for her aunt, Alicia Bleby who had been active and influential in educational work in Cape Colony, South Africa for 20 years.

After Ethel and Jim purchased and moved to the farm at Capel, she became involved in farming, but it is her work as a teacher for which she is most remembered. Her teaching work was very important to their family. It was like a part time job taken on to supplement the farm’s income. It was common for pioneer farmers in the area at the time in the late 1890’s and onwards to do outside work. Despite living off their farms’ produce they could not rely on their farms for all their income. So, to have the then highly regarded ability to teach meant that Ethel had an extremely marketable skill. And the extra income she saved from the work was used directly to send her two sons Les and Reg to Guildford Grammar school in Perth. That gave them an education that was somewhat better than was common at the time. Her teaching was a success in many ways. Her classroom on their farm was a small one-room building only about 70 metres from their house. Her pupils were the children of neighbouring farmers. Among her students was Agnes Moriarty, a child from a nearby farm. In time Agnes was to become her son Les’s wife.

Ethel studied Esperanto an artificial language carefully designed to be the international language because she felt strongly about the need for the people of the whole world to be able to work together. Of course, now English has become the international language instead and Esperanto has been largely set aside. She belonged to an Esperanto club and read books and newspapers in Esperanto. She named the Capel farm El Sarat. Meaning ‘the bridge between heaven and earth’ in Esperanto ‘The bridge between heaven and earth’ is a Rosicrucian concept. The human being is the bridge. So it’s a Rosicrucian teaching translated into Esperanto. Ethel thought globally, big picture, and she was committed to Esperanto.

Jim and Ethel’s Capel farmhouse was a two-bedroom weatherboard home. This kind of house was common in the area at the time.

Ethel spent her working life on the Capel farm and retired to Bunbury. She died in the Stirling Hospital, Bunbury, Western Australia on 9 July 1950 from cardiac failure. She was 75 years old.

Ethel Adeline Yates death notice:
YATES: On July 9, 1950 at Stirling Hospital, Bunbury, Ethel Adeline, dearly beloved wife of James M. Yates of 3 Ecclestone Street, South Bunbury. Dearly loved mother of Les and Reg. Mother In Law of Maud and Agnes. Aged 75 years.

Trove Newspaper Article – Bereavement notices

Story written by Phil King, great grandson of Ethel. Photos from Phil King family photo collection.
With assistance from Jennifer Scott CDCP member.

© Capel District Cemeteries Project 14.02.2022 Updated 14.07.2.25

Holloway – England