Dorothy Muriel Bignell. Dorothy Muriel Bignell.
Dorothy’s own story
My parents, Victor and Dorothy Gannaway (nee Truslove), were married in the Baptist Church, Carew Street, Katanning in 1921.
I was born on the 10 March 1922, at the Brockhurst Hospital where the former Convent now stands. My mother had to take me to the hospital quite often for Dr Pope to massage my club feet and also put them in plaster.
My father worked at the Katanning Flour Mill and also at Kobeelya when the Piesse family lived there. Later my parents shifted to Kirup before moving on to Bornholm where I spent all my school days.
I left Bornholm in 1935 and travelled by train to Katanning for my first employment, which was on William Beeck’s farm at Moojebing. Doing housework, feeding chooks, gathering eggs and milking cows netted me seven shillings and sixpence a week (just under a dollar). I bought a skirt, jumper, beret and overcoat at the Emporium in Austral Terrace in the first few months I was there.
I left Beeck’s to join my family in Yealering where my father was now working on the railways but in 1937 I returned to Katanning. This time, I was employed by my Uncle and Aunt, Gus and Matilda Beeck in Albion Street. Uncle Gus died while I was there, so later Auntie Matilda took in boarders, a dressmaker, school teacher and a telephonist. I got a bit over ten shillings a week, to do housework, washing, ironing and shopping etc.
Auntie had a few chooks and any surplus eggs were sold to Smith’s store in Austral Terrace, which I had to deliver. I wasn’t keen going down the main street with a basket of eggs, so I went along the back lane to the shop.
When I was making biscuits in the walk-in pantry I could look out of the window and see mobs of sheep being driven along the Katanning/Kojonup Road on their way to the saleyard. I didn’t know it then, but my future husband George Bignell was living on a farm connected to the Katanning/Kojonup Road. My Grandmother Emma Beeck (the youngest of the 12) had married Walter Truslove in the new Baptist church in 1901 but he died in 1911.
Grandma later married Walter (Clocky) Rogers, a watch repairer in Clive Street. At the time she was running a tearooms next to Berger’s Shoe Store. It was Mr Berger who measured my feet and sent the measurements to a boot specialist in Perth to enable me to have my first pair of surgical boots made, I was 15 at the time.
After leaving Gus Beeck’s I worked at Monty Balston’s home at the top end of the town, but I didn’t like it there so went back to Yealering and so ended my working days in Katanning.
By marrying a Kojonup farmer during the 2nd World War it has meant that I have been able to constantly keep in touch with this Great Southern town where I was born.
Dorothy Bignell died in Kojonup on 26 April, 2012, aged 90 years after many years of being a mother, grandmother, and committed community person who received Kojonup’s Community Citizen of the Year Award. Her husband, George Bignell, died in 2008. ed.
