23/ 52 Popular Name: Mabel Hunt 1876 -1969

 23/52 Popular Name: Mabel Hunt. 1876 - 1969

Mabel was a popular name in 1876. In Victoria alone, that year, a simple search in TROVE brings up over 300 entries. In 2002 there were 11, most of them Funeral notices for a grandma Mabel who is sadly missed. I never had a friend or acquaintance called Mabel and today no one I know calls their daughter Mabel. I hear that my friend, Sue, (a popular name of the 50s!), has a grandchild named Mabel, so it may be about to experience a revival. My grandfather, Mabel Hunt’s nephew, called her Auntie Mab, so probably that’s how she was referred to in the family. There are other now dated names in this family including Ernest, Edith, Winifred, Herbert, Harold, Arthur, Ethel and Gertrude, all names that were popular in the 1870s and 80s.

Auntie Mab was the daughter of Elizabeth née Best and William Hunt. Elizabeth, the daughter of a Primitive Methodist preacher from Dorset, married William, a Wiltshire Primitive Methodist minister. With their first baby, Maria Ann, they arrived in Victoria in 1867, as missionaries, heading for the gold fields. Ministers in the Methodist Church were moved every three or four years which must have been a difficult lifestyle. No sooner had you unpacked the pictures and books than you would be saying goodbye to your friends. The Hunt children were born all over Western Victoria. In 1870 in Creswick/Clunes Elizabeth had Edith Winifred. Herbert Edward was born in Carlton in 1872. Mabel was born in Sandhurst (Bendigo), in 1876, the fourth child.  Maria was 9, Edith 6 and Edward 4. We can find Elizabeth in charge of the knick-knacks stall at the Sandhurst Methodist fête, baby Mabel, perhaps passed around amongst the women with big sister, Maria doing quite a bit of child and baby care. In 1879, they moved to Geelong where another brother, Harold Arthur was born. 

In April of 1882, when Mabel was five years old, her parents took baby Harold to visit their parents in England, returning in September. I wonder who looked after Maria, Edith, Herbert and Mabel. Maria was 14 but surely too young to take on that responsibility. The following year they were posted to Melbourne and the last child, the sixth, Ethel Gertrude, was born in Carlton. Ethel and Mabel would spend their lives together.

Mabel was 8 in 1884 when the foundation stone was laid of the Primitive Methodist church on the corner of Station Street and Lee Street in North Carlton. The Hon James MacBain, M.L.C. gave a speech in which he said this church would ‘serve to remind their children and their children’s children of the evidence of the faith of their Saviour.’ This child of those children’s children’s children will examine that foundation stone when next in Melbourne. Mabel went to school at the state school in  Drummond Street. 

A posting in Ballarat followed in 1886, which is where Mabel spent her teenage years. Maria, Edith and Mabel attended Clarendon College, a Presbyterian girl’s school in Ballarat.  A young Methodist, Brian Wibberley, newly arrived in the colony from Derbyshire, who preached with their father, became Mabel’s brother-in-law when he married older sister, Maria, in 1890. Mabel was fourteen and surely would have been present at the Eyre Street, Ballarat Primitive Methodist Church to see her sister marry Brian. 

Mabel matriculated in 1893 when she was 17.  After a stint at Talbot, another gold mining Victorian town, the family moved to Brunswick in 1895 and William Hunt was voted President of the Victorian Conference.  These next ten years represented the peak of his career. He was away from home a lot, including a trip to England to negotiate the financial arrangements for the newly amalgamated Australian Methodists. He and Elizabeth managed the Book Depot in Melbourne and probably daughters Mabel and Edith helped with this work while William was away. After the amalgamation William became the President of the Australian Methodist Conference. 

There is an entry in the Sands Melbourne Directory of 1901 of a Miss M Hunt teaching at Marbledown Ladies College and Preparatory School for Boys, situated in Hawthorn. This may well be our Mabel. She would have been 25 in 1901 so perhaps she studied teaching after she matriculated.  We do know for sure that Mabel began work at Methodist Ladies College in 1912 and  Stacey Coenders, the MLC archivist, who has been very helpful in detailing her employment at MLC, thinks it is likely that to teach at MLC she would need to have graduated in Science at university but I can find no evidence of her attending university. 

In 1914 Mab and Ethel had a Christmas holiday in Western Australia, visiting married sister Maria and Rev Brian Wibberley. They travelled by ship from Melbourne, chaperoning Maria and Brian's son, also Brian, and his fiancée, Margery Godlee. In his letters to Margery he jokingly refers to Mabel and Ethel as ‘the ants’: 

Won’t we be a merry party! I told you that my two ants are going. I suppose you will bless those ants choosing to come on the same boat as someone and I. I suppose the ants will bless someone when they hear that I have my fiancée on board. Well, let them bless: what do we care, ‘ants is ants’ I say and ‘us is us.’ so there you are. But still we will let the ants talk to us occasionally. 

Earlier, in May that year he had met Auntie Mab at ‘Grandpa’s cottage’ in Fern Tree Gully. They had both travelled there separately from Melbourne on the train, Auntie Mab accompanied by Miss Crow. They had missed one another at the station but Brian knew the cottage because Aunt Ethel said the other cottage had tin chimneys and Grandpa’s cottage had brick ones. These are the only references I have to Mabel in my grandfather’s letters. 

Mabel was initially employed at MLC as a science teacher, with a special interest in geography and botany. She was form mistress and also heavily involved in the Student Christian Union and led the Bible Study Circle. In 1919 she accepted the position of Lady Superintendent of the Boarding House.. According to Stacey Coenders, the MLC Archivist,

This was one of the more senior roles within the College and the person responsible for the running of the boarding house and wellbeing of its 100+ boarders.

Apparently she continued to teach as is seen in this photo from the 1930’s MLC magazine, ‘Miss Hunt’s Geography excursion’.  

She had time off work during term 3 of 1927 due to illness. My sister, Penny Jackson, has memories of visiting Mabel when she was an old lady and Penny says Mabel had a ‘club foot’. Maybe this was related to her time on sick leave in 1927. 

In February 1928 it was reported in the Melbourne Herald that Mabel and Ethel would accompany Dr Georgina Sweet to England ‘primarily on a private tour’ but also to attend the YWCA World Conference in Budapest in June. Much later, in 1946, Mabel was appointed  the executor of Georgina Sweet’s will, so this was clearly a close and important relationship. Dr Sweet was a wealthy Methodist academic who left her fortune to charity.

In 1929 Mabel returned to MLC as Lady Superintendent and stayed in that position for the next ten years.  

Staff photo from 1933. Mabel is probably the woman in the centre. 

At the time of her retirement in Jan 1939, an article in the Melbourne Age, quotes Mabel’s views on modern education.  In an article entitled Praise for the Modern Girl, she extolls the virtue of organised sport: 

It has not only improved the girls’ physique … but has taught them self-reliance and self-control. They learn to take the rough with the smooth and accept success and defeat in good spirits

Life is less formal than previously but modern girls are well prepared for adult life and active citizenship. 

The womanly arts of dress are not overlooked and Miss Hunt insists that the modern girl is domesticated and very ready to be interested in housewifely affairs. …Miss Hunt will be very much missed by the school; her easy championship of youth and obvious understanding of and sympathy for young things make her an admirable guardian for them. 

She had no special plans for retirement but was going to have a long holiday and spend more time at her cottage in Black Rock, on the things she loved, gardening and reading. She sounds like my kind of woman! 

Penny and I remember visiting Mabel and Ethel in the Dandenongs. I don’t remember Mabel or Ethel but I do remember the wild shady sprawling garden. She lived to be 93, dying in 1969. She is buried in the family grave in the Boroondara Cemetery, with her parents, William and Elizabeth, her uncle Ezra, (Elizabeth's twin), sister Edith, brother Harold and his wife. Ethel was also buried here, but not until 1974.

I do regret that I didn't get to know these 'ants' when I had the chance but it is good to celebrate them now. Single women so often are left out of family history.