24/52 Broken Branch: Maria Ann Hunt. 1867 - 1935

 24/52 Broken Branch: Maria Ann Hunt.(1867 -1935)

For the ‘broken branch’ I will write about Maria Hunt, because Maria was broken in as far as she suffered from chronic illness most of her adult life. My family history research is also broken because I have no idea what her illness was. The nature of it was unmentionable, perhaps not an uncommon problem in researching women’s history. 

Maria Ann Hunt was born in 1867 in Wiltshire. She was named after her grandmother, Anna Maria née Humphries who had died  when Maria’s mother, Elizabeth née Best, was eleven. Maria’s newly married parents, Elizabeth and William Hunt, both raised in Primitive Methodism, set sail for the colony of Victoria soon after Maria was born.

They arrived in Melbourne in December and set off for William’s first posting as a Primitive Methodist minister in Clunes. Over the next 17 years Elizabeth raised five more children: Edith, (1870), Herbert (1872), Mabel (1876), Harold (1880) and Ethel (1884). The family moved every three or four years as was required by the Methodist system. They lived in Clunes/Creswick, Sandhurst (Bendigo), Geelong, Ballarat and  had various years in Melbourne. Maria attended Presbyterian Ladies College in Melbourne and Clarendon College, a Presbyterian girls school in Ballarat, where she later became a teacher. 

In Ballarat, in 1887, Maria met her future husband, Brian Wibberley, a newly arrived young Minister from Derbyshire, posted in Ballarat. They married in April 1890 when Maria was 23.

A month later, Brain’s four year probationary period in the ministry completed, he was welcomed as the first superintendent minister to the newly formed Brighton Circuit. A grand morning tea was held to welcome Mr and Mrs Wibberley, as well as celebrate the new Circuit. As anyone ‘who knows anything about the Primitive Methodists of Brighton would expect….[it was first class] The tables were fairly groaning with … delicacies,’ By July Maria was offering prayers at the opening of the Sunday School ‘Sale of Work’. The report says ‘Mrs Wibberley…is held in great esteem by the young people. Her speech, ‘very neat, terse and appropriate, declared the ‘Sale Of Work’ open. £20 was raised for the Sunday School. Sadly this active presence in the Church did not persist. 

It was in Brighton where Maria gave birth to both her children, Brian William, (1891), and Annie Winifred, (1893) who she called Willy and Nancy. They spent the next seven years in Victoria. Besides Brighton they were posted in Carlton and Talbot, in central Victoria.  

In Maria’s 1935 obituary it is reported that she suffered 40 years of ill health which dates the beginning of her problems to 1895. Because the cause of her poor health is never specified, I speculate that it was either gynaecological or psychological, as both these issues were taboo topics of conversation.  That she only ever had two children supports the gynaecological theory. Her mother and her grandmother both had six which was more usual for the times. Maria’s ill health seems to have begun in the early stages of her reproductive life. Did she have a miscarriage? A problematic pregnancy? Or what happen to prevent her having more children? 

In 1898 Brian was posted in North Adelaide, a prestigious appointment at the Wellington Square Primitive Methodist Church. He was dynamic, outspoken, somewhat controversial, musical and intellectual. He was very busy and often away from home. The Quiz and the Lantern introduced him as a ‘hard hitter, whose utterances comes from a cultured and virile brain.’ In a sermon given in Hobart in 1895, Woman her Power and-Position he recognised important women in the Bible and ‘…Joan of Arc who was burnt as a witch but died a saint, Florence Nightingale and …others who …went out in to the world healing the sick and doing good.’ He praised the importance of mothers, ‘the first prayers were taught by her lips’. ‘He contended that woman ought to have the opportunity of being and doing all that she had been made capable of being and doing.’ He then goes on to ridicule ‘ladies dressed in men’s attire, astride a bicycle’, comparing her to ‘a little boy with his trousers on backwards, not knowing where he was going’. In the end, a woman was intended as man’s helpmate and companion. He did not think that ‘implied inferiority but difference in order, not degree.’ Rev Wibberley was a man of his time. He was an admirable preacher but I might have felt a bit over shadowed and intimidated by him if he had been my husband. 

After the posting at Wellington Square, in 1902 they moved to Moonta in Yorke Peninsular. In 1905 when the Wibberleys left Moonta her illness is mentioned for the first time in the farewell speech:

‘they deeply sympathised with Mrs Wibberley in her affliction and wished from their hearts that it were otherwise with her.’

They returned to Adelaide, to the Kent Town Methodist Church where the Wibberleys met the Godlee family, important and involved parishioners. Theo Godlee was the treasurer and Charlotte and their children involved in the Sunday School. 

In April 1906, after a year in Adelaide, Brian went on a world trip. He was farewelled for his ‘well earned holiday’ at a public meeting at the Payneham Church. In responding to the address Brain said : ‘more gratefully still did he appreciate their great kindness to Mrs Wibberley in her delicate state of health’. On April 13th it was reported int the Yorke Peninsular Advertiser, that the Rev, Mrs and Miss Wibberley, (aged 13),  had  left on the Melbourne express, that the Rev would continue overland to Sydney and then set sail for England via Canada. It seems likely that Maria and Nancy went to Victoria to stay with Maria’s family while Brian was away. Willy, 15,  perhaps  boarded at Prince Alfred College.  They are reported returning on the train to Adelaide in September. On September 1st an advertisement was published in the Advertiser calling for a ‘thoroughly competent general servant’ for Mrs Wibberley. 

In 1910 at the Methodist Conference Brian’s posting in Perth, Western Australia, was proposed. Brian responded that, ‘as regards Mrs Wibberley’s health, she could undertake a sea voyage as well as a train journey. He left himself in their hands and that was what he regarded as serving the Divine Cause.’ He did seem reluctant to go but the family moved to Perth. Willy stayed behind to attend university. At the farewell from Kent Town in 1911 Mrs Wibberley is mentioned: ‘The personality of Mrs Wibberley, who has fulfilled with much sweetness an influential ministry all her own, was tenderly referred to.’

In April 1911 the family took up residence in the Havelock Street Manse in West Perth. In May Brian reports to his friends in South Australia that they ‘will regret to learn that Mrs Wibberley has had a severe illness but her many friends will be gratified to know that she is  well on the way to recovery.’  This suggests that Maria’s illness may be psychological. What was it like to have spent her entire life never staying in the one place for more than 5 years? How hard was it to to leave the community time and time again? She had done it through her childhood and now it continued. Was she depressed? Did the move to WA trigger childhood distress?  The West Australian noted that in accepting the position in Perth it meant ‘severing himself form all his friends, and meant his wife and himself parting from their only son.’

In 1913 Margery Godlee visited Maria and Brian in Perth. Margery’s mother, Charlotte Godlee, writes, on Willy’s birthday, 

I am thinking of Brian, [Willy] so far away from his loved ones but after all distance is not the chief separator and love binds closely with its golden chains so I am sure his birthday will be bright. I am more than pleased that you are having the happiness of being with Mrs Wibberley. No one can as easily enter into your thoughts and desires as she, his mother, and I am sure she will appreciate having you. I truly wish she were more able to enjoy your company.

In May 1914, Margery Godlee and Willy got engaged. Maria wrote warmly to Margery:

Wesley Manse

Perth

May 23rd 1914

My dear Margery, 

I wish that I could seal with my lips dear the love and the welcome that my heart sends to you. You have each won something very precious in the knowledge of this wondrous gift of love you have bestowed on one another and with such wealth are rich indeed. But I feel that I too am a sharer in this wealth for with the thought of what you are and will be to my boy, comes also the knowledge that you are coming right into his mother’s heart, an added possession to be loved too with a great love. 

I do pray that God’s richest blessing may be upon you both and that in this new and fuller joy that has come into your lives, you may comprehend yet more and more that love of Him who has loved us with an ever lasting love. 

Mr Wibberley is of course included in all that I have said and sends you his warmest love. I would like to have written to Mrs Godlee too this mail but cannot so will you please give her my love and tell her I will do so as soon as I possibly can. Nancy is sending you her own little message so with my heart’s warmest and fondest love to you dear, 

Believe me to be 

Your very loving 

M A Wibberley.

In September Maria’s mother, and a Miss Hunt (probably Edith), came to  stay with Maria and Brian for a few months and in the summer of 1914 Willy and Margery, Maria’s sisters, Mabel and Ethel Hunt, went to Perth together. It must have meant a lot to Maria to have family come to her when she was so isolated in WA.  

In 1915 Willy, newly graduated in medicine in Adelaide, signed up with the Royal Army Medical Corps and set sail for England and France. He wrote faithfully from the western front, and was reported missing in May 1917, although he turned up soon after. It must have been a very hard time though to be a mother and have your son at war. Maria would have known many other women of her generation who lost their sons: Margery Godlee lost her brother in July 1916. When Mary Godlee’s fiancé died in 1918 Maria wrote:

Our little Mary! it is terribly hard for  her and for his poor mother too. I have had you all in mind a great deal since the news came for sorrow has been around us here too, and to quite a number of houses during the last two or three weeks. Mr Wibberley has had to ‘break the news’. It is heart breaking work and takes it out of him very much. 

Maria wrote often to Margery in Adelaide. Her letters are consistently apologetic and allude to her ill health. She fails to live up to her own expectations of what a good mother in law should be. In September, 1915, in sending ‘just a small remembrance’ for Margery’s birthday  she says: 

It is a great disappointment that I am not able to  send you a piece of my own work as I had hoped, but I have been quite unable to begin anything fresh since you were here.

Later in this letter she says: 

It has been a great disappointment not to be able to reply myself to your letters but I have done absolutely nothing in that way except write to Will as I could. I really felt rather proud of myself last mail for I have been able to send him a letter with out a break for a good many mails past, though earlier in the time I had to miss a good many to my grief.

In 1918 she sends birthday greetings and a gift: 

Nancy has left with me her birthday gift to you which I will enclose with mine. I hope you will feel something of the love which comes with them both. Mine will be valuable to you on that account I know, though in other aspects I am only too conscious of its defects and as it has been a full three and a half years in the making is is far from fresh looking. 

And again, that Xmas she writes 

The accompanying little gift represents us both, dearest. It is chiefly Nancy’s work and I am very doubtful whether my poor attempt has improved it but you will consider more the motive than the result, I know,

In April 1920 Maria and Brian are posted in Malvern, a suburb of Melbourne. Maria’s mother died in November. 

They remained in Melbourne for four years until they returned to Kent Town. In Adelaide Charlotte, visited regularly and details to Margery the state of her health. In April of 1924 Charlotte reports :  

Mrs Wibberley is still very unwell, very depressed and tired, but Nancy says she was like it when she had the journey from the west.  I think Nancy feels she is less able to stand things.

In May Charlotte visited Maria after Church: 

Mrs Wibberley looked very sweet in a pink wrap knitted in that curly wool. She had a sore throat but did not seem ill. She seems much brighter than I thought she would be with Nancy going away. 

These mentions of depression and to distress caused by Nancy going away suggest that the illness is psychological, doesn’t it?

In Spring Charlotte picks roses for her son to take to Mrs Wibberley:

If she gets them in the morning she can have all day to enjoy them. They have lost their first freshness by the next morning. I have not seen her this week yet but hope to tomorrow ….. She is still pretty worried about her maids. I wish she could get someone really dependable. 

In early December Charlotte is still engaged in the problem of maids. :

I saw Grandma Wibberley yesterday. She is certainly better and we had a little chat about you all, but of course only for a few minutes. I have been fixing up with a woman to wash and clean a day on alternate weeks.’

In 1926  Charlotte says 

‘Mr Wibberley will be with you tomorrow. …Mrs Wibberley seemed a little better yesterday. She is vey pleased to have Mrs Howatt with her. I feel very relieved as I think she must be fearfully lonely with Mr Wibberley away.’ [Mrs Howatt is Maria’s sister, Edith]

My aunt, Judy Symon, remembers being taken by her aunt, Nancy, as a small child, to visit her grandmother. Judy was struck by the fact that her grandmother never got out of bed. She had a tin of chocolate monkeys and a big box of shells which Judy believes came form Fiji. Probably Brian brought these back as a present when he went there in 1906. 

Maria Ann (née Hunt) Wibberley died in 1935. She was 68. In her Obituary in the Australian Christian Commonwealth, it says: 

Her life was an amazing witness to the triumph of an heroic faith. She was an invalid for over 40 years, and passed though deep waters of affliction. But her beautiful spirit ever reflected to her kinfolk and fiends an endurance and patience which was an unconscious rebuke to the murmurings of those of lesser faith and an inspiration and strength to those who went forth from her quiet room to the clamant task of the world. She often said ‘God’s will was best’.