manor house … with a colonial style veranda on two sides. We children had cause to remember this veranda as there was a highly varnished portion from the front steps to the entrance of the house itself with its two glass panels on which was inscribed … ‘Nothing without the Cross’. We were not allowed to walk over that sacred entrance if we had nails in our boots for fear of scratching the highly polished surface; and that is how Mt Pleasant was kept in those days under a fleet of highly efficient housekeepers, cooks and maids, with Curtiss the head gardener presiding over the surroundings with the help of his many assistants.
What a place to keep up. From the lodge gates, always kept closed, and opened by the lodge-keeper on a ring or a hail, up a wide half mile of gravel drive to the well situated house. As one pulled up in front the air was redolent with the odour of Mt Pleasant’s prize chrysanthemums on the veranda if the season was right. The bluestone stables attracted attention, and the family tomb close to the house. There were spacious lawns, English elms and oaks, and down a slope, tennis courts and a full size bowling green. Mt Pleasant had a large orchard, the apples and pears being carefully stored for winter. Down at the hot houses the rather famous Reed grapes were grown. Further through the trees water gleamed from the surface of an artificial lake, with its swans, and trout rising. Here we used to swim after Christmas dinner in the great dining room, with the portraits of Grandfather and Grandmother looking down on us.5
Here Henry’s mother Margaret, Victorian matriarch and active Evangelist, ruled. Widowed in 1880, Margaret had seized the chance to manage her husband’s numerous financial and evangelical pursuits in his name. After his death, Margaret commissioned a new row of cottages in Launceston to house destitute widows, called Dunorlan after their home in England. She bought the Royal Hotel, rejoiced at its demolition, and had built the Memorial Church with a complex to feed and school the needy in Launceston.
At Mount Pleasant, she commissioned a landscaped retreat for a tomb ground to serve as the family vault, set into the side of the hill where the patriarch was interred behind bluestone. The martyr’s descendant (Irish-born Margaret traced her heritage back to a Protestant martyr) had every intention of joining him there. His towering biblical image appeared among embroidered religious texts, in oil paintings, etchings and marble busts. She had his memoir and religious tracts published in London, and continued his commitment to missions in China and New Guinea.
For the rest of her life Margaret dressed in mourning, in gowns of black silk or satin, depending on the season, the black offset by her white lace cap and shawl of lace or soft Shetland wool. She made time for her last grandchild, Cynthia, welcoming her into her room upstairs with long white lace curtains at the windows and evangelical texts on the walls. She saw in the child’s delicate face, under a crop of curls, a likeness to her lost first son, Walter. She held a powerful attraction for the child. It would have been Cynthia’s grandmother who gave her the mournful Victorian children’s books, Eric, or, Little by Little and Foxe’s Martyrs, on the same birthday.6
Perhaps the most marked change Henry and Lila would make was to shift from their parents’ demanding Nonconformism to mainstream Anglicanism, the religion of state and country. Anglicans chose a comforting and less demanding God, one more at ease in society. However, the family preserved the convention of servants addressing the family formally, including the children.
In 1911, the Reeds travelled to England, in part to see the older children. Coralie was nearly fully grown at fifteen, and Margaret was eleven. No record seems to exist about their English schooling; they were destined for domesticity, their duty to be good and hopefully marry well. Dick, at thirteen, graduated from a preparatory school in London to enter Cheltenham College. The college had two streams, the Military and the Classical; Dick was meant for the Military stream:
His father wrote on his admission form that he was intended for an army career, and he was accordingly placed on the Military side, proceeding from class Upper 2 Military to class Special 6 in the time he was here.
John, at ten, was to begin at the preparatory school. When his time for Cheltenham came in 1913, Henry enrolled him in the Classical stream, ‘where the curriculum included Greek as well as Latin and was designed to prepare boys for university entrance and professions such as law’.7
The Reeds spent time visiting various family branches and friends; Henry would also have attended to business affairs. Dick, Margaret and John remained behind at school when the others returned to the Mount Pleasant Estate in 1912. The family returned with a Daimler and a chauffeur, Joseph Holmes, along with fashionable wear for motoring. Lila chose an elegant blue motoring veil.8
Margaret, after some forty year’s management, relinquished control of the business to Henry, her only remaining biological son. The Reed fortune, linked to branches in Melbourne and England, had survived the bank crashes of the 1890s and the threats to their shipping by newly united dockworkers. Margaret remained the domestic matriarch around whom the extended clan of Reeds gathered. Henry Sr had added a large hall for use as a chapel in the courtyard behind the house, conveniently close to the stables, with a garden wall extending to a romantic arbour. The services had ended with Henry’s death, so the chapel became known as the ‘Big Room’, used as a schoolroom when it wasn’t required for large family occasions.
Lila had little influence in the home. Cynthia’s adored nurse was a friend from Lila’s earlier life in England. All three were distressed by the matriarch’s decision for Cynthia to be schooled by a governess, though the child was precocious, provocative, and a source of irritation to her father. Her large, often blackened eyes haunted Henry, as the memory of his brother Walter might have done.
Having lost her only ally in the house, Lila looked to the town below to find some use for her talents. She began by fulfilling her family duties to charitable works in town, and her social obligations, such as hosting visiting vice-regal governors and their entourages. Each fortnight, the widows at Dunorlan Cottages had to be visited and paid a small stipend, a duty she shared with her stepsister-in-law, Hudson’s mother at Wesley Dale. Like Cynthia, Hudson remembered visiting them and the bright silver coin they received. Lila regularly presided over charity bazaars and flower shows, soon establishing herself as a charming and persuasive public speaker.
In 1914, Coralie was eighteen and out in society. In June, Margaret and John were returned to Australia, leaving only Dick behind to finish at Cheltenham. When war was declared, many Tasmanian boys, especially country boys, confident of their horseriding and bush skills, enlisted. This included their cousin Hudson Fysh, who would draw on his piloting experience after the war to found Quantas Airways.
None imagined the catastrophe of modern, mechanised warfare. The children at home added a prayer for soldiers and sailors to their evening observance. The Union Jack was raised high on the roof of Mount Pleasant; the daily papers carried growing lists of local boys killed, wounded or missing.
At home, Cynthia discovered the delights and disadvantages of being among her siblings. She was experienced enough outdoors for John to include her on his bird-watching and egg-collecting adventures. They were often out on their ponies, exploring the surrounding countryside. When summer came they could fish, go boating or swim in the lake. She also had to endure the teasing older brothers seem to find irresistible.
They also spent time with their governess, Miss Greenfield, in the Big Room. (Years later, when John saw the elderly Miss Greenfield, she greeted him as ‘Master John’.)9 The Big Room made an ideal schoolroom, with a high-panelled wood ceilings and long narrow windows punctuating the whitewashed walls. Double doors led down into the enclosed courtyard garden, where the arbour was protected by garden walls and bathed by morning sun. The Big Room housed a harmonium and a piano, a desk Dick kept locked for his guns, and cabinets for John’s ornithological collection — specimens laid out on cottonwool with explanatory notes neatly appended. Books, maps, writing and art materials sat alongside the white marble bust of the patriarch in his prime.
Here, Miss Greenfield taught Barbara and Cynthia, and advised Margaret, who thought she might follow in her step-aunt’s footsteps and become a missionary. Of the daughters, serious-minded Margaret was most like her formidable grandmother, regarded as ‘the plain one’. Like her grandmother, she had a soft spot for the baby of the family and was always ready to take care of Cynthia.