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paid more than anyone else. He was unmarried and came from Charters Towers, where his
mother ran a hotel. Esther now had four young men working for her -Charlie, Jim Aitken, Dave
Tosh and Lloyd - in addition to Alma and Len, who was nearly 23 when Alma wed.
It had apparently not been the young couple's plan to lodge with Esther -which they did for over
a year. For Alma had told Lloyd, when they were courting: 'I'm not going to marry you until I
get a home of my own'. And Esther had said: 'Oh, that land next door's for sale - pity you
couldn't buy it, and then you could live next to me'. Esther's wish was Alma's command, and
somehow Lloyd found the money not only to buy the land at 131 Munro Street, but eventually
to buy a house from the Rickards in Ravenswood and have it transported to Ayr. This took
some time and also cost £400, which was paid off in instalments over a period of several years.
The house in which Alma would live for 53 years, until she died, was not in fact erected and
habitable until 1930 -the year in which Bill married and Len took his mother overseas.
Bill had completed his apprenticeship as a dental mechanic in May 1929, and it appears that he
then worked in Charters Towers, with AW Trembath, dentist, before heading south to
Rockhampton. However, this stint in Charters Towers may have occurred some years later.
Bill's whereabouts in the 1930s are generally rather uncertain, as is information about his first
and second marriages. Even his friendship with Frank Clausen in Ayr has been misreported. For
the story was that Frank had influenced Bill into choosing dentistry as a career. In fact, Frank
Clausen did not arrive in Ayr to practice as a dentist until 1930, by which time Bill was a
qualified dental mechanic, and married. He and Frank are said to have been close friends, and
to have gone off into the bush shooting ducks, wild pigs and crocodiles: Bill was a first class
shot. He was also six years older than Frank.
We do not know why Bill went to Rockhampton in 1929, but we know that he married there.
He was lodging with a Mrs Kate Whitmee, a widow with five children, four of whom were
boys. Mrs Whitmee was Danish in origin (her maiden surname was Holm) and her husband,
Arthur Biron Whitmee, had been Anglo-French. Born in Islington in London, he had been a
labourer working at or near Mt Morgan. The Whitmees had married in Rockhampton in 1902,
when he was 32.
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Their only daughter, Annie Zoe Whitmee, was born in November 1905 -apparently at a railway
station, or on a train. Her birth certificate gives Warren Central Railway as 'where born'.
Bill and Zoe also married in Rockhampton - on 20 January 1930. She was 24 and he was 25.
It is possible that he actually met Zoe somewhere other than Rockhampton and during his
apprenticeship. Apparently Esther was keen on the match and told Bill to marry Zoe.
It was not a happy marriage. It seems they were temperamentally opposed, Bill being easy-
going, with a strong sense of humour, Zoe being somewhat puritanical, obsessive, stubborn and
staid. Alma observed: 'He didn't like her1. And when Alma asked Bill: 'Why did you marry
Zoe?,' he replied: 'What's anybody marry anyone for?'
Meanwhile, Len and Esther had journeyed to England, the first Honeycombes to return to their
native land since William the stonemason and his family had sailed to Australia from Liverpool
80 years ago.
Len, who would be 24 in October 1930, had wanted to visit England for several years. He had
never met his English grandfather, John Honeycombe, who died in Kalgoorlie, and was a child
when his own father died. So any ancestral tales he may have heard would have come from the
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