 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
December 1970; Sharyn, bom 1973; Christopher, born April 1976; and Danielle, born 1983.
Sharyn married Julian Carroll, who worked for Toyota as a parts manager, in March 1995.
Less than three years before this, Chris Honeycombe died of cancer at the age of 16.
The story of his life and wasteful death is told, mainly by his father, in Afterwords. The loss to
his family, and to all Honeycombes was the greater because, of all the sporting Honeycombes,
Chris was likely to have achieved the most in the national and international scene. He was a
champion swimmer, and might have competed for Australia, not just at the Commonwealth
Games, but in Atlanta at the Olympic Games in 1996.
But one Australian Honeycombe has made his mark - as an international expert in metallurgy.
Not only that, he was knighted by the Queen.
This was another Robert Honeycombe - Robert William Kerr Honeycombe, to be precise -
who was born in Melbourne in 1921.
His grandfather George, the eldest son of Dirty Dick, had been born in Scotland at Edinburgh's
seaport, Leith, in February 1853, and was three months old when Richard and Elizabeth
Honeycombe, sailed on The Banker's Daughter from Bristol in May, bound for Geelong and
taking young Jane, two-year-old Mary Ann and the infant George with them to that far corner
of the globe.
The family later moved to Footscray in Melbourne, and in September 1880, when he was 26,
George married Eliza Soutar in the more salubrious southeastern suburb of Prahran. She was a
dressmaker, residing in Albion Street, South Yarra; he was a coach-painter. Of the four sons of
Richard and Elizabeth, he was the only one not to go to South Africa and become caught up in
the Boer War.
Eliza, if not George, had social pretensions as well as unorthodox religious convictions, and her
four children were raised to be proper and socially correct; the whole family attended services
of the independent Australian Church, and three of the children were married by the Church's
charismatic leader, Dr Charles Strong - two of the daughters claiming to be younger than they
were.
But before any of these events occurred, George died, in September 1913 in the Afred
Hospital, having suffered from chronic nephritis (kidney disease) for several years; he was 60.
At the time the family were living at 40 Albion Street, South Yarra, and none of the four children
- William, 31; May, 29; Louisa, 28; and Nancy, 24 - had married and left home.
William, born in December 1881, had fulfilled parental expectations by being a dutiful student
and becoming an accountant. He was talented as well as clever, and while at South Yarra State
School, and aged 14, won prizes for his schoolwork. He then trained as an accountant and was
sufficiently well established to marry above himself in March 1920, when he was 38. His bride
was Rachel Annie Kerr, the 33-year-old daughter of a JP, Robert Kerr, described
399
in the marriage certificate as a 'gentleman'. She was known as Rae; her occupation is given in
the certificate as 'home duties', and her residence as 'Restalrig, Brewster St, Essendon.'
The couple moved into a smart villa called Blythewood in Kooyong Road, Caulfield,
Melbourne, where they lived for five years, during which their two children, a son and a
daughter, Robert and Marjorie, were born. Father William qualified as a company auditor in
February 1923, two months before his aged grandfather, Richard Honeycombe, aged 93, rode
 |