Frederick Kerchner Gaubert migrated, together with his wife Winifred and son Hugh Layton, from Marseilles to Sydney on the ship 'Sydney' (Messagerie Maritimes). They arrived in Sydney on 01.05.1912. In October 1937 Winifred and Margaret left for London. The two women subsequently visited Perth twice - in 1948 for three months and again in 1973 for one month.

 

 

IN DIVORCE.
(Before Mr. Justlee Owen.)

DECREES ABSOLUTE

In the following suits the decrees nisi previously granted were made absolute :—

Frederick Kerchner Gaubert v Winifred Alice Gaubert

The English Gauberts: 1836-1912

I am also very grateful to Frederick Affleck (husband of Joan Gaubert) for the following information -

Frederick Kirchener Gaubert, the father of Hugh Gaubert, was born on the 1st of February 1881 in south London at 37 Kingswood Road, Wimbledon. He was the fifth child of Edward Fradgley Gaubert (1836-1904) and Mary Eliza Henderson (1842-1888). In the 1880s Wimbledon was one of London’s newer and more desirable southern suburbs; the Gaubert home was a modest two-storey attached house, about fifteen minutes on foot from Wimbledon’s growing town centre. Before Frederick’s birth the family had lived more humbly in the older London suburbs of Brixton and Peckham.

Frederick’s father was a Banker’s Clerk who worked in The City of London for the Union Bank, commuting daily from Wimbledon’s by railway. Banker’s clerks held important positions of responsibility as tellers and account keepers. Edward Gaubert was age forty-four when Frederick was born.

Frederick was raised from age eight by a step-mother. Frederick’s own mother was age thirty-eight when he was born. Her origins had been in Camberwell, an inner south London suburb, and her father was head of London’s Fire Brigade. We can imagine young Frederick was thrilled by his connection to the fire engines, with bright red paint and polished brass, noisily powered by steam and pulled by horses. But when Frederick was only seven, in 1888, his mother died. A year later his father was remarried to widow Mary Louisa Cogswell (1841-1908) who was the same age as his late mother. At about the time this step-mother came into the Gaubert household, the family moved to a new home in Merton Hall Road, Wimbledon, grandly named La Maisonette. 

Frederick’s father Edward was born in 1836 in the north-London suburb of Islington, and had also been raised from the age of two by a step-mother. He was the son of a professional photographer and bookseller, also Edward Gaubert (1814-1902), and Elizabeth Fradgeley (1816-1838). She died of tuberculosis when only twenty-five. When Frederick was a toddler, his sixty-eight-year old paternal grandfather Edward Gaubert married a third time. Frederick was twenty when this grandfather died in 1902.   

From early school age Frederick grew up with his two older sisters Edith Mary and Ethel Nora, who were six and four years older than Frederick. His brothers Edward and Walter were eleven and ten years older, and it seems both left home near the time their father was remarried in 1888. So it is likely Frederick saw little of his brothers while he was growing up in Wimbledon. Frederick Gaubert completed his education in Wimbledon at the age of seventeen, and in 1897 began work as a wholesale stationer’s clerk in nearby Merton (according to the Census of 1901), probably working in a small warehouse filling orders for businesses purchasing paper, paper products and other office supplies. In 1900 at the age of nineteen, while still living at home with his father, Frederick’s older sister Edith Mary (b.1874) had been married, becoming Mrs Frederick Price. In September 1904 Frederick Gaubert’s father died, followed almost four years later in July 1908 by his step-mother. She left all the family’s property to his two sisters, and late in 1909 his older sister Ethel Nora (b.1877) took her part of the legacy into a marriage with Mr William Goode. œ

Edward Wilfred Gaubert (1869-1957) Frederick’s older brother, lived for most of his life on the Isle of Sheppey in the mouth of the River Medway in east Kent. He was apprenticed as a joiner and employed early in his career in the British Admiralty Dockyard at Sheerness. In 1891 while ten-year-old Frederick was at school, Edward married Edith Elizabeth Mary Catchpole (1869-1947), whose brother was the publican in the Good Intent public house in Sheerness. Edward eventually became a Foreman of Works in the Department of the Chief Civil Engineer in the Royal Dockyard, where Britain’s Royal Navy was provisioned and repaired – a large and exacting task in this era when Britain’s Royal Navy was the world’s largest and dominated the world’s oceans. According to her death certificate in 1947, she died of ‘coal gas poisoning’. His Edward’s five children included Alfred Fradgley Gaubert (1895-1964), father of Keith Fradgley Gaubert who with his wife Jean live near Bristol and stay in touch with the Australian Gauberts.

Walter Fradgley Gaubert (1871-1936) Frederick’s second brother, joined the Royal Marines at the age of seventeen in 1888, the year his mother died, and was garrisoned in the Royal Marines’ Eastney Barracks in Portsmouth. The Royal Marines were a ‘companion’ force with the Royal Navy, and as a young Private Walter was assigned to its Artillery Division, which at this time provided crew for the large guns in the Royal Navy’s fleet of powerful battleships. An imposing and probably handsome man described in his military record as five feet and eleven inches tall (181 centimetres) with a ‘fresh complexion’, dark brown hair and hazel eyes, he achieved the senior non-commissioned rank of Colour Sergeant. He had several spells at sea, and was serving in the battleship HMS Royal Sovereign during the historic Fleet Review in which the world’s largest navy celebrated Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee at Spithead (Isle of White) in June 1897.

Walter Gaubert retired from the Royal Marines in May 1909, and became a dispensing chemist (according to travel documents in the 1920s) and seems to have lived with his family for much of his remaining years in Gibraltar, from which he travelled as a tourist to many parts of the Empire. The evidence suggests his children attended English boarding schools. It is unlikely Frederick saw his brother Walter more than a few times in the two decades Walter was in Portsmouth and at sea with the Royal Marines.     

While in the Royal Marines Walter achieved recognition as an outstanding cricketer – at least two matches in which this was demonstrated were recorded in the contemporary press. In June 1993 the Portsmouth Evening Standard reported a match between the Royal Marines Artillery and the Southsea Athletic Cricket Club in which he took 6 wickets for 120 runs; and in August 1896 the Hampshire Telegraph reported a match between the Royal Marines and the Scottish Rifles in which “the feature of the bowling was that Gaubert took six wickets for 19 runs”. The photograph here (from about 1900) which shows Walter’s young brother Frederick Gaubert as captain of a cricket team suggests he also was an excellent cricketer. Nearest to home for him was the Mitcham Cricket Club in the Surrey Cricket League, said to be the world’s oldest.

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