A precious treat for you this week, in the most beautiful photo we think we’ve ever seen!
This is the Juicy Fruit ‘Set’ dressed for the 1939 St Joseph’s Primary School Children’s Ball. St Joseph’s was once on the northern side of Salvado Road, Subiaco, near McCourt Street, and is one of Newman College’s antecedent schools.
Children’s Balls were hugely popular and always fancy dress. Clever mothers prepared ‘sets’ like this to go in the Grand Parade, from which prizewinners were selected.
This ‘set’ was made by Mrs Kathleen Hodge, whose husband John owned a barber’s shop at 236 Cambridge Street, roughly where the carwash at BP now stands, on the corner of Harborne Street. Their daughter Mary Bell (nee Hodge) is kneeling, second from left. She is the mother of Olympic (1976 and 1984) hockey player David Bell OAM.
Maureen Felton (nee Rule, kneeling first left), gave this image to Sister Dorothea Hickey (1955), and it is one of the wonderful images she donated to our Archives on her recent visit to Perth.
Preliminary research on these girls reveals a first cousin of Mary Hodge in Margaret Heron (standing, middle), whose mother Etty (nee Hodge) was John Hodge’s older sister. Digging further, we found as youngsters living in the Goldfields in the early 1900s, Etty and John attended all the Children’s Balls, too!