Never Forget Their Kindness: Fire at Beaconsfield

In April 1919 Eva Cotterill (nee Trezise) was 28. She had a three year old daughter, Mavis Winifred, and her husband of 5 years had been away in at the war in Europe for the past 2 and a half years.

With her husband away, many of the young couple’s belongings were stored in Eva’s parents’ house on Blue Tier Rd, south west of Beaconsfield.

The house was in a paddock, beyond that was orchard and then bushland.

On the afternoon of Wednesday 2 April no one was home at the house.

A fire burning in nearby bushland threw a spark into the shingle roof and the house burnt down.

Over the next few weeks, the community came together to raise funds and to donate furniture.

Eva’s father, Joseph Trezise, was so grateful that he promised to never forget their kindness.

The Land District Chart doesn’t show any Trezise land on Blue Tier Rd/Salisbury Rd.

Another article about the fire says that the house was owned by the Stonehouses. The Stonehouse block on Salisbury Rd, is at the northern end, and currently has a house that I can’t tell the age of. Stonehouse was Eva’s mother’s maiden name, so TE Stonehouse is likely to have been Eva’s uncle, Thomas E Stonehouse. The earliest record I can find of Stonehouses having land on that road, is the farm of Alfred and Lydia Stonehouse in 1881 (which may be the block shown as belonging to P Brown).

Eva was a Cotterill by marriage, and there is definitely Cotterill land on that road. The land noted as Cotterill land on early 20thC maps is on the western side of what is now Salisbury Rd. The land doesn’t have a house on it now, and the ‘hillshade’ of the land doesn’t show any formations that suggests a house site.

However, across the road from this block is the house (or the ruins of it) that I was told in the Beaconsfield museum is the Cotterill family home! The year the map was made, the land was owned by “Wellington” and had been since 1912 – I’m yet to sort out the truth of the story about that ruin.

 

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I’d known that there’d been a house fire, and that that was why there are so few “things” from my family, but I was surprised to find out that it was eighty years before I was born and yet was one of the big stories that had come though to me.