Sydney Francis Rebbeck 1878 - 1939
Second Son of George & Helen Eliza Rebbeck
Sydney
Rebbeck was named after the city of Sydney, Australia which his father,
George, visited and liked very much. He lived with his family at 34,
Stirling Street until his father and mother moved to Ringwood, in the
New Forest whereupon he and his wife, Emily, moved into number 31, which
was a larger house. Edith Lillian and her twin, William Frederick, were
born in number 34, while Margaret was born at 31. He worked in the Portsmouth
Naval Dockyard as a shipwright. Sydney and
Emily had a large family, born boy, girl, boy in order. Even the twins
kept the order by Edith arriving before William. The youngest boy, John
Leonard died in infancy following a chest illness. His mother, having
6 other children to look after, left him in the care of her mother.
She regretted this as she felt her mother had left him sleeping and
did not wake him to give him his medicine. Emily would say, when all
her other children were grown up, " Ollie is a dressmaker, Dollie
a hat maker, Bill is an electrician (later an inspector of taxes), etc.
they all have professions, I wonder what Johnny Lenny would have been?"
The family had its share of health problems. Sydney suffered with a weak chest. Edith and Dorothy both contracted diphtheria when Emily, in an attempt to prevent the dreaded illness from spreading to the rest of the family, hung a blanket soaked in disinfectant over the bedroom doorway. The youngest of the family, Margaret, suffered rheumatism following an incident when she fell in the lake at Southsea. (She leant out too far trying to see the swans) A passer-by helped her two older sisters pull her out but it was a long, cold and wet walk home. The condition was so bad that when she was in secondary school she was unable to take PE lessons and instead learned to type. She subsequently followed her father in working at the Dockyard at Portsmouth, as a shorthand typist until she met and married Henry Brown of Tintagel, in Cornwall. Then she became a farmer's wife instead.
W. George writes of his father
He was a queer man; he hated Mother to go out of an evening. Whenever I upset him he had only one threat, he'd give me a shilling to buy newspapers, which I'd have to sell. Of course it never got beyond the threat stage but I still remember the night Mother had gone round to Grafton Street to see her Mother. It put him in a vile temper and when I was a bit slow with my homework, he began the old 'newspaper' ploy. I didn't wait for his shilling, I was in my shirtsleeves and I flew crying to Granny Coombes' house, mum took me home and told the 'old man' off. It was queer the way he treated me. I couldn't do anything right.
On one occasion in our 'courting days' Lena and I went up to his allotment and dug over quite a fair patch of it but he wasn't at all pleased. There were more important things that needed doing.
Yet brother Syd could do no wrong. Bill and I both did well enough at school to win apprenticeships in the dockyards but Syd cost Dad £25 for his apprenticeship. Only once did Dad chastise Syd, who had no objections to selling newspapers. One Saturday evening he met one of his low life pals in the main road selling the "Football Mail' and took half of his papers to sell for him. Unfortunately one of Dad's work-mates saw him and recognised him and on Monday pulled Dad's leg about being hard up and sending his kids out to work. The old man was furious and gave Syd the only whacking I remember him getting for letting the family down. When I took the 'Eleven Plus' I copied my answers down, my pessimistic parent said at first I hadn't passed and then thought maybe I might scrape through. 964 competed for 180 places. I came 25th. What a scrape.
