BROCKELBANK, Lilla

Lilla Brockebank, cricketer and architect, was the fifth of the six daughters of Duncan Brockelbank, actuary and accountant, and his wife Bessy Jemima, née Westmore .[1]  Lilla was born in Hackney, London in 1883.[2] The family left London for Australia in August 1885 aboard the Melbourne.  A month into the journey Duncan died of consumption.[3]

Bessy and her six young children arrived in November 1885 and settled at 1 Josephine Terrace, 34 Albert Street, East Melbourne.  She had herself and her children, all under the age of nine, to support. Her solution was to teach piano.  She advertised her own training as ‘pupil of Ebenezer Prout (Crystal-palace School of Arts) and Professor Wylde, Mus. Doc. (London Academy)’.[4]  Within three years she had met and married Carl Hendrik Ipsen, a wood turner and later a show stand manufacturer.[5] The Brockelbank family moved into his house in Victoria Street, Abbotsford.  Bessy continued to give piano lessons and became a piano teacher at the Presbyterian Ladies College (PLC) in East Melbourne.[6]  She kept this position until at least 1908.

Meanwhile Lilla attended the Central State School in Gleadell Street, Richmond. In her last year there, aged 13, she won a Melbourne Educational Institute Scholarship, one of only ten awarded and she was the only girl.[7]  With this she was able to continue her education with a private tutor, R Livingston, B A.  She gained her Matriculation in 1899 with third class honours in Elementary Anatomy, Physiology and Botany.[8]  

About this time the family, along with two half-siblings born to Carl and Bessy, moved back to East Melbourne and were living at 132 Powlett Street.[9]  In 1899 Lilla was confirmed at St Peter’s Eastern Hill.[10]  This was the beginning of a long and devoted association with the church throughout her life. 

The vicar at this time was Ernest Selwyn Hughes, an accomplished rower and cricketer, and no doubt it was he who stirred Lilla’s interest in cricket. The first Ladies’ Cricket match played in Australia was in 1874 and sporadic matches were played over the next 25 years, often held as charity fund-raisers, but it was not until the early 1900s that the sport took off and soon there were at least 21 teams playing regularly.  One of these early teams was Coldstream (named apparently after the Coldstream Guards, and nothing to do with Coldstream, the township).  This team was based in East Melbourne and its home ground was the Friendly Society Gardens.[11]  Its colours were red and yellow.[12] This was Lilla’s team.  Frank Gooley, the verger at St Peter’s, also a keen cricketer, was heavily involved and acted as umpire for many of the matches.  In 1905 the Victorian Ladies Cricket Association was formed at Gooley’s instigation. Vida Goldstein was the first president and membership was restricted to bona-fide teams within a 10 mile radius of the Melbourne GPO. In the VLCA’s first year Coldstream won 17 of its 18 matches.[13]  

A Church of England Ladies Cricket Association was also established about the same time, and St Peter’s fielded its own team.  Its home ground was Yarra Park.  Lilla played for this team too.[14]

Lilla was described as very short in stature, and was compared to the English all-rounder – Wilfred Rhodes. ‘At the wickets she uses the right-handed stance, and when in the attack bowls a slow to medium left-hand break’.[15]

In 1908, at the age of 25, Lilla went back to study.  Over four years she attended the Working Men’s College where she passed with credit geometry (Grade I) and trigonometry (Grade IA); and passed algebra (Grade I), land surveying (Grade II), applied mechanics (Grade I) and engineering drawing (Grades I, II and structures Grade I). She was the only female.[16]

During this time, according to the electoral rolls, she was living in Fitzroy and working as a clerk.  But by 1919 she was back in East Melbourne, at 480 Albert Street, and working as an architect’s assistant. In the same year, as secretary, she advertised in The Age calling for ladies’ cricket teams to join the ‘new association’.[17]  The old VLCA had been disbanded at the beginning of the war because of the extra demands on women it had brought.  The interesting thing about the ad is that she gave her address as 101 Queen Street.  This was the same address as Sidney Smith & Ogg, architects.  

IN 1922 she placed another cricket recruitment ad and gave her address this time as 317 Collins Street.[18]  This was the address of two possibilities.  The first was Harry A Norris, possibly Melbourne’s most highly regarded architect of the interwar years.  The second was Dunlop & Hunt Home Builders Ltd. who offered pre-prepared plans which could be tweaked to suit individual buyers.  

The following year Lilla bought her own house in Burlington Terrace, 394 Albert Street.  She leased it as a boarding house with a live-in manager running it. She herself continued to live in rented premises, moving to 412 Albert Street in 1924 and again in 1931 to 374 Albert Street.[19]  Each day she cycled to work in the city. [20]

In 1926 E S Hughes resigned as vicar due to ill health.  This event made apparent another side to Lilla’s character.  She was fiercely loyal to the charismatic Hughes and took an almost hysterical set against the next vicar, F E Maynard.  In the first instance Maynard was forced to dismiss the church’s organist and choirmaster, Fred Nott, because it was agreed by most of the congregation that his standard of performance was simply not good enough.  But Lilla chose to defend Nott as a form of resistance to Maynard, even allowing him to use her house as a venue to give music lessons.  Another instance of her trouble-making occurred when Maynard was absent overseas for a year.  During this time she held rival church services in her house using Hughes’ catechism notes and reading his sermons.  James Cheong who was acting vicar in Maynard’s absence wrote to Maynard, ‘I am contemplating conferring on her publicly the Order PP (Parish Pest)!!’[21]

She later wrote her reminiscences of Hughes in which she gives what Colin Holden calls an ‘idealised portrait’ of him which was published in 1944, shortly after his death.[22]

In 1935 Lilla finally moved into her own house, although she continued to rent out rooms, or flats.[23]  This may have been triggered by the death of her step-father the same year.  Perhaps he left her a little money that allowed a final payment on the house.  She also started calling herself an architect.[24]  This was no doubt a descriptor conferred on her by herself.  After many years as an architect’s assistant she would have had a thorough apprenticeship.  So far nothing has come to light of her work.

She was a member of the Union Jack Club.[25]  This was an association registered under the Patriotic Funds Act and open to anyone of British nationality.  During the years of WWII one of its main purposes was to collect good quality clothing to send to the bomb victims in England. Lilla was proud of her British nationality, even perhaps a little snobbish.  In an overview of women’s cricket written in 1934 the reporter wrote that ‘Miss L Brockelbank, one of the pioneers of women’s cricket in Victoria, has a clear recollection of her girlhood days in England when she first commenced her cricket career, and later played when she came to Australia, and played in the first team in Victoria’.[26] As we know she was only two when she arrived in Melbourne.

She died at home in 1948. Her obituary described her as ‘one of the most colourful personalities among the pioneers of Victorian women’s cricket’.[27] Her will appointed her sister Susan Bessy, her half-brother Carl Frederick Hendrik Ipsen and musician Frederick John Nott as her executors [28].  Her funeral, not surprisingly, was at St Peter’s.

Footnotes:
1. England Census 1881
2. Ancestry, Duncan Brockelbank family tree
3. The Age, 9 Nov 1885, p.4
4. The Argus, 18 Jan 1886, p.1
5. Ancestry, Bessy Brockelbank family tree
6. The Argus, 21 Jan 1890, p.8; The Argus, 25 April 1890, p.4
7. The Age, 30 Dec 1896, p.3
8. The Argus, 25 Dec 1897, p.9; The Australasian, 6 Jan 1900, p.46
9. City of Melbourne Rate Books, Albert Ward, 1896-1907
10. The Church of England Messenger for Victoria and Ecclesiastical Gazette for the Diocese of Melbourne, 1 Dec 1899, p.181
11. Box Hill Historical Society Newsletter, Vol 22, Issue 4, Aug 2016, p.4 https://www.boxhillhistoricalsociety.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/BHHS_Nlttr_August_2016.pdf 
12. Punch, 6 Sept 1906, p.28
13. Box Hill HSN
14. Box Hill HSN
15. Sporting Globe, 25 Nov 1922, p.4 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article184801567
16. The Age, 30 Jan 1909, p.14; 1 Feb 1909, p.7; 5 Feb 1909, p.8; 18 Jan 1910, p.11; 31 May 1910, p.10; 16 Jan 1912, p.9
17. The Age, 17 Oct 1919, p.10
18. Sporting Globe, 25 Nov 1922, p.4
19. City of Melbourne Rate Books, Gipps Ward, 1923-1934
20. The Herald, 17 Jul 1948, p.9
21. Colin Holden, From Tories at Prayer to Socialists at Mass: A History of St Peter’s, Eastern Hill. MUP, 1996, pp.144-145
22. Colin Holden, p.99
23. City of Melbourne Rate Books, Gipps Ward, 1935
24. Ancestry, electoral rolls 1936-1948
25. The Age, 24 Jul 1940, p.5
26. The Herald, 9 Feb 1934, p.26 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article243321501    
27. The Herald, 17 Jul 1948, p.9
28. The Argus, 21 Jul 1948, p.12