The Oldest Living Soall?
By Carol Campbell (nee Soall)
This article was originally published in the December 2001 edition of Soul Search, the journal of The Sole Society.
Your members may be interested in the following article that I have recently come across.
Lillian Paull (nee Soall) came to Australia with her family when she was only young on the Osterley. The photograph is of her about 3 years ago. Below is the newspaper article that accompanied the photo.
Although Lillian is my great Aunt, due to marriage break ups I don't know her well. She is still a feisty lady and I believe she also has a sister with Alzheimer’s who is alive as well. In the last Soul Society journal that I received some one was asking about the oldest living Soall, I think that Lillian would be in the running.
“Lillian
Paull has more reason than most to be excited at the discovery of musty record
books in the bowels of East Fremantle council.
The two leather bound volumes were unearthed in a recent search of the town hall’s cellars, detailing the dealings of the estate of William Dalgety Moore. One of Swan River colony’s early civic and business leaders, WD Moore lived in east Fremantle on Woodside Estate, now the hospital of the same name.
“We just used to call it Moore’s mansion,” said Mrs. Paull. The 91-year-old has plenty of her own stories about the Moores, breathing life into the bare statistics and transactions in the new found dusty tomes.
As a girl of 13, she was sent to live at the huge estate as company and maid for the then widow, Annie Moore, and her daughter of the same name. “ I tell you I was scared stiff because it was this great big house,” laughed Mrs. Paull.
“They were really nice people and always nice to me. One of the daughters married a farmer and when she came down she would bring a big block of fresh butter for my family.
“I remember sitting in the ballroom mending carpets to get them ready for sale when they auctioned everything off.”
She went with the family up to Nedlands, but grew lonely and was soon back at Woodside, by now a hospital, as a ward maid and later nursing aide. Years later, during W.W.II, she became Australia’s first female insurance agent and the first woman to draw the same wage as a man.
The documents will help paint a picture of both WD Moore’s life and life in Fremantle and East Fremantle at that time.In a ceremony on the grounds of Woodside last Thursday, Town Mayor Andrew Smith symbolically handed them over to Richard Moore, the old man’s great grandson, who then gave them to the Battye library for safe keeping.”