Life History

Notes

• Erminio Giuseppe Marchesi, (known generally as Fred but also anglicized to Ernest Joseph), was born in Cromer, Norfolk, where his mother was running the Marchesi tea room and bakery shop. He went to primary school at Willow Lane, Norwich, with his older brothers Louis and Terry.  As he grew up, he helped in the family business founded by his father, and also spent holidays in Poschiavo, Switzerland, with his grandparents. His son David has contributed the following: -
  
  "My father married mother in 1932 at Littlehampton and they moved to Bath, where Frederick Edward was born in 1934, and later to Birmingham, where I was born in 1938. We lived mainly in Devon after the war, when Dad had been serving in the RAF, gaining the rank of Flight Lieutenant. We left Teignmouth in November 1947, to emigrate to Australia, a move that in those days was likely to be definitive. This was partly in an effort to find a drier climate for son Frederick, who was asthmatic from an early age. I never quite knew if either Dad or Mother really wanted to go, but my brother's health was a major consideration. On the whole, people's expectations were less dominant in those days, so that the obvious advantages of Australian life over that of Britain veiled the less tangible sacrifices that emigrants had perhaps made in moving to a different culture, far away from family and friends.
  
  The family settled in the Melbourne area and for a couple of years, they ran a Bemina Cafè in High Street, Belgrave, then a separate town about five miles from the edge of Melbourne's suburban sprawl. I remember particularly clearly helping chop and raise wood by pulley from the back of the cafe, about twenty-five feet below the floor level, as it was on a slope. Dad then became a manager for the Migrant Workers' Hostel agency of the Immigration Department. This meant that we moved from hostel to hostel, where housing was provided, sometimes in Nissan huts, for the Immigrants, with rather better housing for the managers and families. In l956, Dad took a job with the Melbourne Olympic Committee, as equipment Manager for the village; he later-worked for the Commonwealth Games organization in Perth. Finally, his last few years of full-time work were as Catering Manager in Victorian hospitals (e.g. Ballarat).
  
  Soon after retiring, Dad had a heart attack, but this did not disable him; it was only in 1974 that a stroke laid him fairly low. With Mother's devoted attention he continued to live reasonably comfortably in the Geelong area, where grand-nephew David John, lived with his mother and step-family. Finally, my parents returned to England in 1978, and Dad died after another heart attack in 1980 at Christchurch."