Gazette

A man called Percival

5th August 2009 02:00:20 AM

This account of Percival Thwaites was provided to the Gazette by his great-niece Gail Thwaites.

THE name Thwaites is well known in Pakenham as belonging to one of the town’s pioneer families.

Percival Ferry Thwaites was the first of the family to come to Pakenham.

He was a quiet, shy man with a bad stutter, white hair, and a long white beard that made him look like George Bernard Shaw.

He was the shire engineer in the early part of last century, and Thwaites Road is named after him.

Percy’s brother Ernest was an inventor, the first man to film the Melbourne Cup and show the film on the same day, legend has it.

The energetic brothers started the RACV more than 100 years ago, along with other like-minded pioneers in the automotive industry.

Percival lived in Ahern Road, and by the time he married Ivy Bartlett in 1926, the Pakenham Gazette was a well-established provincial newspaper.

The Thwaites name made its mark elsewhere in Victoria too, a generation earlier. Percival’s grandfather Robert died in the wreck of the Earl of Chalemont in 1853 at Barwon Heads. Percival’s father Robert Ferry Thwaites was an adventurer until at the age of 38 he took a 16-year-old bride, Pauline Lockett. They lived at Geelong and had two sons: Ernest and Percival.

Ernest amazed everyone at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre one year when he played a recording of the national anthem, with sound effects close to the sound of a real band. Audiences were marvelling at new technologies then as they do now.

Percy and Ivy had no children, but they did look after Percy’s father Robert Ferry Thwaites, who later in his life became an artist of some note, painting with members of the Heidelberg school. A painting signed by R. F. Thwaites is collectable. He died in 1917, the year the Pakenham Gazette set up office in Pakenham.

Percy was struck down by a stroke in 1956, and when Ivy died in 1964, the Thwaites house and land in Ahern Road was sold off and subdivided.

Their son Lindsay, better known as Guy, married a member of another pioneering Pakenham family, Jean Close.