Isabella Jane Peacock

Isabella Jane PEACOCK (RIN: 094), daughter of David PEACOCK and Ann BAIRD , was born May 29, 1885 in Christchurch NZ. She died June 15, 1964 in Bulli, NSW.

She married Charles Henry Excell WILKINSON (RIN: 083), son of Charles Augustus WILKINSON and Mary NORTH Charles was born March 15,1876 in Bimbenang, Glanmire, NSW. He died August 31, 1946 in Auburn,NSW.

Isabella Jane Peacock was the youngest of the family of David Peacock and his wife Anne (nee Baird) She was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1885 but the Peacock family eventually settled in Lithgow. She married Charles Henry Excell Wilkinson and raised 8 children, 4 boys and 4 girls, to adulthood.

As the wife of a miner life was quite difficult and fortunes unpredictable. To supplement the family income she worked at one time as a cleaner at the Baby Health Centre, her son Jack helping her with the floor polishing. She spent her married life in Lithgow but spent the latter years of her life living with each of her children for a while, then moving on to another one.

Her daughter-in-law Joan Wilkinson and grand-daughter Daphne Nielsen (nee Wray) remember Grandma (as she was generally known) as a person who was gentle and loving and never angry. Apparently she used to be constantly humming or singing to herself, and also had a mannerism of wringing her hands together. She was known by some of her grandchildren as "Grandma with the big black bag", for obvious reasons.

She had a couple of idiosyncracies. She loved grapes and also apples. She didn't wear the bottom false teeth but could still manage to eat apples without them. She was also an excellent cook. If you asked her for a recipe it was always "a handful of this and a bit of that" - not your traditional recipe at all.

Her grandson David Wilkinson remembers her as a gentle, somewhat overweight woman in her later years. She spoke in a friendly, sweet sort of voice. She must have had a wicked sense of humour because she convinced him at a barbecue that the half centimetre layer of charcoal around a very burnt potato was the best part. He ate as much as he could, believing the charcoal was the best part, even though he hated it at the time. (Perhaps he was just gullible)

She must also have been a very tolerant person, to put up with the antics of a couple of grown Wilkinson males still living at home. One trick that Dave and Jack would play on her was to pick her up under the arms and carry her down the back steps and tie her up by the apron strings to the back gate. Later, when she lived in Lett Street, her son Dave lived in Mort Street. It was only a few houses along the back lane from one house to the other. Her daughter-in-law Mary Wilkinson recalled that often she would get Marion ready for bed, send her up the back lane with her father Dave to say goodnight to Grandma. But she would come home excited and definitely not ready to settle for the night because her uncles, who still lived at home, played games with her at the kitchen table and stirred her up.

David remembers a family trip to Bulli to see her towards the end of her life. At that stage she was very frail and hardly moved from a comfortable chair. It was the last time he saw Grandma alive. She died in Bulli in 1964.