Obituary

Front cover of the Templetonian magazine 1952

This announcement of a former employee's death says a great deal about relationships between employees and other staff at this time. From this source you can see that Miss Brown probably cared for the other staff, but relationships were very formal and there would be few opportunities for employees to get to know each other well.

Mary Brown's Obituary Templetonian December 1952.

Miss Brown began work with us about the turn of the century in Kerr Street factory. After a time, she became Mistress in the Finishing Department, which position she held until transferred to Crownpoint as Welfare Supervisor in 1924.

She was associated with Miss Mortimer and Miss Riddell in the pioneer days of industrial welfare and took a great interesting the youth of Crownpoint. On one occasion, she ran a bazaar to raise funds for the purchase of a piano for the canteen. She was unremitting in her efforts to prevent accidents and permitted no fancy hair-do's or the wearing of bracelets near machinery. To encourage loom boys to take a pride in their work, she offered a weekly prize of 5/- for the cleanest kept loom.

Miss Brown was respected and held rather in awe by the younger workers, but beneath a somewhat austere and forbidding manner she hid a heart of gold, and mothered the rising generation under her charge.

She retired at the end of 1939, and while we saw little of her from that time onward, her somewhat sudden death on 18 th August of this year came as a shock to her many friends.