Showing posts with label Boltz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Boltz. Show all posts

Tuesday, 4 July 2017

Trove Tuesday: Flying the Kangaroo route in 1949

Qantas Kangaroo Route Advertisement 1948 retrieved from Pinterest


Most migrants to Australia, including immigrants in my family, came here by sea. My grandfather is an exception. He arrived by air.

Hans Boltz was born on 4 July 1910 in Berlin, where he trained at the State Institute for map drawing as a cartographer. From 1930 to the beginning of World War II he worked for the Prussian Geological State Institute (Geological Survey of Prussia or Preußischen Geologischen Landesanstalt). After the war, when he found his way back to Berlin, he discovered that this building, in Invalidenstraße 44, was situated in the Russian zone. Hans lived in the American zone and, reluctant to travel every day into the Russian-occupied part of the city or move there, he resigned. In 1948 he applied for work with the Australian government, which at the time was recruiting Germans with qualifications and skills in short supply in Australia. He got a job as a cartographer with the Australian Bureau of Mineral Resources.

Berlin, Mitte, Invalidenstraße 44, Bundesministerium für Verkehr, Bau und Stadtentwicklung
Invalidenstraße 44 in Berlin-Mitte, the building of the former Geological Survey of Prussia. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Hans Boltz's file created by the Department of Post War Reconstruction includes the dates of his journey from Berlin to Canberra:
  • Wednesday 13 July 1949 left Germany for London
  • Sunday 7 August 1949 left London
  • Thursday 11 August 1949 arrived Canberra via Sydney
  • Friday 12 August 1949 commenced working for the Bureau of Mineral Resources.


NAA: MT105/8, 1/6/4531 Page 2 of 143 (click to enlarge image)

In the late 1980s with the help of my grandfather Hans I spent some time compiling my family tree on my mother's side. I had bought a book in 1978 called The History of our Family, published by Poplar Books of New Jersey. This had a series of templates for recording family history. One of these was for immigration.

Decades afterwards, my grandfather remembered very clearly his trip from Berlin and his arrival, on 11 August 1949.







I summarised my grandfather's recollections as follows:
Hans Fritz Boltz emigrated from Berlin to Canberra 11 . 8 . 1949
Aeroplane - Berlin - Hamburg - London 4 weeks London
museums / concerts ... wandering around sightseeing
London - Cairo - Karachi - Singapore - Darwin - Sydney -
Helopolis Hotel Cairo  Raffles Hotel Singapore  Qantas flight
In London my grandfather was given English lessons. He was not just a tourist.

Qantas Sydney-London Constellation route map retrieved from Pinterest


On Trove I have found an advertisement for the route in August 1949.

AUSTRALIA-ENGLAND CONSTELLATION SERVICE (1949, August 4). Daily Commercial News and Shipping List (Sydney, NSW : 1891 - 1954), p. 4. Retrieved July 4, 2017, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article163836624

A Qantas Empire Airways Constellation airliner, photographed by Frank Hurley retrieved from http://trove.nla.gov.au/version/40487425


In 2007 Qantas celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Kangaroo route. This video includes footage of the journey on the Lockheed Constellation aeroplanes. The first flight on the route had departed 1 December 1947.





The journey took four days, 55 hours of flying time. There were two overnight stops, one in Cairo and the other in Singapore. In Cairo my grandfather stayed at the Heliopolis Palace Hotel. In Singapore at the Raffles. There were 29 passengers and 11 crew.

Poster for the Heliopolis Palace Hotel retrieved from Palace intrigue: Egypt in the Golden Age of Travel

COLLECTIE TROPENMUSEUM Entree van het Raffles Hotel Singapore TMnr 60018239
Raffles Hotel in 1932. Image from Wikimedia Commons


The airfare in 1949 was £260 sterling. By way of comparison my grandfather's salary on starting with the Australian Public Service as an experienced cartographer was £222 a year and the average earnings for men in Australia was about £220 a year. The Australian government paid my grandfather's fare.






Sources
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Saturday, 29 April 2017

Z is for Zehlendorf

My maternal grandparents, Hans Boltz (1910-1992) and Charlotte  Manock (1912-1988) were married in 1937.

Their first home was in Eschershauser Weg 27, Steglitz-Zehlendorf, Berlin. Zehlendorf is a district in the south-west of Berlin near the Krumme Lanke lake, on the edge of the Grunewald forest.

They lived in a  flat (apartment) in a housing estate known as Onkel Toms Hütte, served by a  U-Bahn station named after the 1852 anti-slavery novel. The estate, designed by several by well-known architects, among them Bruno Taut and Hugo Härings, was built between 1926 and 1932 . The apartment blocks had communal back gardens that led into the forest.

My grandmother, Charlotte Boltz, outside her new home in 1937

Eschershauser Weg in 1937

Eschershauser Weg in the snow about 1937




from Google maps
A satellite view of Eschershauser Weg showing how it is set in the forest and the communal grounds surrounding the flats from Google maps



According to Google Maps a U-Bahn leaves for Berlin Zoo every ten minutes. The journey takes just over half an hour. Charlotte's parents lived near Berlin Zoo.


Public transport from Eschershauser Weg to Berlin Zoo from Google maps

Hans's parents lived at Florastraße 13 in Steglitz. His father, Fritz Boltz (1879-1954) was a live-in janitor at a school there. There is still a school at that address. Florastraße is about six kilometres away from Eschershauser Weg and it takes about half an hour to get there by public transport.


From Eschershauser Weg, Zehlendorf, to Florastraße, Steglitz per Google maps
I visited Eschershauser Weg in 1982



The back of the flats overlook a communal garden with a sand pit and play space. Each flat has a balcony. Photographed 1982.


The sandpit at the back of the flats in 1982


My mother playing in the sandpit at Christmas time. She was three years old.

My mother playing in the sandpit aged 4


My mother on her sled at Christmas when she was three years old. The balconies at the back of the flats can be seen.

My mother told me about tobogganing on her sled down a very steep slope with two stones at the bottom of the path that you had to avoid. I found the path and stones in 1982. The slope was not big but it must have seemed so to a small child.
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Monday, 18 April 2016

O is for Oma cooking from Dr Oetker's "Backen Macht Freude"

I didn't actually call my grandmother Charlotte Boltz née Manock (1912-1988) Oma, Grandma in German, when I was young. Although she was from Germany, to me she was just Grandma. However, my cousins called her Oma and my children know of her as Oma, distinguishing her from the many other Grandmas in the family.

My grandmother used to bake wonderful cakes, many of them from recipes in this book by the Dr Oetker company. I particularly remember her baking Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, Black Forest cherry cake.

My mother's copy of Dr Oetker's cookbook Backen macht Freude, (Cooking with joy). It probably dates from the early 1950s. It cost DM1.80. The Deutschmark was introduced in 1948.
The recipe for Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte page 104. (click on image to enlarge)
The recipe continued on page 105.


The recipe calls for a biscuit base, then a sponge. The cherries are sour cherries.

There were sour cherry trees at the bottom of my grandparent's garden. We would pick them each year around Christmas tree. Grandma bottled them. There were always cherries bottled and stored for cake making.

Some of my grandmother's cakes for a birthday in May 1985, quite probably my grandmother's birthday. The cake on the left hand side is Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte. The other cake is a chocolate and almond cake. My grandmother was very fond of lily of the valley on the right hand side of the photo.

Yesterday I baked a cake from Dr Oetker's recipe. I was pleased with the result. The taste takes me back to my childhood. The cake is very light, not too chocolately and the sour cherries are beautifully tangy.

Baking the cake

Making the biscuit base. It seemed very dry despite the egg white but it did come together after being chilled.


the biscuit mixture is chilled and rested
pressed into the base of the springform tin
my baked biscuit base fitted perfectly onto my cake plate

Baking the sponge
the egg yolks are beaten with a little warm water til they are pale and creamy
egg whites are beaten separately
fold egg whites in - I do it a third at a time
add sifted dry ingredients
and fold in gently
the baked sponge
upside down cooling - I am pleased with the texture
The filling
Assembling the cake

The finished product
Essential ingredients
I felt fortunate to be able to buy in Ballarat both sour cherries and Kirschwasser from the Schwarzwald


Further reading

Translation of the recipe into English by Reddit users at the request of somebody else whose Grandma used to make this cake: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/13jtsz/my_grandma_who_past_away_used_to_make_a_black/
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