Catherine Elizabeth Jones

   Another name for Catherine was Kathleen or Kath.

  General Notes:

Cath lived at home with her father until his death in 1955 when she was 35 years of age.
During the war years she struck up a friendship with an American serviceman who was serving in Sydney, but the relationship came to an end when he was shipped back home. While leading an active social life for all of her years after that, she never married.
Cath suffered from health problems for most of her life, being diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 17 or 18, and also suffering from thyroid problems like her mother. Despite these complications she was an independent and active woman who didn't let anything stand in her way. She loved to travel, and left Australia on a cruise ship soon after her father's death for a couple of years. She travelled to the United Kingdom, Europe and the Middle East (Egypt), then went to the United States and South America. She also worked for part of her time away, in an office in England, and in the United States as a nanny.
Back in Sydney she worked as an adding machine operator and comptometrist for various employers for most of her working life. She worked at the Angus Steak Cave (a well-known restaurant in George Street), Adam's Hotel (owned by William Adams of Tattersall's fame), and the Sydney Hilton. She worked at Adam's for about twelve years, eventually bcoming the Catering Manager there.
While she was working at Adam's she bought her first brand-new car, a Volkswagen Beetle, which saw much travel over the years. She frequently drove it to Grong Grong in the Riverina area of New South Wales to visit her sister Phyllis. In 1965 she and her friend Essie put the VW on the train and went to Perth. They were met in Perth by Cath's niece, Jen Jenkins (nee Jones), and set off down the Western Australian coast to Albany, then to Esperance, up to Norseman, then across the Nullarbor Plain. In those days the trip had 800 miles of dirt road and very little traffic other than semi-trailers. When the road was dry, it was deeply rutted, red and dusty. Compounding the adventurous spirit of the journey, as an insulin-dependent diabetic Cath had to boil up needles and syringes at every use, and keep insulin refrigerated - quite a challenge travelling by car in outback Australia in 1965. At Norseman, a small outback mining town, Cath discovered that her insulin bottle had leaked. There was one chemist shop in the town and it stocked a different type of insulin, but she had no choice but to use it: luckily it did the job.
The intrepid travellers got talking to the driver of an empty semi-trailer at a little stop just before the dirt started on the Eyre Highway. They promptly did a deal with him and loaded the VW onto the back of the semi, where it was chained down. They travelled on the semi all day, all night and into the next day into South Australia, where they unloaded the VW and continued their drive!
When she was in her early forties Cath bought her first unit in Ashfield in Sydney. She was surely steaming when the bank insisted that her brother, Doug, be a guarantor for the mortgage as the bank was not in the habit of lending money to single women.
Over the years Cath had a number of diabetic episodes, and she suffered several strokes in her fifties. In her later years she moved to Narrandera in the Riverina area of New South Wales to live with her sister Phyllis and her husband John. She passed away in Narrandera in 1987.