cheffers.org

Why Cheffers.org?

Cheffers is not a common name and it is very easy to trace the ancestors. The English system provided a registration process which documents your birth, place of residents and the date of your death. The name Cheffers can be traced back to Cornwall in 1640 by a fellow named Richard Cheffers. Although, there are many lines since then and trying to find a link to Richard can be very tricky. However, over the years, our family members have made some remarkable achievements, some have experienced and written their stories and others have either explored the world or lived simple lives. The site provides some information about their lives and their achievements. If you are from the Cheffers, Bingham or Murray line and have some information/stories about your family, please let us know by contacting the email below.

Need access to the content? Email the contact below:

Contacts

• Andrew Cheffers -- andrew.david@cheffers.org

Family Stories

• What happen to Jesse May? (Bingham Line)



Jessie May Savagar was born in 1903 in Allendale, a small gold mining town in Victoria, Australia. Jessie was married to Robert Savagar.

She died tragically in 1936 after gallantly trying to overcome post-natal depression after her first baby, a son called Robert Savagar, died very soon after birth. She became pregnant again as this was recommended to Robert and Jessie to help her get over the depression, and Margaret was born on November 14, 1935. The depression was not overcome after Margaret's birth and, possibly, the effect was made worse.

The sad facts that occurred on that tragic night of 17 July 1936.

Baby Robert Savagar died when still a baby and was buried in the family plot in Melbourne General Cemetery. There is no inscription noted on the headstone of the date of the birth and death of this baby.

Jessie developed post-natal depression after the loss of this baby Robert and when she realized her frightening nightmares were not going away, she agreed to seek medical help and so she was in and out of Mental Hospital. She was told that the cure was to have another baby, and this resulted in Margaret being born. However, the depression still persisted and might have exacerbated the delusional dreams in that she was afraid to go to sleep because she had horrific nightmares; e.g., she dreamed of sticking knives into the baby. Robert would walk with her at times to help her during the night. She was so horrified by these murderous dreams that she would not sleep in the same room with Robert and baby Margaret.

Her sister in law, Robina (Beanie McFarlane) was living at 50 Boorool Rd., East Kew, Melbourne, with Jessie and Robert at the time. Jessie received treatment in a Sorrento based mental hospital, but her symptoms did not abate and may have worsened. She returned to live with Robert at 50 Boorool Rd., East Kew, Melbourne, but was not able to put away thoughts of harming her child and being a burden to Robert, and committed suicide by gassing herself with the gas stove in the kitchen. She left a note on the door of the kitchen that said, “Beanie, don’t open the door. Look after Margaret.” Because she could not rid herself of the thoughts of harming her baby and, as the medical treatment she had received had not relieved her torment, she believed the only way for her to not commit such a terrible act was to kill herself and save the life of the baby.

On the night before she killed herself, Robert had come home from the Bingham factory where he had been working overtime and had gone to bed and slept heavily. Jess had probably got up during the night and been so depressed after another frightening nightmare that she decided to kill herself. It was said that she had been so frightened she would actually carry out those tormenting dreams.

Robert, Jesse's husband, Allen and Beanie, along with Allen’s brothers and their wives, were so distressed that they did not reveal this terrible tragedy to their children, so much so that Allen, who had adopted Margaret, brought her up believing that she was his daughter. When Margaret, in her fifties, became curiuos about her long lost aunt, had approached her oldest Uncle, Tom and asked What happen to Jesse? Tom then told her the story and revealed that she was the daughter of Jesse Savagar.

Further stories told by Margaret Cheffers can be read in her memoirs.

• The hard times for Margaret Patience Murray (Bingham Line)



Margaret Patience Murray married Thomas A Bingham at Clunes, Victoria, on 1st May, 1895. They lived in the town of Allendale, where they would initially raise their family.

Allendale was a busy mining town totally sustained by gold mines also known as the Berry Leads. At the time, her husband had a carrying business carting furniture and other items around the mines and a light daily service to Ballarat. He was a self-taught blacksmith and a jack of all trades.

As a mother, she would bath the kids at night with a big fire next to the tub which keeps the water warm. The winter nights in Allendale were bitterly cold and the fire was important to keep them warm. Margaret's Christian faith would allow her to sing the hymns in the burning light as she scrubbed the dirt from the kids toes. Hymns such as Onward Christian Soldiers, Marching as to War, With the Cross of Jesus’ and ‘I’m a little candle burning bright in the night.

She tended to a garden of flowers and herbs and life was good. But when the gold mining stopped producing, they had to move to the work.

Thomas went in searched for employment and came back and moved the family to Leeton NSW. The NSW Irrigation Trust was giving 50-60 acres of land, near Murrumbidgee River, to those who applied for it. The idea was that the farmer's would grow peaches and other fruits to sell to the peach cannery at Leeton. When Margaret's family arrived in Leeton, they lived in tents. One tent for the kitchen and the other for a bedroom. Life was getting hard during this period, but she prevailed.

In Margaret's spare time, she helped the Red Cross on market days in Leeton. It was normal for farmers to have no money so they donated pigs for sale. She would assist in cleaning and dressing them on the Friday to be ready for the next day.

She was a very affectionate and religious woman and she liked going on picnics and often they would go to the Murrumbidgee for holidays. They camped with the aborigines and gave them fish. She was very disturbed by the aborigines not having many clothes, so she went around the farms and collected clothes. Huckerback waistcoats, which had been out of fashion for many years, were very popular with them.

Thomas was disappearing for long lengths of time, presumably drinking, leaving her and the family to fend for themselves, she grew ill and her kids were concerned.

The family moved to Melbourne where the kids would get better schooling and she would be closer to her sisters. They stayed for the first couple of nights at the Salvation Army Hostel in King Street and then lived with their Aunty Mary and Aunt Liz where the boys picked up small handyman jobs. They found a house with three rooms with a kitchen on the 2nd floor of No. 3 Dundas Place, Albert Park.

At this stage, her husband was drunk every night and was violent to them. This was affecting her health. Her children, Tom, Jesse, Dave and Allen with their mother, decided to leave. They rented a house in Middle Park and moved while their father was at work. They loaded up and shifted all their stuff in one afternoon. Some days later, her son Tom recalled 'I went to work in the afternoon and later on, when I came out of the Middle Park train station, my father was waiting for me. He said, “Don’t run away, I know where you live.” He came with me to our house and caused a bad scene. Margaret wanted to go back to him, but the kids threw him out and he never troubled them again.' The children took over by supporting her until she died of liver cancer on the 18th of March 1929. She was remembered as a lovely person and a terrific mother. Every year, a service for her was held at a certain picnic table near Albert Park lake.

Her husband died many years later at Swan Hill in 1957 and for closure, they paid for his funeral.

Further life stories of the Binghams can be read in The Life and Time of Thomas Bingham.

• John Cheffers (making the 1985 Who's Who list)



In 1972, Dr Cheffers, Professor Emeritus, founded the Boston University School of Education's Tuesday-Thursday Physical Education Program. The program is recognised internationally for its unconventional teaching and learning environment.

Only an Aussie larrikin would descend on such a prestigious learning institution in a foreign land with a new teaching program that challenged the roots of sports education. His office on campus was the only one to boast a well-stocked green fridge and it was a focus for Friday afternoon social gatherings Cheffers loved colourful shirts and was also passionate about classical music, especially Mozart. He would recite Banjo Paterson's Clancy of the Overflow at every and any opportunity.

Larrikins love to tell colourful stories, tall tales and true, and Cheffers's children recognised this talent in their father from an earliest age. His son Andrew said, "When dad told us a story, he made the most ordinary event sound exciting."

John Theodore Francis Cheffers was born on May 13, 1936 into a struggling working class family in Melbourne. His family battled hard to give him the finest possible schooling and he won a scholarship to the prestigious Melbourne High School. He often walked the 10 kilometres from the city school home to Kew because he had no money for the tram fare.

He wasn't a great student, as it turned out, but he put himself through night school to achieve his matriculation (year 12) certificate while working full-time.

He was a gifted sportsman, excelling at Australian Rules football and at 18 began a promising first grade career with Carlton. He was also talented in the high jump, long jump and pole vault and held Olympic team aspirations until a competition accident, a torn anterior cruciate ligament, in the State Athletic Championships in 1957 abruptly ended his sporting career.

This injury was the first of two major turning points that set him on his life's career path. Unable to compete at the highest level, he turned to coaching track and field athletes.

The Coburg Athletics Club in Melbourne at the time boasted male Olympians in the 1956 Melbourne Games and he was sent to the club track one day by his former coach in 1958, thinking he was to coach young male athletes.

However, in those days, male and female sport athletics clubs were segregated, and he had been sent to the Coburg Women's Athletic Club.

A 14-year-old teenager athlete at the track, Jean Roberts, went home that night and was asked by her father what her new coach was like. She replied ''He's terrific! He made me feel that I mattered!"

Under Cheffers's coaching, Roberts went on to represent Australia at the 1968 Olympic Games and four Commonwealth Games, also winning Australian and US national titles.

As a teacher, his ability to empathise with students in his classes was also evident from the beginning. During his final year as a student teacher in 1957, he was sent to a suburban primary school in Melbourne on a three-week placement. There he confronted a teacher in a class who was fond of using a leather strap on the children. Striding determinedly up to the teacher in the class room, Cheffers seized the leather weapon, refusing to hand it over. The teacher complained to the headmaster, was sacked instantly, and Cheffers was installed for the remainder of his three weeks as the class teacher.

As a young teacher, Cheffers was picked to teach in Melbourne's Preston East High School, where the housing commission children of struggling World War II veterans mixed with impoverished migrant children living in tough transition camps.

He developed a reputation as a teacher with passion, in the classroom and on the sports field.

In 1958, Cheffers married Margaret Bingham, his childhood sweetheart. Then came the second turning point in Cheffers's career. In 1968, he was appointed to develop standards of sporting excellence in athletics in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and to be head coach of the Rhodesian Olympic athletics team for the Mexico Games.

Together with photographer Dave Paynter, he initiated a sports photo that went world wide in June 1968, depicting the team's marathon athlete Mathias Kanda running against a steam train known as The Gwelo to Selukwe Flyer.



Rhodesia was banned from competition in Mexico because of the world protest against apartheid, despite the country having a multi-racial Olympic selection policy. Believing that politics had no place in sport, Cheffers strongly disagreed with the black power salute by American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the Mexico Games.

He also believed he had failed the athletes of Rhodesia and returned to Australia to write a book about the injustice done to his athletes. A Wilderness Of Spite Rodesia Denied tells the story of Rhodesia's Olympic ban from the point of view of two black athletes and their coach.

Cheffers had no money to get the book published, but nevertheless, he dictated it at the kitchen table, transcribed in longhand and typed up. He eventually took the manuscript with him to America, took out a loan and published it privately in 1972.

In 1969, Cheffers coached the Papua New Guinea national athletics team at the third South Pacific Games, then, in the early 1970s, took his family and his passion to the US to pursue his academic career. A doctorate in education at Temple University in 1973 was followed by tenure at Boston University in 1974.

It was in Boston the Cheffers philosophy of teaching blossomed. His unconventional methods reached out to everyone, from disadvantaged kids in the public school system to academics and became one of Boston University's longest-running community service initiatives.

In 1984, Cheffers was lured back to Australia as the second director of the Australian Institute of Sport. He had a vision that sporting excellence should not be confined to the winning of Olympic medals.

He fought hard to develop the teaching of the Institute's standards in all states and territories, at all levels of ability, across all the barriers of disadvantage. He incorporated his philosophy of support for indigenous athletes, women and the disabled within the institute's objectives.

In 1984, Cheffers was appointed president of AIESEP (the Association Internationale des Ecoles Superieures d'Education Physique) and in 1986, returned to academia in Boston until his retirement in 2002, when he was made a professor emeritus. He spent a productive retirement in Murrumbateman near Canberra.

During his academic career, Cheffers wrote 16 books on sport and education. His final publication, in 2011, Only the Educated are Free summed up his life's teaching philosophy.

John's obituary written by John Bell (SMH)

He died in October 2012 on board a 747 in the middle of the Pacific Ocean journeying back to Australia. He had a long battle with sickness and therefore wanting to live the rest of his life on his property in Murrumbateman NSW.

Further publication written by John are provided on the Publications page.