General News
27 May, 2026
A Tale of a Tailor’s Shop, and a long-lost aunt
The history of a town or community is more than dates and facts, however interesting they may be.
It is also the story of the people who lived there, of human lives lived with the inevitable joys and tragedies of the human condition.
Sometimes history and the personal intertwine, and the resultant revelation illuminates both.
I was reminded of this recently when a cousin gave me a number of old family photographs which had belonged to my aunt.
Most I recognised, but one was a mystery.
It was a somewhat battered old sepia photograph of a group of young people, standing and sitting together, with a much older man standing beside them.
It was obviously an amateur photograph, taken in front of a broken paling fence, perhaps in a backyard somewhere, with discarded items on the ground.
It was also obvious that this was not a random image but had been deliberately taken to record a significant connection among all those in the photograph.
My historical research over many years led me to the answer: it was a photograph of the staff of Lemon Brothers tailors, of Scott Street, Warracknabeal, taken about 1927, and of personal significance, the group of young people included my aunt, Hazel Bawden, who worked for Lemon Brothers before her untimely death from tuberculosis in 1928.
The brothers William Hans Lemon and Robert Ferguson Lemon came to Warracknabeal from Campbell’s Creek, near Stawell, and established a very successful and well-regarded tailoring business.
According to the 1910 publication Prosperous and Progressive Warracknabeal: Lemon Bros. employ one of the largest staffs in the country towns in Victoria, and each year there is a gradual increase. This increase can only be traced to one reason – that is, the excellence of their work.
The premises are centrally situated in Scott-street, Warracknabeal, and contain a well-selected and high-class stock of mercery, leather goods such as bags, etc. Ladies’ tailoring is a speciality, and they carry out a great deal of work in this department… The Lemon Bros. are popular men, Mr Will. Lemon devoting much of his spare time to cricket, and Mr. Robert Lemon is one of the finest shots in the Wimmera district.
Lemon Brothers Tailors was situated at 140 Scott Street, just to the north of the Royal Mail Hotel and operated from 1907 until 1942, when Robert Lemon died.
William Lemon died during the Spanish Influenza epidemic in 1919, which confirms that the man in the photograph was his younger brother, Robert Lemon.
Hazel Bawden was only 17 when she died.
She was the daughter of Henry and Ellen (Nellie) Bawden.
Her father came to Warracknabeal from South Australia in the 1890s at the instigation of his uncle, who was an engineer at W. C. Thomas’s flour mill.
My grandfather subsequently worked for Thomas’s at Warracknabeal, Newport (where Hazel was born in October 1910), Rainbow, and finally back to Warracknabeal, where he rose to become foreman miller until one hand was crushed in a milling accident in 1927, requiring partial amputation.
Hazel was employed at Lemon Brothers after leaving school, and worked there until her health gradually deteriorated.
Newspaper reports after her death in August 1928 provide evidence of the high regard in which she was held, of her involvement in young people’s organisations in the Methodist Church, and of her patience and acceptance, which inspired the minister, Rev. L. E. Wilkinson.
Few photographs of Hazel survive, particularly in her later years.
One that did was a somewhat indistinct head-and-shoulders image.
My grandparents had a number of these copied after Hazel’s death (probably at Discacati’s studio) from what was believed to be a photograph of Lemon Brothers staff.
That original photograph, believed lost until it came into my hands, enabled me to finally compare both the full photograph and the image of Hazel taken from it so many years ago.
It would be interesting to learn whether any readers know of family members who worked at Lemon Brothers during this period, or of descendants of the Lemon brothers’ four children.
Contributed by John Schubert