Marion Ethel Davies

Marion Ethel Davies was born at Irving Road, Toorak [Melbourne] in 1875. She was the fourth child and second daughter of eleven children born to John Mark Davies and Emily Frances Scales. She attended Cornelia Ladies College along with her sister Lil. From about 1880 the family lived in a new 16 room house in Kooyong Road, which was sold in 1891, when they moved to their recently completed mansion in East Malvern. This was the end of the Land Boom and the family had been heavily involved. With most of the mansion locked up, they lived in part of it and the sisters worked to maintain it.
In 1911, Marion married David Steel whose family had also attended the Toorak Presbyterian Church, and the Steel and Davies boys had been at Toorak College together. The following year, she gave birth to twin boys, then three more sons and a daughter arrived by 1919.
During the first World War, they lived at Brunswick, moving to 88 Stanhope Street in Malvern until 1923 when they moved to a larger house at 121 Stanhope Street until 1935. They then moved to 6 Nott Street, Malvern, a few doors from his brother Will, and always not far from the Davies sisters.
Five of Marion's six children served overseas in the second World War and she wrote regularly to all of them. Her eldest, John, who had gone farming with his brother David, was part of the ill-fated 8th Division which was sent to Java in February 1942 and were sent to the Burma railway. Marion was probably one of the mothers, wives and girlfriends who met each week to provide mutual support in the absence of news. Although John survived the worst of the railway construction in 1943, he succumbed to the deprivations in Thailand in October 1944 although his family did not learn of this until the end of the war a year later.
In the 1950s, Marion became blind following unsuccessful operations for cataracts. She wrote regularly to her daughter Mary in England using a hat elastic writing aid to keep her lines on track and taught herself Braille to continue her love of reading. Her husband died in 1961 and she continued  in her home with a live-in companion until about a year before she died, when she moved to a nursing home nearby. She died in 1966, just short of her 91st birthday, survived by four sons, a daughter, and ten grandchildren.