Beatrice Mears, nee McPherson, was born in Tomsey Street, Adelaide, the seventh of ten children. Her father, a stern Methodist, was the carpentry foreman at Harris Scarfe. One of the children's favourite pastimes was long walks about the City and suburbs. Beatrice went to the Franklin Street School and remembers attending Queen Victoria's Jubilee celebrations in 1897 (and the stale bun that was supplied for lunch) and her Sixth Class teacher who was terrorised for six months before the class was abandoned. On leaving school Beatrice, who like her mother loved sewing, was apprenticed to a dressmaker but ill health caused her to leave after six months. She spent the following thirteen years at home helping her mother until she married in 1915. Mrs Mears and her husband, a commercial traveller, lived at St Peters until 1929 when they moved to her present home at Kensington Park. Their children, two girls, were born in 1918 and 1925.

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