Elizabeth Beattie Telfer

Role: Daughter of the Telfer family, married into the Beaton family

Elizabeth Beattie "Bessie" Telfer was born in 1871 and died in 1948. She married into the Beaton family.

Family

• Father: Adam Francis Telfer (1842–1925)
• Mother: Margaret Dougal Telfer (1849–1936)
• Spouse: William John Beaton (d. 18 Jun 1942, aged 73, Tantanoola)
• Children (8): Ivy, Margaret, Bill, Olive, Harold & Frank (twins), Ken, Colin Lindsay Beaton (1915–1944) — youngest son, WW2 POW, died 14 May 1944 aged 29

Family Stories

🖊️ Anecdote — as told in From the Borders to the Bush (book pp. 269–272, 280–285): Bessie was the one who made the family tree flower. She came from Edgerston and married William Beaton, and look what she sent out into the world: eight children, and six of them into teaching careers. William ran the post office, sat as Chairman and Clerk of the Council, and helped start the Tantanoola Football Club in the years it mattered. And it was Bessie's own hand that pegged the prize boards at the Show — her scones, her verbenas, her pastry, even ironed shirts took a ribbon, just like her mother's. She watched two wars take her boys. Harold and Frank served and came back, though the war marked them. And Colin she never saw home again; the Japanese took him at Changi and he died on the Burma Railway at twenty-nine, and it broke her. She went to her rest at Tantanoola in 1948, a queen of that town's day.

(Anecdote only — family colour, told as the elders tell it. Does not establish any relationship, date or place.)