J. J. C. Bradfield is by far our family history’s “claim to fame”. Its unfortunate that he is not known by the Canadian Crew descendants unless they read any family genealogy about the Australian immigration in the mid to late 1800s.
I’m not going into the history and stories surrounding J. J. C. Bradfield here because you can simply Google his name or buy or borrow a book about him from the library. I’ll only summarize:
John Job Crew Bradfield was the engineer behind the building the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the engineer behind creating the specs for another famous bridge in Australia – Story Bridge.
I will relate how I found out about him.
After my Dad died in 1988, and I began to deep-dive into my family history, I visited my cousin Myrtle Connolly in Ottawa. She was an avid family historian and she shared many documents and pictures with me, including letters she’d received from an Alice MacGregor in Australia. I then began to write to Alice myself. It was very exciting to get mail from Australia and, like Myrtle, Alice was very keen to share her family’s history with me – and the biggest story was John Job Crew Bradfield.
I didn’t dwell on it a lot then. I just thought it was great to have a smart relative who had a high-up job building a big bridge in a far off country.
A few years later my mom is remarried and takes a trip with her new husband overseas. She starts chatting with an Australian guy sitting beside her on the plane. My mom knew my Dad’s family history and knew that his grandmother was Rachel Crew and knew that some of the Crew’s immigrated to Australia. So that began the fateful conversation. This guy was over the moon that he was sitting beside a “relative” of J. J. C. Bradfield. I think he could have been Bradfield Fan Club president if there was one. He insisted on getting my mom’s address and sent her photocopies of information on Bradfield, including one of a book on him. It was then that I realized the J. J. C. Bradfield was somewhat of an Australian hero.
Of course, television has made our world so much smaller and “far away countries” are not so far anymore. I usually try and watch the New Years celebrations every year being broadcast from the Sydney Harbour Bridge and it really is a spectacular bridge.
