The Distel family

William Robert “Willi” Distel

Villingen, 3 April 1906 - Melbourne, 27 July 1972

A hairdresser from the Black Forest who left home at seventeen and did not settle until Melbourne, twelve years and four countries later.

Studio portrait of Willi Distel as a young man in a dark suit, about 1925
Willi at about nineteen. The print is annotated Willi 1925 and Bremen on the reverse, which places it in the months he spent at Winkler’s ladies’ salon there.

He was born at eleven in the morning on 3 April 1906, in the Niedere Strasse in Villingen, and registered three days later as Wilhelm Robert, the second son of Robert Distel, master butcher, and his wife Anna. He signed himself Willi all his life, and in Australia answered to William and to Bill.

He left school in 1920. A confectionery apprenticeship fell through on the first day, his father wanted him in a factory, and he went down to the labour exchange himself to see what was left. Three trades still had a place open: printing, bookbinding, hairdressing. He took the hairdressing, and it carried him for the rest of his working life: through Frankenthal in the French-occupied Rhineland at the height of the hyperinflation, through Stuttgart, Auerbach, Berlin, Bremen and Düsseldorf, on foot across Westphalia with no job at all, then to Sweden, and to Switzerland.

He sailed for Australia from Toulon in 1928, landed at Fremantle, and reached Melbourne on 1 February 1930. The Villingen side of the family put the decision down to the Depression, and set it out in five sentences in the booklet they printed for the family butcher’s shop in 1986:

Willi lernt das Friseurhandwerk. Er beschliesst in der Zeit der Weltwirtschaftskrise auszuwandern. Sein Ziel ist Australien, wo er in der Gegend von Melbourne ein Friseurgeschäft betreibt.

Willi learned the hairdressing trade. He decided to emigrate during the world economic crisis. His destination was Australia, where he runs a hairdressing business in the Melbourne area.

A few years later his mother wrote from Villingen asking whether he could look after his younger brother Alf through the Depression. That was all it took, a few simple words. He married Doris Thora Verbena Blundell in Melbourne in 1936; they had three children, Derek, Alan and Kay. In 1949 he gave up the trade altogether and bought a general store at Walpa in East Gippsland. He died at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in 1972, aged 66.

What he left

Title page of Willi Distel's diary

His diary

1921 - 1930

56 handwritten pages, mostly in German Kurrent cursive, carrying him from the apprenticeship in Villingen to a boarding house in Brunswick, Melbourne. Transcribed and translated, page by page, with a map of the journey and a thread following the romances.

His life in dates

Villingen, 1906-1920

Apprenticeship and the journeyman years, 1920-1926

His own chapter headings give the dates.

Sweden and Switzerland, 1926-1928

The voyage, Perth and Melbourne, 1928-1930

The Orient Line liner RMS Ormonde at anchor in Sydney Harbour, dressed overall, with the partly built Sydney Harbour Bridge behind
The Ormonde, Sydney Harbour, 26 January 1931. Not his voyage, but his ship, two and a half years on: dressed overall for the Anniversary Regatta, with the arch of the Harbour Bridge closed but the deck not yet hung. The Orient Line ran her London to Brisbane by way of Gibraltar, Toulon, Naples, Port Said, Suez, Colombo and Fremantle, which is the diary’s route port for port, and which is why a man leaving Switzerland joined her in the south of France. Of her berths, 1,017 of 1,491 were third class.
Australian National Maritime Museum, William Hall collection, object 00013681. No known copyright restrictions.

Melbourne, marriage and Walpa, 1930-1963

The diary stops in 1930 and nothing replaces it. What follows rests on four documents and on his son’s memory, dictated seventy-odd years later. Read the thinness of this stretch as a gap in the record, not a gap in the life.

Last years, 1964-1972

Three middle-aged men on a bench on a hillside in the Black Forest, 1965
Three brothers near Lindenberg, 1965. Willi with Friedrich and Bernhard, on a bus trip into the Black Forest during the visit home. He had left Germany thirty-seven years before.
A tall house with a tiled roof on a Villingen street, photographed in 1965
Die alte Heimat, 1965: the old homeland. One of around 130 photographs he brought back from that journey, nearly every one written on the back, in German, in English, and often both in the same sentence.

After

About this page

The years 1920 to 1930 are dated from his own diary, and can be pinned to the week. The forty-two Australian years that follow rest on four documents and on his son Derek’s recollection. Where the two disagree, the diary wins.

The diary itself notes that its early chapters were written up later, in Stuttgart, so the apprenticeship years are recalled rather than contemporaneous. Quotations are given as he wrote them, including the English of the later pages, which he was still learning.