Trevor Stokes (Class of 1951) – a Fruitful Life
Posted on May 7, 2024
Trevor Stokes was five when he joined Friends’ in 1938, attending the Friends’ Preparatory School in Sandy Bay. (“Little Friends” as it was known, was a then feeder to the main school and housed in a View Street building that still stands.) The same year he moved to the Commercial Road campus – 1941, when Ernest Unwin was headmaster – his older brother Maxwell (1933-37) applied to the Royal Australian Navy.
In 1949, a 16-year-old Trevor joined the Merchant Navy, indentured to the British India Steam Navigation Company. For four years he sailed between Australia, India, Africa, Japan and Europe. (A 1952 clipping from the Singapore Tiger Standard newspaper recounts how Third Officer Trevor Stokes and two shipmates built a yacht on board a freighter “to prove the wireless operator wrong” that it couldn’t be done.) He returned after their father’s death in 1954, and the brothers took on Trevor senior’s partnership in Stokes and Hammond, the fruit and vegetable wholesalers then on Burnett Street.
After selling in 1978, Trevor operated a fitness equipment business until his death in 1984. He and wife Geraldine had two children. Max died a year later, in 1985. His three sons with wife Helen, and two of his grandchildren, also went to Friends’.
