Jeannette Propsting (Class of 1922) a Connection Beyond Generations
Posted on February 17, 2025
When Nathanial Propsting learned he was dying, he knew he could afford to send one of his five children to board and study at Friends’. Of his three sons and two daughters, until then all home-schooled at their property in Penguin, he chose Jeannette (Class of 1922).
“She was outstanding, there’s no doubt about it,” says her daughter Marie Moore. Jeannette completed the university entrance exam a year early at Friends’ and, too young to be accepted into uni, stayed a little longer at the School, deciding to cram five years of German studies into one.
She then studied at the University of Tasmania and qualified as a Primary and Secondary teacher but, as was the practice at the time, automatically lost her Sydney teaching work once married. By the Great Depression, her sailor husband Owen Fletcher was “on the swag”, travelling across NSW to pick up any job he could to send money to his wife and young son, Larry. Eventually the labour shortages of WWII allowed Jeannette to start teaching again, while Owen entered the Merchant Navy. Jeannette died in 1970.
“The Friends’ School meant everything to her,” says Marie, the younger of Jeannette’s two children and one of Sydney’s first computer programmers. “It opened up opportunities for her.”
Marie never attended Friends’ but has visited with her children Anthony and Patricia to experience a place that shaped her mother. It’s also a location where the surname Propsting has a long history. Marie was delighted to discover that on Friends’ original register in 1887, the first, second and third students listed were all Propstings: Alfred, Fred and Hadley, grandchildren of the School’s co-founder, Henry Propsting.
