Olga, Una and William Dawson all attended school in Brussels
Brussels 1908
Olga Dawson, Una Dawson and their younger brother, William (Willie) Dawson were all educated not in Jacksonville, Florida, but in Brussels, Belgium. Their parents, Anita (Ball) Dawson and William Bunn Dawson were wealthy and wanted the best education for their three surviving children (five children had died during infancy) and a European education was what they had chosen. Mother Anita stayed with the children in Europe while the father William tended to his business in Jacksonville. When summer came, he joined his wife and children in Europe and together they took their three teenagers to museums and other cultural points of interests. This went on for many years. My Grandmother (then teenager) Olga, was not particularly happy spending her summers this way. She was much more interested in young men and having fun than being dragged around in the summer heat, in heavy clothes, from museum to museum. When she got married at 18, she was greatly relieved. Now she could start living a proper life, she felt.
I feel very sorry for the young William who did not have much fun having only his older sisters for company. He was put in a boarding school in Brussels which allowed him to spend weekends with the family. He was not happy with this at all and ran away from school. His father in Jacksonville found out what had happened and wrote him a very stern letter in 1908 (see below), trying to get him to understand why he should put up with school. But he was only eleven years old the poor boy.
How did young Willie react when he got this letter from his father?. We do not know but he did not throw it away because it is still here for us to read. Either he or someone else framed the three pages. Maybe young Willie was inspired by his father’s words that he would take over his father’s business one day. Sadly his father died in 1916, only eight years after the letter was written and after a battle with cancer. This is the only letter by William Bunn Dawson senior that I have seen and it is nice to hear his voice for the first time. Maybe someone else has some of his letters? A big Thank You to Dorian DeVries, the granddaughter of young Willie who found the three framed pages framed on the wall of her older brother. Dorian is a master at finding family facts, passport applications, wills, newspaper clippings that all help enormously in telling the story of a great family.
We know that Anita and William Dawson were keen to find a school that young William would like, so much that they decided to stay in Brussels to be with him, giving him support, instead of going to Paris to attend Olga’s wedding in 1909. It was a very small wedding and Olga even contemplated not bothering with a white wedding gown. She wrote to Folke that it would suffice with her ordinary day dress. Folke convinced her to go for the white wedding gown. I have a feeling that the ceremony did not matter that much to Olga, she just wanted to get away from Brussels, schools and museums just like Una and Willie. When Olga left for Sweden with her very handsome husband Folke to create their new life, sister Una and brother Willie continued their education in Brussels and Paris for a few more years. After that they finally went back to Jacksonville in Florida.
