Both Arthur William Oates and Clara Ellen Oates had returned to 341 Great Horton Road by the time of the 1901 census, when the Oates household living at the cabinet shop includes Adnah and Emily and their seven children aged between twenty and three years old. It seems reasonable that with five young children and another on the way, Adnah and Emily decided that Arthur William and Clara Ellen could live elsewhere for a while. Arthur William’s journey was by far the longer, but he was staying with an aunt instead of a local family. How long Arthur William stayed with Emma, and what influence this had on his sense of independence and interest in the wider world beyond the hamlets around Bradford, remains speculative, but his willingness to shift his own young family around the world to Fremantle fundamentally changed the history of one branch of the Oates family, and some of the Flegg family as well.
In 1901 the neighbours of the Cabinet Shop at 341 Great Horton Rd include the butcher Swift Carter (33), his wife Martha (29) and son George (3) at 343 Great Horton Rd, and iron monger Frank Lister (41), his wife Sarah (41), son Fred (16, printer compositor) and Martha (60, widowed mother in law) at 339 Great Horton Rd.