Category Archives: Emigration

Three Sisters: Sarah

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Both it (Hong Kong) and the native inhabitants have undergone marvellous changes within the last twenty-five years. A splendid town has been built out of its barren rocks; and the hill-sides are covered with trees, which not only enhance the picturesqueness of the place, but are of great value in purifying the air, and improving the health of the population. In morality, too, it has undergone a change; though perhaps not quite so marked, as the organization of the police has become more perfect, while the good feeling and interest of the wealthy and respectable class of native residents have been enlisted in the suppression of crime.

John Thomson, Illustrations of China and its People, (1873-4)

View_of_Hong_Kong_HarbourHong Kong Harbour 1860s, Marciano Antonio Baptista (1826–96)

There is much more of a mystery surrounding the life of the multi-named Sarah Westle Maria Skelton than that of any of her four siblings. The second child of my great-great grandfather, the Yorkshire-born master tailor James Skelton (see The Tailor of Horsleydown), and his first wife, Sarah Vaughan, Sarah jnr. was born in June 1826 in Printers’ Place*, in the parish of Horsleydown, in riverside Bermondsey, two years after her older sister, Margaret Sarah. The couple’s first daughter was presumably named after James’ own mother, Margaret Bowes, who had brought up her two young children after the death of her second husband (also named James Skelton) in 1799 at the terribly young age of 22. However, it does seem rather unusual to have the name Sarah popping up again so soon in the family after it had already been given as a middle name. Yet, what is perhaps more interesting is that Sarah is the only one of the five children to have two middle names, one of which is obviously a surname.

* Printers’ Place was just a temporary address for the family as the following year they were living in Broad Street, before moving round the corner into Horsleydown Lane, where they were to remain until 1844.  English Heritage describes Printers Place thus: In 1819 Printers’ Place was made up of 12 houses. These were mainly of one type, a three-storey, brick-built dwelling of six rooms with a kitchen ‘in the garden’, except for a larger house at the east end containing a broker’s shop on the ground floor and four rooms on the first floor. More humble accommodation existed in the form of two brick tenements at the rear of the row, each with three rooms.

The name Westle, may have come from the Vaughan side of the family, of whom I know little about, although research in that direction has proved inconclusive. However, it has obviously been important to the family as Sarah’s brother, James William, named his palatial Croydon residence ‘Westle House’, unless this was purely in homage to his sister. I have written about this once wonderful house before (see The Story So Far), which was one of a handful of villas erected along Morland Road when the area was first being developed. The building and subsequent decline of this property (the last original one still standing in the street) appears to be a very apt analogy for the spectacular economic rise and fall that many Victorian families – and the country as a whole – experienced throughout the 19th century.

westle-houseWestle House in the 21st Century

With the middle names of Westle Maria, I expected Sarah jnr. to be relatively easy to trace, but apart from the delightful discovery of the connection to the Croydon house, this soon appeared not be the case. She is there in 1841 in Horsleydown Lane along with the rest of the family and their sole domestic help on the first proper census. But by the next census of 1851, when the newly widowed James was living in the upmarket parish of Brixton with his two youngest unmarried daughters, Ann and Helen Ann (just to confuse things again), she is nowhere to be found.

The most obvious Victorian answer to this was that she’d died young, or had married. But while I soon discovered the death and burial records of her older sister, Margaret Sarah (from TB), shortly after their mother’s demise (an emotional blow that sent James into the arms of the teenage Mary Ann Hawkins, from whom I am descended), Sarah turns up alive and unmarried as a witness on her sister Ann’s marriage to William Haydon in 1851. Ann’s Australian gold rush adventure with William and their children has been described in detail over the last three posts, so regular readers will know what happened to Sarah’s adventurous younger sister throughout the 1850s. But did Ann perhaps unwittingly spur her older single sister on to exotic travels of her own, or was it in fact the reverse?

Two years after I began searching for Sarah, I found a very unusual marriage notice describing her betrothal at the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Hong Kong to the Honourable Henry John Ball, the Acting Chief Justice (of Hong Kong) in 1866. This piece of information was another one of the highlights of my genealogical research. Could it really be that out of the four living children of James Skelton, three of them had gone to set up home in distinctly different far-flung colonies? Only Helen Ann (whose story will be told next month) stayed in England, eventually settling down in Ipswich and leading a suburban middle-class life with her second husband, a pharmacist. Knowing the risks of illness and disease, both at sea and in foreign climes, these offspring of James must have been gutsy risk-takers, whose own father’s migration from the Yorkshire Dales to the capital earlier in the century, pales in comparison.

P1070231 (3)

batgung-lcsd-1860s-catholic-cathedralDistant Twin Domes (left) of the Old Cathedral in Hong Kong, 1865

However, this appearance of Sarah’s in Hong Kong at the mature age of forty in 1866 does rather beg the question: where was she and what was she doing in the twenty years previous to that? Like her brother, the mahogany merchant, James William (see A Tale of Exploitation), she is missing from both the 1851 and 1861 census, making me wonder if she had also been living overseas during these periods. And when I dug a little deeper into the life of her judge husband, I realised that there was a good chance that she, too, had set sail for foreign climes long before she ended up in the burgeoning British colony of Hong Kong.

1414689559814_wps_3_Saltire_News_and_Sport_LtHong Kong Waterfront, 1860s, John Thomson

Henry John Ball is ‘famous’ enough to have his own (rather basic) Wikipedia entry here, probably written by a relative. As mentioned, he was the son of a barrister who then became a barrister himself, after studying for both a BA at the University of London and then at Oxford. After graduating from Oxford in 1845 he became a ‘special pleader’, before being called to the bar in 1853, where he was affiliated to the Inner Temple. It would then appear that he was appointed attorney-general of British Honduras in 1855, remaining in that post until 1862, for a yearly stipend of £500 (while no doubt carrying on private legal work). And I think it is fair to say that it was most likely while in British Honduras that he made the acquaintance of James William Skelton, a successful mahogany dealer, and only brother of Sarah Westle Maria Skelton.

Did James William introduce Henry and Sarah to each other when he returned to London in the 1860s, or did Sarah in fact work for James William in British Honduras and meet her future husband that way? Her absence from the census of 1851 and 1861 makes me wonder if she did not decide to join her brother out in the Caribbean to help with his growing export business. As a single woman who was not quite wealthy enough to be a lady of leisure, and who had been brought up to find an occupation for herself, she perhaps wanted to take on a task which would allow her to escape the family situation in London. Not only were her two little sisters finding husbands for themselves, but her father had taken up with an impoverished single mother, younger even than herself, and had begun to create a second family with his new mistress. Thus, suddenly finding herself unable to fulfil the role of dutiful unmarried daughter to her widowed father, she may have wanted some kind of escape from the type of mundane roles which were open to middle class women in mid-Victorian England.  

I hope one day to be able to discover what Sarah actually did in the two decades between her mother’s death in 1846, and her marriage to Henry John Ball in Hong Kong in 1866. Somehow I think she would not have drifted into the life of a provincial governess or shopkeeper, and I wonder if James William was not also keeping an eye on his spinster sister. As I have mentioned in earlier chapters, it would seem that once my great-great grandfather set up home with his young mistress, the older children of the first marriage rallied around each other, no doubt horrified at their father’s lifestyle choice. James William even went as far as to try to protect his father’s reputation, describing him on official documents as Esquire and Gentleman, and stating he was of Brixton (then an upmarket suburb) as opposed to the less salubrious area of Kennington/Walworth (where he had moved with Mary Ann Hawkins and their growing brood).

Whenever and wherever Henry John Ball actually did meet Sarah Westle Maria Skelton, on the 5th of August 1862, The London Gazette announced that: The Queen has been pleased to appoint Henry John Ball, esq. to be Judge of the Court of Summary Jurisdiction for the colony of Hong Kong. As Ball’s Wikipedia entry points out, he was to remain in the colony until 1873, reprising a number of legislative and executive roles over the period, many of them filling in for those who were absent or on sick leave, including Acting Chief Justice. While I initially thought this rather strange, it turns out that a good many of these officials were often not able to perform their duties due to illness brought on by the demands of the climate, in addition to the need to return home on a regular basis to fulfil personal and professional goals.

Establishing the jurisdiction for such a far-flung colony was certainly a very challenging task, particularly in light of the fact that not only had the Chinese inhabitants a very different ‘legal’ system (following Confucianism), but the colonial government  had to deal with unfamiliar local crimes, such as piracy and kidnapping. And as more immigrants arrived in Hong Kong from other parts of China, the territory was put under further strain.

1414690451606_wps_14_Saltire_News_and_Sport_LtHong Kong Street (note sedan chairs) 1860s, by John Thomson

We cannot ascertain for sure if it was illness or personal reasons that led the Balls to undertake the voyage back to England in the summer of 1873 on the SS Pekin, but given that Sarah was obviously sick before she set sail from the colony, I suspect it was the former. Entries from the archives of the Hongkong Government Gazette (online search facilities here) show that Henry John Ball was absent (on leave) from government meetings from June 1873. This would tally with the fact that he had remained in England after the dreadful event on the 22nd of August 1873, when his wife of eight years became fatally ill at sea, suffering from what was described in the ship’s records as Tubercular Diarrhea. Sadly, she was not the only one to succumb to illness on board as two others were reported to have lost their lives during the voyage (a not uncommon occurrence at that time). But for Henry John Ball it was possibly too much to bear: almost exactly a year later, on the 20th of August 1874, Sarah’s newly widowed husband himself died in London at his residency in Half Moon Street, Picadilly at the age of 54 from Cirrhosis of the Liver and Exhaustion.

Henry John Ball never returned to Hong Kong after losing Sarah. And one month after his own death, in September 1874, in a terrible twist of fate, the Ball’s large Hong Kong house, named Ball’s Court, which was situated in the wealthy enclave of the Western Mid-Levels above Victoria Harbour, was severely damaged by a devastating local typhoon in which over 2,000 lives were lost. 

Vol3_Fig-6_10     Ball’s Court after the Typhoon of 1874

Henry John Ball’s last will and testament, made out on 7th August 1874, just a few days before he died, included an estate of only five thousands pounds, an amount which seems surprisingly low (unless undeclared monies were tied up overseas). Of personal interest to me was the mention that Sarah’s jewellery and trinkets should be given to her niece, Helen Tyler (the daughter of her younger surviving sister, Helen Ann), in addition to the fact that Henry John Ball’s large Chinese cabinet should be given to his friend, James William Skelton. As Sarah’s brother is described as a ‘friend’, rather than a relative, then I believe this points to the fact that it was James who brought Sarah and Henry together (perhaps inadvertently), thus granting them a few years of (unplanned?) happiness together later in life. Interestingly, Henry John Ball’s will also mentions that his white tropical garb should be sent to a friend in British Honduras, a detail which made me feel quite unexpectedly melancholy.

1414690465837_wps_17_Saltire_News_and_Sport_Lt (3)

This wonderful Image of William Mercer (far left) in Hong Kong in the 1860s, taken by Scottish photographer John Thomson, illustrates the type of white clothing that the Victorian colonialists wore. Mercer was the colonial secretary of Hong Kong from 1854 to 1868 (he had been in the government for ten years previous to that), a position Henry John Ball took over in 1867 during Mercer’s absence. This photograph (along with others above) comes from a recently discovered album of Thomson’s Hong Kong images which belonged to the Mercer family, and which sold at auction for just under £50,000. Although the album only contains 27 photographs, I do wonder if there might actually be one in which an image of Mr and Mrs Henry Ball in their heyday can be seen.

As regular readers will know, in early 2016 I took a trip to Australia, in part to research the life of Sarah’s sister, Ann Haydon, and her family on the Central Victorian goldfields in the 1850s. Flying via Hong Kong, I touched down for several hours in the ‘new’ international airport of Chep Lap Kok, which afforded me glimpses of the surrounding water and spectacular mountain landscape. Of course, it was then I realised with a certain degree of frustration that I should have tried to incorporate a stopover in Hong Kong in order to undertake some extra research. And as I sat in the departure lounge, waiting for my connecting flight to Melbourne, wondering where my head had been when I’d planned my trip, memories of my first and only visit to Hong Kong almost twenty-five years previously came flooding back.

It was in the summer of 1992 at the end of a long sojourn overseas, and  after two and a half years away from home, I was preparing both mentally and physically to head back to my family. My sight-seeing was thus rather half-hearted as I spent most of the week looking for a cheap flight to London, and stocking up on gifts for friends and family (as well as searching for the ubiquitous duty-free camera). However, while I remember taking the ferry to Macau one day, and also travelling out to laid-back Lamma Island to visit a friend, I certainly missed out on many of the ‘must see’ parts of Hong Kong during my short stay there.

HONG KONG HARBOUR 1992View from the Star Ferry terminal, Kowloon, Hong Kong 1992

So , Dear Readers, there is really only one thing left to do – and that is to plan my return trip, while being suitably prepared to carry out the genealogical research that will help illuminate the lost lives of Sarah Westle Maria and her honourable judge.

The Incidental Genealogist, August 2018

The Lost Boy on the Bendigo Road

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Oh, who would paint a goldfield,
And limn the picture right,
As we have often seen it
In early morning’s light.
The yellow mounds of mullock
With spots of red and white,
The  scattered quartz that glistened
Like diamonds in  light.

The azure lines of ridges,
The bush of darkest green,
The little homes of calico,
That dotted all the scene.
Oh, they were lion-hearted
Who gave our country birth!
Oh, they were of the stoutest sons
From all the lands on earth!
Henry Lawson The Roaring Days (1889)

size1         Edwin Stocqueler, Australian Gold Diggings c1855

The Tuesday I spent with the Castlemaine Historical Society was one of those perfect research days that made me want to spend the rest of my life buried among boxes of archives. It brought to mind those drama infused months when I returned to my genealogical quest after twenty years of neglect, and the excitement I felt at discovering new records on a daily basis (see Begin Again). Not only had I two decades of censuses to catch up on then – and all the spin-off research that created – but the digital revolution meant I could usually receive instant answers to my questions. And as I sat at the computer monitor in the old courthouse in Castlemaine clicking through the database of the collections, it felt as if I was reliving that stomach-churning period all over again.

Anyone who thinks that new technology has put an end to research on the ground should think again. Like many parochial records, those held in Castlemaine were not all in the public domain, and the knowledge required to interpret and contextualise them was greatly enhanced by the local historians. These volunteers (who also carry out their own research) were more than happy to help me try to reconstruct my ancestors’ lives on the Victorian goldfields.

It felt strange to be bandying place names about in front of people who actually knew the exotic-sounding destinations I’d read about on dreary winter afternoons: Eagle Hawk was not just an early mining settlement to the Castlemaine historians, but a quiet neighbourhood of Maldon with a number of fascinating old mining remains; the cemetery at Tarrangower was a sprawling place, rich in local history, and could be visited from Maldon on a bush hike via the backroads, if the weather was not too hot.

MALDON CEMETERYThe sprawling Maldon Cemetery at Tarrangower

I like to think my excitement was infectious on that day, as more researchers popped over to our terminal to see what we were in the process of discovering, offering up advice as well as names of people to contact. They knew of an expert on the Eagle Hawk diggings who had written a book about the early goldrush there – I should go and see him! And I needed to contact the superintendent of the cemetery at Tarrangower to find Ann’s grave record. Plus it would be sensible of me to arrange access to the Maldon Museum and Archives before I left the area.

My head buzzed with ideas and plans. I felt panicked at the thought that I had only one day set aside for exploring Maldon itself. How could I have been so stupid as to think there would be nothing but a quaint little outback town that I would wander around and then leave after a couple of hours? These Australian social historians who were plying me with facts and information, along with strong tea and biscuits, had an incredible amount of knowledge at their fingertips. It seemed to me that their short colonial history had given them a focus and a passion that extended beyond their local area to the immigrant stories of the ‘old country’.

At times I felt like an ancient traveller from that place, with my funny accent, and accounts of the Victorian London my ancestors left behind when they boarded the Atalante in 1854, lured by reports of gold in the great South Land. Perhaps they had even played the contemporary family board game Race to the Gold Diggings, introduced in the short and interesting clip from the National Library of Australia (below).

The local researchers were lucky in having access to the archives of one of Australia’s oldest still-running newspapers, the Tarrangower Times, which has been published in Maldon since 1858. The archived articles (now digitalised and accessible in Australian state libraries) show how the town’s development accelerated at the close of the 1850s, mimicking on a smaller scale the sudden growth of Melbourne which I described in last month’s chapter.

The name Tarrangower, which is still used today for the region, was confusingly also used to refer to what is now known as Maldon before it was settled by the colonialists. However, all this changed when gold was discovered in 1853, and miners rushed to the area from Melbourne and neighbouring goldfields in an attempt to make their fortune. What made the new township of Maldon so successful though, was that once the initial scramble to find surface gold was over, discoveries of quartz gold in underground seams (called reefs) were made. And with the quick introduction of machinery to crush the stone and extract the gold, this meant that Maldon continued to grow while other nearby diggings were abandoned after only a few months.

A contemporary description of this phenomenon is as follows: It was a novel and exciting experience for new-chum inexperienced miners to feast eyes on chunks of gold freely showing in quartz at their feet, and baffling as well, for few if any had the foggiest notion how to go about extracting the bright golden metal from the rock. A number got to work at first with heavy buckhammers, but in the course of time primitive crushing machines were installed, and soon great wealth began pouring into the pocket of numerous lucky miners.*

So it is little wonder that the Haydons settled in the area – being a family with young children they would no doubt have wanted to be in a more stable and growing community. Perhaps they even imagined being there for the rest of their lives, eventually becoming ‘important’ people in the town. As Maldon had some of the richest gold seams in Australia and its intact goldrush architecture gave it the honour of becoming Australia’s first ‘Notable Town’ by the National Trust of Australia in 1966, there have been a number of books and articles written about the place over the years. Most of these also make reference to local worthies and characters from the early days, and there is no reason why the Haydons might not have ended up in a footnote to history somewhere!

mainReplica of an early goldrush township near to Maldon

However, thanks to the Tarrangower Times and the meticulous records of the local court there was a paper trail of sorts which allowed me to put together a story of the Haydons’ lives in Maldon. This was beyond anything I could have imagined before my visit: originally I’d planned to just ‘rock up’ (no pun intended), take a few photographs, check out the local museum and leave to resume the rest of my trip (which would actually mostly be spent in Tasmania). But with the help and patience of the Castlemaine Historical Society and the local public library I was able to understand something of the lives the Haydons led in the Victorian goldfields.

The first thing that my researcher and I uncovered was the Maldon Court records, kept from 1858 when Maldon first became a municipality. As they fall within the Castlemaine District jurisdiction, we were able to access them from the archives there. My initial thought when I saw that a W. J. Haydon had been up before the local courts several times between 1858 and 1860 was one of trepidation. I felt sure it would turn out to be some mining-related misdemeanour (of which the other researchers assured me there were many). Had William fought someone over a claim? Or even worse: had he stolen someone’s pickings or harmed another miner in the process? In the end I was relieved to see that he was actually the plaintiff – or in other words, the one who had brought the issue to court in the first place. And it turned out that the defendants were actually miners who owed him money for board and lodgings (and goods sold) – a common occurrence where credit was widely accepted in order for businesses to remain competitive. So the first thing I learnt that morning was that William James Haydon was in fact a boarding house keeper as well as being a miner.

This came as a complete surprise to me as this ‘profession’ had not been listed in any of the registration documents I’d received from the Victorian Archives i.e. the births of his children and the death of Ann. Could it be that this had just been a temporary role for William or simply deemed an unimportant one? However, I later discovered that many women on the Australian goldfields did such work, so it is  most likely that the running of this establishment fell to Ann. In fact, in 1858 the Tarrangower Times displayed an advertisement for a Servant of all work for Mrs. Hayden at The Billiard Rooms, Eagle Hawk. Despite being a different spelling of the surname, The Billiard Rooms crops up again in association with the Haydons, so I am assuming this must be Ann. For example, another advertisement in January of that year states: Found – on Porcupine Flat, a young kangaroo dog* The owner can have the same by describing it and paying expenses to W. Haydon, Billiards Room, Eagle Hawk.

* This was a cross between and a greyhound and a larger dog (such as a Scottish deerhound) which was used for hunting kangaroos. 

r819_0_5745_4885_w1200_h678_fmaxThomas Tyrwhitt Balcombe’s ‘Kangaroo Dog’ 1853, from the collection of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

The afore-mentioned reference to Ann seeking help with the running of the boarding house in 1858 is particularly poignant, given that when she died in October 1860 her death certificate stated that she had been suffering from tuberculosis for over two years. And if that wasn’t enough, in September 1859 she gave birth to her fourth and final child – a girl named Elizabeth, whose middle name bore that of her sister, Helen, who had recently married and set up home in London. Even with domestic help (and without illness and pregnancy to contend with), running a boarding house must have been a full-on occupation in those days. No doubt the older children helped as well, which is possibly how the story of The Lost Boy on the Bendigo Road came about.

Of all the documents I have uncovered in the course of my research, that newspaper article was probably the most personal and descriptive. Not only did it help to conjure up a picture of the local goldfields in the 1850s, but it also showed that the Haydon’s were part of a tight-knit community. And when I re-read the article after my return from Australia I smiled to see that in the research centre in Castlemaine I had underlined in pencil the phrase who is a very intelligent boy. Presumably that is why Ann had entrusted William with such an errand in the first place, although it is hard to imagine how a boy who had grown up in such an environment would be anything but ‘streetwise’. Brought out to Australia as a toddler, little William could not have retained any memories of his time in England and would have known nothing but life in the Central Victorian goldfields

I have taken the liberty of reproducing the article in full here (including the original rather idiosyncratic punctuation) as it is such a charming read: LOST AND FOUND. – The neighbourhood of Eagle Hawk was on Saturday evening thrown into a state of painful excitement from the fact of a young child, son of Mr. W. Haydon being missing. It appears that the youngster (who is about 7 years old) had been sent from Eagle Hawk to Bell’s Reef, and performed the journey in safety. The party to whom he had been sent naturally supposing that he would be equally successful in finding his way home, sent him thither towards evening. Mrs. Haydon feeling uneasy at the prolonged absence of the boy, communicated with Bell’s Reef, and to the consternation of all, it was found that he had started for home some hours previous. The neighbours turned out en masse, and the hills and gullies underwent a rigorous examination, but to no purpose. Nothing could be learnt of the absentee save that a woman on Porcupine had seen and spoken to him early in the afternoon. All Saturday night passed – the anguish of the parents may be more readily conceived than described, and the most gloomy forebodings pervaded the breast of all parties. The general idea was that the poor little fellow had fallen down one of the numerous holes on and near Porcupine Flat*, but early on Sunday morning, to the joy of all, the truant was discovered in a tent on the Bendigo road, where he had been taken care of, was soon restored to the bosom of his family. The child, who is a very intelligent boy, and on being found said that he kept the road, and for a long time thought he was right, but at length beginning to doubt, he still thought the best plan would be to keep the beaten track. Too much praise cannot be given to the residents on Eagle Hawk, for the prompt manner in which they turned out in search of the lost one. From the Tarrangower Times, 12th April, 1859.

*Such worries were not unfounded as many children often died falling into waterholes and abandoned pit mines.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThe Bendigo Road (from Maldon) today

Other less dramatic articles in the newspaper reported William Haydon appealing against a rates assessment in 1859 – which seems to be more or less standard practice in the town at the time. The following year he puts his name to a signatory request for a public meeting concerning the licensing laws. Again this was not an unusual occurrence in the growing colony, where laws were being shaped on an ongoing basis – except for the fact that William does this two weeks after Ann’s death. This might indicate that he expected to remain in the area, but could also be in solidarity with his fellow inn keepers as the community had most likely rallied round the family when Ann was gravely ill and in the dreadful weeks afterwards, However, whatever William’s intentions in those gloomy days after Ann’s death, six months later he was back in Melbourne with his four motherless children, ready to board the Sussex* and make the return trip to England. And this explains why his youngest child Elizabeth Helen, who had been unbaptised in Australia – possibly due to her mother’s ill-health, showed up in the baptism records from Brixton in 1861, confusing me at the outset of my enquiry (see Three Sisters: Ann).

SUSSEX

*The Sussex (left) was a popular emigrant ship which shuttled between England and Australia at the height of the goldrush. In September 1861 it docked at Southampton four months after leaving Melbourne, carrying a large quantity of gold, wool and copper, alongside returning emigrants, including the Haydons. Sadly, the ship was eventually wrecked on rocks off Port Philipp in an accident in 1871.

IEP133Landing Gold from The Australian steam-ship, in the East India Docks Illustrated London News 22 January 1853

I wonder whether William departed Australia with a heavy heart or whether he was pleased to leave the colony behind with its memories of Ann and the hardships of the early goldfields. We know that when he returned to London he lived with his parents, working for his father once again in the building trade, before he remarried in 1864. So at some point the whole seven years in Australia must have felt like a dream – or at the very least a fantastic tale. And as William lived to be on old man, dying on the eve of the outbreak of WW1 (sadly in the same year as William Junior – who by then was 62), his grandchildren possibly plied him with questions about his life as a gold miner ‘in the olden days’. Or perhaps he tried to keep the memories of his time in Australia compartmentalised, out of respect for his new wife and the three younger children they’d had together. But it is quite likely that his first family would have wanted to reminisce about their mother and their formative years, especially as they grew older themselves and had their own families.

Unfortunately we will never know how the Haydons dealt with life on their return to London, especially the children, with their wild ways and colonial burrs, who had known nothing but the hot and dusty Australian bush. Although one thing I did find out was that Charles Skelton Haydon – the first of the children to be born on Australian soil – had once fancifully put in the census of 1881 (when he was newly married), that he was born on the Boat at sea, although on all the other census returns he simply put Australia or Victoria, Australia as his birthplace. Charles at least must have retained some form of connection with the colony as his first-born son, Charles William (no surprise there), emigrated to Australia himself as a young man, becoming a fruit grower until he enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in 1916. He later returned to Britain after the war.

But before I get ahead of myself by racing into the twentieth century with its futuristic wars, I would like to return to the Maldon of 1858. This was the year that William Haydon first advertised a share of a mining claim on Eagle Hawk Reef belonging to Bruce and Coleman, giving his address as the Billiards Rooms. A year later his name crops up again in the mining news section of the Tarrangower Times in relation to a meeting of claimholders on the southside of Eagle Hawk Gully. These miners had decided to amalgamate their claims in order to create a new mining company – which they cheekily named Perseverance (not an uncommon name for a mine at the time). The article goes into some detail about the size of the share, the dimensions of the mine and the working regulations and finally states: This is another step in the right direction taken by the Eagle Hawk miners, who are I am happy to say, beginning to lose faith in the non-combination style of working.

This idea to work more cooperatively on the reefs was a clever move, as once this type of mining took off it was not long before it was commercialised, and many of the work was carried out by companies employing diggers. The technology for quartz crushing soon became more sophisticated, and by the end of the 1850s steam engines had been installed in many of the mines, giving rise to chimney stacks to ventilate the fires which heated the water. Not only did this change the look of the diggings, but the relentless noise and dust from the stamp batteries permeated Maldon and the surrounding townships night and day. This type of extraction was to continue for another 70 years, leaving a permanently scarred landscape which is still visible in the area today, along with remnants of some of the later mine workings.

downloadEarly quartz crushing in Victoria c1861

Once the Castlemaine research centre closed in the mid-afternoon (the heat, the heat), I headed straight over to the public library to read up on the history of the Tarrangower diggings. It all seemed more real and poignant now that I was actually embedded in the locality,  and I took copious notes from the books and pamphlets in the local history section, photocopying as much as I could get away with (and carry).

I was especially surprised to discover that Eagle Hawk had actually developed faster in the goldrush years than Maldon itself. By the early 1860s the township was described thus: Its busy shopping street was lined both sides with trading establishments of every description. There were practising doctors, lawyers and chemists, at least three hotels, two churches, a day school, and a large amusement theatre. The area was surrounded by crushing and puddling machines and a swimming pool proved very popular.*

After reading such a description I was keener than ever to spend as much time as possible in Maldon and Eagle Hawk before I left the area. And that night I fell asleep on my motel bed, surrounded with sheets of A4 paper, dreaming about kangaroo dogs and fantastical steam crushing machines, until I woke up to the distant sound of the early morning traffic thundering along the nearby highway. Blinking in the harsh light already coming through a gap in the curtains I had the sudden delightful realisation that in a couple of hours I would be about to embark on what I hoped would be one of the most exciting excursions of my genealogical quest to date.

To be continued next month in Maldon: Notable Town.

*Both extracts above taken from A Concise History of Maldon and the Tarrangower Diggings by A. J. William (1953)

The Incidental Genealogist, June 2018

 

 

Three Sisters: Ann

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When first we left old England’s shores
Such yarns as we were told
As how folks in Australia
Could pick up lumps of gold

So when we got to Melbourne Town
We were ready soon to slip
And get even with the captain
We scuttled from the ship

    With My Swag All On My Shoulder (trad. arr.)

Frustratingly, the four daughters of my great-great grandfather’s first marriage seemed to disappear one by one from the records just as the Victorian age began to pick up steam. Unlike their successful middle brother, the mahogany merchant James William Skelton (see A Tale of Exploitation) the paper trail which documented their lives suddenly petered out when they reached their twenties, leaving me to wonder what had happened to all of them.

With Margaret Sarah, James Skelton’s first born, and possibly his favourite child (as she taught music at his tailoring premises in the city), I soon discovered she had died from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four, shortly after her mother’s demise from cancer of the womb (see Present at the Death). These twin tragic events appeared to precipitate James’ dash into the bed of the impoverished teenage Mary Ann (my paternal great-great grandmother), a relationship I have written about at length in another chapter (see When I Grow Rich). Regular readers will know that Mary Ann Hawkins’ story runs through that of my branch of the Skelton family like an earth wire, and although she was the one who is responsible for our existence, she could also be said to be the one responsible for our ‘downfall’.

In the first census shortly after the two deaths, taken in 1851, James Skelton is still recorded as living in Coldharbour Lane in Brixton in the family home with his younger daughters, Ann and Helen. However, we know that Mary Ann was already pregnant with their first child by then, although she was registered along with her infant son William (whose father was not James) at another address. I can imagine that my great-great grandfather had probably been attempting to keep this embarrassing relationship a secret from his adult children. (Although knowing grown-up daughters, they probably would have guessed at his situation, maybe even humouring him by feigning ignorance of his nocturnal wanderings).

COLD HARBOUR LANE HOUSE (2)The house in Brixton where James lived with Ann and Helen in 1851

The child that Mary Ann was pregnant with in 1851 was the first of five children she would go on to have with James. And although they did not marry until shortly before his death in 1867 at the age of 68, by 1861 they were openly living together in Walworth. So sometime in the 1850s James would have had to have ‘the discussion’ with his four living children. By then his only son, James William, was already out in British Honduras and had fathered an illegitimate daughter of his own, so he possibly felt removed from the situation. However, it is fair to say that as a Victorian social climber he was probably not too happy about his father’s sudden drop in status, continuing to refer to him as ‘a gentleman from Brixton’ until his death.

Aldred Rd. (2)Aldred Road in Kennington – where James lived with Mary Ann

For the girls it may have also felt like a betrayal of sorts. Particularly as Mary Ann was the same age as Ann, the youngest daughter. So it is interesting to note that in 1851, only a few months after the census was taken, Ann Skelton married William James Haydon – a 23 year old plumber, painter and decorator who worked for his father’s business. On the marriage certificate, James Skelton (his handwriting shaky) and Ann’s older sister, Sarah Westle Maria Skelton*, were the official witnesses.

*This was the only document to record the presence of Sarah, who had been untraceable since the 1841 census, when as a teenage girl she was living with the rest of the family in Horsleydown Lane.

A son, William, was born in Surbiton ten months after the wedding. A daughter, Elizabeth Helen, must have also been born, for although there is no birth record, this child of Willian and Ann Haydon’s was baptised in Brixton in 1861. There was, however, frustratingly no census return for the young family earlier in that year. It also seemed strange that there was a gap of almost a decade between the birth of the two children. But everything eventually became clear when I discovered William Haydon in the 1871 census, back in South London at the family home in Brixton Road. There he was listed as having six children – three of whom had been born in Australia, including the aforementioned Elizabeth Helen. Yet he was no longer married to Ann, but a woman called Mary Ann from the east London parish of Dalston. It was then – with a jolt – I realised that she must have been William’s second wife. Which in those days usually meant one thing only.

Eventually I began to gradually put together the story of Ann’s short but adventurous life in Australia. And when I turned up in the Victorian outback in January 2016, in the fierce heat of high summer, I was finally able to understand the risks that Ann had taken when she had made the notoriously dangerous voyage ‘down under’ with her young family in search of the immigrant dream over 160 years earlier.

gipsy-jh

I arrived in Melbourne on a balmy Antipodean evening, less than a week into the new year, queasy and disoriented from two long-haul flights, Yet it was the most delicious and strangest feeling to walk out of Tullamarine airport and realise that I was now on the opposite side of the world. What kind of weird magic was it that had taken me there in the space of a day compared to Ann’s three month ordeal? I wanted to reach back through time to tell her all about that marvellous invention that would radically change our lives in the centuries to follow. But I knew that even if I could, it would be too much for her to bear. For she would surely guess that if man could invent such a flying machine they would also have come up with a cure for the disease that was to prove fatal for her and her two older sisters.

*

The wonderful thing about Australian birth records (or at least the Victorian state ones) is the amount of detail each contains. Not only are both parents’ ages given, but also their birthplace, their marriage date and place, the number of children they already have, as well as the father’s profession. And a quick on-line credit card transaction can have these records on your computer a few minutes after locating them in the archives. But on that first warm but windy morning in Melbourne, bleary yet elated, I decided to trek out through the bland northern suburbs to the Victorian Archives Centre, wanting to ascertain for myself if there was anything more to discover. It was more or less a wasted trip (with me shivering in the air conditioning and cursing the fact the cafeteria was unexpectedly closed), although I was at least able to find out more about the ship on which the family arrived in Australia.

The three Haydons set sail from the Port of London on March 20th 1854, travelling with 25 other paying passengers (passage cost £7 and 16 shillings each) in a ‘windjammer’ full of rum, brandy, wine, beer, tobacco, and hardware, bound for Port Philip. After three months at sea they finally landed on the Yarra river on July 24th 1854 – right in the midst of a cool Melbourne winter. The city at that time was booming and a huge ‘canvas town’ had been erected to house the new immigrants who had been arriving daily since gold had been discovered in Victoria three years earlier. Many of those living there were ‘digging widows’ (with their children): women who were waiting to get the message to join their husbands on the goldfields.

459789389c088922b4002626958f058b       Canvas Town, South Melbourne 1850s (c) Gov of Victoria

Whether the Haydons stayed in such a place initially or were lucky to have lodgings in a boarding house, we will, unfortunately, never know. However, throughout that decade Melbourne would use its new-found wealth to transform from a rough and ready frontier town to a grand colonial city. 1854 was the year many great municipal schemes and public buildings were nearing completion. And when William Haydon set sail back to England in 1861 with his four motherless children in tow, he would have found the place as elegant as any old-world city.

Did William make the decision to go ‘down under’ in 1854 primarily to search for gold, or was he just attracted by the many advertisements for passage to this exciting new land that would have been all over London at the time? Being a young man, the idea of the gold rush presumably enthralled him, but perhaps he was canny enough to realise that his tradesman skills would be more likely to create wealth in a country that was going through a fevered expansion. But whatever the reasons, we know that a year after the Haydons’ arrival in Victoria they were living far from Melbourne in the wild and uncharted interior of the state, indicating that gold was the primary motive.

Gold_mining_scene_-_miners_and_familiesGold Miner and Family c1861 by Richard Daintree (c) Victoria State Library

The birth records of their three Australian-born children (their first-born, little William, had made the voyage with them at one and a half) show that they moved from the principal gold-prospecting areas in Victoria: from the settlement of ‘Muckleford’ in The Loddon to ‘Deep Creek’ at Hepburn, and finally to the wonderfully named ‘Eagle Hawk’ at Maldon. In 1855, on the birth of Charles Skelton Haydon, his father is described as being a plumber/glazier by the registrar in Castlemaine. But by 1857, when the first girl, Sarah Ann, was born, he was already described as a ‘Goldminer’. Another daughter was to follow two years later, when William was still described as a miner.

And from this record it is interesting to note that from July to September of 1859 there were only five births in the boomtown Maldon area, and all to miners (few of whom would have had their families with them). I was fascinated by the names of the mining settlements into which these children were born: Sandy Creek, Porcupine Flat, Lister’s Gully, all evocative of the Gold rush landscape – yet their poetic beauty could not obscure the knowledge of the harsh conditions the families would have faced in such places.

45e5dc1313bcf22bab4670c11ee6180bCastlemaine in the 1860s, photographer unknown

Before I left for Australia I had spent some time researching the areas in which the Haydons had lived. Hepburn (or Daylesford) was now a chi-chi spa town, marketing itself through the natural mineral springs it possessed. It didn’t seem to have much connection with its previous incarnation as a gold-rush town. But something about the bleak-sounding Eagle Hawk at a village called Maldon piqued my interest. Perhaps because the family had spent the most time in that area – and Ann had been interred there in 1860 (one of the first burials in the new municipal graveyard).

In addition, the settlement of Muckleford (where the family had initially lived), was located just outside Castlemaine (the administrative centre of the Mount Alexander Diggings region), on the main road to Maldon. So it seemed as if I would manage to see both of those key places. Then what really sold Maldon to me was its description as Australia’s ‘first notable town’, an honour bestowed in 1966 through the National Trust of Australia due to the intact gold rush architecture, and which prevents any alterations to the buildings. A short Victorian state-sponsored tourist video (below) gives a flavour of the town, although on the day I visited there were only a handful of people around as the temperature was almost 40 degrees!

You can perhaps imagine my feelings as I prepared to leave Melbourne after four days exploring the city, and take the train to Castlemaine. I was excited, yet feared disappointment. I’d enjoyed my time in Melbourne, but after first visiting the wonderful Museum of Immigration and doing my usual ‘pounding the streets until my feet bled’ – or in this case burnt to a crisp –  I already knew that the ‘old’ Melbourne that was so beloved of locals and tourists was just being built when the Haydons arrived. So any attempt to understand how they would have experienced the colony proved futile. Perhaps the closest I felt to them was when I crawled into a replica ‘immigrant ship’ in the museum, trying to imagine how they survived the three months at sea.

DSCN0102 (2)

295395bd1d50ffc3b1bad34b8886db12New (2016) and Old (1854) Melbourne: Swanston St from two different angles.

I even took a long boat trip from the centre of town down the Yarra River and out to the old maritime settlement of Williamstown to try to experience how they might have felt when they sailed into the huge bay of Port Philip. But it seemed like all of Melbourne was there, eating and drinking vast quantities, while lying in the sunshine, and the whole exuberant over-excess made me feel sad and lonely.

DSCN0154 (2)Melbourne Skyline from Williamstown

220px-Fort_Gellibrand

After taking the self-guided historic town trail, I decided to walk out to the old bluestone Williamstown Lighthouse at Gellibrand Point (see left), telling myself that this was possibly the first sight of Australia Ann would have had from on deck the Atalante. But somehow I couldn’t quite conjure up the spirit of the 1850s with all the conspicuous consumption around me, and I was quite relieved when the afternoon finally came to a close, and all the BBQs were packed up and the SUVs driven back to suburbia.

Disembarking from the boat back in the centre of town I thought I saw my cousin and his wife on the other side of the river. I knew they often holidayed in Australia as their youngest son had emigrated there several years previously (although their break was usually over Christmas and New Year – and David was based near Sydney). Nevertheless, I ran over the bridge to catch up with them, and of course it was not Steve and Beverley at all, but two slightly more glamorous look-alikes. It was then I glanced down and saw the glaring red marks all over my feet and ankles – the very place I’d forgotten to put on sunscreen. I was, I surmised, possibly slightly ‘sunstruck’ and so I hurried back to my hotel, pausing to pick up some calamine lotion and a pie en route.

Sprawled on the bed with my notebook computer (is there anything more blissful than returning to a hotel room alone?) I did some last minute research for my trip to Castlemaine. What would the weather be like? What were the exact times of the infrequent Maldon buses? And the official opening hours of the Maldon Visitor Centre and Heritage Museum? And was there any place in Castlemaine itself where I could obtain more information about the Mount Alexander goldfields in general?

Of course, I should not have left all these important tasks until my last night in Melbourne, but in the excitement of being free to explore a strange city I had fallen into my typical unfocused research pattern which revolved around just turning up in a place and walking around to soak up the atmosphere, and hopefully at the same time noticing things and being able to talk to people. And although this is an excellent strategy in some ways (leading to all sorts of unexpected sights and encounters), it really should be combined with a more structured approach. Particularly if it is taking place in a country on the other side of the world!

This was, however, actually my third visit to Australia: the first being on a working holiday visa in 1989; the second being my pre-wedding ‘honeymoon’ in 2005, but which involved me coming out on my own a few weeks earlier ‘just to get a bit of extra travelling in’. However, I had never visited the goldfields region before, and had in fact spent very little time in Victoria at all. So I was looking forward to my trip into the interior of the state, and wondering whether the places would remind me of the old ghost towns I’d visited in California. These were abandoned settlements that had captured my imagination in a way that had taken me by surprise (not being a fan of Wild West tropes), especially when the human stories behind the deserted buildings leapt to the fore.

I was to be in Castlemaine for three nights – plenty of time (or so I thought) to explore the area and visit Maldon. And I had agreed to meet up with an Australian friend later in the week, who had already booked our onward accommodation. Now, looking back, I see that this was perhaps one of the daftest things I could have done. As someone who is almost pathologically afraid of letting people down, one of the most stressful things for me is having to cancel arrangements I’ve already made with others. And so I kept right on with the agreed plan, even though all my instincts were screaming Stay! Stay! Stay!

And the reason for this was pure and simple: I fell in love with the rugged beauty of Central Victoria, the friendliness of the people, the surprisingly cool and arty town of Castlemaine, the open and curious nature of those I told about my research. And I made one very serendipitous connection which brought me much closer to understanding Ann’s life in Malden – and for that alone I will always be grateful to the Castlemaine Historical Society.

This lively group meets in the Old Court House every Tuesday to carry out research for themselves and others. For a small fee, visitors are welcome to use the facilities and pick the brains of the resident researchers. And it just so happened that the day I was due to arrive in Castlemaine coincided with the eve of the first meeting of the Historical Society after the festive break.

31379720 (2)Back of the Old Court House Castlemaine (where the researchers eat their pies)

So shortly before nine o’clock on a Tuesday in mid-January I headed out through the wide Castlemaine streets to the Old Court House, already sweating in the formidable heat. As well as a sun hat and water, I was carrying a slim folder containing my meagre research notes. I did not realise then quite how much they would be augmented by the end of that day.

To be continued next month in The Lost Boy on the Bendigo Road

The Incidental Genealogist, May 2018