Category: Family History

Self explanatory?

Stones in Cumberland

Family history research led me to hunt for the Sharp family, who were then just one name among many. The count of direct ancestors you possess increases exponentially each generation the further back you go. By the time of your third great-grand parents (GGG grandmother or father), that could be up to thirty-two different family names. Double that number each subsequent generation.

The Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 – 1956) Tuesday 19 July 1904 p1

John Sharpe died at his home, “Barvin”, Leviathan Reef, on the outskirts of the town of Maryborough in Victoria, on 17^th July 1904 at the age of seventy nine. His body travelled by train to the cemetery in the east of Melbourne where it was buried. He had arrived in Port Philip Bay, Australia, on a ship called the Hibernia, 11 October 1852. Sometime after he arrived in Australia, he added an “e” to the end of his name, presumably just to frustrate future family history researchers. His story in the Australian colonies is still to be properly told. However his daughter, Tamar, left one of the few tangible traces of the Sharp(e) family’s existence for me in the form of her signature on a nineteenth century petition in Victoria calling for women’s suffrage. As she is a direct ancestor, this is an object of very great pride to me.

Towards the Scottish border in England as it looked in 1998.

But it was the location of the family’s origins that attracted my attention. They came from England (as a disproportionate number of my ancestors do), but the Sharps was the first I had discovered who came from Cumberland, an English county on the north eastern border with Scotland. I had visited the region many years ago during my first visit to Britain in 1998. I visited Carlisle, the principal city of the region, and I remembered standing on the walls of the castle, a bleak edifice of red brick, looking across equally bleak country rolling away to the north.

This was both a working castle and a fortress city. Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned here, and the bloody conclusion of the Jacobite rebellion after unification of the two nations, resolved itself here in a pile of gory entrails. I was staring across the land from where the invading Scots army, not once but many times would have emerged. It was still a dozen years before I learnt that it would be perfectly feasible that I might have ancestors both doing the running and screaming with faces blue from woad paint (or the extreme cold), AND also standing on the battlements, voiding their loins in pure abject terror.

The walls of Carlisle Castle. This was not a romantic place.

When I finally found out something about my ancestry I discovered that once again, I has passed very near a location without understanding any of it’s personal significance to me. John Sharp was born at a place called Cardurnock, a few miles west of Carlisle on the shores of the Solway firth, some time before 15 April 1827, which was the date of his baptism. Why one thing interests me and not another is something I don’t entirely understand within myself yet, but it was learning that John’s father, a farmer named William Sharp, had, after his eldest son had departed for Australia, taken out the lease of a water-powered flour mill in a nearby parish called Allhallows and ended his days at a place called Harby Brow. The more I learned from the English Census records, the more I wanted to see this place.

In October 2015 I finally got the chance. Also to visit the Lakes District, located just south of where the Sharp family had lived. My timing was unusually good. Two months later much of Cumbria, as the historic counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland are now known, were under water from catastrophic winter floods.

From both church and census records, the Sharps seemed to have been farmers or farm labourers in this region since at least the early eighteenth century. I am not surprised I am not able to trace the records any further back, for that was the time when the last lot of invading armies swept through the vicinity and the written records would have made very good kindling. Long part of England’s north western frontier, Cumbria was once with the kingdom of Scotland, and before there was even a concept of England or a Scotland, an independent Celtic kingdom. During the Roman occupation period this was border country — a transition zone between the Mediterranean influenced south and the tribal Picts to the north. Hadrian’s Wall began here, and crawled east, dividing the British island in to two.

Bowness: Where the Wall began.

The first fort on Wall’s west-most flank was started in a military settlement in what is now the village of Bowness-On-Solway. I caught a bus there from Carlisle. On this flat marshy coast on south side of the Solway firth, a wide flat body of water beyond which which is Scotland, it is not hard to guess where the stones of Hadrian’s Wall ended up. The parish church of St Michael was reputed to be located on the Roman Fort’s granary.

St Michael’s Church in Bowness-on-Solway. You are looking at stones used to construct Hadrian’s Wall

This eight-hundred plus year old building, constructed out of the remains of a eighteen-hundred year old structure, also housed a stone of a more recent date, a mere one-hundred-and-sixty odd years old. The sun was in the wrong direction,

The stone in St Michael’s bone yard. You will have to take my word for it that the name on it is Sharp.

and I could scarcely make out the inscription on the old worn grave stones. It was only when I got back to Australia and was able to enhance the photographs I took that late afternoon, that I found I had been standing before a memorial to Edward and Jane Sharp, parents to William, grandparents to John. They were still alive when he departed for Australia. How close had he been to them? What had it meant to them that now he was gone never to return?

They also farmed at Cardurnock, to the west of Bowness-on-Solway. I tried to walk to there but the hour of the last bus back to my accommodation in Carlisle defeated me. I did, however, get to experience what the surrounding land felt like.

Across the Solway firth is Scotland

It was stark flat, beautiful country, still farmed today for dairy cattle, also a wildlife reserve, and a place of natural beauty. I believe the British government want to erect a Nuclear Power plant on the site. In Scotland across the water, I could see the decommissioned bulk of an older nuclear plant amid a sea of wind turbines.

Harby Brow is south west of Carlisle, half way to Keswick in the famous Lakes District. It is roughly due south of Bowness-on-Solway. William Sharp and his family did not take possession of the mill until some years after his eldest son John departed for Australia. I wish I knew on what terms they parted. William was born in Cardurnock, but farmed and raised his family in a nearby hamlet called Blitterlees. I did not visit Blitterlees as I have no record of which property they may have occupied in the region. Passing nearby in the bus, it all seemed very similar to the flat country around Cardurnock. Allhallows, the parish where Harby Brow mill was located, was in somewhat different country. It was hilly, but not mountainous. There were dense thickets of trees amid the ploughed fields and tall and thick undergrowth straddled the public right of way along which I walked from the village of Mealsgate to where I hoped my destination would lie.

This way to the right of way

The long abandoned old parish church of Allhalows in Cumbria.

On my way along, I passed a tiny and ancient stone church, all but strangled by the vegetation, the odd gravestone extending from the foliage like the grin of a gap-toothed hag. I paused, took a photo, and moved on. I passed modern farmsteads on the hilltops, contemporary operations on an ancient template. Avenues of trees lead me to the head of a freshly ploughed meadow across from which I finally saw my destination. This was the manor of Harby Brow, and I knew nearby, had to be the mill.

The manor farm was mostly a nineteenth century collection of buildings that the heritage report rather sniffily states “are of no interest.“ (Sorry, but I beg to differ.) The whole reason that this site has a heritage report at all is due to the pele tower that is attached to one corner of the complex. A pele tower is sort of a mini-castle you have when you don’t have a full-on castle such as they have back in Carlisle. In the millennia after Hadrian’s Wall, such a structure was essential as a place of safety against the constant low-level warfare that jagged to and fro across the uncomfortably nearby border. Soon I would learn that the field I was about to tramp across, legend said, was the site of the very last border raid from Scotland into England, and a battle had taken place on this spot. I would very much like to find some corroborating evidence for this. Also, back in the ancient period, a Roman military camp was sited near here, to guard the river crossing that which Harby Brow would centuries later control, and provided the power for the Mill, now just a short distance away.

Across an ancient battlefield, to the right is Harby Brow Manor and to the left is the mill, slightly obscured behind the ridge of a hill.

Crossing the battle field (as I have christened it) I encountered the farmer whose land it was, and after apologizing for trespassing (for I had veered off the path of the right-of-way) and explaining what I was looking for he pointed me in the right direction.

“Pele” or “peel” tower? Take your pick.

I stood outside the Harby Brow manor with it’s splendid tower, then walked down the short laneway to the Mill. I knocked on the door but there was nobody home. When I had searched on the internet a few years ago I had learnt that the mill had been renovated as holiday accommodation, but that web site has since vanished so I can only assume it is once again a private family home. It has long since ceased to be a mill. I took a quick look around the side to see where the water wheel was once fixed and departed, not feeling comfortable being a trespasser.

Harby Brow Mill

Where once was a mill wheel.

When I returned to the top of the lane between the Mill and the Manor, I met with that farmer again, who not unreasonably, was checking to see this stranger was not getting up to no good. We talked for a while, and perhaps after I had convinced him of my genuineness, he opened up and started to tell me the area’s history — that is how I learned of the last battle and of the Roman fort. It was obvious he loved his home and its heritage and he told me how they had restored as much as they could of the ancient church of Allhalows, the one I had passed earlier. Then he dropped a bombshell. When I mentioned my family name from this area, he told me he remembered seeing that name on a headstone in the overgrown church yard.

I retraced my steps. I walked though the arch into the church yard. Weeds towered over the creeper-strangled stones. The ruins that surrounded it mocked the stout locked wooden door of the restored portion of church. I was resigned to the fact that the knowledge that my forebears had been here and were still remembered would be the extent of the memory I would take away from this place. Then I found it.

Moss green, and dappled in the filtered light of the overhanging branches of a great tree, it stood in splendid isolation and near perfect condition. It stood where it had been since 1876, the tomb stone of my great-great-great-great grandfather William Sharp, the Miller, marking a plot he shared with his daughter Sarah, who died aged only twenty six, who waited in the earth to be reunited with her father for nearly twenty years more.

Here a small corner of England will always carry my DNA.

I stood before them both and contemplated the tangled web of luck, coincidence and unlooked for kindness that had brought me from nearly the other side of the planet, to here, where one tiny sliver of my identity was formed.

Postscript

In February 2017 I visited eastern Australia and was finally able to visit the grave of John Sharpe himself in Melbourne. On visiting the town of Maryborough, some tantalising clues as to his life in Australia presented themselves and I hope to some day write an account of his story as well.

The final resting place of John Sharpe and his wife Martha in Boondara Cemetery, Kew, Victoria. The faded carving of his name can just be made out on the front of the otherwise unmarked grave.

8 December 2016

Twenty-one Children

James Dyson married Fanny Hoffingham (an alias) on 10 September 1842

They had four children:

George	Born	18 August 1843	Died	7 November 1859
Joseph *	Born	1 August 1845	Died	19 May 1912
William	Born	8 June 1847	Died	14 June 1915
Hannah	Born	22 May 1849	Died	16 January 1850

Dyson next hooked up with Jane Edwards nee Develin. Her two children born while she was still with Richard Edwards later took Dyson’s surname:

Ellen Christina *	Born	11 January 1851	Died	19 May 1912
James *	Born	25 January 1853	Died	23 August 1918

Children born to James and Jane before they were married:

Thomas *	Born	15 January 1855	Died	22 July 1914
Hannah *	Born	25 October 1856	Died	7 April 1902
Andrew *	Born	30 October 1858	Died	17 April 1927
John *	Born	26 February 1860	Died	13 May 1913

James and Jane eventually married on 25 February 1861.

Matthew *	Born	12 June 1861	Died	14 April 1911
Samuel	Born	21 March 1863	Died	2 May 1864
George	Born	24 November 1864	Died	8 March 1928
Samuel	Born	10 September 1866	Died	12 July 1884
Septimus	Born	4 April 1868	Died	9 September 1938
Octavius Charles *	Born	4 March 1870	Died	6 June 1929
Mary Jane	Born	9 April 1872	Died	15 June 1923
Mabel Grace *	Born	27 December 1874	Died	5 November 1944
Ethel May	Born	9 March 1876	Died	4 January 1877
Sydney Earnest	Born	11 January 1878	Died	28 March 1879
Sydney Earnest	Born	16 November 1879	Died	21 April 1880

The family plot in the East Perth Cemetery.

*These children in their turn, had surviving offspring.

The source of this material was a transcription from the Dyson family bible made in the mid 1990’s. I have never seen the original. I wonder who looks after it today?

5 November 2016

Too outrageous a coincidence?
Searching for James Dyson’s first wife and finding instead the Children’s Friend Society.

A little after a year since he arrived in the Swan River Colony, James Dyson, a labourer in the town of Perth, married for the first time that we know of. Civil registration of Births, Marriages and Deaths only begin in the Colony of Western Australia in 1841, so from this record—which is also the first tangible, formal document with James Dyson’s name on it in Western Australia—we know that the ceremony, witnessed by Stephen and Hannah Bridget Hyde (the couple’s neighbours in Perth for the next decade), took place on 25 October 1842.

There are no known images of James Dyson and Fanny, but if a painting did turn up, we can safely assume it would not look like this.

…or this.

Dyson was lying about his age—he was at least eight years older than the twenty-three years that was stated on that certificate. Of his bride, we are forced accept her age at the time of marriage (twenty-two) is nearly accurate for we have so little else to go on with. She signed with a mark (x) which strongly implies she was illiterate. Her name was written down for her as Fanny Hoffington. She gave birth to four children with Dyson before her own death. There is no official death certificate yet located, or any mention of the event in any of the local newspapers. Her marriage, the birth of her children and her place of burial represents the extent of the official knowledge we have about her, and even that is riddled with contradictions.

Her pre-marriage name is described differently on every single source record that mentions her:

Marriage: Fanny Hoffington
Birth of son George: Fanny Skeffington
Birth of son Joseph: Fanny Hoffingham
Birth of son William: Fanny Hovenden
Birth of daughter Hannah: Fanny unknown (If they couldn’t work out her maiden name when she was alive, what chance do the rest of us have?)

We have her tomb stone, but can we trust it?

Her headstone in the old East Perth Cemetery gives her name as Frances, and confirms she was the wife of James Dyson, giving the date of her death. However this headstone was completed in 1901, a good half century after her demise.

The secondary source for Fanny Dyson’s existence comes from a transcription of a family bible made in the mid 1990’s. I have not seen the original and I don’t know where it is now located, or if it survives at all.

This transcription reads:

Married 1st: 10.9.1842 Frances Overton HOFFINGHAM
Died Perth, 12.5.1850, buried East Perth Cemetery.

It adds yet another possible family name to the mix. So where did this Frances/Fanny Overton Hoffingham/Hoffington/Skeffington/Hovenden aka unknown come from?

Having raised this question rhetorically, I still don’t have a satisfactory answer, but in researching the problem I came across a solution that could fit but is so outrageously improbable that it just couldn’t be true… One solid bit of written evidence… or a DNA test… could swiftly demolish this house of cards, but such is the hand I’ve been dealt. (If you think I am overcooking my metaphors, you haven’t sniffed nothing yet…)

There is no record of how Fanny (as I shall now call her—great-great-great-great grandmother being too much of a mouthful) arrived in the Swan River Colony. Records for servants, labourers, wives and children arriving were seldom made. If she had been a convict, there would have been some record. The ruling culture was unapologetically sexist, classist and would have felt no shame in any other *ist you would like to pin to them. Such was their overwhelming sense of superiority, any who did not measure up to their own self-image of importance, quite simply was not worth mentioning. Thus, arrival notices such as published in the Shipping news obscures the identities of an extensive swathe of population who may have been in the young colony. Steerage passengers on boats were not named.

This should not divert attention away from the fact that the population of the twelve-year old colony was still pathetic.

By 1841, the Colony’s pitiful non-aboriginal population of under four-thousand men women and children was not just stagnant, it was contracting. workers were in critically short supply. The first colonists had bought out a labour force that they bound to themselves by contract. While under contract, it was illegal for a servant to leave a master’s employ. But after a decade, these contracts had mostly expired (or were about to), and those workers were then free to either work for themselves, or get the hell out of colony as soon as they were able, away from bosses far too much in love with themselves. Young female domestic servants were in especially short supply. They had a tendency to swiftly and inconveniently give birth to children, or get married— often both (but not necessarily in that order.)

I suspected there had to be some scheme to at least attempt to replenish the work force and add to the stock of peons (much later on, convicts would be brought in, but not until 1850). If Frances was not an unrecorded child, or the domestic servant of some named immigrant, she might have arrived through some such scheme. Then I found the following article in a newspaper of the year 1837:—

Swan River Guardian (WA : 1836 – 1838) Thursday 28 December 1837 p274

The date was about right. Might Fanny have be one of these girls from the Orphan School?

I draw your attention to an inestimable book by Geoff Blackburn called The Children’s Friend Society: Juvenile Emigrants to Western Australia, South Africa and Canada 1834-1842.

From it, I learned about the Children’s Friend Society, the first in a long tradition of sending to Western Australia, child migrants as a virtual slave labour force (useful until they got too old or their indentures expired). As always, the road to hell was paved with good intentions. However, the seventy-three children who were dispatched to the Swan River Colony (only seventy-two actually arrived) had a much kinder time of it than their brethren sent to Canada or the colonies at South Africa. The great majority of those sent were boys, which makes it much easier to account for the female immigrants.

A Captain Edward Pelham Brenton founded the society in 1830, fired by the same evangelistic religious impulse of the era that motivated little Wilberforce to push through the laws in Britain abolishing slavery. Immigration was not part of the original plan: it was initially a scheme for training orphans for employment. Not just orphans, but all “the neglected and destitute children that infest the streets of the Metropolis” (p16)… but when jobs could not be found for their parents let alone their children, the Empire’s colonies beckoned.

By 1841, the society was defunct. Brenton was dead, metaphorically and literally from a broken heart. Allegations of mistreatment of young people sent, in particular, to the colony at Cape Town—sealed the scheme’s fate—the court of public opinion in Britain passed its judgement. But in Western Australia, perpetually out of synch with the spirit of the times, the society’s agent in the colony continued writing to request more ~~fodder~~ orphans be sent, even after the head office in London was closed. This hapless agent was the Colony’s colonial chaplain, John Burdett Wittenoom.

John Burdett Wittenoom. SLWA

Wittenoom, who under no circumstances could ever be accused of being an evangelical, did have one redeeming characteristic in the exercise of his pastoral duties: He seemed to genuinely care for the welfare of the children that passed through his charge. The record shows that he followed their progress and checked up on them long after he had any official requirement to do so. His passion was children’s education (and perhaps music). He might have been the first to admit that he would have much rather have remained the master of a college back in London than take the job of token government religious leader in an obscure colony on the far side of the world. He would have had little enthusiasm for the religious drive of the disturbingly young wife of the Governor of that Colony, Ellen Stirling, but in the Children’s Friend Society they did share a common interest. She was acting matron for some of the Society’s charges on the ship that brought her and her husband back to Western Australia in 1834. Although, like her soon-to-be monarch, Victoria, she was barely older than the young women she had guardianship of.

Lady Ellen Stirling. National Portrait Gallery of Australia.

The ‘orphans’ were supposed to be teenagers before they were dispatched to the colonies, and before that time, they needed to be housed and trained back in England. The young Princess Victoria was also a supporter of the society. In her honour, The Royal Victoria Asylum for Girls at Chiswick to the west of London was named. This was the Orphan School of that newspaper article.

It is a bizarre quirk of this culture how these girls were guarded; age or experience counted for nothing. Being, or having been married, was all. This is Jane Austen territory. That Lady Ellen Stirling was only twenty, and perpetually pregnant, somehow made her a suitable guardian for other younger women. While she did have her newly-knighted husband present on that voyage, (though you wonder how useful Sir James Stirling would have been in the situation) that was not the case for the matron sent out on the “Eleanor” to look out for those twelve girls in 1836. She was a young widow of thirty with four very young children of her own. They accompanied their mother to Western Australia, and they were likewise sponsored by the Society for their passage to the Colony. Wittenoom would also keep an eye out for their well being.

Now for the big reveal:— All the orphan girls are accounted for and none are named Fanny or Frances. Anticlimactic, yes? Their Matron, in short order, remarried to a man in the colony named Edwin Knott, and the former Mrs Sarah Massingham took his name. The youngest of her four children to the late John Massingham was born in 1833 and was only aged four in 1837. In 1842 she was nine, so even allowing for the greatest elasticity in birth-dates for both parties involved, she could not have been the wife of James Dyson even though she indeed was called Frances (or Fanny) Massingham. She married a young labourer called John Wansbrough out in the Beverly district in 1856 but died in childbirth later that same year.

Massingham — Hoffingham… We are talking illiteracy here, so it might have worked… and it still might! The eldest of Mrs Knott’s children was also a daughter. In 1842, Emma Massingham was aged about fourteen. Now Dyson was in actuality aged over thirty years, so, if these two did indeed hook-up (to use an anachronistic term), it is quite a repellent concept to my thinking and would have been pushing things even by the standards of those days. They would have had, although, as a rôle model, the by now former Governor of the Colony who was thirty when he married his wife of sixteen. Wittenoom would not have approved of the match, I am sure, so that could be why Emma might have assumed the name of her younger sister and the couple both lied about their age to the registrar. They were not married in any Church service Wittenoom presided over. Then the deed was done.

Not very convincing, is it?

This is all pure supposition of course, and a long bow is drawn to even more ludicrous levels of tension when you discover after the first Mrs Dyson’s reputed death in 1850, four months after the death of her last baby, leaving three young boys aged between six and two, Emma Massingham wedded a man named John Henry Gregory in 1851. The Gregorys had ten children over the course of a marriage that lasted sixty three years. They both died only a few months apart, the year the Great War began in 1914.

Of course, maybe Fanny Dyson never died, and she left her husband, as James Dyson’s next wife would leave her first husband*. Remember, we do not have her formal record of death even though she was allegedly interred in Perth’s only official burial ground and deaths were supposed to be recorded. How could James have ever been persuaded to go along with such an outrageous scheme? But Dyson had secrets, many secrets, including one big one he would not have wanted coming to light just as the first convict ships were arriving in Western Australia. There was leverage to be applied, possibly enough for him to have seen his young wife ‘dead’ as the only alternative to discovery.

This story is just that. It cannot be proven. Running a nose over the dead fish of feasibility reveals that this stinks. Yet so much in James Dyson’s history, especially when Mrs Richard Edwards, the former Miss Jane Devling and Dyson’s eventual second wife enters the narrative, is equally pungent, if not actively odourific. The difference is for the outrageous tale of Mrs Jane Dyson, we can prove that it is true.

Updates and future research directions.

Since this article was written, an even more far fetched theory concerning the identity of the first Mrs Dyson has been developed. Unlike this one, I believe it to be true!
- P.S. It turns out Fanny Dyson did leave her husband, but then she died.
1 November 2016
A Dark Deed in a Damp Land

Halifax is a town in the West Riding of Yorkshire, not that far from the Lancashire border to the west. With little in the way of useful agricultural land in the district until comparatively modern times, the processing of wool, and later on, cotton, evolved into an industry that dominated the town. Messrs Buck and Kershaw established themselves in business as stuff merchants in the late eighteenth century. “Stuff” has a few different definitions, but in this case referred to worsted cloth, a material which is spun from wool. By the first third of the nineteenth century the original Mr William Buck and Mr James Kershaw were long departed, but the business lived on, running a worsted spinning mill, a warehouse in the ancient street in Halifax known as the “Woolshops” and a head office at a prime location in the very heart of town on Union street.

Halifax in 1835

Mr Thomas Robershaw was one of Messrs Buck and Kershaw’s employees in Halifax. He was a warehouse manager for the business and was thirty-six years old. It’s not clear yet whether he was married or had any family. His residence was about a mile away from his place of employment, in a locale known as Kings Cross. His journey to home was west down the Kings Cross Lane, also a major thoroughfare to the junction of paths that lead out of the district to the manufacturing and trading centres in East Lancashire. Houses for the rapidly expanding workforce sprawled outwards from the old town. Civic services were non-existent for the burgeoning population, but in the finest tradition of laissez-faire economics the private sector filled the gap with inns and beer-houses. In the whole parish there were but three policemen, and two of those were volunteer constables. What could possibly go wrong?

On the evening of Monday, 17 June 1833, for Mr Robertshaw, things finally did go wrong. First of all, he left his pocket book in the inn he visited on his way home from work. Such was how his fortune would play out that this careless or intoxicated act would soon be recast as luck. The hour was late when he departed the establishment and his home was still a mile away. While the mid-summer night may have been fine, there was also a new moon. There may have been the odd lantern outside a public house, but street lighting was a thing of the future. Mr Robertshaw walked home in the dark.

Town of Halifax, Yorkshire, from The Penny Magazine, 15 March 1834

Somewhere between the Halifax town centre and King Cross is as close as can be identified that the assault took place. There were five of them, but how much he saw we can not tell. That he was not altogether in the remote wilderness is the extreme length they went to silence him in their struggle. Soil was grabbed and stuffed in his mouth, more and more dirt to smother his cries, a suffocating pressure like he was being buried alive from the inside out. It felt like he was going to die. His chest would have pounded with terror and the useless adrenaline urged him to breathe faster for the air that would not come. Roughly, his pockets were searched. Perhaps they searched again, for they did not find what they had expected to find on the sort of man such as he, that would make such a desperate action worthwhile. Coins worth nine shillings were all that they found, and they took them. Then perhaps for spite for such a miserable haul someone took his hat. After that they let him go and fled, leaving Mr Robertshaw barely alive to spit out the choking dirt. There is not much more to say on Mr Robertshaw’s life other than that he most likely never fully recovered from this ordeal.

Eighteen days later he stood in the courthouse in the nearby town of Bradford to give evidence against four young men accused of theft from his person. The fifth member of the gang was not in the dock. He was a much older man than the others and was also their alleged ringleader. He would have stood where Mr Robertshaw had stood on the witness stand when he gave evidence against his compatriots. Maybe part of the deal was that the four were only charged with the theft and not the assault. The jury found them duly guilty. Highway robbers were still routinely sentenced to death. Instead, the four young men were sentenced to transportation for seven years and the older man walked free. How Mr Robertshaw felt about this outcome is not known. If he felt that justice had been done we cannot tell.

While the four young men were imprisoned on the hulks awaiting transportation to Australia it is recorded that they confessed their parts in this crime. None of them appealed their sentence although they had the opportunity to do so. Maybe they had realised the full enormity of their actions and that a re-examination might go that much worse for them. For on Monday, 29 July 1833, exactly one month after the attack, Mr Thomas Robertshaw, of King Cross, foreman to Messrs. Buck and Kershaw, stuff merchants, Halifax, died. He was buried the next day in the churchyard of the Holy Trinity church in Halifax by curate William Wilmott, M.A. He does not have a headstone.

Future research

The crime, the pursuit and apprehension of the gang is recorded in some detail in the regional contemporary newspapers. The preliminary documents of the trial exists which lists the jurors and witnesses against the accused.

…continued.

19 October 2016
Van Diemen’s Land

James Dyson served seven years as a convict in Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) between 1834 and 1840. He arrived in Hobart Town on the convict ship Moffat on 9 May 1834. Until 1837 he worked on the road gang in that town, Then he was transferred to northern Tasmania around the Launceston district and was assigned to various masters in the area. He was never granted a ticket-of-leave or a conditional pardon, instead his sentence was extended, and he remained in the system until 3 July 1840. He left the colony a year later for the free settlement (one without convict labour) of Western Australia.

He was not a model prisoner, although his long record of malfeasance while in bond should be seen in context over a seven year sentence. Below is an attempted translation of Dyson’s official record as a convict. It is hoped that some more flesh can be applied to these bare bones of history:—

~~Transcription updated 13 September 2022~~
Transcription updated 5 May 2023

Hobart Town

26 August 1834 P[ublic]W[orks]./ Drunk to be worked on the Roads 6 months /[ordered by] P[rincipal]. S[uperintendent of Convict Department]/

26 August 1834 [Assigned to] P[rincipal] S[Superintendent of Convict Department’s] office

9 September 1834 [Assigned to] W[harf] W[orks] Off[ice]

? July 1835 P[ublic]W[orks,] Absent from his Work, 25 lashes / [ordered by] A[lexander] Murray

24 July 1835 P[ublic] W[orks,] Disorderly Conduct in the Street, Tread Wheel for the next 6 Saturday Afternoons / [ordered by] J[osiah]. S[pode].

1 August 1835 P[ublic]W[orks,] Idleness to be confined in Barracks on Saturday & Sleep in a Solitary Cell 3 Nights / [ordered by] Alex[ander] Murray

21 September 1835 Hobart Town P.O [sentence?] ex[tende]d 7₁[by 1 year?]

2 October 1835 Disorderly Conduct in Absenting himself from work on the 2^nd Oct / 12 lashes/ [ordered by] A[lexander] Murray

24 August 1836 P[ublic]W[orks,] Absent from Barracks all night, 3 Months hard labour in view of the Town Surveyors Gang / [ordered by] W[illiam] Gunn

29 August 1836 [Assigned to] P[rincipal] S[Superintendent of Convict Department’s] Off[ice]

4 February 1837 Having in his possession a Woman’s cap & some Lace without giving a satisfactory account of them / Hard labour in chains 3 Months / [ordered by] P[rincipal] S[uperintendent of Convict Department] / at his trade Vide [see] Liut Governors decision 4/2/1837

7 February 1837 [Assigned to] P[rincipal] S[Superintendent of Convict Department’s] Off[ice]

Launceston

14 July 1837 [assigned to] L[aunceston]

16 September 1837 D[avid] Williams / Returned to Govt his master not requiring his services [date may be in 1839]

Corra Linn, Evandale

4 December 1837 [assigned to] Morven [Evandale District]

7 December 1837 [Master is Henry] Nickolls/ Assaulting (and threatening)?? Violence to his master 6 months hard labour in the Street & ret[turned] to Government ([ordered by] R[ichard]. Wales) [to] Kings Meadows Chain Gang, after[wards to] Laun[ceston] assignable. Vide [see] Lieutenant Governor’s Decision

King’s Meadows, Launceston

16 December 1837 [assigned to] C[hief]. P[olice]. M[agistrate]. [then either ink blot or obscure word]

?1 December 1837 L[aunceston] [date obscured -either 21 or 31]

Cressy Estate

2 October 1838 N[orfolk] Plains [thank you Lenore!]

Some one or some place associated with the Cressy Estate?

5 October 1838 VDL Establishment / Incorrigible idleness and using abusive language. 26 lashes & returned to Government / [ordered by] J[ames]. C[ubbiston]. S[utherland].

Campbell Town

13 October 1838 [Assigned to] C[ampbell] t[own] of[fice]

Calstock Estate, Deloraine

20 October 1838 ? [Assignment lost off fold of page] Possibly Calstock Estate near Deloraine

Snake Banks (Powranna)

23 November 1838 [Lt Pearson] Foote/ Idleness & neglect of duty. 6 months hard labour / [magistrate] W[illiam]. M[oriarty]/ Snake Banks & Returned to his Service vide Ltd Gov Decision 23 Nov 1838

Calstock Estate, Deloraine?

23 May 1839 Theoretically the date returned to the service of Pearson Foote, RN.

Launceston

? October 1839 L[auncesto]n

11 November 1839 G[eorge] Town off[ice] [Assigned to Samuel McKee (implied)] [thank you Ned!]

8 January 1840 Sm Mc’Kee / Returned Depot Do [his master not requiring his services]

3 July 1840 Free [by Servitude] Certificate No 524/1840

Sources:

CON-31-1-10 image 143

17 October 2016
The Lancashire Hotpot
Queen Anne, just so you know. (There might be a test later)

Five minutes of searching the internet revealed no consensus on the origin of the name Dyson. Thankfully this is not what this article is about. Regardless of the original etymology or geographical location of a theoretical common ancestor, (and while it would give me no pain at all to be able to trace my ancestry all the way back to a female cattle rustler in the West Riding of Yorkshire) the earliest credible ancestor I can identify from the surviving records is that of Simeon Dyson from Crompton, near Oldham in Lancashire. ~~His son, Ely (or Eli) was born during the reign of Queen Anne, some time before April 1701.~~

Bill and Madge. R White, engraver, died 1703, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

His son William was born about 1687, during the reign of King William III and Mary II.

Hand Loom Weaver in Lancashire. James Dyson’s father sold machine parts.

For several generations thereafter, the descendants of Simeon were predominately cloth weavers in the hilly east of Lancashire, occasionally spilling over the county borders into Cheshire to the south, or east into Yorkshire. The weaving of wool into cloth using hand looms was a traditional cottage industry in the region, and Simeon’s listed trade as a joiner—a specialised skill in carpentry—hints at his future family’s success in manufacturing the implements of the weaving trade.

Joseph Dyson (1783-1839) was born into a very different world to that of Simeon, his great-great-grandfather. King George III had comprehensively lost the American colonies and the spinning material of choice was now cotton. Staggering technological advances in the production process transformed a rural landscape into both an industrial and urban one. During Joseph’s lifetime, the transition from water power to coal and steam would have turned the damp wet country (the moisture being ideal for the cotton spinning process) from green to black. Joseph married Hannah Binns in the Church of St Chad at Rochdale, on 19 January 1804. His father-in-law, Mr. Andrew Binns was described as a Cotton Spinner which does not really adequately reflect the reality that he was not a weaving machine operator (skilled though such operators needed to be), but was actually an owner of a mill in his home town of Mossley.

The town of Mossley lies on the border between three counties, Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire in England.

Joseph seems to have had a varied career that involved quite a bit of travelling about the county. At the time of his marriage, his trade was listed as clothier, which suggests he was involved in the selling end of the cloth production cycle. By 1815 he was described as a cotton weaver, which again tends to down play his responsibilities as an overlooker—a factory floor supervisor. He made his residence on the outskirts of Oldham town, a district glorying in the name of Mumps. He owned at least six cottages on a small street that looped underneath the hill-side overlooking the main road out of town. It’s grand name of Regent Street seems somewhat overblown. Those six cottages (now long gone, as are everything else contemporary to him or his family on Regent street) probably was the heart of his cotton empire, as far as it went. The impossibly large number of occupants of this tiny street are mostly listed as cotton spinners in the 1841 England Census, which took place only a short time after his death. Dyson probably owned or sold the hand spinning machines worked by them in his cottages. His travelling work continued as a machine broker and a trader in cotton waste. When he died at home in Regent Street in 1839 he left his children an estate worth £2000… to some of his children at least.

Regent Street, Mumps, Oldham, Lancashire, England: visited October 2015. There is nothing remaining of anything even remotely associated with the Dyson family.

His sons continued in the Cotton milling trade as Spinners, Overlookers, Managers and Yarn Agents— except one.

Of his nine supposed children, three appear not to have been born to his wife, Hannah—and at least one of those may have been adopted from his unmarried sister.

All the children that survived into adulthood were mentioned in his will, witnessed shortly before he died at his home on 13 July 1839, his long-suffering (inferred by the circumstances) wife having pre-deceased him eighteen months before. All the children were mentioned, except one.
- Thomas Dyson, born 1803 at Quickwood (Saddleworth) near Mossley.
- Andrew Dyson, born 1806 at Mossley.
- William (i), born 1808, died 1814 at Quickwood.
- John, born 1815, at Bough, Mossley.
- Mary, born 1822 at Mossley.
- Sarah, born 1824, at Oldham
- William (ii), born about 1826.
- Joseph, born 1828, at Mumps.
The missing child was James Dyson. He was reputed to be born in Newton Heath, a suburb of Manchester on 15 October 1810, but no baptism record has been discovered for him. Birth certificates are still a generation away. At least two of his siblings, John and Mary, are described as illegitimate on their baptismal records. In John’s case, Joseph is the reputed father, while Mary was probably the daughter of Joseph’s unmarried sister Betty. The second William Dyson also has a missing baptism record but, like older brother James, he indubitably existed. James Dyson is not in the 1841 census that locates most his siblings living together in Regent’s street, or working with their late mother’s Binns relatives. He was either in, or about to arrive in Western Australia at that precise moment. Essentially, there is no formal record tying James Dyson to this family in Lancashire. And that’s the way (I am sure) they wanted it. Informally, however:—

James Dyson in Western Australia, outlived all but one of his siblings back in Lancashire, and at the time of his death, and until her own in 1896, sister Sarah lived in Newton Heath, Manchester — the only definitely recorded member of his family to do so. She lived in a house named “Birch-villa” on Droylsden road. It’s name might a reference to to the family’s cotton mill founded after the time of her father and run brothers Andrew and Joseph. It was known as Bower Mill and was located in Hollinwood, equidistant between Newton Heath and Oldham, near the site of an old house occupied by the family called “Birchen Bower.” The house was famous for many legends including a real life mummy and ghost story. Today there is a motorway on the site.

But what had James done to be so comprehensively written out of the family story in Lancashire? Before him, James was a family name among the Lancashire Dysons. It was demonstratively “retired” after him. He was not the last bastard to be fathered by his father so it could not be that. There remained some memory of the family’s antecedents in Lancashire by James Dyson’s Australian children, and there may have been some (long lost) line of communication back to someone in the home country.

The Daily News, 23 June 1888, p. 3

James arrived in Western Australia on the ship Napoleon in 1841, but the surviving passenger list for the January arrival at Fremantle from England does not mention him. But wait, does not the press clipping below say he arrived in July, 1833?

The West Australian (Perth, WA : 1879-1954) Tuesday 19 July 1910 page 1

The year the colonial barque Napoleon visited Western Australia was most definitely 1841— she made two visits to Fremantle in that year, one in January, and the second in July. She is not to be confused with an American whaler of the same name also in the vicinity at that time. A passenger list for the January visit contains no mention of Dyson, although the ship sailed direct from England. From the second July visit, no passenger manifest has been located and the port of origin this time was quite different.

The Napoleon sailed from Fremantle in February 1841 and arrived in March at Launceston, Van Diemen’s Land. There she underwent re-fitting to be a whaler and sailed back to Fremantle in May, arriving on the 12 July 1841.

The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal (WA : 1833 – 1847) Sat 7 Aug 1841 Page 1

There was a man called James Dyson then living in or around Launceston in what is now known as northern Tasmania in 1841. Furthermore, there are distinct records of a young man called James Dyson who departed from England in January 1834 for the prison colony of Van Diemen’s Land. This James Dyson did indeed depart from Lancashire in 1833, never to return.

The circumstances of his departure were no doubt a massive embarrassment to his family, and more than enough cause enough for his father to wipe him out of the family inheritance, however his ancient cattle rustling antecedents may well have nodded with approval.

…continued.
17 October 2016
An introduction to the Dysons

“A lot has been written and spoken about the Dyson family […], the majority of which was unmitigated bunkum…”

Edwin Greenslade Murphy aka “Dryblower” wrote this in 1927 on the death of a very prominent (pun intended) member of said family. The well-known Sunday Times scribe and popular poet was in an excellent position to know as he had written much of it.

Dryblower‘s inventions were (mostly) affectionate as he counted the recently deceased Andrew “Drewy” Dyson a friend. From his insider’s position he made tantalising mention of

“…those who have been privileged to see the pictures and paintings of Drewy’s ancestors, the family Bibles, the old oaken cabinets, caskets, etc, were given a peep into a past that was full of interest and history.”

Always classy: The press says goodbye to Drewy Dyson. Truth (Perth, WA : 1903 – 1931) 23 April 1927 page 1.

Andrew “Drewy” Dyson (1858-1927) was one of twenty-one children that the Western Australian colonist James Dyson was believed to be the father of. There were at least forty-four grandchildren, seventy-eight great-grandchildren, and beyond that generation the white-noise makes an accurate count of numbers near impossible. The peep into the past that Dryblower could gaze on — that has long been dispersed, and may no longer even exist.

The Daily News (Perth, WA : 1882 – 1950) Friday 19 May 1893 p2

James Dyson was a man who had a swamp named after him. He and his family were cultural institutions during the second half of the nineteenth century, and the beginning of the twentieth, in Perth, Western Australia. If his son Drewy had been about in the twenty-first century he would have been an internet meme and social-media superstar.

So who was James Dyson?

James Dyson was about 31 when he arrived in the Colony of Western Australia on 11 July 1841 on the Colonial whaling barque Napoleon. The certificate of his marriage to Frances (Fanny) Hoffingham in October of 1942 is the earliest mention of Dyson in print in the Swan River Colony. He gave his age as 23, but he was certainly lying.

The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal (WA : 1833-1847) Saturday 29 March 1845 page 3

His occupation is listed as labourer. On the birth certificates of his first four children he was more specifically described as a pit-sawyer. In 1845 he won a tender to supply timber for the construction of the Aboriginal Institution (a prison) on Rottnest Island. This is not the same structure — known as the Quod, that exists today— This second gaol was constructed after the original was burnt down by the superintendent, while attempting to smoke out some escaped prisoners. (But where were they going to escape to on a small island?) Irrespective of this, Dyson was also paid by the government for some materials used for the surviving replacement. His career as a successful timber contractor, merchant, butcher, baker, man of property and Perth City Councillor was established.

The Perth Gazette and Independent Journal of Politics and News (WA : 1848 – 1864), 6 May 1853, page 3

The first shipload of convicts landed in Western Australia on 1 June 1850, transforming the free colony into a penal settlement. Dyson’s infant daughter had died, and he was left with three boys to care for between the age of 7 and 3. Enter Mrs Edwards who was looking for a place to stay.

The former Miss Jane Develing only arrived in the Colony in October of the previous year— she swiftly married Mr Richard Edwards— and gave birth to her first child (but not in that order), all before the age of eighteen. When her husband fell on hard times, Jane might have been employed by Dyson as nurse to his young family.

In 1853, she gave birth to her second child, whose name was registered as James Edwards. Some time later both her husband and James Dyson were arrested for brawling down the main street of Perth. Richard Edwards vanished from the public record and presumably the colony some time after that.

Afterwards, James’ own wife Fanny was lost, but Jane and James lived together for a further eight years before they were finally able to be married. The two children allegedly by her first husband took the name of Dyson, and a further four children were born before their parent’s church wedding in 1861 have no birth certificates at all.

1859 ‘Local and Domestic Intelligence.’, The Inquirer & Commercial News (Perth, WA : 1855 – 1901), 16 November, p. 2

Dyson’s business flourished under the early years of the convict system, even if his social standing was dubious. He became one of the largest employers of labour in the colony— Convict labour was employed for cutting timber, brick making, herding and slaughtering cattle. He began to build up a small real-estate empire. He owned a store and house on the corner of Murray and King Street in Perth. He was not an extensive land owner by the standards of the colony’s elite but he was a significant one. Lake Jualubup in present day Shenton Park was more commonly known in this era as Dyson’s Swamp. It was near this water, in late 1859, that his eldest child George died in a horrific accident involving a bullock cart.

Money talked. By 1860, Dyson had reached a threshold of wealth where some measure of respectability could not be denied him. He was eligible to serve on juries, but more importantly, as a rate-payer, he had the right to vote in elections for the Town Council of the City of Perth, and for the Road Boards on the Canning and around Perth. He may have been under the patronage of George Shenton senior (1811-1867). Possibly the most successful and influential merchant in the colony—and most devout and pious Christian—was tickled by the evidence of an indubitable sinner reformed. James Dyson and Jane had their wedding in the Wesleyan Chapel on William Street to Jane on 25 February 1861, and their remaining eleven (yes 11) children were all born within wedlock. Shenton gifted James a family bible in 1864. He also sold him the land that became known as Dyson’s Swamp. Years later Dyson was compelled to sell the land back to Shenton’s son.

Enter “Drewy”

The town of Perth in the time of James Dyson.

In 1867 another of Dyson’s children, a boy of nine, was lost in the dense bush around Armadale. He had wandered away from his father’s convict timber cutting party with only his dog for company and was lost in the trees. This was the first mention (but far from last) of Andrew (later Drewy) Dyson in the colony’s newspapers. His distraught father rode out for the search only to be re-united with the child at Narrogin (as Armadale was then called, most confusingly). Later that year James was elected to the Perth City Council as a councillor for the West Ward, a seat he would hold for nearly a decade. The most notable event during Dyson’s tenure on the council was the construction and opening of the Perth Town Hall. It may be just coincidence (and those are pigs wheeling in the sky overhead) that this period coincides with Dyson winning many contracts to sell timber to city, used mostly for kerbing on the pavements.

The later years of Dyson’s life were marked by what were euphemistically described as “reversals” and the unravelling of his family life. His lands had to be sold. A young son shot a business rival’s even younger son in the head during a hunting expedition (both survived, but Dyson’s child was exiled to Victoria). Dyson was compelled to move into the home of his eldest son Joseph on the corner of Murray and William street (This corner also was known as “Dyson’s Corner,” not to be confused with the first “Dyson’s Corner” on King and Murray Street). His marriage failed.

The Inquirer & Commercial News (Perth, WA : 1855 – 1901), 18 April 18834, p. 5

Jane left James, or was thrown out of the house by him about 1883—Accounts vary. She was then convicted of theft from her new employer, who was an old associate of her husband. After she had served her time (during which another one of their children— Samuel—died aged 17), she took many of the younger children with her and founded what became one of the most successful brothels in Perth during the gold rush boom of the 1890’s— but that is another article. While Jane was still in the old Perth Gaol, her son, Andrew “Drewy” Dyson, now with the reputation as one of the meanest drunks in the colony, and freshly released from hospital after a suicide attempt, lurched back to the family home and beat up his elderly father. He was sent back to gaol for another six months, but Drewy’s redemption and fall and redemption and fall and unexpected lottery win was to far eclipse the fortunes of his father.

The Perth Gazette and Independent Journal of Politics and News (WA : 1848-64) Friday 7 August 1863 page 2

James Dyson, who was not born in Manchester, Lancashire, England, about the year 1810, would have been very familiar with the concept of a friendly societies, particularly the International Order Of Oddfellows (IOOF). Their purpose was to provide a form of life and health insurance to workers in an era before any form of social security. This they did, combined with the old-boy’s-club fraternity of quasi-secret societies such as the freemasons.

The Sons of Australia Benefit Society had been formed in Western Australia some years before Dyson had arrived in the Colony, and bore much the same relationship to the Oddfellows as the “Hungry Jacks” franchise in Australia does to “Burger King”. The Sons of Australia Benefit Society had been favoured with the grant of some prime real estate from the the government during their early days, which ensured that even when their membership was low, their balance sheet was always healthy. When Dyson first joined is not yet ascertained, however he was openly associated with the organisation by the early 1860’s when he rose steadily to be treasurer then, vice-chairman. His son Joseph was also a member and eventually became chairman and a trustee.

The Dyson family grave in the East Perth Cemetery, It is one of the few to survive.

When Dyson died at Joseph’s house on 18 June 1888, allegedly at the age of 77, the annual celebratory dinner for the Sons of Australia Benefit Society was immediately cancelled as a mark of respect. He was buried in the family plot in what is now known as the Old East Perth Cemetery with his first wife, assorted predeceased children, and then much later his second wife Jane, after she died in 1899. The rare surviving headstone in the cemetery was erected by James and Jane’s son, Drewy — now a Funeral Director and a notorious identity in the last days of pre-federation Western Australia.

This was the end of James Dyson’s life, but it is far from a complete telling. A tale of murder and mayhem hid behind a respectable countenance.

The Daily News (Perth, WA : 1882 – 1950) Friday 18 March 1892 p 2

His sixteen surviving children themselves all spawned legacies, heroic or squalid, mundane or perverse, outrageous or conventional, sometimes surpassing that of their father. It turns out that one of those threads leads right to me. Maybe I shouldn’t be so proud of that, but I am.

11 October 2016