Shadowy Spouses

In the last six months, something odd happened. Many (not all) of the shadow wives and husbands of the Dyson children — AND a parent of a parent too — inadvertently stumbled out of the historical shade.

I have written up some of this (but it is nowhere near ready to go), the rest is being assimilated into the book… so before we all die of old age — here is a brief taster of some of the latest discoveries in the works.

Emily Bates

Andrew Drewy Dyson’s girlfriend and mother of his child.

All that was known about her previously:

• Attended a theatre performance in Perth where Drewy Dyson made a scene.
• Gave birth to his son Andrew Samuel Dyson a few months later in 1894 on the family property near Dog Swamp.

What we have now:

• Emily Bates was born in 1875 to a desperately poor family in south London. The family name might have been Betts rather than Bates. She sailed to Western Australia on an immigration ship named Gulf of Martaban in 1891.
• Apparently employed by the Dysons as a domestic servant — getting pregnant by her boss resulted in some horrific internal injuries after the birth of the child, and that child was then taken away by her employers as their own. She fled to the recently established Salvation Army Women’s refuge in Perth, and that organisation smuggled her out of the colony for a new start in South Australia.
• She continued working as a domestic servant in Adelaide, but was continually in and out of hospital for the rest of her life until she died there in 1926. She was 52 years old.

John William Stevenson

Second husband of Hannah Smith, nee Dyson

What we knew before:

• The couple hooked up (but never actually married) in northern Tasmania. He was a hotel publican. Hannah gave birth to a child at Launceston in 1893.
• They return as a family to Perth, Western Australia. He was next involved in a public scandal involving fraud against the government railways by the Perth Ice Company. He was a clerk for that company.
• After the charges against him are dropped, the family moves to Kalgoorlie (as you do) but Hannah Stevenson died there in 1902, aged only 45, and John Stevenson himself drops dead only a few year later in 1908. They leave a 14 year old orphan girl living in a Kalgoorlie brothel, as the hotel the family lived out of was known to be…

What we have now:

• John William Stevenson immigrated to New Zealand from Scotland as a young man and set up in Wellington as a merchant, then as a sharebroker.
• At age 36 (but looking ten years or so older) he abandoned respectable career, wife and child for a life of adventure in the Australian colonies.
• It took his lawfully married first wife seventeen years to finally pin him down and serve the divorce papers. The case was heard in absentia by the court in New Zealand, so by the time the divorce was finalised in 1902, his second wife Hannah had already been dead two months.
• The story of his 14 year old daughter has a surprisingly optimistic ending…

Henry Seafield Grant

One more drunken wastrel.

What we knew before:

• Only that Mrs Mary Jane Robinson, nee Dyson, also went by the name Mrs Grant, and went to her grave as Mary Jane Grant-Robinson

What we have now:

• Henry Seafield Grant was a young and up-and-coming theatrical impresario who threw off his showgirl wife in Victoria for a life of thespianism and heavy drinking in the boom-time gold-rush colony of Western Australia.
• Several years later in Perth (1903), his luck ran out after he got blind drunk one evening. He went indoors and searched for something in the wardrobe. Instead he found the barrel of a revolver pointed at his nose. He had wandered into the wrong house. Not only was the residence not his own, he had managed to be caught red-handed burglarising the family residence of a serving police constable.
• He never crawled out of the bottle again.
• He rented a house in East Perth where Mrs Jacky Robinson nee Dyson lived as his “housekeeper”. She always denied she was married to Harry Grant, who is described as the “Manager of a Club”.
• Jacky’s family detested her housing arrangements. A nephew by her younger sister Mabel, trashed his auntie’s house and wanted to beat the crap out of Grant at 1 a.m. in the morning.
• But for the prurient press coverage of this family dispute after it ended up in court (1921), we might never have learned of the existence of Harry Grant, or that Mary Jane was fostering a seven year old child in his house.
• Robert Jordan was the son of a soldier who was killed in France in 1916. The boy’s mother had recently (1920) married another man. What happened to this child in the aftermath of Mary Jane’s own death two years later in 1923 is not immediately obvious.
• A year after Jacky died, Grant remarried. He died in 1939.

Mary Thivelin

Might be the mother of Mrs Jane Dyson: neé Edwards, Devling, Develing, Devlin, Develin, &c., &c.

What we knew before:

Bugger all.

What we (might) know now:

The future second Mrs Dyson was committed to the St Pancras poorhouse near King’s Cross in London around about the year 1840 or 1841 when she was about six or seven years old. This year range comes from the testimony she gave at an inquest into the death of a former inmate of the workhouse held during 1846. Her name is recorded as “Jane Develing” in contemporary newspaper and poorhouse records.

While Jane has long been described as an orphan, that does not necessarily discount one or both parents still being alive when she was admitted to the poorhouse. However, there is no trace of any convincing matches in the 1841 census for those who possibly could have been her parents, either in the poorhouse with her, or outside it in the immediate vicinity.

Jane herself, is listed in the England census of June 1841. Her name is recorded as “Jane Devlin.” Her age is given to be 7 years old. She is within St Pancras Poorhouse.

This poorhouse had some very specific conditions of entry compared to elsewhere in the country. Because it was not part of a Poor Law Union, those eligible to be admitted were restricted solely to residents of the parish district. In the case of a child, that would include her parents, either the living or suddenly deceased.

Therefore, the parish burial ground for St Pancras should retain the records of someone who died in the age range to be one of Janes’s parents, and expired sometime between the years 1839-1841 (just to be on the safe side).

The burial record of Mary Thivelin, aged 35. Address: Undecipherable Squiggle St in the Parish of St Pancras is the nearest credible match. She was interred in the ground on 8 February 1841, four months before her possible child is recorded as being in the poorhouse located immediately next door to where she was buried. Her marital state is not recorded.

To muddy the waters still further, the official register of deaths transcribes her name as “Mary Shovelin” What it actually says on paper is anyone’s guess.

There is far too much research required before this identity can be fully confirmed or ruled out as Jane’s mother, or her actual family name. It raises some interesting lines of inquiry, including origins in Ireland, or Huguenot ancestors from northern France or Belgium known to have settled in the south of England.

What we still don’t know:

Indeed.