Tag: Benjamin Mason

  • The Smoking Gun

    The Smoking Gun

    Today is a red-letter day.

    Today I found the smoking gun.

    Then they shot him.

    My pet peeve is the way certain of my ancestors have been air-brushed out of history just as blatantly as a Soviet apparatchik on one of Stalin’s bad days…

    Dyson, the Perth marine-store dealer of Falstaffian brawn, is connected with the Groperopolis Wesleyan Church. Leastways his father built it. Old man Dyson, the yarn rues, had to wait a deuce of a time for his money.

    Sunday Times (Perth, WA : 1902 – 1954) Sunday 13 December 1903 p8

    This Dyson, is of course, Drewy, and the church his father James was supposed to have built is the Wesleyan Church on the corner of Hay and William Street. Completed in 1870, it is one of the earliest surviving buildings in Perth.

    Wesley Church this very day, Perth, Western Australia

    Aged nine in 1867, Drewy claimed to have worked on the build himself:—

    “Drewey Dyson’s dad built the present Wesleyan Church.
    […]
    Anno Domini 1867, when Dyson, sen, was building the present Wesleyan Church, at the corner of Hay and William-street, the present Drewey Dyson, of West Perth, was billy-boy on the job, and used to make the tea at midday, run messages, and generally make himself useful in a small-boy way.”

    Sunday Times (Perth, WA : 1902 – 1954) Sunday 18 May 1919 p17
    Sunday Times (Perth, WA : 1902 – 1954) Sunday 2 July 1922 p7

    Then there was the famous article and photograph of Drewy and “Lemonade Joe” Moor from 1922 which mentioned how the two assisted a Mr Carson to build the weather-cock on the Church steeple.

    That seemed to be enough evidence:— James Dyson had built the Wesley Church, where his son Joseph would later be a Sunday School teacher and another son would be convicted of throwing eggs at the parishioners…

    … Then I read all the official Wesley Church histories I could find… There have been quite a few over the years, mostly by pastors past and present, and the tale they tell is of progress ever upwards (but never quite explaining the utter irrelevance of their movement by the later half of the twentieth century and beyond).  The most recent of these, however, was not written by a cleric, so was refreshingly open about some of the less than saintly shenanigans  surrounding the institution. In Thea Shipley’s Full Circle: A History of Wesley Church Perth, published in 2003, there was a whole chapter devoted to the construction of the church building. Because I felt I could trust this author not to sugar-coat the history, and because there was absolutely no mention of any of the Dysons in any of the earlier histories either, I was forced to the conclusion that James Dyson’s role in the construction of the church was yet another Drewy Dyson fantasy. Benjamin Mason, Dyson’s rival in the timber trade was definitely recorded as having provided timber, and William Buggins, a well known builder of the time (and also connected to Joseph Dyson’s in-laws’ family) was mentioned to have overseen construction, that clinched it for me.

    The front of the original St George’s Cathedral in the late 1860’s

    It was not impossible that Drewy had miss-remembered which church his old dad had worked on. Construction on the first St George’s Church commenced a few years before James Dyson arrived in the colony. By March 1842, progress was still crawling as the iron roof ordered from England failed to arrive. As was noted in a later history:—

    “It was then decided to make a wooden roof locally and the sawyers in the Colony combined to raise the price of timber for the purpose.”

    [T. G. Heydon, “The Early Church in Western Australia”, The Western Australian Historical Society (Inc) Journal and proceedings Vol II. Part XI p1]

    James Dyson was on the ground by now, and this sounds exactly what I would have expected him to do…

    Even if he did not contribute to this initial phase, he was certainly involved in a later extension to the church in 1862.  (It is important to note that this is not the same Cathedral building that stands today, which dates to the last years of the nineteenth century)

    The Inquirer & Commercial News (Perth, WA : 1855 – 1901) Wednesday 2 July 1862 p2

    Also involved in this extension is the same Mr Buggins previously referred to. Given that both he and Dyson are mentioned together for this project and Buggins alone is mentioned in the Wesleyan histories, it begins to look like Drewy’s memories might have been at fault.

    Stereographic view of the back of St George’s Cathedral, for which James Dyson provided timber flooring.

    The work on the original St George’s Church was famously slow and ill-funded and the story that Dyson did not get paid for a very long time rang true for his involvement with that project. On the other hand, the Wesley Church of 1870 (the second of its name), was begun in 1867 and was largely funded by the Shenton family, in particular, their patriarch, George Shenton (senior). When Shenton died suddenly and unexpectedly at sea in 1870, shortly before the building was opened, the outstanding sums were allegedly paid out by his family as a tribute his memory. This was the same Shenton Dyson bought his swamp from, and whose son, who would have paid the final bills for the church, would buy it back from Dyson some years later. Shenton senior had gifted to Dyson a family bible on the occasion of his (eventual) marriage to Mrs Jane Edwards. Given this history, it  did not sound right to me that the Shentons would not pay their bills on time.

    Here my investigations might have ended with the the conclusion that:—No, James Dyson didn’t build the Wesleyan Church, but his kids might have watched with interest, given that the family only lived a few houses down on Murray Street…

    Then the trail led me to William Traylen, Methodist Pastor in Western Australia. He arrived in the colony only days after the death of Shenton, and was one of the first speakers from the pulpit of the newly consecrated church. He was involved in the temperance movement, and his name had arisen in conjunction with Joseph Dyson’s  activities in the same sphere as was mentioned in the article concerning the mystery of Dyson’s Hotel. While researching further, I learned he kept a diary, some of which survived and has been published.

    I tracked down this book (compiled by one of his ancestors), and found something that none of the official histories of the Wesley Church, Perth, had deigned to share with us*— It was a reproduction of an 1867 ledger during the construction phase of the church, and it revealed what the public record had tried so hard to obscure—

    *(I do not include Thea Shipley in this complaint. Her manuscript was published posthumously and who knows what was cut out, or never written.)

    Buggins, Mason, and James Dyson — all together on the ledger — all paid by the building committee of the Wesleyan Church. Dyson supplied both Bricks AND Timber and was paid £672, 7s and 10d. Yes, he built the Wesley Church; No, Drewy was not lying… for a change.

    Today was a good day….

    …So here are some more of my great-great-great-great grandfather’s bricks:

  • Steam Powered Luddites

    Steam Powered Luddites

    James Dyson had built something of an empire in Western Australia on the back of supplying timber sourced the old fashioned way—by hand. Pity the other pit-sawyer though, who had to stand in that pit when the logs were being sliced into planks, and pity also the poor sap (pun intended) whose on-the-job-training did not include lessons where not to stand when the tree fell.

    Dyson’s business portfolio included more than just being a timber merchant, so his decline from being one of the largest employers in the colony to near penury cannot be attributed solely to competition in the timber trade, but one of his sons shooting a business rival’s son in the head would not have been conducive to any sort of cooperation when Benjamin Mason (father of the wounded party) together with his partner Francis Bird took the next logical step and introduced steam-powered machinery into the timber cutting process.

    The “convict fence” in the Canning River off Riverton in 2012.
    The Inquirer and Commercial News, 2 September 1868, p. 2

    Bird & Mason’s business was conducted on a scale that Dyson’s business model might have been unable to complete with. They also employed  many convicts. In 1864, they built a new mill at a place called Bickley Brook in the Darling Scarp east of Perth. Steam power was used to run a circular saw. On horse-drawn railway tracks, cut timber was carted to a landing site on the Canning River and sent down in barges to Perth and Fremantle. The traces of the posts that made up the path for the horses that dragged the barges across the shallow waters can still be seen today.

    Although Mason and Bird’s enterprise was not to survive the test of time, even better resourced companies would arise to carry on what they had started. But Dyson while was unwilling or unable to make the transition to the mechanised future of timber processing, other members of his family might not have been not so reticent.

    Back in the “Old” Country…

    A Lancashire Hand Loom Weaver.
    The Morning Post (Lancashire), 21 November 1870 p7

    Dyson’s father, Joseph, had been a cotton-spinning machine seller. That put him on the cutting edge of technology for the late eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. His other sons who were not juvenile delinquents: Andrew, William and Joseph, all were involved in the spinning and weaving processes for cotton that was increasingly being centralised in powered mills, rather than in private homes and tenements such as their father had serviced. Bower Mill in Hollinwood, near Oldham, was initially an unpowered factory; it had been built for rope making, and that process was by hand. But during the same period of the 1860’s when James Dyson’s hand timber sawing business was at its peak, his brothers converted the ancient building to process cotton using coal fired steam engines.  Across the road from the mill was a Colliery, a seam of coal even ran underneath the mill itself. It should have been a match made in heaven, but instead subsidence in the mining tunnels caused severe damage to the floor of the factory. Not to worry though. After the inevitable protracted legal tussle, the two surviving brothers Andrew and Joseph won a frankly gianormous sum of money in compensation.

    Back to us Luddites.

    The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal (WA : 1833 – 1847) Sat 29 Aug 1835 Page 555

    The Swan River Colony that James Dyson found himself in what was possibly the most isolated British settlement in the world at that time (prepares to be bombarded with other examples). News from home was six months away at best (Home being defined as the British Isles in this case). The nearest neighbouring colonies were weeks away by sail, or more. Technological progress took some time to filter through to what was essentially an agrarian economy, but you’d be daft to think they weren’t aware of progress happening elsewhere. When steam ships eventually regularly paid visits to the western third of the Australian continent, they would bypass Perth entirely and call in at Albany on the far south coast for coaling. The coal they required in vast quantities had to be imported to the colony. King George’s Sound and Princess Royal Harbour were simply more sheltered locations to complete this laborious work then storm swept Gage Roads.

    The Perth Gazette and West Australian Times (WA : 1864 – 1874) Fri 25 Nov 1870 Page 2 (P.S. This is actually satire, y’know!)

    The Government imported a steam dredge at vast expense  in 1869 to reclaim land on the Perth foreshore and to deepen the river estuary. Like the other much derided plan of the time—The volunteers wanted a troop of mounted rifles, but their C.O. wanted them to be mounted artillery, the dredge was the subject of active derision.

    The Steam Dredge “Black Swan”

    Eventually the dredge did fulfil it’s promise, but the joke is still on us. After all the resources expended in reclaiming the foreshore for the public, a more recent government decided that this very same foreshore should have a large hole dug into it so rich people could pay a lot of money to stay in buildings around it. The pointless inlet that was created was about as popular as the dredging machine that had first filled it in, nearly 150 years ago.

    By 1871, even as his businesses were gradually running down, more and more of James Dyson’s attention may have been on his civic duties. He was on the council of the Perth City and the Perth Road Boards respectively. That year the members of the road board went to inspect a new timber cutting machine. I would be interesting to have heard Dyson’s reaction.

    The Perth Gazette and West Australian Times (WA : 1864 – 1874) Friday 10 November 1871 p3

    During his time on the City Council, both the electric telegraph and the first steam powered fire engine was delivered to the city.

    Dyson’s sons, you would imagine, would have been more in tune with new technology. You would mostly be wrong. Horse power was their limit. Their father had been born into the white heat of the cutting edge of the industrial revolution, which might have been why Thomas, Andrew, John and possibly Matthew were apprenticed as blacksmiths, but only Andrew and Thomas did any manufacturing. They had been born and grown up into a poor, rural and insular corner of the British Empire, where (essentially) a slave labour force rather than ingenuity was what got things done. Thomas had the most success mass producing furniture, but he went to Victoria. (Maybe shooting your father’s business rival’s son hadn’t turned out to be such a bad career move after all) Andrew built coaches (when he wasn’t on the bottle or behind bars) John ended up digging coal.

    Truth (Perth, WA : 1903 – 1931), Saturday 12 December 1914, page 7

    Andrew Drewy Dyson for all his many flaws, was no simpleton. He understood marketing. He was praised for his craftsmanship, (which was considerable when he stayed away from the bottle).  So when the first steam locomotive came to town in 1880, take this tale of the country yokel with a massive grain of salt, after all, Drewy probably wasn’t even there…

    THE RAILWAY.
    A week-end contemporary which specialises in reminiscences of Old Sydney should stick to yarns of Chowder, Clontarf, Surry Hills, the Argyle Cut, and other haunts of Noo South pushdom.

    Recently it printed, a picture of a railway locomotive in the Perth-yards, attached to some seated trucks, and labelled it “The First Railway Engine Used in WA” The letterpress goes on to say it ran on the Fremantle-Guildford line, and was the pioneer of all such traction.

    As a matter of fact, there was a well-equipped State-owned railway line between Geraldton and Northampton long before the Fremantle-Perth Guildford line was thought of, it being used for the cartage of passengers and base metals.

    When the Perth-to-Fremantle line was nearing completion a popular query amongst the younger of the local population was as to how the engine and carriages would dodge the trees en route.

    The elders explained, but the juvenile native-born, were a bit sceptical.

    The day arrived when the first Puffing Billy was to arrive in Perth from the Port, and the population of the capital gathered in expectant, half-doubtful multitudes where now is the Central Station.

    After a long wait some of the crowd voiced the opinion that the train wouldn’t be able to find its way up to Perth, and made bets of kangaroo skins, logs of sandalwood, etc., that black trackers would have to be sent out to bring it in.

    Finally, a loud, long-continued whistling was heard from the bush where now is Leederville. Later it sounded from about West Perth, and owing to a temporary break in the line the engine remained there some time, occasionally whistling to let the waiting crowd know it would be soon coming along.

    “There you are!” roared Drewy Dyson, who had been one of the most consistent pessimists; “it’s lost in the bush. Listen to it coo-ee-ing” ! ! !

    Sunday Times (Perth, WA : 1902 – 1954) Sunday 20 December 1914 page 8

    …continued.

  • Timber!

    Timber!

    Timber was the business of James Dyson from his earliest years in Western Australia. A year after his arrival in 1841 he was working as a labourer. Of the few people from this time we know for sure that he associated with, Stephen Hyde was a carpenter, and his next door neighbour in Perth for the next ten years.  By 1845 James was describing himself as a sawyer, and the earliest mention of him in the newspapers of the Swan River Colony was as the successful bidder for a government contract to supply timber boards for a building on Rottnest Island.

    The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal (WA : 1833 – 1847) Sat 15 Jul 1843 Page 4
    The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal (WA : 1833 – 1847) Sat 14 Nov 1840 Page 2

    Neither of these articles from the period mention Dyson but they do illustrate an important point. It was not possible to just wander out and collect timber, particularly not from unoccupied crown land. To be a sawyer, you needed either money, or a patron. (Apropos to nothing, Peter Brown (or Broun) and Robert McBride Brown were brothers.)

    If Dyson was working as a sawyer prior to 1843, he must have (in conjunction with someone else) been employed by or worked with, one or more of the following gentlemen:

    The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal (WA : 1833 – 1847) Saturday 26 November 1842 p3

    After this date, the regulations changed, and most frustratingly, names of licensees were no longer published in the papers. We can know, however, how the work was done by James, at least in the beginning:

    A generic illustration of pit sawyers at work. [http://www.nationaltrusttas.org.au]

    Shortly after his arrival he commenced business as a pitsawyer — a laborious occupation, but of a most lucrative nature in days previous to the application of steam machinery. After about nearly twenty years he established himself in town as timber merchant and general dealer, and in those days was amongst the largest employers of labor in the colony.

    The Daily News (Perth, WA : 1882 – 1950) Saturday 23 June 1888 p 3

    From 1850, two equally momentous events transformed the Western Australia; on the 25th October 1849, Dyson’s future second wife Jane Develing arrived in the Colony on the Mary. On 1 June 1850 the ship Scindian landed the first large scale cohort of convicts to Western Australia. These prisoners were initially occupied building their own gaol in Fremantle, but Dyson would eventually employ one of these men: Thomas Hart was a burglar, but his professed trade was as a mason. In what capacity Dyson employed him I have not yet uncovered.

    The Perth Gazette and Independent Journal of Politics and News (WA : 1848 – 1864) Friday 11 April 1851 p4s

    From later ships, a convict would usually be granted probation very soon after he arrived in the form of a ticket-of-leave. They were by no means free, but they were no more a slave labour force than any other employee in the colony at the time.

    The Perth Gazette and Independent Journal of Politics and News (WA : 1848 – 1864) Friday 18 July 1851 p2

    A convict depôt was established under the shadow of Mount Eliza near where the Swan Brewery buildings now stand. This place was also adjacent to a stone quarry that recalcitrant or unemployed convicts could be assigned to. (In later years after transportation had ceased, this depôt would become the old men’s home.) The men’s skills were advertised for prospective employers. From the attached list, Dyson would choose Henry Rugg, brickmaker and Thomas Molineux, Miner. Dyson was involved at various times with brick making in Perth, but once again it is by no means certain that this was what these men were employed for by him.

    Thomas Matthews was serving a ten years for theft and had arrived on the convict ship William Jardine on 4th August 1852. His trade was watchmaker, but he was employed by Dyson as a sawyer on 28th April 1855. It was not a great choice for either…

    The Inquirer and Commercial News (Perth, WA : 1855 – 1901) Wed 10 Oct 1855 Page 2

    Matthews was working near Lake Monger, north of town, which does give a clue about where Dyson was operating and what sort of timber he might have been collecting at the time. Tuart was a valued hardwood for general construction work and sheoak was used for roofing shingles.

    An example of a shingle roof.

    Convicts, as a rule, do not write testimonials to their masters’ treatment of them, so we only hear anything about them when something goes wrong. Richard Griffin was a housebreaker who arrived on the Lord Raglan, 1 June 1856.  Dyson most definitely did employ him as a sawyer from 14 May 1860. Under a month later he was returned to the depôt, and thence to the police court:

    The Perth Gazette and Independent Journal of Politics and News (WA : 1848 – 1864) Friday 8 June 1860 p3

    This is a rare example of a Dyson being complimented by a magistrate. William was James Dyson’s third son and was born free, but he was in turn complimented by father for his action? Remember, James Dyson had once been a convict himself, in Van Diemen’s Land. He had never been granted either ticket-of-leave or conditional-pardon status and had served out the full seven years of his sentence. If you look at his record, you could see it was far from spotless. This was a man that understood exactly what it entailed to be accused and convicted of “Idleness & neglect of duty”. His attitude seems to be, “I know what you are thinking, because I thought it myself, once. I didn’t get away with it then, and I’ll be d—ed if I let you get away with it now.” This impression is reinforced by a later recollection of Drewy Dyson, of his father.

    Drewy’s father was a man who held very strong opinions on the jury system of trying criminals and suspected criminals, and more than once in his time when in a panel has been the cause of pulling up a barrister and even a judge during the course of various cases. Old Man Dyson was exceedingly well-versed in law and not bush-law at that, and could quote off hand chapters from British authorities that would not be possible to any but those possessing a wonderfully retentive memory. As a boy Drewy received many strong lessons in common humanity and equity from his father, the latter taking him on more than one occasion to see condemned men being brought chained through the streets of Perth in an open cart, just as they were taken to Tyburn in London in days long gone by.

    Sunday Times (Perth, WA : 1902 – 1954), Sunday 24 April 1927, page 14

    So it was that Drewy Dyson’s older brother probably came to regret messing about with that gun in the wetlands north of town in the year 1867.

    The Inquirer & Commercial News (Perth, WA : 1855 – 1901) Wednesday 24 July 1867 p2

    Thomas might have preferred prison. He was exiled from Perth, not to return for nearly twenty years. He served an apprenticeship in Geelong, Victoria, but eventually, out of all Dyson’s many children, he would end up with the greatest success in business. Young Benjamin Mason was the son of Benjamin Mason, senior. The Mason family of Perth were another clan of storekeepers, publicans, carpenters and general entrepreneurs very similar to the Dysons in many respects. One can’t help but fear that having your son shoot your near neighbour’s son in the head must have put a crimp in the personal relations between the two families and may have thwarted any potential business cooperation. This is especially unfortunate as Ben Mason’s name, in conjunction with that of his parter Francis Bird, will be forever linked with the next stage of development of the timber industry in Western Australia. It was part of an evolution Dyson was not able to or was unwilling to adapt to.

    …continued.