The Ratbag Encyclopedia

Family history, Western Australian history, or just history

Tag: Fanny Hoffingham

This author’s great great great great grandmother.

  • Grave Matters

    Grave Matters

    Help save the grave of James Dyson and his two wives in East Perth Cemetery

    The bodies of James Dyson and his wives Fanny and Jane lie in the old East Perth Cemetery. The three were united only briefly together under the same roof in life, and when they died many years apart, they were not necessarily buried in the same plot. But eventually all three were reunited on (not under) a single headstone in a family grave, in the oldest burial ground for the pioneer residents of Perth in Western Australia.

    The stone in 2013
    The same stone in 2018

    James Dyson was buried in the Methodist Cemetery, as that portion of the East Perth site was then known, the day after he died on 19 June 1888. Fanny died in 1854 (not 1850 as the headstone suggests) but the error is understandable as this monument was commissioned after the death of Mrs Jane Dyson on 12 August 1899 by one of her many sons with James. Andrew “Drewey” Dyson was born in 1858 many years after the death of Fanny (she is referred to as “Frances” nowhere else but on this headstone) and he was famous for many things including being a funeral director.

    The Daily News, Friday 18 March 1892 p 2

    Drewey (or Drewy) was famous for mostly the wrong reasons. As a funeral director he pioneered the use of advertising for his trade but there was substance as well to his notoriety :—

    A Perth undertaker got it for the axe-ing last night — that is to say, somebody rapped him over the head with an axe. The undertaker was a Mr. Dyson ; but as no serious consequences are anticipated, he will not— ahem !— die soon.

    The Daily News, Tuesday 3 November 1896 p3
    The West Australian. Tuesday 11 December 1894 p6

    He won the government contract to bury the paupers. Business was good in 1896 when a smallpox epidemic hit the town. How good? Drewy and a friend drank the profits and its always possible to date exactly when he went on a bender from the records of the police courts in the days afterwards:—

    Andrew Dyson, the well-known coachbuilder and undertaker, of Murray-street, became involved in a very serious row yesterday. He had been drinking all day and was very violent and abusive. He caught one of his men smoking while at work, and he abused him soundly. Finally he made a rush at him to inflict summary punishment, but as he came on, the man struck him a heavy blow on the head with an axe, Medical assistance was at once summoned, and the wound was dressed. Dyson retained consciousness, though at times he become rambling and incoherent, No arrest has yet been made.

    The Daily News, Tuesday 3 November 1896 p3

    Drewy was a favourite of the press — he provided them with so many good stories — but the one told above had a sequel many years later when the Subiaco-Jolimont Cemetery was closed and the bodies transferred to the newer Karrakatta burial ground:—

    THE COFFIN ROMANCE
    The Way “Drewy” Dyson—Buries Old Bones
    Drewy Dyson seems to have had a good deal to do with the burying, digging up again, and replanting of small-pox and typhoid corpses. The 48 who were buried in unregistered ground at Subiaco were entrusted, to “Drewy” and a friend named Lee to inter. The specifications, set out that the bones should be encased in jarrah coffins, but Drewy, if all accounts be true, packed them with much Christian ceremony into kerosene cases painted to a suitable hue. Then during the burial, he splashed up some of the profits in two dozen of ale, which he satisfactorily consumed while the bones were consecrated. This is not Drewy’s first experience of the same bones. He was the original planter, and probably thinks that anything will do for a secondhand burial.
    It is not likely that the bones will object to the nature of the coffins, but the imposition is there all the same.

    Sunday Times, 14 October 1906 page 4S
    (It wouldn’t have been printable!)
    Sunday Times, 28 October 1906 p 1S

    Drewy Dyson’s notoriety overshadowed not only his own real accomplishments but those of his family. None of his parents were angels though. His father served his sentence in Van Diemen’s Land as a convict before starting afresh in Perth during the 1840s, rising up to be one of the largest employers of labour in the Colony (including ticket-of-leave Western Australian convicts). James Dyson built the town of Perth — It was his timber that paved the streets during the 1870’s, his bricks that made up so many buildings of the time (of which only the Wesley Church on William Street now remains) and his membership of the Perth City Council at a time when the Perth Town Hall was opened on his watch. He owned lake Julabup — known in his time as Dyson’s Swamp — an integral part of the network supporting the beef and dairy industry that kept Perth fed during the nineteenth century (pre-refrigeration) and the corner in Perth known as Dyson’s Corner where his butcher’s business and bakery operated out of.

    Yet there are few other memorials to James Dyson, his two wives and they twenty-one children they produced together. Many of their children buried in the Karrakatta Cemetery that ultimately succeeded East Perth as the community’s principal burial place at the beginning of the twentieth century. Few had headstones, and the policy of that institution after 120 years of operation is to recycle the ground for new burials. As the years pass it will become near impossible to locate the unmarked graves or even the location of headstones once they are built over.

    The destruction of monuments at Karrakatta is ongoing and deliberate. The damage to the monuments at East Perth Cemetery between the time of its closure to its protection as a heritage site was far worse, but in 2019 it is still possible to visit the family grave of Dysons with it’s fallen headstone and wrought iron railings around the plot. But for how much longer? The gravestone is snapped into multiple pieces and the lead-lettering is wearing away after 120 years exposed to the elements. The iron railings are rusting.

    A plan has been drawn up to preserve the historic grave of James, Fanny and Jane Dyson for future generations to come. A quote from the conservators to do the work has been prepared… The problem is that it is expensive… bloody expensive. The estimate is $5,000 (Australian) if all goes well, up to $6,000 if something unexpected is discovered like the stone is especially fragile now.

    None of us individually can afford anything like that amount — but collectively… how many children, grand-children, great-grand children and onwards did J,F&J produce? There were 21 in the first generation alone, of whom ten of these produced children too. For reasons of privacy it is difficult to accurately calculate how many living descendants there are today. A conservative guess is about four hundred people. If two-thirds that number contributed $20 each the amount would be raised, but every little bit would help.

    John and Julie Dyson are great-grandchildren of James and Jane. They have set up a go-fund-me campaign to raise the funds to complete this vital restoration work. If you are able to contribute anything at all that would be grand, but if you could pass on a link to this page or the go-fund-me page to anyone else who has a passion for history and preserving the past could you please do so: —

    https://www.gofundme.com/restoring-james-dyson039s-grave

  • Alias Hoffington

    Alias Hoffington

    Fanny Hoffingham or Hoffington. It might even have been Skeffington, but I’ve seen the original document from which that transcription arose and I now know that it was Hoffington too. She was the first wife of James Dyson, ex-Tasmanian convict and future West Australian property owner and entrepreneur. Mother to his first four children and cruelly discarded by him in favour of the nubile and teen-aged Mrs Richard Edwards (junior)… better known to history as Jane Devling, or Mrs Jane Dyson.

    We now know she is not buried in the same family plot as her husband and his second wife, and that she was alive for several years after the date inscribed on her headstone in that cemetery. She took her own life probably in state care, probably in the Perth lunatic asylum during the year 1854 — an institution so badly represented in the the archives that not only is there no death certificate for Mrs Fanny Dyson, its not even clear where the asylum was located in Perth at that date.

    That was the extent of what we knew about the first Mrs Dyson. Before her name appears on her marriage certificate dated 25 October 1842 the name Fanny Hoffington or any of its variants appears precisely nowhere.

    It’s a useful mantra to employ, I suppose: If someone tells me “I guess we’ll never know for sure”… That’s a green light for me to bloody mindedly be sure. Then… once I’m convinced that “Yes, we probably know all that can be known, and that all the avenues of research have been finally exhausted..” … that’s when a vital piece of new information that totally upsets what you thought you knew about a particular subject is revealed.

    Such was the case with Fanny — but it was instinct, not evidence, that made me suspect I had uncovered her secret, via a series of outrageous coincidences possibly even linking her to her future husband before either had left England’s shore. The trouble is that even outrageous coincidences may still be just that, merely coincidences. I was looking for hard evidence, but the documents from 190 years ago were not providing that. However, neither were they providing proof that my theory was false.

    “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” is quote I was certain came from Ambrose Bierce, but looking it up it appears to be from Samuel Johnston made at least a century earlier in 1775. Here is my own riff on the sentiment:

    “DNA is the last refuge of a family historian”

    Alan J. Thompson, 2019

    A certain commercial genealogy website to which I have linked my own DNA test also provides a long list of others who share segments of the same chromosomes that I possess. A subset of these distant biological cousins also have publicly searchable family trees back to the generation of Fanny’s possible parents or grand-parents. Two of these trees contain Fanny’s proposed true family name and a match with an individual that might be an uncle, grand-uncle, grandfather, or even father for her. This name does not appear in any other context on my current family tree, nor do any other matches with my known family names appear in these other trees.

    This would not be conclusive proof on its own, nor can it be said that further documentary evidence may not still be uncovered that will demolish the baroque, Byzantine story of the first Mrs Dyson that I believe I have successfully constructed. But I’m now prepared to state my theory and die on this hill if that be my fate.

    Fanny Hoffington was an alias for her real name which was Fanny Johnstone nee Dewhirst. A false name was necessary as her first husband Lorenzo Johnstone was very much alive and serving out the last days of his fourteen-year sentence as a convict in Van Diemen’s Land. The two had married in Launceston on 15 January 1840. At that time Fanny was also a convict — but despite that her conduct had been terrible to the extent that eighteen months had been added to her seven year sentence for theft, she was granted her absolute freedom on 3 July 1840. This was the same day that another convict felon received his freedom. His name was James Dyson.

    Both had much in common: Both were from the same part of the world — both were sentenced in the same court house in Yorkshire, for similar crimes committed in Halifax in the West Riding of that county. They could well have known each other back in that town. He was a Bad Boy, she was a Bad Girl. In all probability she fled Van Diemen’s Land with Dyson on the barque Napoleon when she (the boat) sailed from Launceston on 1 May 1841. They were both much closer in age than what either had stated on their marriage certificate. He was closer to thirty than twenty-three, and Fanny was probably a couple of years older than James rather than a year younger (as she claimed) at twenty-two.

    So James Dyson’s first wife was a one-eyed sex-worker from Halifax, Yorkshire, convicted of stealing from one of her clients, and would have been found guilty of bigamy if her track-covering had not been near-perfect.

    Let the roller-coaster ride begin!

  • Joseph Dyson the Elder: The Respectable one

    Joseph Dyson the Elder: The Respectable one

    Could the situation have got any more tragic for the Dyson family in the November of 1859? This is the family of James Dyson, the timber merchant of Perth, Western Australia we are talking about here, so yes it had been (and would be again).

    Since the death of Dyson’s first wife, the family had actually been doing fairly well. Convicts had arrived in the Colony during 1850 and cut labourer’s wages by 60%, It was hard at first, but Dyson was now an employer himself, and by utilising both free and ticket-of-leave workers, he was soon to be counted among the largest employers of labour in the colony.

    He was on the cusp of eligibility (through his growing real-estate holdings) to be selected as a juror, and hence, eligible to stand for public office. Having £150 in assets was the measure of tangible respectability for a man who was was yet to marry his future second wife, although they already had seven children together (including two from her previous marriage and three from his). They were counting down the days until her first husband could be declared legally dead. Dyson clashed in court with the Perth Town Trust over the right to collect timber on the Trust’s land, but soon he would be eligible not only to vote for councillors to that body, but be a councillor himself.

    Awards day: Inquirer (Perth, WA : 1840 – 1855) Wednesday 28 December 1853 page 3

    He had three sons on the cusp of manhood. William, the youngest surviving child by his first marriage was then twelve, and might have been a bit of a concern. He did not seem to have the academic nous of the next, Joseph, then fourteen, who was one of the first students to attend the state-run Perth Boy’s school in St George’s Terrace (when it was opened in 1854).

    Perth Boys School in 1861 photographed by Alfred Hawes Stone (SLWA) Joseph Dyson would have been among the first students to use this building. Other buildings including the courthouse were used before this.

    This is speculation based on the abject lack of any future positive mark William has left to posterity. There is a mention in 1887 that he may not have been able to hold his liquor (thus marking him out as a true Dyson), then there are a number of traffic offences (involving horses). One of these includes a fine for mistreating a horse, which leaves me unable to summon any affection for him whatsoever. William’s ending was sad. He did not seem able to function outside the family umbrella, so by the beginning of the 20th Century when the family of James Dyson had well and truly disintegrated, he was reduced to the situation of being a mad old bastard ranting about the extent of his family’s fortune back in the good old days.

    The Daily News (Perth, WA : 1882 – 1950) Saturday 19 March 1904 p8

    The “Fremantle” they threatened him with was, of course, the insane asylum. The Old Men’s Depôt had not long been moved from it’s uncomfortably public location at the foot of Mt Eliza to a less confronting locale conveniently situated in Claremont. William was only 54 years old at the time. He lived the rest of his life in the Claremont Retreat, later known as Sunset Hospital, where he died, totally forgotten, in June 1915. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the cemetery at Karrakatta. He had outlived all his immediate family.

    The Dysons had famously owned property in the Subiaco-Claremont area. In 1858 James purchased a wetland lake from George Shenton, senior. Apart from being one of the most influential merchants and financiers in the Colony, Shenton was also the chairman of the Perth Town Trust, yet despite that, seemed to hold Dyson in some high regard. Many years later, Dyson was compelled to sell the lake back to Shenton’s son, George, junior. The area around the lake was a significant camping ground for the Noongar inhabitants near Perth. Their name for the wetland area was Julabup, but from the time of Dyson’s possession of a British title deed, it became known as Dyson’s Swamp.

    There are no records of Dyson’s interactions with the aboriginal custodians of his property, so I remain cautiously hopeful relations were good. Julabup is now formally returned to its original label as Lake Julabup after a long stretch when it was known as Shenton Lake. But it will always be Dyson’s Swamp to me.

    Lake Julubup in 2016

    Dyson had been expanding from his original business as a timber cutter, to being a building contractor, market gardener, baker, butcher, brick-maker and general dealer. Not that he personally did any of these things—that was what convicts and family members were for. Dyson’s swamp was a key asset. The Perth city herd of cattle was marshalled just outside the north of the city. In theory the abbatoirs were supposed to be on the eastern edge of town, by the Claise Brook—In practice, butchers plied their trade wherever they had their premises. Dyson’s Perth city dwelling and butchery was on the corner of William and King Streets. This was the first Dyson’s Corner. Dyson’s swamp was a convenient watering area for the herd near the town, as such, it was quite a lucrative piece of real estate. No doubt it was also a useful source of timber that he could legally exploit. His eldest son might well have been carting timber on the bullock cart when James Dyson’s world fell apart.

    George Dyson might not have had the formal education of his younger brother, but he was described as sharp, active and industrious when aged nearly sixteen. It is not hard to imagine that he was his father’s pride and joy. Two months after his death, his desolate father was drinking himself into insensibility. It was a uniquely nineteenth century traffic accident. The bullocks pulling the cart had swerved suddenly and crushed the young lad between the wheels of the cart and a tree. He died a short time later. The accident certainly took place on the path to Dyson’s Swamp.

    An example of a bullock team from about three quarters of a century later in the south west of Western Australia. [SLWA]

    The grave site of George Dyson is lost. If George had lived, the fortunes of the Dyson clan might have been very different. But George was gone. His place as James’s heir was inherited, somewhat awkwardly, by James Dyson’s second son. This is where Joseph Dyson the Elder’s story really begins.

    …continued.

  • Too outrageous a coincidence?

    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
    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.