Tag: Jane Dyson

  • Shadowy Spouses

    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.

    ss Gulf of Martaban

    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

    Approximate location where the All Nations Hotel in Kalgoorlie stood. Photo May 2024.

    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.

    “A NEIGHBOURLY NOISE.” Truth (Perth, WA : 1903 – 1931) 8 January 1921: 7. Web. 10 Aug 2024 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article210047354.

    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.

    A name and an abode in the Parish of Saint Pancras burial records for February 1841.

    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.

  • Unreliable Witness

    Unreliable Witness

    The Dyson family grave site in East Perth Cemetery.

    This is a 2022 sequel (of sorts) to the article On Cemetery Hill posted June 2018

    Cemetery Hill in East Perth was the home of numerous discrete burial grounds for the occupants of the Perth settlement from the time it was set aside for that purpose in 1829 until its closure to fresh burials in 1916. Each of the grounds were — in theory — managed by various Christian religious sects or the representatives of certain ethnic minorities. In practice — who buried who/what/when was a free-for-all.

    By the last decade of the nineteenth century — when the population of the city was suddenly swollen by those arriving on the coat-tails of the gold seekers, the rules of supply and demand ensured the profession of funeral director suddenly became an attractive one. Those best in a position to provide this unavoidable service were coach makers, wheelwrights, and those in associated trades. Not only had they the ready-to-go transport up the sandy road to Cemetery Hill, they could knock up the the coffins as well.

    The Daily News, Friday 18 March 1892 p 2

    One such entrepreneur was Andrew “Drewy” Dyson, some time blacksmith, livery proprietor and coach builder. He would bury anyone, any denomination, any time,.. all for just £5. By the end of the boom he was broke…

    All joking aside, by 1900, after Mrs Jane Dyson — Drewy’s mother, and the last verified family member of the Dyson family buried in East Perth — died, Drewy was verifiably down on his luck. The debts were mounting. His mourning carriage and hearse were offered for sale early in 1899, so it is a fair assumption he was no longer in the funeral trade from that time.

    PERTH LOCAL COURT.
    THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 16.
    (Before Mr. J. Cowan, P.M.)
    […]
    APPLICATIONS, ETC.—W.A. Produce Co. v. A. Dyson, motion for committal for non-compliance of judgment order, £2 instalments due ; order to issue for seven days’ imprisonment, warrant to lie for a fortnight.”

    The West Australian, 17 November 1899 p6

    So how did he afford the headstone that commemorated the existence of his mother, father, and his father’s first wife? It was he who commissioned and paid for this monument, and we know this, because it says so on the inscription, and if he had not paid monumental masons Peters and Gillies for their work, the court action to recover the debt would have been in all the papers. Everything else Drewy Dyson ever said or did was reported in ridiculous detail at the time. E.g.:

    Drewey Dyson, of the peculiar physical proportions, caused a commotion in Mounts’ Bay-road the other afternoon. He was swimming his horse in the river beyond the brewery, both he and the prad being in the altogether.
    After the natatorial exercise; the horse was in better wind than the man, and when Drewey reached the bank he collapsed, all his efforts not availing him to assume the perpendicular. An alarm was given, and the brewery people, the old men from the depot, and the young people from Crawley quickly assembled to view what appeared in the dim religious light to be a stranded whale. When the case was accurately diagnosed, the blushes that illuminated the landscape of Crawley were such as have never previously been called up by the sight of any other kind of fish. Drewey gradually recovered.”

    Sunday Times (Perth, WA : 1902 – 1954) Sunday 26 March 1905 p4
    Mirror (Perth, WA : 1921 – 1956), 7 August 1926, p. 1

    Andrew “Drewy” Dyson died on 17 April 1927. He was buried in the City’s replacement burial ground of Karrakatta Cemetery. If he was broke in 1900, he was positively destitute in 1927 — so it is probable he never had a headstone for himself. Even if he did, it would not have survived. This new official cemetery was a place of memory with a policy of “renewal” whereby the plots are respectfully bulldozed and headstones dumped in a skip (or at the very least stripped of any context) a few short years after interment. Thus it is a historical irony that it it is still possible to visit Drewy’s exact resting place. The name on the current headstone is not of he, but of his son, and that is the sole reason it survives.

    Question: “Who do you have to try to kill to get your grave preserved in Karrakatta Cemetery?” Answer: “Yes”

    Some questions that could have been easily answered 100 years ago will, by the sheer entropy of time, be unanswerable today — Assuming that is, if there’s even enough information left to formulate a question. The quest to preserve one of the few tangible reminders of the Dyson family’s past in Western Australia would prove to be an opportunity not only to ask, but to answer some of these questions about the family grave site in East Perth. Not the the least of these questions has to be: How did it survive at all?

    In the intervening 100 years or so since the East Perth Cemeteries were closed for new burials, responsibility for the maintenance of the monuments in the old burial grounds was vested in no-one. Bulldozers flattened large chunks of the site and any headstones found damaged were wilfully torn down and ground into rubble during the course of the twentieth century.

    The degradation continued until the National Trust of Western Australia were finally permitted to assume control of what was left by the year 1994. Hundreds — if not thousands — of grave stones had by then been lost, and mediocre record keeping back when it was an active burial ground will ensure that many who lie in the entities of what is now collectively known as the East Perth Cemeteries will lie in anonymity for ever more.

    Nevertheless, the Dyson family plot is one of the rare survivors. Maybe it is mostly intact because there was no one in authority to order its destruction.

    Plot 75

    East Perth Cemeteries Plot 75 (in 2018)

    During the second decade of the twenty-first century, a number of descendents of those who lay in what had once been the Wesleyan Cemetery in East Perth — independently came to the realisation that one of the few physical reminders that their ancestors walked the earth was dissolving back into the earth at an accelerating pace. Photographs of the headstone taken over the past forty years illustrated a worrying trend.

    1982
    2013
    2018

    The National Trust WA’s website tells the story of what happened next:

    Dyson grave restoration at East Perth Cemeteries

    Progress in 2020

    This photo courtesy of the National Trust WA 2021.

    Postscript

    A profound thanks to Kerri Rose for her generous financial support without which this project could never have been completed.

  • 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

  • Literally —ing the Patriarchy: Introducing Jane.

    Literally —ing the Patriarchy: Introducing Jane.

    It should be clear by now that I have no problem mocking my ancestors— when they are bullies, pompous, arrogant, do monumentally stupid things, or are just so completely and utterly full of themselves it is all too easy. Of course, most of whom I have written about so far have been blokes. That’s because the blokes loved talking about themselves (and other blokes) to the exclusion of all else. Their life’s details were recounted by yet more blokes with very fixed ideas about what was worth recording and what was not. Now every single one of these blokes had a mother. A goodly proportion of them also had wives and daughters. You might not realise that from the surviving records.

    I’m afraid to say I haven’t read this book, but the title alone pretty much sums up how my female ancestors are presented in the historiography.

    And here’s something even more shocking for you to process;  ALL of your ancestors both male AND female engaged in the act of sexual intercourse, and what’s even more horrifying, some of them actually enjoyed the experience and voluntarily repeated the process more than once.  You can go take a cold shower now.

    Mary Chapman, Margaret Gunn, Sarah Coe, Sophia Borghart, Frances Hoffingham, Mary Ann Spencer. These are all women in my direct ancestry going back eight generations and are part of an even longer list for which there appears to be no information on at all apart from their names. In the surviving records they they have no friends, back story, loves and losses other than as appendages to their respective spouses.

    The name of James Dyson’s own biological mother in Lancashire is not known, but she did indubitably give birth to him at some time around 1810, presumably she knew his father. Even the actual spouse of his reputed father, Hannah (nee Binns) is only a name, existing in the records solely as the the daughter of a father, wife of a (philandering) husband, and mother to (most) of his children.

    Of James Dyson’s first wife Frances (or Fanny), no two documents can even agree on the same family name.  What is confirmed is that he exchanged her in for a newer, younger model, the still married Mrs Richard Edwards (junior). Her maiden name was Jane Develing.

    Now I am in a slightly tricky position when writing about Jane. I am a descendent of Frances, Dyson’s first wife. I also happen to be male. If I adopt my usual snarky tone with Jane’s story, am I opening myself up to accusations that I denying my family connection with her out of some (utterly-unearned) sense of genetic moral superiority? I might even be accused of blaming Jane for the ultimate fall from social grace of her husband and by extension the rest of his family. I could be blaming Jane for the crime of being a woman, and that would be bullshit. I could go in the other direction and say that Jane was a victim for being a woman in a man’s world, but while that argument might be made, but it also denigrates Jane’s character as someone who most definitely made her own choices in life.

    Jane Develing is mentioned in two major works of Western Australian history, and in this regard she is well up on both her husband James and her most famous son Drewy. These two examples bookend her life with her second husband so they are well worth surveying:

    The Bride Ships” by Rica Erickson (1992, Hesperian Press) starts with the arrival of Jane’s ship, the Mary in Fremantle on 25 October 1849.  Jane is described as “The most notorious of the servant girls […] evidently a person of some spirit…” (p11). The book explains the circumstances whereby young women were sent to the Western Australian colony for use as servants, or wives. Jane’s own origins are not explored, but it does describe her successful prosecution of a fellow shipmate on the voyage for assault after they had arrived in Western Australia. He was one of the “Parkhurst Boys”, juvenile delinquents assembled from Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight. Unmarried Jane was heavily pregnant at the time of the assault.  The book then baldly records that she married a widower named Richard Edwards, then another widower called James Dyson, who later became a Perth City Councillor. The bit where the former and future husbands brawled in the street wasn’t mentioned.

    The late Dr Rica Erickson was a wonderful historian. I wish Jane had been the subject of a whole chapter rather than a paragraph as I’m sure then we would all know a great deal more about Jane Develing and the Dysons than we do at present.

    Divorce 1880’s style.
    The Inquirer & Commercial News (Perth, WA : 1855 – 1901) Wednesday 18 April 1883 p5

    “The People of Perth” by C.T. Stannage (1979, Perth City Council) is an official history of the city commissioned by the council itself. Despite this, Stannage pulls no punches and the starchier councillors must have wondered what the hell they had just paid for. He does not not shy away from the seamier side of life that I am sure his sponsors would have preferred he had just glossed over. He takes up Jane’s story a little time after she had separated from her second husband. He uses Jane as a case study for women deserted by their spouses.

    “… One such was Jane Dyson who, with her young daughter Anna, found employment with the wealthy butcher John Liddelow at his establishment on the corner of Barrack and Murray Streets […] Over a four month period Jane stole from Liddelow goods and cash to the value of £58. […] Jane was sentenced to imprisonment for five years. On her release she became one of Perth’s best known madams with a popular establishment in Stirling Street. The fate of her daughter Anna is only to be guessed at.”

    (Stannage p118-119)

    The late Tom Stannage is pushing an agenda of social inequality with this story, but Mrs Jane Dyson is no Fantine from Les Misérables and Anna (actually Hannah) was no Cosette. In 1884 Hannah was twenty-eight, with a nine year old daughter also named Hannah. She had been divorced from her husband since 1877. In the appeal for clemency that Jane sent to the governor in 1885, Detective Police Inspector Lawrence raised a couple of salient points —

    This petitioner previous to her conviction had been living apart from her husband for some considerable time— Cohabiting with an ex-convict named John Smith — and has done absolutely nothing, since leaving her husband and towards providing for the young children she mentions. — […]

    The sum of £32. 10 — (part of the money stolen) was found in her box, when arrested, which she was Keeping for the purpose of paying her daughters passage from the neighbouring Colonies, in Conjunction with whom She intended opening a brothel in this City.

    SRO; Consignment No. 527 ; Item No. 1885/1505 ; Item Title : “Prisoner Jane Dyson – Petition to His Excellency The Administrator”

    Mrs Jane Dyson was first and foremost, a survivor. She paid the males in her life— indeed the entire system she was forced to exist within— exactly same respect it, and they, afforded her: precisely none. I admire her for that. I also believe my admiration would have been absolutely irrelevant to her. When she died in 1901 her son Drewy gave her a fine headstone in the same plot with her late husband James and his first wife Fanny. But in her will, she left all her possessions to her surviving daughters. Jane had the last word.

    The actress Louise Brooks in the 1929 German film “Pandora’s Box”. A particular gentleman has ruined himself in pursuit of this young lady. In response he suggests that she might like to shoot herself for his lack of judgement.