Tag: restoration

  • 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.

  • How 2020 ended…

    How 2020 ended…

    This has not been a good year.

    But think of how it will be remembered two hundred years from now. How much remains within the collective imagination of the events of the year 1820 CE? How many people are now thinking about what happened only one hundred years ago, if we had not just lived through this particular year?

    The book on the Dyson family progresses — but slowly. Sections on the early years in Lancashire, their life in Western Australia up till the time of the coming of convicts is done. The slow boat to Van Diemen’s Land has started. Bits and pieces of the rest exist as copious notes in various states of legibility, but there is still a long way to go.

    However

    There is a social media meme going around where two images are posted.. “How [Individual] started the year… How, [Individual] going now”. In deference to the sociologists of future eras, I’m not going to explain what the significance of this is.

    However, I also find myself in the possibly unique position of being able to subvert this meme and at the same time totally kill the black humour that is the sole point of it…

    This is what James Dyson’s gravestone looked like at the beginning of 2020…

    Photograph by a disgruntled family relative…

    This is what (part of it) it looks like now…

    Image courtesy of Colgan Industries, supplied by the National Trust of Western Australia.
    Image courtesy of Colgan Industries, supplied by the National Trust of Western Australia.

    This happened only through the support of numerous family members and friends, and an incredibly generous individual who got us over the fund raising line at the beginning of the year.

    Restoration of the Dyson Grave in East Perth Cemetery has begun.

    […] The builder was able to collect the headstone from East Perth Cemeteries earlier in the year and has taken it to their workshop where it has undergone a full JOS clean (hot gentle pressure wash). […] The lead lettering has been replaced by an experienced specialist tradesperson who used this as an opportunity to teach an apprentice in this traditional heritage skill. We are also still working on the repining and repair works required, […] It is a slow but steady process.

    National Trust of WA

    Supervised by the National Trust of WA, the pieces of the headstone were raised at some time during the middle of the year by the sub-contractors performing the restoration work. To be honest, I was very disappointed I could not be present on site when the broken slabs were lifted. Knowing what I now know about our lot, I was fully prepared to see something like this when the stones were removed:—

    Larrikin trapped under fallen headstone (simulation only).

    Restoration work is being done by Colgan Industries, and it is nice for a change to be able to say completely unironically:

    Great work everyone, and thank you!

    Postscript

    Everyone involved in this project and all the future generations to come owe Kerri Rose a profound debt of gratitude for her generous financial support without which this project could ever 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