Afterwords by Steve Errington | Friends Of Battye Library

Afterwords - Steve Errington

What’s in a name? Part 1 Tranby House

The National Trust of Western Australia has been busy changing the names of some of its prime properties. ‘Old Farm, Strawberry Hill’ in Albany is being re-signposted ‘Strawberry Hill’ with ‘The Old Farm’ as a subsidiary name. And ‘Tranby House’ in Maylands has slowly become ‘Peninsula Farm (Tranby)’. When I first visited the old house in Maylands in about 1980, it was called Tranby House. Not totally surprising because it was built in 1839 by Joseph Hardey who had arrived in 1830 on the brig Tranby. A 1929 plaque on the wall identifies it as Tranby House. A 1940 Western Mail series on Historic Homesteads called it Tranby House. My 1980 copy of the National Trust brochure called it Tranby House (see photo opposite). The problem is that Joseph Hardey, a Wesleyan lay preacher, a founder of Methodism in WA, and a successful farmer, had never called it Tranby House. He always gave his address as Peninsula Farm, the name also used in advertisements and news stories. Not that all of Peninsula Farm was his – it was a group settlement of Tranby families. But back in 1830 there had been a Tranby House. This was a three - room prefabricated wooden house brought out on the Tranby and erected in Fremantle soon afterwards. Joseph and his expectant wife Ann lived in it and it was also used for religious services, both Wesleyan and Church of England. After Joseph and Ann moved to Maylands it was rented out for £78 per year for use as a coffee shop. In October 1831 it was sold to young businessman Phillip Dod. One hundred years later another Tranby House appeared. In 1906 WJ Cotton had built a warehouse and coffee palace at the corner of King and Wellington Streets, Perth. In 1938 it emerged as Tranby House, the scene of regular euchre contests with cash prizes, admission 1s 2d including supper. During World War Two the building was a recruiting centre for the Women’s Land Army and the WRANS. In 1948 it was resumed by the Commonwealth government and the name disappeared. In the 1950s it was the place where males turning eighteen went for their National Service (Nashos) medical exam. By 1957 the need for Army recruits was falling, a ‘birthday ballot’ was introduced and in 1959 my birthdate was pulled out of the barrel. Passing the medical would have brought me 140 days of army training. It was not to be - a childhood eye injury and asking “what chart?” when doing an eye test without my spectacles settled the matter. I was told that in an emergency I would be asked to fill sandbags. The building still stands. It has always had two addresses - 90 King Street and 575 Wellington Street. And it has a coffee shop right on the corner. My connection with the old house on Peninsula Farm is of much longer duration: I’m now a voluntary guide there with the National Trust. We are open Fridays to Sundays 12.30 – 4.00 pm (but closed during July). It is well worth a visit and you must pop over to the adjacent Peninsula Tea Gardens – they also do coffee.

First published in the July 2018 Newsletter

What’s in a name Part two: Strawberry Hill and Gooseberry Hill

Western Australia’s first farm was the government farm established in 1827 at King George’s Sound in what became Albany. Now in the hands of the National Trust, the property has recently been re-badged as ‘Strawberry Hill’ with ‘The Old Farm’ as a subsidiary name. Why ‘strawberry’ hill? Were strawberries involved at all in its naming? In a metropolitan parallel, were gooseberries key to naming the hills suburb? What we do know is that strawberries were being grown in Albany as early as 1831. When control of the settlement at the Sound was transferred from Sydney to Perth in March 1831 Dr Alexander Collie was made Government Resident. Writing to his brother George in a letter started on 20 October 1831, Collie reported: Our strawberries are ripe since the last week of October. They are of a large size and well flavoured.1 According to Collie’s biographer Gwen Chessell, Collie was then living in a hut at the government farm and supervising its development. Collie had a four-room cottage built at the farm for Governor Stirling’s extended visit starting November 1831. In March 1833 Collie was recalled to Perth to be Colonial Surgeon. His successor, Sir Richard Spencer, arrived in September that year. Governor Stirling had told Spencer that he could buy the government farm and its four-roomed cottage. By then the site of the farm was clearly known as Strawberry Hill as the name was used in correspondence about the purchase. As acting Resident Lt Donald McLeod and Assistant Surveyor Alfred Hillman wrote to Spencer in November 1833: In reply to your letter dated 1st October last requesting us to value the Government Cottage & Garden on Strawberry Hill … .2 Were strawberries then spreading on the hill? Probably. But was there already a precedent in England where strawberries grew wild? Strawberry Hill is an affluent locality in Twickenham with a famous house (since 1776) and a railway station (since 1873). Strawberry Hill House or just Strawberry Hill was built by Horace Walpole, man of letters, gothic revivalist, author of The Count of Otranto, and son of former Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole. In May this year I made a quick visit to Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, just long enough to buy the guide book and fridge magnet and take a photo. Walpole built it around a much older building called ‘Chopped Straw Hall’ but found the name Strawberry Hill in some lease documents in 1749. Until 1970 Perth had its own Strawberry Hill, in Adelaide Terrace, a house once the home of the Burt family. Walpole’s famous house could well have suggested the name though Ruth Marchant James has recorded how young Alice Stone (1848-1929) picked strawberries on its hillside terraces as a child. What of Gooseberry Hill? According to ‘An early Settler’ writing in 1833, both strawberry plants and Cape gooseberry bushes were then ‘very abundant’ at Swan River.3 It is hard to imagine that gooseberries weren’t responsible for the name. Gooseberry Hill ‘near Guildford’ was an established geographical feature by 1876 and rapidly became an area noted for its fruit production, including gooseberries. The pioneer of the area was William Henry Mead who took up 40 acres in 1873. In their history of Kalamunda, John Slee and Bill Shaw offer an explanation of how the name came into being: they report a story that Mead’s wife Eleanor named the hill after some Cape gooseberry bushes growing wild on the side of the hill.

First published in the November 2018 Newsletter

Convict 4027 writes a letter home

Not many letters written home by our 9600 convicts have survived. But in 1967 a Xerox copy of one written in Fremantle Prison in 1856 found its
way into the safe hands of the Mitchell Library in Sydney. It was written by Griffith Boyer, a 20 year-old who had arrived in Fremantle on the
convict ship Runnymede in September.
Under the rules convicts could write home every two months. On 21 November, he wrote his second letter, opening in the formal way he had been taught:

I once again embrace the opportunity of addressing these few lines to you hoping they will find you all at home in good health as they leave me
here … .
The letter was sent to John and Elizabeth Boyer in Church Street, Barnsley, Yorkshire enclosing a lock of his hair plaited on a card.

Griffith was born in his ancestral village of Barnton, Cheshire and was baptised in nearby Little Leigh on 7 August 1836. After schooling he had taken up his father’s trade of platelaying. Platelayers were employed by railway companies to lay and repair the rails on which their trains ran (the early version of rails were called ‘plates’). Remarkably, in Fremantle Prison Griffith was able to practise his trade:

Dear parents I am working at my own trade platelaying in and about the prison yard with wooden rails.

Before the convicts built the prison they built a wooden tramway down what became Fairbairn Street to deliver the excavated soil and stone into the town. In his letter Griffith wrote ‘I like this colony very well’ but he also proclaimed his innocence:

I am sure you too often trouble yourself about me knowing that I have been transported away from you innocent.

Griffith was sentenced to transportation for fifteen years for manslaughter. His father John would have had better knowledge than most parents about whether their son was innocent or not – he and Griffith’s brother William were at the crime scene.

It was nearly midnight outside the ‘Bunch of Grapes’ pub at Silkstone, near Barnsley on 14 August 1854. William and a miner named George Turton had a fight in which Turton was stabbed. Turton walked away but John and Griffith made a life-changing decision: they followed him. Giffith had a knife and in the fight that followed he stabbed Turton three times. The injuries proved fatal but Turton survived long enough to make a deposition before a magistrate, naming Griffith as the one who stabbed him.

Griffith received his ticket-of-leave in July 1858, his Conditional Pardon in August 1861 and settled in the Toodyay area. In 1861, at Dumbarton near Toodyay, he married Isabella Lucas. Together they had four daughters and raised two, Elizabeth and Louisa, to adulthood.

Griffith never went home and it is not known if he remained in touch but, in September 1867, the Fremantle Herald published a query from England requesting his address, should he still be in the Colony.

In August 1872 his name re-appeared in the same newspaper when he helped save another Toodyay resident from drowning in that winter’s disastrous floods. Mrs Shea was taking two pigs to Newcastle in her one-horse trap. Water had covered the road to a great depth and her young horse had panicked and broken free. Mrs Shea spent several hours standing on the side of the trap in water above her waist until Griffith and another man swam to her rescue.

On 8 June 1880 Louisa Boyer married Charles Ellery in Toodyay and on 17 December that year Elizabeth married Edward Stone in Wesley Church, Perth. Sadly, neither Griffith nor Isabella lived to see their daughters married.

Isabella had died in 1875 and early in 1880 Griffith was at Williams River, probably looking for sandalwood, when he was taken ill. A visiting doctor recommended that he be transferred to Perth Public Hospital (now RPH) and it was there that he died on 15 January. He is buried in an unmarked grave at the East Perth Cemeteries.

First published in the March 2019 Newsletter

Who was the 1830 forger?

Increasing numbers of people carry no cash with them, relying instead on a plastic card to make even tiny purchases. In 1829-30 citizens of the Swan River Settlement also carried no cash in their pockets or purses. They had no choice – sea captains took all the gold, silver and copper coins away as payment for their cargoes, and there was no bank to issue banknotes.

In January 1830 Lt Governor James Stirling wrote to London asking for more hard cash as well as appointment of a Colonial Treasurer. But what was to be done in the meantime? Stirling and Colonial Secretary Peter Brown hatched a plan: they would issue promissory notes on behalf of the local government, promising to redeem them ‘on demand’ with coins or Treasury Bills.

There was no printing press in the colony so the task was given to clerks in Brown’s office. They wrote out notes for £1, £5 and £10 which were numbered, signed by both Brown and Stirling, and listed. The first notes went into circulation in February 1830.

The Colonial Office in London agreed to fund a Colonial Treasurer and appointed John Lewis, a commissariat veteran. Lewis arrived in December 1831 bringing with him £5000 in British silver coins. He was under orders to do away with the local notes so he began calling them in, issuing silver coins and Treasury Bills in exchange. In doing so he unveiled a major fraud: many of the numbers were duplicated. The local government had been cheated of £288, a large sum given that a clerk’s salary was £100 a year.

In February 1830 there were two clerks in Peter Brown’s office, James Knight who had just married Mrs Brown’s maid Mary Ann Smith, and Arthur Price. But there was a high staff turnover: Knight resigned in May 1830 and was replaced by George Stewart who resigned in November and was replaced by Richard Wells. Price was sacked in June 1830 and replaced by Benjamin Dyer who was sacked in June 1831. So, who was the forger: Knight, Price, Stewart, Dyer or Wells? In 1833 Stirling was in London and had to explain to Treasury officials what had gone wrong. Despite their careful control he had to admit that his and Brown’s forged signatures were so good that they couldn’t pick the genuine ones. Naturally both men knew who the fraudster was because they would have recognised his handwriting on the duplicates.

They didn’t name him but Stirling provided a clue to solving the crime: the man had quitted the Colony before its detection. The Knights left for Sydney in June 1830 but returned in 1835. Price waited around until April 1831, Dyer until December 1833. Wells stayed to become manager of the Western Australian Bank in 1841. Which leaves George W. Stewart.

In his resignation letter of 16 November 1830 Stewart regretted ‘misrepresentations met with regarding my having kept low company’. He advised Brown that he planned to leave for England in two or three weeks, and did so.

Confirmation that Stewart was the forger came in July 1831. In London someone presented for payment Treasury Bill No. 95 dated 24 November 1830, purporting to be drawn by Stirling in favour of George Stewart, for £147 12s. Treasury officials, having received Stirling’s official list of Bills, knew that the genuine No. 95 was made out on a different day to someone else for a different sum, and refused to pay.

It wasn’t Stewart who presented the forged Bill. He had died at sea ‘off the Cape’ on about 4 March 1831. Could it have been a ‘low company’ accomplice pretending to be his widow? In December his sister wrote to Peter Brown from London checking whether Stewart had died a bachelor.

First published in the July 2019 Newsletter

An 1830 visitor

Travel diary of a young man called John Pocock who spent three months here in 1830. 166 years after his visit his jottings were published in London under the title Travels of a London Schoolboy 1826 – 1830: John Pocock’s diary of life in London and voyages to Cape Town and the Swan River Settlement.

Our man arrived on the Medina an unlucky ship that ran aground on arrival. After spending a night on Carnac Island with some offloaded cargo he came ashore at the South Bay on 26 July 1830.

Pocock was servant to Dr Thomas Carter (‘Mr C’ in the diary). Fellow voyagers included John and Mary Ann Bateman, their five children and Mary Ann’s sister Harriet Benningfield. Also Henry Vincent who would soon be the Fremantle Gaoler (also William Green who Vincent would lock up on several occasions).

Pocock wasn’t impressed with Fremantle or ‘Fleamantle’, a ‘mere assemblage of wooden houses, tents, and two or three erections of stone’ with its neighbourhood ‘nothing but white sand.’

Having survived a near shipwreck himself he was fascinated to see the Marquis of Anglesea. ‘upright on the rocks, one of which is complete through her timbers’ and in use as a prison. On 19 August he walked around Arthur Head and discovered the foundations for a new prison [the Round House] just laid. He was puzzled by priorities; ‘Surely, the governor should have blessed the place with a church before spending so much money upon a prison?’

Now and again he had to make up pills or replace bandages but mostly he visited friends or made new acquaintances in their tents and portable houses. One of the latter, made by Mannings of Holborn, was sold at a profit by Dr Carter. Another was put up by a patient, the troubled Captain Lionel Ripley Pearce, who ran amuck with his sword which he rammed through the bakehouse. In quieter moments he and Pearce visited the serang of the Ellen whose lascar crew had found a way to make curry from a local wild herb.

Young John went beachcombing for shells and went shooting in the forest where he saw wallabies (possibly quokkas) but leant his gun against a ‘Black Boy’ (grass tree) and couldn’t find it again.

He recorded gossip: ‘Mr Lewis is very attentive to Miss Benningfield, the old coquette who tried France, England etc., for thirty-five years in vain for a husband’ [Harriet Benningfield married Richard Lewis the following February].

On 12 September Dr Carter told him he could have 3 or 4 days off to visit the country, and on 20 September he left for Perth. He liked what he saw: Perth is by far more pretty than Fremantle and much larger. The houses have a very comfortable and neat appearance. So thick are the trees here, that one can hardly see two or more houses at a time except by the Governor’s Residence where they have been cleared away. He thought there were ‘about 40 domiciles of one kind or other’ and saw ‘several pretty gardens in a flourishing state and well stocked with vegetables.’ He might have discovered our first library – he ‘peeped in at a room called the Reading Room near the jetty’ and was surprised at the advancement of the place.

Out walking with a friend, he saw the Governor’s house where he also saw Captain Stirling. He saw the Revd Scott’s rush church, ‘an imposing clean little structure with the bell hoisted up in a tree which grows close to the door.’

After a few more weeks spent shooting, fishing and caring for Captain Pearce our diarist sailed away on 19 October aboard the Skerne for South Africa, where he settled.