Down Under Up Top: their stories

Down Under Up Top (https://rmsghistoryextra.wordpress.com/2019/07/26/down-under-up-top/) carried the information about early travel between Australia and UK which eight of our former pupils experienced. That gave the background so here, then, are those pupils who set sail from Oz outward.

Elizabeth Minnie Lumley was actually born ‘at sea’ off Adelaide in 1857. Her father was Chief Officer of SS United Service and it is possible his wife had travelled with him and that Elizabeth was therefore born on the United Service but this is unconfirmed. Whilst an image of SS United Service has not been found, it probably looked not dissimilar to the Great Eastern sailing in the same period.

https://www.iln.org.uk/iln_years/year/1857.htm

 

 

Elizabeth appeared on a census in 1861 in Limehouse aged 4 so we may assume that the family normally lived there whilst the father was away. His death in 1864, after two years’ absence at sea, made Elizabeth eligible as a pupil and she joined the School in about 1867. She left in 1873 as Gold Medallist and Head of the School, described by Miss Davis as “a particularly good and clever girl”. Despite her early venture on the high seas – or perhaps because of it – Elizabeth appears to have remained in UK for the rest of her life.

 

 

 

Florence Annie Hopkins was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1868 whilst three older siblings were born in New Zealand. Her father, as a serving soldier was, presumably, stationed in these places. Like Elizabeth, Florence appears to have travelled the High Seas as a baby because a younger brother was born in UK in 1869. In 1871, the family were at South Denes Barracks, Great Yarmouth, part of which was a Naval Hospital and lunatic asylum.

Image of Barracks map from https://www.greatwarforum.org;

Given Florence’s later occupation and place of work, this is interesting. In 1891, she was a nurse at Brookwood Asylum.

https://www.countyasylums.co.uk/brookwood-woking/

Unusually, Florence appears to have become a pupil following the death of her mother, not her father. He subsequently married twice more. After 1891, Florence disappears without trace so possibly she went overseas again but we do not know.

May Winifred Vockins was born on 21 March 1884 in Adelaide, Australia. Although not found on the 1891 census she must have been in UK about this time as she was admitted to Belleville Road School, Wandsworth in 1892 but joined RMIG not long afterwards. Her parents had been married in London in 1877 and a sister was born in Australia in 1878, sadly dying after just two months. Clearly the family were still there in 1888 as not only was May’s younger brother born there, but her father died there in that year.

After leaving school, May became a shorthand typist and she did not return to Australia but she did later travel in 1939 to New York. Clearly this was only a visit as she returned the same year and is present in the 1939 register. She went out on the Aquitania and returned on the Britannic, both vessels of the Cunard White Star line.

www.thegreatoceanliners.com/aquitania.html

& the Britannic https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19783396

Florence May Webb was born in Ipswich, Queensland and her application for a place at the School was supported by Raphael Lodge, No. 1850, a Queensland lodge. The Matron’s Book states that Florence ‘returned to school on 21 January 1901 having been absent & receiving treatment for curvature of the spine’ (scoliosis). At the time, this was usually treated with traction and a plaster cast together with remedial exercise to strengthen the muscles on the opposite side to the curvature. Florence was 15 in 1901, so she would have been due to leave school shortly and the Matron’s book duly records her departure in Dec 1902. Where she went thereafter is unknown. She is not found on the 1911 census but as she later married in Queensland and died there in 1936, presumably she returned to her place of birth.

Her father was Edward Robert Webb, MRCS. In 1880 he was in practice in London but by 1881 was in Queensland as Acting Surgeon Superintendent at Woogaroo Asylum being called to give evidence at one of the enquiries made into conditions at the asylum. (http://fhr.slq.qld.gov.au/committees/we_wh.htm)

Image of Woogaroo Asylum from http://blogs.slq.qld.gov.au

Marjorie Gimblette was born in Fremantle on 25 May 1899. Marjorie’s parents had married in 1892 in Llanelli and in 1895 emigrated to Coolgardie, founded in 1892 with the discovery of quartz gold.

‘[Coolgardie] is located 510 kilometres east of Perth … At its peak in 1900 it had 23 hotels, 3 breweries, 6 banks, 2 stock exchanges and 3 daily and 4 weekly newspapers. The population then was 15,000, with 25,000 more in the area.’ http://www.outbackfamilyhistory.com.au/records/record.php?record_id=117&town=Coolgardie

Sadly, Marjorie’s father died on 2 Feb 1902 and was buried in Coolgardie cemetery. Despite this being a goldfield area, William Gimblette was in fact an accountant. After his death, his widow and daughter returned to UK. It is not known when but Gladys Mary Gimblette trained as a midwife and qualified in 1903 so it was probably immediately after his death that they sailed for ‘home’. Marjorie never returned to Australia and married in Llanelli before subsequently living in Llandudno (1939). She died in Aberystwyth in 1985.

Amy Margaret D’arcy Sugden was born 1 Apr 1894 in Queensland and, apart from the fact that masonic records have her supported by a Queensland lodge and refer to her as Australian, all other records place her in UK. Her father, D’Arcy Sugden, MRCS, is registered with a Masonic lodge in Bundaberg, Queensland in 1878 and he married in 1879. A son was born in 1883 in Queensland but died 12 months later. Lodge records show that D’Arcy had returned to UK by 1900 and was a member of Rahere Lodge in London, in the vicinity of Barts Hospital. We could probably infer that he was working there. In 1901, he is with a lodge in Buckfastleigh whilst his wife and daughter were in Sevenoaks, Kent so perhaps D’Arcy was preparing a home for them in Devon. Another son was born in Buckfastleigh in 1902 but the next record for D’Arcy is his death from double pneumonia on 30 December 1903. His death was attributed to his getting wet whilst attending an urgent case. Apart from one brief record, no travel documents have been found for the family but as no intercontinental time shift was available, they must have crossed the seas somehow and at some point between 1894 and 1900.

Amy was on the school roll by 1905 and would have left around 1909. In 1911 she was Crowborough, Sussex as a boarder and by 1939 is recorded as a shorthand typist @ 94 Herbert Road, High Wycombe, living with her widowed mother. Amy continued the family tradition of proving difficult to track down as we have to leapfrog to 1974 for the next record, which is her death. Her probate indicates that she was by then a resident of Davey Court Elderly People’s Home in Exmouth where she died on 12 Sept 1974.

https://www.exmouthjournal.co.uk/

Annie Earnshaw Hewer was born 28 Oct 1903 and her sister Ethel Mary Hewer on 29 November 1905, both in Queensland. Their father, Alfred Earnshaw Hewer, was Government Medical Officer of Queensland. He had arrived in Australia in the 1890s and married Mary Emily Clerk on 23 Jan 1902, but he died in Hampstead, London on Oct. 17, 1910, aged 45. The family travelled from Australia and arrived in London on 14 Jun 1910. Given the date of the father’s death, one could assume that he was already very ill when he travelled. They travelled on the SS Runic, later torpedoed (1944) off the coast of Ireland.

Photo by Allan C. Green – This image from the Collections of the State Library of Victoria

 

By 1913, both girls were pupils at RMIG, Annie leaving in 1920 and Ethel in 1922. Annie undertook secretarial training and had a post at Australia House before, in 1921, returning to Australia with her mother on the SS Themistocles which sailed the London to Australia via Cape Town route.

Image from John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland

 

 

 

 

Thereafter Annie remained in Queensland, married in 1932 but remained in contact with the School, via OMGA, until at least 1973.

Ethel also returned to Australia, in 1923, travelling on the same ship that had brought her to London in 1910. She trained as a nurse and wrote to the School in 1929 to say she had a job with Dr Wallis Heare and was engaged to be married. This marriage did not take place however and between 1936 (when she was at the same address as her mother in Queensland) and 1939 (when we find her in the 1939 register in Sevenoaks, Kent), Ethel undertook her third oceanic crossing. When she left Australia, it was probably the last time she saw her mother, who died in 1944 in Yungaburra, Queensland. In 1942, Ethel married in Hampstead and made her home in UK. She died in Surrey in 1996.

These all too brief biographical notes barely scratch the surface of their life stories but if any of them left diaries, as transoceanic passengers by boat were encouraged to do, the School is not aware of them. Nor do we have any images of them.

Unless you know better …

Down Under Up Top

A goodly number of our former pupils have wended their way to the Antipodes for new lives. Going from the UK to Australia or New Zealand is a well-established global passage. Indeed, the vast majority of websites concentrate on the emigration routes from UK. But this post is actually looking at the reverse trend, so to speak. At least eight of our former pupils between 1857 and 1905 were born in Australia and made their way to UK as very young children.

Today’s transoceanic travel is comparatively a piece of cake. Nineteenth century sailing to and from Australia was gambling with one’s life a lot of the time. To those of us used to rolling up at an airport and boarding a flight; sitting back and relaxing, even if for a goodly time, being fed regularly, using on board conveniences; then landing, through customs and out to perhaps a holiday or a new life, or to visit relatives not seen for a few years, it is quite eye-popping discovering what travel was like for some of our earlier pupils.

For a start off, “In calm weather a sailing ship might take as long as four months, while a well-run clipper ship with favourable winds could make the journey in a little over half this time.” https://museumsvictoria.com.au/longform/journeys-to-australia/ Compared with that, almost 24 hours cooped up in cattle-class is a doddle! The sailing equivalent of cattle-class – steerage – was below the water line but the Southern ocean storms they might encounter were not their only problems. “Hygiene was poor at the best of times and worse in bad weather” (ibid) so in stormy weather, the order ‘batten down the hatches’ went out. And this meant that the steerage passengers were locked in without ventilation or light for the duration of the storm. Candles or oil lanterns were forbidden because of the danger of fire:

“… cramped conditions with timber, straw mattresses, hemp (rope) and tar caulking, meant a fire could spread with terrifying speed” (ibid)

Fire at sea is the mariner’s worst nightmare and, as few could swim and there were nowhere near enough lifeboats, a shipwreck left little chance of rescue. The conditions in steerage during a storm, with many people crammed together, no toilet facilities and the inevitable seasickness, must have been horrifying and doesn’t bear thinking about it. So perhaps we won’t. Think about it, I mean. Oh no – too late, the image is there …

Vinegar and chloride of lime were used to wash the decks of the ships, as fresh water was reserved for drinking and cooking. The vinegar helped prevent the spread of disease, although the understanding of why was not yet there, and, if nothing else, it made the ship smell better. Relatively.

On better managed ships, the areas below deck were thoroughly cleaned every few days by sailors and the women in steerage. Most ships provided only basic toilet and bathing facilities.

‘Sea bathing in the Tropics’, sketch from Edward Snell’s diary on the Bolton, London to Melbourne, 1849 (ibid)

The illustration indicates all too clearly the lack of privacy and may not have been available to ladies at all! Bathing was not normally a regular occurrence as the connection between personal hygiene and disease was little understood at the time. Most made do with a clean-up with a damp cloth under a blanket.

Straw bedding attracted fleas and cockroaches so people laid out their bedding in fine weather to air it. During storms, though, the bedding could get – and stay – soaking wet and this added to the problems with outbreaks of influenza and pneumonia.

Facilities for washing clothes were very restricted so many passengers wore the same clothes throughout the voyage. This, added to the stink emanating from the bilges below steerage, and given the increase in heat in the tropics, probably meant that the ship’s imminent arrival in port was announced by the wind rather than by any sightings from land!

The first steam ships made the journey to Australia in 1852 but these early steamers also had sails as their engines were inefficient and there were no coal depots mid-ocean for re-fuelling and actually few coaling ports en route.

The introduction of more efficient compound steam engines and iron, rather than wooden, hulls, enabled a voyage to be completed entirely under steam power. This was from the 1860s onwards but it was not until the 1880s that they became the transport of choice for emigrants. Because these ships did not have to rely on wind power and could travel at a constant speed, and the motive power could also provide electric lighting, refrigeration and ventilation, they could provide more comfort for passengers.

‘Grand saloons were able to be provided for first class passengers, and small cabins instead of sleeping berths were provided in steerage class.’ (ibid)

 

Married couples’ accommodation in steerage, by unknown artist, taken from the Illustrated London News, 13 April 1844

So accommodation such as above began to give way to smaller cabins for significantly fewer people! A diary of a journey made in 1874, read across the grain, shows how accommodation had improved.

the hatching had broken open in the second class cabin and they … all had to get to work baling … water out of the saloon (Diary of Ally Heathcote, England to Melbourne, Victoria, Onboard ‘SS Northumberland’, 1874) https://museumsvictoria.com.au/longform/journeys-to-australia/ [my emphasis]

The routes between Australia and London (with the Suez Canal option only available after 1869)

London to Perth is just a smidgen over 9000 miles with Sydney another 1500 miles further on. So that’s 10.5 thousand miles for things to go wrong. Great storms, gigantic icebergs, danger of shipwreck were some external factors but death from dysentery or typhus from the insanitary conditions and mediocre medical treatment at best added to the dangers.

“Deaths at sea were tragically common. As many as one in five children, and one in 60 adults died on the voyage to Australia” (ibid)

Conditions improved as the ships got larger. The Orient, launched in 1879, was the largest steamship built for the Australia route. It offered comforts unheard of for the period, including a promenade deck, refrigeration, and later, electric lighting.

Painting by Charles Dickinson Gregory of the sailing ship Orient on the sea, (1927)

Amongst other things was an ice-making plant. Horses were stabled on the rear deck and pigs, sheep and cows were in cages. These were not intended for a new life in another country because they were converted into pork, lamb and beef for diners in first-class!

‘The first-class saloon was fitted out with ornate brass furniture and elaborate wooden carvings, whilst the music saloon boasted a grand piano and an organ amidst profusely growing ferns and dracaenas.’ (ibid)

The SS Great Britain, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s ship, carried thousands on the Australia-London route from 1852, being converted to sail in 1881.

In 1884, she was retired to the Falkland Islands and used as a warehouse and coal hulk before being scuttled in 1937. But as those who have visited Bristol will know, this was not her end. In 1970, Sir Jack Arnold Hayward, OBE paid for the vessel to be raised, towed back to the United Kingdom, and returned to the Bristol dry dock where she had been built. And where she can be visited to gain an idea of what life on board might have been.

 

Sir Jack Hayward from his obituary, Daily Telegraph 13 Jan 2015

 

Image from a cabin in SS Great Britain from https://teatimeinwonderland.co.uk/2016/11/09/bristol-brunels-ss-great-britain/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And none of this takes into account something that hasn’t changed – even today. The decision to leave one country for a new life far away brings the emotional issue of having to say goodbye to home and loved ones.

‘… people were very conscious of the fact that they would probably never see their friends and relatives again.’ (https://museumsvictoria.com.au/longform/journeys-to-australia/)

All in all, it was not a voyage undertaken lightly. Nonetheless, eight of our pupils did undertake it, some more than once.

Elizabeth Minnie Lumley b 1857; Florence Hopkins, 1868; May Vockins 1884; Florence Webb 1886; Amy Margaret d’Arcy Sugden, 1894; Marjorie Gimblette, 1899 and Annie & Ethel Hewer in 1903 & 1905 respectively were all born in Australia and became pupils in London.

Just to offer some balance, Emma Amelia Humphreys (1829) and Margaret Humphries (1836), both former pupils, went to Australia before any of the above were born. Emma and Margaret, despite the different spellings, do appear to be sisters! They would definitely have travelled by sailing ship because their emigration occurred before steam ships were in use. The individual stories of these travellers must await another day.

All aboard who’s going aboard, please!