Shorthorns and murder

When Laura and Henrietta Travers arrived in East Gippsland in the southern winter of 1858, it cannot have taken very long for them to discover that among the many things that their future husbands, William Pearson of Kilmany Park and Lemuel Bolden of Strathfieldsaye, had in common was that they were both seasoned killers. Even as recently as the 1930s Australian newspapers were readily prepared to present such facts as were disclosed, indeed mythologized, by the perpetrators themselves in as generous as possible a light—usually in the absence of any other plausible witnesses. The following article, for example, appeared on the country page in the Melbourne Argus on Tuesday, September 11, 1934 (page 3), and the diminishing headlines already set out the sub-editor’s depressing sense of priority, “First Stud Shorthorns: The Bolden Brothers: Duels to Death with Blacks”:

Some of the best cattle from the leading Shorthorn studs in England were brought out to Port Phillip in 1840 by the Bolden brothers, who occupied the whole of the country between Mortlake and Warrnambool. Their stations included Grassmere, Minjah, and Merang. The site of Warrnambool was part of their heifer paddock. They were the first to fence extensively, and one of the Bolden fences ran from the Hopkins River to Woodford. Evidence of one of their out-stations may still be seen at Woolongoon.

Out with a blackfellow in search of horses, a Bolden was attacked by his companion, and to save his life he was obliged to shoot his assailant. Another Bolden came up with a native in the act of spearing cattle. A fight to the death ensued, and the squatter won. But soon afterwards the Boldens sold their western runs and their cattle herds. Their stud shorthorns were acquired by John and Peter Manifold. Among the stud shorthorns brought out by the Boldens was Mussulman, by Old Cherry, bred by Colonel Cradock. Mussulman was the most valuable bull of his day. He was purchased for 400 guineas to go to Port Phillip, and the purchaser were required to sign a bond agreeing to pay 1,200 guineas should he be taken back to England. Mussulman was hired by the Booths of Warlaby before his exportation. The celebrated Bracelet—twin sister of Necklace—was mated with him, and the great sire Buckingham was the reward. Leonard, another noted Warlaby sire, was by Mussulman. The Old Cherry blood was used also by Thomas Bates, who produced the Cherry Duchess tribe, prized throughout the shorthorn world. The cows introduced to the colony by these pioneers included Lady Vane, the dam of Viscount, and Red Rose, the dam of Mussulman the younger. Choked by a potato, one of the best of the cows died on the voyage out.

After leaving the Hopkins country, the Boldens were interested in other runs. They had Perrin Yallock for a time, Sandford Bolden was at Banyule, Heidelberg, and Lemuel Bolden was interested in Stathfieldsaye. One of the brothers returned to England, and became a shorthorn authority there. The Grand Duchess herd of Edward Bolden at [Springfield Hall] Lancaster was developed on the advice given by this old Port Phillip squatter. That herd reached the top of the shorthorn tree. It was sold subsequently to Betts and Atherton, who paid 300 guineas for every animal, including the oldest bull and the last born calf.

Although they flourished for but a brief period as cattle breeders in Port Phillip, the Bolden brothers deserve to rank among the principal pioneers of the cattle industry of Australia. The choice shorthorns which they brought to the colony laid the foundations of many of the best herds in the land.

I suppose the best that can be said is that in due course Laura and Henrietta may have been able to exercise a measure of civilizing influence over their much older husbands, however by the end of the 1850s the veil of secrecy that enabled the early squatters to get away with murder was already lifted—and they could no longer do quite so much as they pleased. In any case most of the worst damage was already done, and, along with many other Scots settlers in East Gippsland, Mr. Pearson and Mr. Bolden were pursuing the not altogether different aims of acquiring wealth and respectability.

The Florine

James Shaw, The Admella wrecked, Cape Banks, 6th August, 1859 (AGSA)

According to the “Shipping Intelligence” column in the Argus on Monday, July 5, 1858 (page 4), the four-year-old 1,042-ton Florine, which sailed from Liverpool on February 23, and might easily have sunk after she was dismasted à la Admella (above) in early April, carried the following enormous cargo in addition to our nineteen-year-old great-great-grandmother Laura Travers and her knitting—an impressive ballast that may well have made all the difference during that terrible gale in the South Atlantic: 237 hogsheads of Hale and Stuart ale; 20 hogsheads of beer; 200 cases of Callender and Caldwell spirits; 125 bundles of wire; 64 flagstones; 2,000 fire-bricks; a number of boilers; many packages of “machinery”; 50 barrels of salt; one case of seeds; five tierces of fish; 650 cases of bottled porter; 621 boxes of oilmen’s stores; 125 kegs of nails; one range; two trusses; eight cases of “hardware”; 2 pedestal clocks; 1,600 bushels of barley; 438 bars of iron; 30 firkins of butter; 5 casks of chicory; eight dog-carts; six bales of linen; 231 cast-iron pipes; 60 tons of pig iron; six casks of sausage skins; 13 tierces of hams; one bin of malt; 40 bags of refined sugar; 68,000 slates; 7,040 tiles; four Parkin and Wharton mangles; four crates of earthenware; four casks of horseshoes; six bales of paper; 42 grindstones; 117 tons of coal; 13 cases of plate-glass; 53 cases of pickles, and much else besides—in other words leaning heavily towards alcohol, food, and building materials, most if not all intended for sale at the diggings. 

If the experience of sailing aboard the Florine had tested Laura up to the limits of endurance, at least she survived and prospered. Alas, Dr. and Mrs. Ffloyd Minter Peck, to whose party she and her elder sister Henrietta had been attached, did not fare so well. At first Dr. Peck slotted conveniently into the local community of East Gippsland, serving alongside our great-great-grandfather William Pearson on the committee of management of the Sale Agricultural Society from its inception on December 16, 1859—along with John Johnson, the future Judge Johnson, who with his family was another cabin passenger on the Florine. However, Mrs. Peck died very soon afterwards, and, following a rather brief period of mourning, Dr. Peck remarried on August 15, 1860, to Menie, the daughter of Duncan Campbell, Esq., of Rockside, Islay, Argyllshire. He died, aged 43, on January 7, 1864, at their residence, Islay Cottage, in Cuninghame Street, Sale. Having lived at such close quarters with the five Peck children, and having shared the ordeal of the Florine, it is inconceivable that Laura and Henrietta did not each maintain a kindly interest in their welfare through the 1860s, as both women started producing their own bewildering number of children for William Pearson and his crony Lemuel Bolden of Strathfieldsaye on the northwest shore of Lake Wellington.

Eventually Laura and Henrietta were separated, when Mr. Bolden diversified his interests and went to southern Queensland. He died in Brisbane on January 27, 1898. Henrietta proved far more durable even than Laura, who died at her enormous house in suburban Melbourne, aged 59, in 1896. A few months after her eighty-first birthday in 1916, Henrietta Bolden died in Brisbane. And even then her obituary notice clung stubbornly to the memory of the old rogue whose peccadilloes eighty years earlier did more than anything else to define the harsh trajectory followed by both sisters: “There passed away on July 10 [1916] an old colonist in Henrietta Bolden, of Hyning, Sandgate, Queensland. The deceased was a daughter of the late Judge Travers, of Madras Residency. She came to Australia in 1858, and in 1860 married the late Lemuel Bolden, of Victoria, who was the first squatter to import Bates pure-bred short-horn cattle. Later they went to Queensland, and lived at Northbrook, on the Brisbane River, but for the last 18 years Mrs. Bolden had lived quietly at Sandgate. She leaves five sons and two daughters” (The Daily News, Perth, Western Australia, Thursday, July 27, 1916, page 4).

Who founded Seaspray?

A delightful controversy ignited in the pages of The Gippsland Times in February and March 1921 over the question as to who founded Prospect (Seaspray) on the Ninety Mile Beach, where for many years Uncle David Borthwick had his farm. Satisfactorily, the answer appears to be great-great-grandfather William Pearson of Kilmany Park, among several other gentlemen including his crony and brother-in-law Lemuel Bolden of Strathfieldsaye. In a letter to the editor (“Who Founded Seaspray?” Thursday, March 3, 1921, p. 3) an anonymous correspondent set the record straight: “Sir,—Fifty years ago [c. 1871] Mr. W. F. Foster, our then Police Magistrate, the original Mr. Wm. Pearson, of Kilmany, Mr. L[emuel]. Bolden [his brother-in-law], of the Aurora Flour Mills, with their wives and children, and their nurses, and numerous other people, were in the habit of camping for weeks in the summer in tilted wagons, tents, &c., on the beach at Prospect, which has recently been called Seaspray. It was realized from the first that the place would always be a valuable seaside resort in summer, not only for Sale, but for all the surrounding districts; the one great drawback was the difficulty in getting there in the absence of anything like a passable road leading to it. And Mr. [James] McLachlan is fully entitled to the gratitude of the whole community for his unselfishness and untiring exertions for many years in providing a road for the benefit of the public; and if he were presented with a comfortable residence at Seaspray he would not be overpaid for the trouble he has taken for a long time past to provide that place with its first and most essential need. Many old residents were flabbergasted on reading Cr. A. G. Futcher’s letter in Monday’s ‘Times,’ [February 28] to find that gentleman claiming to be the founder of Seaspray! He says: ‘Twenty years ago, when I founded Seaspray—’ Really his modesty is delightful! Cr. A. G. Futcher has always been known to look after No. 1, and he has done very well. But honour to whom honour is due; and old residents know that Seaspray would be what it is today if Cr. A. G. Futcher had never existed. But Seaspray would have been many years behind what it is today if Mr. McLachlan had not given his services without any remuneration. And while some are striving to have a part of Seaspray cut up and sold, which would offer a safe speculation in which to invest their capital, let us at least be fair to Mr. McLachlan, and give him, and not Cr. Futcher, the credit for making Seaspray what it is.— Yours, &c., A 50 YEARS AGO CAMPAIGNER.”

Secrets

The dangerous and rather melancholy aspect of making careful historical inquiries about pioneering ancestors is that you eventually discover their secrets.

Our great-great-grandfather, the Hon. William Pearson, M.L.C. (1818–1893) spent fifteen years from September 1841 clearing and taking possession of an enormous pastoral run of what eventually amounted to 17,274 acres at the confluence of the Thomson and La Trobe Rivers, stretching much of the fifteen miles between Rosedale and Sale in East Gippsland; it was the largest freehold property in Victoria. He named it Kilmany Park, after the parish in Fifeshire where he was born. In the same period he joined the sinister conspiracy of Scots settlers led by Angus McMillan to rid the entire region of its Aboriginal population, the blameless Kurnai people. In 1849 William was tried in Melbourne before Judge à Beckett; defended by Redmond Barry, but unfortunately found guilty by a jury of his peers of horsewhipping a Catholic neighbor, Mr. Desailly, after an altercation during a race meeting in which both men rode rather fiercely and for high stakes at Green Wattle Hill. Having thus asserted his presence locally, in about 1857 William Pearson sailed back to England to find himself a bride.

According to the entry for “Pearson of Kippenross” in Sir Bernard Burke’s A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Colonial Gentry, the young woman he selected was Eliza Laura (1837–1896), the daughter of Henry Thomas Travers, late of the Hon. East India Company’s Bengal Civil Service. Laura, as she was known, and her sister Henrietta came to East Gippsland and were both married soon afterwards: Laura to William at Grassdale, near Sale, on August 4, 1859 (just before her twenty-second birthday; he was forty-one), and Henrietta to William’s Gippsland crony Lemuel Bolden of Strathfieldsaye on January 26, 1860. The latter ceremony took place at Kilmany Park.

Henry Thomas Travers was the son of Peter Travers, physician to the English forces in Portugal and eventually also to the Court of Dom Pedro III at Lisbon. Peter Travers was in turn the son of a Devon watchmaker, and the grandson of a Huguenot refugee who like so many others settled in England after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). Peter Travers married Mary (1741–1815), the daughter of Peter Paré of Plymouth, another Huguenot gentleman. Peter and Mary Travers had at least five sons and two daughters, all of whom were baptized at the Embassy in Lisbon, including our four times great-grandfather Henry Thomas Travers (June 15, 1779).

Peter Travers’s younger brother John Travers (who died an extremely wealthy man in 1809) was an elder brother of Trinity House, and formerly a captain in the Hon. East India Company’s Navy. In 1786 (the year before Warren Hastings’s impeachment), in 1791, 1796, 1801, and again in 1806, John Travers was elected to the powerful H.E.I.C. Court of Directors. Through his uncle’s influence (actually no other mechanism existed), Henry Thomas Travers and three of his brothers, Peter Paré, John Benward, and George Francis, entered the East India Company’s Civil Service as cadets: Peter and John in 1791, and George and Henry in 1794. Henry was fifteen. By 1800 all four young men were en poste in India: Peter in Bombay; John and George at Fort St. George (Madras), and Henry in Calcutta.

On November 25 of that year, aged twenty-one, Henry married Miss Eliza Finch. That union was noted in the following year’s Asiatic Annual Register. Young Mrs. Travers produced a daughter (1803) and at least two sons, of whom the elder died in infancy at Calcutta, and was buried in the South Park Street Burial Ground—“Here lies the infant son of H. T. Travers, Esq. / Obit. 21st February 1805”—but John George (born 1807) survived. Mrs. Travers did not. She died the usual colonial death of dysentery or fever in about 1812.

After an appropriate period of restrained mourning, Mr. Travers married for the second time, at Kishnaghur on June 2, 1814, this time to Amelia Martha (née Grimes), the widow of the Rev. Dr. Henry Peter Stacy, D.D. For her first husband Mrs. Stacy produced two sons and two daughters, but for Henry Thomas Travers she produced a further son and two daughters (at least). For a while the second Mrs. Travers proved more robust than the first, nevertheless she too expired, on December 10, 1826, at Banjetty near Moorshedabad, from something virulent or exotic, probably both.

In 1804 Mr. Travers first appeared in the East-India Register and Directory as Resident Assistant Surgeon at Hurriaul, Bengal, with apparently minimal training. The following year he doubled as the local Commercial Resident, and remained there until at least 1806. From 1810 Mr. Travers was Collector of Midnapore, and in 1816 moved to the more lucrative mercantile position of Collector of Moorshedabad (Murshidabad on the banks of the River Bhagirathi, a tributory of the Ganges in West Bengal). He occupied that post without interruption from 1816 until his retirement in 1832, and lived with his family and a small army of servants in a large, pretty house and garden in Durrumtollah Street, Calcutta.

Mr. Travers’s brother Peter began his career as First Assistant to the Treasurers at Bombay (1802), to which responsibilities were in 1804 added an assistantship to the Custom Master. This apprenticeship led him in due course to take over as Custom Master and Reporter-General of External Commerce (1808). The following year he was made a Justice of the Peace. Eventually he retired to Fairfield Lodge, Exeter (1825).

George started off as Collector of Trichinopoly (Tiruchirappalli) (1810), but soon assumed the position of Judge and Magistrate of Ganjam (until 1816), evidently knowing as little about the law as Henry ever knew about medicine. Nevertheless, life on the bench must have suited George, because he soon rose to the third Judgeship of the Provincial Court of Appeal and Circuit for the northern division (1816 to 1820). He, too, retired comparatively early, in 1821.

Meanwhile, having begun as Collector of Ongole and Nellore (1808 to 1809), John Benward Travers joined his brother George as second Judge on the same Court of Appeal (1814 to 1820), an arrangement that seems to have been as harmonious as it was cosy. In upholding the awesome majesty of the law, their Lordships relied in part upon the administrative and military support of a rapidly multiplying tribe of John Travers’s other relations: sons, brothers, nephews, and cousins in every branch of the Company’s civil service and various regiments of the Indian Army, in which several of our Borthwick ancestors were by then also serving with distinction.

On May 1, 1832, aged fifty-three, presumably mindful of the needs of his young family, and satisfied that by then his eldest surviving son John George was safely ensconced in the Company’s service (after a stint at the East India Company College, i.e. Haileybury), Henry Thomas Travers retired on the Civil Fund annuity of £400 per annum; cashed in his Indian investments; sailed back to England via the Cape on board the Northumberland, and settled in St. Peter’s Terrace, Hammersmith, where, according to the 1841 census, his household consisted of at least one daughter, Sarah Campbell Travers, aged 20; Mary Grimes, aged 25, presumably a relation of the second Mrs. Travers, and Elizabeth Savage, aged 20, none of whom were born in England.

On June 12 of that same year, 1841, at St. Peter’s Church, Hammersmith, Sarah Campbell Travers married a chemist, Anthony Michael, the son of Michael Anthony Reboul, physician. Mr. Travers, Miss Grimes, and Miss Savage were all witnesses. Other members of this slightly unconventional household were Mary Whate, aged 20 (apparently not a Travers relation), and a number of servants, including a Scottish couple, Alexander and Elizabeth Macdonald, both aged 25, who, together with his housekeeper Mary Gregg, Mr. Travers remembered in his will with considerable generosity.

By 1844 Henry, his brother George, and an unmarried sister who lived with George, each owned not less than £1,000 pounds in East-India stock. This entitled them to three votes at the Company’s general election of that year; from Christ Church College, Oxford, the young John Ruskin controlled only two. Mr. Travers’s death on February 22, 1848, aged 68, at 26 Notting Hill Terrace, Kensington, was noted in The Gentleman’s Magazine and Allen’s Indian Mail and Register of Intelligence.

You are perhaps beginning to see into the dark heart of the problem. The young sisters whom great-great grandfather William Pearson recruited in London in about 1857/58 were born at Mr. Travers’s residence at 26 Notting Hill Terrace on March 27, 1835 (Henrietta) and on September 25, 1837 ([Eliza] Laura, our great-great grandmother), but in those years Mr. Travers was a wealthy widower, belonging to the once raffish but now increasingly quaint H.E.I.C. circle of retired Regency nabobs. He never re-married.

Under the terms of the will Mr. Travers drafted in 1846 (National Archives, Kew), inter alia generous legacies were distributed among Mr. Travers’s surviving siblings, his adult children, nieces and nephews, and his servants, but the bulk of that enormously long document concerns the provisions of a trust, administered by his sister Elizabeth Susannah, Mrs. Henry Butts Owen; his brother George, and two other executors who are difficult to place, for the benefit of two “natural” daughters: Henrietta and [Eliza] Laura “Fossey otherwise Travers,” and the gentlemen who it was fervently hoped would in due course marry them and assume legal control of their legacies. Much of the small print deals with what would happen to the money if one or either of the girls did not reach the age of twenty-one, or if both died before marrying, or if either one or both never married at all.

According to the baptismal register at Christ Church, St. Marylebone, the girls’ mother was one Lucy Fossey, and that is the sum total of everything that we know about her. Beyond the comparatively generous provisions in his will, in both cases the ruttish Henry Thomas Travers had the decency at least to record his name as the girls’ father (occupation: “Gent.”), which almost certainly means that Lucy was unmarried. She was probably a servant girl, but in 1841 she was no longer living in Henry Thomas Travers’s household in St. Peter’s Terrace, Hammersmith, and nor were Henrietta and Laura.

One possibility is that Mr. Travers maintained not one household, nor two, but at least three, all in London. This practice was not uncommon, and is further suggested by the fact that in 1844 Mr. Travers supplied to the East India Company Register an address different again from St. Peter’s Terrace, Hammersmith (where he is documented in 1841), and 26 Notting Hill Terrace, Kensington (where he is likewise documented in 1835, 1837, 1846, 1848, i.e. at the time of his death), namely “Connaught-terrace, Edgeware-road.” It may be that his third family of Fossey lived in either one of these last two houses.

However, the 1841 census records “Henrieta Travers [aged 6]” and “Laura D[itt]o [aged 4]” in a forlornly large cluster of young girls then residing with a handful of pathetically young schoolmistresses, governesses, and an unmarried clergyman at Albion House, a boarding school in St. Peter’s Square, not too far away from Mr. Travers’s residence in Hammersmith. That ad hoc educational establishment was set up in 1813 by a Mr. Maxwell in what one nearly contemporary source pluckily described as “a spacious mansion, built in that style of architecture which prevailed at the commencement of the reign of James I.” No doubt it was creaking, cold, dark and damp—ghastly.

We do not know how William Pearson found the nineteen- or twenty-year-old Laura Travers in London and successfully paid court, but it seems likely that it was through one of her trustees. A doughty self-made colonist such as William provided not only an ideal solution to the problem of “Fossey otherwise Travers,” but the added bonus of permanently erasing it from an Early Victorian London in which such residual peccadilloes were increasingly regarded as inconvenient, embarrassing, or actually harmful in the prospective marriage stakes of otherwise untainted half-siblings and their progeny.

Nor do we know if, from the point of view of Kilmany Park near Sale in East Gippsland, Gran’s father ever learned his mother’s secret à la Magwitch. In the 1870s and 1880s innocent questions may have been asked about his (at best) shadowy English maternal grandmother. They were either unsatisfactorily evaded, or else handled with that chilly, firm, pursed-lip, shutter-clattering bluntness that Gran and our late mother ultimately inherited also: a vital component, it seems, of our mitochondrial DNA.

It is certainly tempting to see this matter as ample justification for the large investment our pioneering great-great grandfather made in the pedigree that was painstakingly assembled by a team of Edinburgh genealogists for inclusion in Burke’s Colonial Gentry (1891), which incidentally awarded him the slightly bombastic title of “head” pro tempore of “the old Scottish family of PERSON of LOCHLANDS, PIERSON of the barony of BALMADIES, Forfarshire, and PEARSON of the barony of KIPPENROSS, Dunblane, Perthshire,”which remains slightly shrill in its unremitting claims to distinction and respectability. Certainly, at nine pages with fifteen footnotes, it is by far the longest pedigree of any Victorian colonist listed in Burke’s Colonial Gentry, and connoisseurs of that neglected work have learned to treat the such elaborate entries with much circumspection, if not caution.

It is not clear what if any of her father’s inheritance Laura “Travers” brought with her to East Gippsland. However, in the fourteen years between 1860 and 1874 she also produced for William five sons and two daughters. Henry Travers Pearson (1861–1880) and John Benward Pearson (1866–1925) were named after her father and his elder brother respectively, so to that extent the recollection of her nabob legacy was at the very least appreciated, if only gingerly. Certainly William Pearson’s own mother Helen put up the cash to buy the initial freehold of Kilmany Park. In about 1860 she sailed from Scotland and took up residence there. Thenceforth to Laura fell the burden not merely of caring for four infants under five, but looking after an elderly mother-in-law whom she had never met before. Certainly by 1879, Laura Pearson owned the freehold of 8,132 acres contiguous with Kilmany, and in 1896 when probate was granted she left estate valued at £8,319, more than ten times larger than any other estate listed in the Argus, not just on that day (November 13) but all through the month. When she died Laura Pearson was by any measure a wealthy widow.

Through the 1860s and 1870s Laura’s sister Henrietta produced at least eight children for Lemuel Bolden of Strathfieldsaye. Neither sister ever saw their mother again (even if they ever knew her at all), or indeed any of their father’s wealthy London relations. Indeed, at first the only people they knew upon arriving in colonial East Gippsland were Laura’s bridegroom, William Pearson, and the family of Peck, with whom the sisters apparently sailed aboard the Florine in May, June, and July 1858, and resided temporarily in Sale until Laura’s wedding day. It must have been wholly terrifying, but I suppose no worse than being packed off to a boarding school for motherless young women in St. Peter’s Square, Hammersmith, aged three or four.