Friday, December 2, 2011

Princess of the Waters - Chapter Six


CHAPTER SIX
Photo: Royal Adelaide Hospital circa. 1900, where Eliza Ash Camplin died.

At the time of her suicide my great-great-grandmother was living with her son Thomas in Bridge Street, Kensington.  She was also sharing the house with Thomas’s de-facto, Mary Ann Guratovich who must be the ‘wife’ cryptically referred to in the police report, as the one with whom Eliza had not argued on the night of her suicide.
Mary Ann sounds like a formidable character. With one husband dead, another abandoned and the courage to take her children – somewhere between three or six of them, working on the ratio at the time of one child every two years, sometimes starting within months of a marriage – and to set up house with a man in 1900 and to ‘live in sin’ for twenty-five years until the death of her husband made it possible for them to marry, and one who trained and qualified as a nurse in her fifties, suggests a woman of character, independence, strength and determination. No wonder they quarrelled. However, it is the fact that they quarrelled which suggests Eliza may have had more in common with her ‘daughter-in-law’ than she thought. Not only do ‘opposites attract’ but we tend to react negatively to those who are most like us. Perhaps John Thomas, like so many men, had married his mother!
Can we find insight into Eliza’s character by knowing Mary Ann better? Perhaps.    She was the daughter of Isaac Horton, another synchronistic connection with the name of Isaac, an agricultural labourer, and Jane Orr and she had been born in Manchester in 1860. She arrived on the Art Union in 1864, one presumes, given her age, with her emigrating parents. In 1880 she married Robert Henry Foale, who died in 1891 probably in an accident, but certainly it seems, suddenly. The following year she married Matteo (Peter) Guratovich, a mariner of Port Adelaide who probably worked with Robert on the docks. Guratovich had been born in Ragusa, Dalmatia. Eight years later she was living in Bridge Street with John Thomas Camplin; no doubt with some, if not all of her children who would have been aged between nineteen and nine. It must have been a crowded house – no wonder Eliza was sitting on the back verandah.
She was also eight years older than John Thomas, something of a cradle snatcher, unusual for the times and this may well have been what annoyed Eliza most of all. Little ‘Tom’ had been taken in by a scheming older woman who was just looking for an ‘easy touch.’  Although, as it turned out, the relationship endured for more than forty years and appears to have been a loving one, but Eliza was not to know that.
According to the inquest report she had been living with her son for two weeks, having spent the previous fortnight in Royal Adelaide Hospital. If she had been admitted to hospital for such a long time and then needed to be with family then she was not well. Did she decide to end it all because of physical pain, emotional pain, or a combination of both?
 Perhaps the month itself stood in savage mockery of all that her life had come to be. Eliza had been admitted to hospital, a month earlier; a few days before her 46th wedding anniversary. She died in the same month that she had been married. But, on the other side of the world it was Spring, with Summer sighing in the wings, not Autumn whispering of Winter. From that second day of October, in far-away London, she had made her way through years of marriage and motherhood, to die estranged, probably disappointed in many of her children, and to all intents and purposes, alone. Her life began with high hopes and ended with no hopes, in the same month.
At the inquest Thomas said his mother had been sitting on the back verandah and had refused to take her tea, which at the time, is likely to have been what we now call dinner as opposed to a cup of tea. People ate earlier in those days, and in fact did so until well into the 1960’s at least amongst the working classes. Men arrived home about five and dinner was expected to be on the table. It would have been early evening when Eliza made her ever-so final choice, unless she had lingered, turning the bottle over in her hands, waiting for darkness to devour the world.
The verandah would have been more of a lean-to, added on later, probably stretching off from the kitchen.  There may have been a laundry at the other end with a wood-burning copper for washing sheets, actually boiling them, and a trough with a corrugated board against which clothes would be rubbed clean. There may also have been a mangle for wringing out the water before hanging on the line. I remember my mother in the early fifties boiling water in a gas-fired copper and scrubbing clothes on a board made of timber and corrugated glass. The troughs were made of cement and the mangle was bolted on one side with clothes rinsed in clean water and whites given a second rinse in water, turned blue through the slow, deliquescent dissolve of a square, dark blue tablet which was meant to brighten whites!
 Within sight would have been the backyard toilet, or ‘dunny’ as Australians came to call them – a narrow and upright rectangle box of timber or brick, within which was a hole dug into the ground, containing a metal can, covered by a wooden seat. The colloquial term for such outdoor loos was ‘thunderbox’ for all the reasons one can imagine. They were generally unlit and night-time visits were rare because of snakes and spiders, particularly the redback which loved to live in the ‘box’ where one sat, and bite intruders – more of a problem for men than women. The redback spider gives a nasty bite, which, until the 20th century, was often fatal so the ‘pot under the bed’ was a night-time ritual.
On the verandah, as there was still in the homes of so many of my country relatives and my grandparents, when I was a child, would have been a metal stand holding an enamel basin filled with cold, soapy water. Even in summer this water would be freezing. Or perhaps it just looked icy and the thought gave birth to the feeling. If it had been standing for days a brown scum would lace the edge of the water, dropping like blossoms when we dipped our hands in to wash them. A large bar of yellow soap would sit below on a narrow, circular, metal shelf and a towel would hang on a rail at the side. As often as not the towel would be grimy and ragged – country living encouraging little in the way of aesthetics. But hard work and social graces make uncomfortable bedfellows and such niceties would not become a part of family life until long after Eliza had gone to her eternal rest.
As Eliza sat outside, with her thoughts and her fears, Thomas and Mary Ann and a gaggle of children, would have been sitting inside eating their tea, in a small dining room as opposed to a table in the kitchen, the size of such rooms being generally small. Kitchens were very basic at the start of the 20th century. A typical kitchen had one sink with a cold water tap and a wood-heated or gas-fired cast iron stove and this is the sort of kitchen my grandparents had. Even in the early fifties the kitchens of the working classes were simple and we also had to keep our food cool in an ice chest; a cupboard with a tray at the top to hold a block of ice delivered every few days. The ice-man would take his enormous metal ‘tongs’ and grasp a huge block of ice from beneath the hessian covers on the back of his truck. The ice would be studded with bits of sacking and crumbs of dirt, which he would attempt to wipe off in perfunctory slide, with his large, leathery hands. It would be carried to the kitchen, dripping first on earth and stone path and then on the shiny, but worn linoleum floor, before being placed in the metal-lined compartment. It would have been little different in my great-great-grandmother’s day.
 If Eliza had taken her tea it probably would have been boiled potatoes or cabbage with roasted meat followed by rice pudding or tapioca or sago. This was the sort of food my mother cooked – English stodge, where the goal was to cook the living hell out of food to ensure that it was thoroughly ‘dead.’ It was certainly tasteless but it was all we knew. Why I and my siblings grew up to enjoy cooking and to love good food is hard to say although a food revolution rolled across Australia in the sixties, sweeping away the bland, boiled and baked horrors of our childhood and leaving in its wake a country which today possesses some of the best food and restaurants in the world.
 But for the Camplins such simple meals, supplemented with eggs and chickens and fresh vegetables and fruit from the garden, probably still boiled pretty much to death, was a diet they shared with most other Australians – at least those of Scottish, English and Irish descent. Breakfast was mostly porridge or toast and tea, the drink, was usually heavily sweetened, as it is still in much of the Third World today. There seems to be a rule that the poorer one is the more sugar one likes. But I can understand that in a way – if there is little ‘sweetness’ in life then, when you have the chance, take as much sweetness as you can. By 1900 the most popular condiments were tomato sauce and Worcestershire sauce, which again, is hardly surprising given that when you boil and bake things to semi-extinction you need some way of returning taste to them.
But as in England the most reliable and nutritious food source, something which I believe contributed greatly to the general longevity of the Camplins, was the back garden. With no control over content or labelling it was not surprising that when foods were first tested in the early 1900’s they found coal tar in a raspberry drink and alcohol in lollies. This led to the Victorian Pure Food Act in 1905 which was the first law of its kind in the world –yet another first among many for the young nation.
 Eliza, by the time she died, would have known many of the things which Australians today would still recognise – Bushells Tea, Foster’s Lager, Arnott’s Biscuits and Rosella Jams. But she was not around to taste two great Australian food icons – lamingtons, the chocolate and coconut covered cake and Vegemite, the ubiquitous, black, salty yeast extract which Australians are first fed as babies and which everyone loves. It is an acquired taste however and one which needs to be developed young! For non-Australians it is probably the equivalent of being presented with ‘fried spiders’ or ‘soused caterpillars’ if you have not grown up on them.
No doubt food was the last thing on Eliza’s mind as she sat out the back, probably in a cane chair, the sort of outdoor furniture which was popular at the time, a small table by her side, on which the liniment would have stood. How long did she ponder it? Minutes or hours? Sitting there, what did she think, with the glass bottle in her withered hands and the evening sun washing the last gasps of light across the garden? In the embrace of that fading day, with the crisp call of birds settling in high trees, she made a decision which could not be unmade. And after those final, gulping swallows she called out: ‘Goodbye. Goodbye all.’
‘Have you been silly,’ said her son, as if asking if she wanted sugar in her tea. Her reply, he told the police later, was that she said she had drunk all the poison. The fact that he had left her with a bottle clearly marked, in two places, POISON, suggests he did not fear she would take her life. Or perhaps he did and it was a preferred option.
That may sound a strange thing to say but Thomas’s question sounds odd to me. ‘Have you been silly,’ he asks when his mother calls out, ‘Goodbye, Goodbye all.’ It is a rather simple and even odd thing to say after downing a bottle of poison. I mean, it just all sounds so normal. And then his response is equally queer. He thinks she has done something silly with the medicine, as in drink it, to kill herself. If he thought that why did he not rush to her side instead of asking what is in essence, a silly question? There is a stilted, scripted, convenient feel to the story which obviously has been told by Thomas to the police and the inquest.
Was she conscious when he found her, in that initial, brief, excited state which opium brings, even when it is mixed with soap and meant to be applied externally? Or had she slumped into the stupor from which she would not recover with closed eyes, contracted pupils, slow pulse and deep, stertorous breathing like endless snores? When he found her she would have looked drunk – for a Camplin, not a strange state at all. The sallow skin, she most likely had, given the look of her daughters of whom we do have some photographs and the police report of Ebenezer, of whom we have much in words and nothing in pictures, would be slightly flushed and she would still be warm, the coldness and pallor only appearing later, as she neared death.
Death in such cases usually follows within seven to twelve hours. Given that it was early evening and she was sitting outside in October, when it would be dark by about six, it sounds like Eliza lived for a lot longer than the average. It would be nearly midday the next day before she died – something like eighteen hours after the poison has slipped so easily and bitterly down her throat.
Toxic doses of opium paralyse the pneumogastrics and the heart, weakening the pulse which becomes more rapid. Large doses depress breathing and this is what usually causes death – centric respiratory paralysis. Perhaps the plus with dying from opium poisoning is that one is unconscious and therefore not aware of any physical discomfort.
Such attempts at suicide can be thwarted if treatment is quickly administered but Thomas and his wife, who had not that night argued with her mother-in-law, may not have known what to do. A teaspoon of mustard or tablespoon of salt in warm water should be put down the throat and cold water splashed on the face. Slapping the body vigorously and forcing the person to keep walking can also help. Her daughter-in-law may have been happy to help with this. Anything to keep them from surrendering to the sleep of death.
They called the doctor which proved to be yet another delay. How long it would take to get Eliza onto a cart or dray and into hospital is hard to say but the Camplins did have carts or drays and sold them as well; although that may have been a later development and on the night that Eliza chose to take her life, they had to find a friend or family member from whom to borrow the transport. It still would have taken a good hour or more to get into the city although one would have thought the shuddering and bumping of the cart might have kept her from the deep and deadly sleep.
 It was Friday, October 26, in the early evening and Eliza would not die until 11.30 the next morning in the Royal Adelaide Hospital.  The doctors would have pumped her stomach but they probably knew that it was pointless – treatment after forty minutes from swallowing the poison being largely ineffectual. Her death was reported to the police and an inquest was held.
It is clear from the description of the ‘poison’ in the inquest report that what she had drunk contained opium or laudanum … a sedative with slightly stimulating effects, commonly used at the time for a variety of ailments including gastro-intestinal conditions and depression, or hysteria as it was more often known in the 19th century as well as for topical treatments.
The question is whether or not this bottle of opium-based liniment was the first exposure to the drug or whether there had been a close relationship between Eliza and the 19th century’s favourite ‘little helper’ laudanum.
Laudanum was used for the most and the least serious of conditions and it was also spoon-fed to infants. But it was easy to become addicted to opium and in fact many over-the-counter medications could be found to meet the need. More than anything it was used as a pain reliever… both physical and psychological. But it was also hallucinogenic and when used over long periods led to not just addiction but distorted thinking.
Whether or not Eliza had a long history of laudanum use, both for physical and emotional conditions, she had reached a point where life had simply become unbearable. But killing herself suggests that she was at a very low point indeed. Even more so given that from the sound of it what she drank was an anodyne treatment, or an opium and soap-based liniment designed to be used externally. 

What was going on in her mind, might be explained from some additional information. A Richard Holliday wrote to me:

I think I can fill in some details of where Eliza disappeared to. 
It seems to me that once her surviving daughters were married she was free to leave her violent husband and sons. 

She fled to Melbourne and on 24 Feb 1894 describing herself as a 58 year old housekeeper, widowed in 1890, with 6 children living and 2 dead, married 73 year old widower (a wealthy grazier) Richard Warren in Melbourne. She gave her parents as John Thomas Ash and Elizabeth Wilkins. Both gave their address as Barry Street, Northcote


This was only a month after her sister Sarah had posted the missing persons notice.

As we know, she made her way back to Adelaide at some point, taking her life in October 1900, having left Richard Warren, who died in 1904 in the Melbourne Benevolent Asylum. His death certificate does not mention Eliza. 


The report in the Adelaide Advertiser, three days later says:

SUICIDE BY POISONING.
The city coroner (Dr. W. Ramsay Smith) held an inquest on Monday morning at the Adelaide Hospital on the body of Eliza Camplin, who was admitted to that institution on Friday evening suffering from the effects of opium poisoning and who died the following morning.
Thomas Camplin, woodcarter, of Bridge Street, Kensington, identified the body as that of his late mother, who was about 68 years of age. Deceased had been living; with him for about a fortnight, and for two weeks prior to that had been in the Adelaide Hospital.
On Friday evening last she refused to take her tea, and afterwards she called out to them from the back verandah, "Good-bye, good-bye, all" Witness asked her whether she was silly, and she said she had drunk all the poison, and when asked what the poison was, told them it was the lotion which had been given for her complaint.
 He sent for Dr. Borthwick, who attended to her, and on the doctor's advice he conveyed deceased to the Adelaide Hospital. There had been no quarrel between his wife and deceased that evening.
William Frederick Hammer, dispensing chemist at the Adelaide Hospital, deposed to having dispensed the liniment to deceased on the prescription of Dr. Bickle. It consisted of 3 oz. of tincture of option and 3 oz. soap liniment. The bottle, which was similar to that produced, was labelled poison in two places.
 Dr. McDonald, resident medical officer at the Adelaide Hospital, stated that deceased was attended to promptly on her arrival at the hospital, and the usual treatment for opium-poisoning was resorted to, (pumping the stomach) but deceased succumbed at 11.30 o'clock on Saturday morning.
After further evidence the jury, without retiring, returned a verdict that deceased came to her death by administering to herself, with intent to kill, a dose of liniment containing opium.
PHOTO: 16 Bridge Street, Kensington where Eliza took poison, looks much the same today as it did then.
Then again, there is something oddly touching and simple, if not simple-minded about the words, ‘goodbye all, goodbye all,’ and I can only wonder yet again if Eliza had had a long history of laudanum addiction which had impaired her mental processes. Although, leaving her on the verandah with a lethal dose of poison if she had been depressed or addicted does not make sense, unless of course Thomas and the ‘wife with which she did not quarrel that night’ hoped it might be the temptation it proved to be.
If we give her son and his wife the benefit of the doubt, it suggests that Eliza did not have a problem with addiction, nor was she prone to depression or the sort of mental illness which might predispose one to suicide. However, instinct makes me lean toward the former theory if only because, even taking into account the language of the times, the ‘story’ of Eliza being left alone and then calling out, goodbye, goodbye all, only to have her son ask if she had been ‘silly’ seems a tad flimsy to me. And the mention that there was ‘no quarrel’ between her and her daughter-in-law that night, suggests a less than happy relationship between the two of them.
It is also significant that having been released from hospital and needing care, she goes to her son and his de-facto wife. Normally it was the daughters who carried the burden of caring for aged or ill parents. She could have gone to Mary Eliza, Louise Jane, Emily Edith or Sarah Ann!  Although Mary and Emily probably need to be left out of the equation because Mary was living in the mid-north of South Australia, hundreds of miles away, and Emily had not even mentioned her mother in the notice for her marriage to the Catholic James Dynon, so was not likely to take in a mother who had committed the sin of leaving her husband. But that still leaves Louise and Sarah and the fact that Eliza did not go to either of them suggests estrangement and that adds weight to the argument that it was Eliza who left Isaac and not the other way around. That in itself demonstrates a strength of character which none of her daughters may have wanted to live with anyway. Ebenezer’s wife had more than enough on her plate and may have simply refused to take on more Camplin complications.  William had wandered off and anyway, being unmarried may not have had a home which he could offer his mother, which left John Thomas and his ‘live-in lover.’
And there are clues to the fact that perhaps Mary Ann may not have been the easiest person to have around. Barely a week after marrying Guratovich, on March 18,1892 there is a cryptic clue that all was not well when the following appeared in the paper: MY WIFE (Mary Ann) having returned home  debts contracted by her will be recognised. MATTEO GURATOVICH, Alberton.
What we have here is what looks like an unpredictable spendthrift and given the problems Eliza had with her husband and own children, probably not a welcome addition to the family. Or perhaps Eliza disapproved of the de-facto relationship. There is a sense, because of the comment, that arguments between Eliza and her daughter-in-law were neither uncommon, nor unexpected. It also suggests a relationship of some duration.
John Thomas’s wife Sarah had died in 1896 and by 1900 Mary Ann is living with him which suggests, given the seeming ‘unhappiness’ of her marriage, she might have been ‘in situ’ for at least three years if not more.  If she had left her Croatian husband after one week of marriage she may have left again, for good, within a month or a year. She and Eliza may well have had seven years to decide they disliked each other and to argue.
Which raises the question as to whether Eliza willingly took the lethal dose or not! One could ponder the fact that she ‘refused to take her tea’ - perhaps because she feared being poisoned! There are some suspicious elements to the ‘report’ but clearly not suspicious enough for the coroner to consider.
 However, it is all conjecture and whatever the truth she was estranged from her husband, living alone it seems, disappointed in her sons no doubt, probably estranged from her newly converted Catholic daughter, if not all of her daughters, and certainly unwell, either physically or psychologically or both, or she would not have just spent two weeks in hospital. Whether it was suicide or murder, it was a blessed release.
One presumes given the hours between drinking the poison and death that Eliza’s children would have had time to see her and perhaps be at her bedside when she died. Sarah was living at Parkside which is barely two miles from the hospital in the city. Did she walk to her mother’s bedside? Probably.  Even if they had been estranged it would have been the ‘right’ thing to do. That is if she knew. There were few home telephones in those days and the distance between Kensington and Parkside was three miles but one presumes someone from the family would walk to Castle Street to tell her and that Sarah would then walk the mile and a half into the hospital. As it turned out there was plenty of time for any of her children who wished to be with her when she died, to do so except Mary Eliza who was living hundreds of miles away in the mid-north of South Australia.
The story of Eliza’s death was not one passed down as oral history. Such things would not be. It was re-discovered through ancestry research, as is often so much that is shocking, shameful or reprehensible about our ancestors. I am sure if my mother had heard the story she would have told it to me. One thing she always loved was a good gossip, especially about others and particularly when the information was of a negative kind.
And suicide was considered to be a shameful act until well into the 20th century. It is hard to know how many of Eliza’s children would have attended her funeral given the circumstances of her death. If they were estranged it is likely that Isaac was not there although perhaps he made the effort, emerging from his beer-soaked refuge to stand by the side of his wife’s grave.
There is no doubt that while Eliza may have finally found peace, there were troubles and torments aplenty for the remaining members of her family. Although in 1900 Isaac himself had only a few more years left to live. Did he go to the funeral? Who can say? I like to think that even if he was a serious drunk by this time that he made his way to the cemetery, standing in his shabby, unwashed clothes, perhaps to watch from a distance, as the body of his estranged and sad wife was laid deep in the dry, brown dirt.
It would have been a small funeral given her ‘crime’ of suicide and perhaps the only voices raised in song as she was lowered into the waiting earth, were those of the galahs and parakeets, screeching and gambolling in the nearby trees, as they do still today in so many Adelaide cemeteries.
She had been born in the shadow of one of England’s greatest estates, Woburn Abbey, and had died sad, and in many respects, alone, in a small city on the far distant side of the world. Her last farewell had been polite: ‘Goodbye, Goodbye All,’ as if she were setting out on a journey or a voyage to somewhere distant – which of course she was. It may have been a touch of the theatrical in her nature or it may have just been a simple courtesy as she said farewell before embarking on the longest journey and the greatest adventure of all – Death!
Whether after admitting to drinking the poison and before lapsing into a stupor she thought better of what she had done and said sorry, we can never know. But I doubt it. Upending a bottle of poisonous liniment is in its own strange way an act of courage and completion and after a lifetime of struggle, disappointment and probably pain, both physical and emotional, I like to think Eliza Ash Camplin was more than ready to take her leave and had no apologies for anyone.
For once she acted as her eldest son had so often done – she saw the ‘main chance’ and she took it, no matter the cost! I have been in a place where I understood why people killed themselves, but, having grown up with a mother who more than once descended to the depths of hell and returned, because, as she said, she might miss something – I knew that such tortured times always pass – and there is life beyond the hell of living.
Perhaps Eliza also knew that but no longer cared. As she neared her seventies, increasingly dependent upon perhaps resentful and unkind children, with no husband to support her, the future would have looked increasingly bleak. It is one thing to descend to the depths and know you can return during youth or even middle age, but at sixty-eight, for her times, Eliza would have been old and any future, no matter how positive a spin she could put on it, would have been hard, if not harsh, and limiting.
In the year that Eliza took her life there were 3.8million Australians and the country was in the grip of the worst recorded drought in the new nation’s ‘history’. It had spread with breathless heat and dust from its birth five years earlier and had three more years to run. The economic privation which arose from the drought no doubt played a part in some 1,500 Australians enlisting to fight in the Boer War in the following year, a year which Isaac would live to see, where Australia became a federation, the six separate colonies joining together as states to form the Commonwealth of Australia with Sir Edmund Barton, the nation’s first Prime Minister.
How much Eliza cared about what was happening or might happen in the world around her we cannot know,  but, there are times when death is preferable to life and for my great-great-grandmother, on that dimming October evening, sitting on the narrow back verandah of her son’s house, the realisation came, perhaps suddenly, that this was one of those times. Sadly, it would also be a place that one of her great-grandchildren would reach.
As a suicide and given the separation with Isaac, she is not likely to have been buried with family at Payneham, although neither was Isaac for that matter. There is no record of her name amongst the burial records for Payneham Cemetery, where some Camplins were laid to rest, and having taken her life it is highly possible she would have been denied burial in any consecrated ground. Since she died at Adelaide Hospital she most likely was buried at West Terrace Cemetery where they had a large area set aside for such ‘sinful deaths’ including stillborn babies, destined to spend their life in the next world in limbo. Although her name did appear on a headstone at the family plot at Payneham Cemetery some years later with an incorrect date of death which denied her a week more of life.
But someone, it seems, eventually forgave her or at least cared enough to add her name to the headstone some years later – perhaps when it was safe to do so. One likely candidate is her third daughter, Louise Jane Camplin Hodge who lived until her ninety-second year, dying two years after I was born in 1951. Hers was also death by accident and less tragic because of her age and perhaps the fact that there was an element of farce to it.
 Poor old Louise, who had left her Unley home to ‘go to town’ as one did as a special event in the times, was struck by a tram near the intersection of King William and Wakefield Streets, at about three o’clock in the afternoon. To add insult to injury it was December 24, 1951 – the day before Christmas. She was carried about 20ft from the point of impact and at the age of ninety-one, was not surprisingly dead by the time they got her to a ward at the Royal Adelaide Hospital which was literally around the corner.  Louise it seems was as deaf as a post and did not hear the tram coming with its warning sound of ‘ding-ding.’  A young friend was hit by a tram in Melbourne when I was living there in the 1970’s and he luckily survived, youth being on his side, to be forever after known as ‘ding-ding’ that being the last thing he said he heard. But Louise heard nothing and met her end with sudden indignity, leaving behind a lot of unwrapped presents and a bleak Christmas for her family.
But, given that Louise’s last surviving brother Thomas had died twelve years earlier and her last surviving sister, my great-grandmother, Sarah had died fourteen years earlier, Louise was the last surviving child of Isaac and Eliza and most likely to be the one who restored some measure of respect to her poor mother’s name.
Or is she? Perhaps it was Sarah, my feisty, strong-willed great-grandmother who didn’t care about the shame of her mother’s actions and who sought to return some semblance of respectability to her long-suffering mother. Or it could have been Ebenezer in a soft-hearted moment. His wife Alice is buried here and perhaps as he stood by her graveside he remembered his long-dead mother and decided to put things right. The date may have been wrong but it was the sentiment which was important. It probably does not matter who gave Eliza a carved name in death. Whoever did it we can be sure that Eliza would have been pleased.
And if she is at West Terrace Cemetery, despite no evidence from available records, she is, ironically, in death, back once more with Isaac. For what the available records do show is quite a few Camplins here, including the patriarch Isaac,76, along with their son John Thomas,70, who died in 1939 and his wife Mary Ann, 79, who died in 1940 and finally got her Tom ‘back’, as well as another son of Isaac and Eliza, the one who went missing, William Henry, 79, who died in 1942.  And buried with them are Ebenezer’s grandson, Ronald Arthur and his great-grand-daughter, Rosemary; stories of tragedy, accident and suicide.  Rosemary Ann Camplin died in 1944 at the age of one as the result of an accident and her father, Ronald Arthur, a butcher – one of the Camplin family trades, of Beulah Street, Norwood, was twenty-five when he shot himself in the head in 1948 leaving his wife to raise their four remaining children.
Ronald was the son of Ebenezer and Alice’s son, Thomas and his wife Ella. Thomas fought in the First World War and died in 1944 – the same year that his son Ronald lost his baby daughter. Like his great-grandmother, Ronald reached a point where death was preferable to life, and, like his grandfather Ebenezer, he had lost a child to a tragic accident. The newspaper report states he was ‘worried about housing’ and maybe he was; many of the Camplins were still living on the financial edge, but perhaps the truth was that he had never recovered from the death of his daughter, and that of his father, in one, ghastly year of grieving.
 And it was quite a year, because his remaining child, three year-old Leonard Ronald was admitted to the same hospital where his little sister had died, nine months earlier after drinking poison. They were ‘cleaning at the time’ said the report, and that is how the accident happened. A curious toddler and carless parents can be dangerous and little Leonard Ronald was a lot luckier than his baby sister. His condition was not however serious and he recovered. There is either carelessness, bad luck or something else at work with these Camplins to have two such accidents, one deadly, within months of each other. Ronald’s wife Alma must have been pregnant given that four years later, when Ronald commits suicide, she is left with four children.
There is also the possibility that Ronald may have played a part in his daughter’s death. Rosemary was badly scalded in an accident and died in the Adelaide Children’s Hospital on February 14, 1944.Was the alcohol and aggression factor at work in yet another Camplin? Ronald would kill himself close to that date just four years later – on February 25. Accidents, tragedy and suicide for another generation.
But, following the deaths of both Eliza and Isaac, for the remaining Camplins, life would muddle along in the same erratic and confused way that it had done while their parents were alive, demonstrating along with endurance, resilience and hard work a certain ‘oddness.’ And the ‘oddness’ is something which has been handed down in varying forms. Perhaps eccentricity is a more acceptable word but it means pretty much the same thing.
 In January of 1917 there appeared in The Advertiser Public Notices the following:

ANYONE found harbouring my ADOPTED SON,
WILLIAM THOMAS CAMPLIN, after this date will be PROSECUTED, as he left home without any cause, and he stutters very much.
T. CAMPLIN, 36, High-street. Kensington. 19/1/17.  
           
            It reads very much as if the young, stuttering William Thomas had good cause to leave his adoptive father’s home. This is the John Thomas, known as Thomas, with whom Eliza was living when she took poison and the William Thomas Camplin might be Mary Ann’s son by Robert Henry Foale but given that the children were born between 1880 and 1891 the age does not seem to fit. Another possibility is that Mary Ann was pregnant with Guratovich’s child when she moved in with John Thomas and he adopted the boy. This would have to be a birth around 1897 making him about twenty.
Although, the William and Thomas are very much Camplin names and he may also be an illegitimate son of Thomas’s brother William, who never married and who died in 1942 at The Salvation Army Eventide Home, Linden Park, Adelaide. But it is the mention of stuttering which makes me think either he was William’s son and of another possibility – that and the very Camplin names of William and Thomas, the latter being shared by John Thomas and his adopted son who stutters very much – the boy was the bastard son of John Thomas Camplin and Mary Ann Guratovich!
Stuttering was something from which my maternal uncle suffered as a child and that fact suggests a possible genetic link. My mother’s youngest brother Kenneth suffered badly from stuttering as a child and ‘cured’ himself of the condition as a young man through determined effort.  But whether the missing William Thomas was a Camplin or not, and whether he returned to the family home and his ‘adoptive’ father, remains a question without an answer.
John Thomas Camplin, commonly known as Tom, perhaps with the help of Mary Ann, became in later years relatively successful as a seller of drays and carriages. He had the hard work gene and unlike his older brother Ebenezer, seemed to leave behind the wild days and buckle down to sober living and respectability. Well, he was living ‘in sin’ but it seems he was otherwise respectable.
And even the feisty Mary Ann, or perhaps because of it, became a respected citizen, training, one presumes during the First World War, as a nurse and thereafter being referred to in various newspaper reports as Nurse Camplin. Then again, it was not until 1924 when they were finally able to marry that she could have called herself Mrs Camplin so using Nurse Camplin was a useful alternative.
In 1919 she is in the newspaper and in the wars with a report of a trap capsizing on February 3:
While Nurse Camplin, of High-street, Kensington, and her daughter, Mrs. Burns, And a baby were out driving the pony bolted along Margaret-street, and caused the vehicle to capsize, completely »mashing it. Nurse Camplin was thrown heavily to the ground, and sustained serious, injuries to her face. Mrs. Burns and the baby received only a few bruises. !
In that way of sloppy standards for journalists of the times, Mrs Burns is in fact Mrs Byrne as we know, having found a memorial notice in 1909 for Robert Henry Foale, from his only daughter Emily and her husband, Michael Byrne.
FOALE.-In memory of Robert Henry Foale, who died at Dale Street, Port Adelaide, on May 28, 1891.        
No matter how we pray, dear dad. No matter how we call,
 There is nothing left to answer, ' But your photo on the wall.
-Inserted by his only daughter and son-in-law, Emily and Michael Byrne.  
There was also a notice from his youngest son, Walter, who was not old enough to remember his father and who was probably the youngest in the family. In eleven years of marriage, given the habits of the times, there were probably three other children at least. It is not likely that the William Thomas with the stutter would have been one of them because why would John Thomas adopt one, and not the youngest one, when the other sons retained their father’s name? Michael Byrne’s sister married an H. Foale, as recorded in a notice for their father’s death – H no doubt for Henry.
Whether it is irony or synchrony there was more than one Camplin wife who had a dangerous relationship with traps and a tendency toward facial injury.  William Camplin, the son of Ebenezer and Alice, who had run away at the age of twelve obviously made his escape again at an older age and ended up in Port Pirie where his wife and daughters were involved in a spring cart accident in 1913.
It seems the horse, a ‘spirited animal’ took fright in Solomontown  and bolted into Ellen Street – some distance away – before it turned a corner sharply, overturning the cart as men tried to stop it.  As with Nurse Camplin, this Mrs Camplin suffered severe cuts to the face and shock although her children were only badly shaken. They were taken to Prest’s Department Store which was nearby and treated by the doctor. We lived in Port Pirie, near Solomontown, for four years in the early 1970’s and I shopped at Prests, and became friendly with the family, yet again, unaware of the connection; a connection which would re-appear with my maternal grandfather, Jack Belchamber, who was sent to work on a farm outside of Port Pirie when he emigrated to Australia in 1911 – just two years earlier. He and William Camplin may well have crossed paths in Port Pirie without knowing that within a few years they would become related through marriage –  William and his wife Hilda, being cousins. . William would live in Port Pirie for the remainder of his life and is buried in the Catholic Section of the town’s cemetery.
 Two years later Mrs Camplin was in the wars again when she was milking in the yard of her Warnertown home and a dog rushed in and frightened the cow which threw her to the ground and ‘trod on her face inflicting some ugly scars and bruises.’  Another accident and more facial injuries.
But, it is clear that the daughter-in-law with whom Eliza did not argue on the night she chose death went on to do good works as Nurse Camplin and that she had an enduring and loving relationship with her ‘Tom.’ She nursed him through his final, lingering illness and on the first anniversary placed a poignant notice in the newspaper:

CAMPLIN. —In loving memory of my loving! husband Thomas Camplin, died on the 30th of June. 1939. Today I am thinking of someone. Who to me was good and true. Whose smile was as sweet as the sunshine. Dear Tom. that someone Is you. —Inserted by his loving wife.

Within three weeks of putting the memorial notice in the newspaper, Mary Ann would join him. She died on July 21, 1940 at 16 High Street, Kensington, the home they had shared for many years. Whatever she may have been and whatever Eliza may have thought of her, Mary Ann Horton Foale Guratovich Camplin turned out to be the love of her son’s life.  A mother could wish no more.
There was less respectability for Ebenezer and his family. His son Thomas, known as Sonny, joined the Lighthorse in World War One and went on to be one of the more ‘colourful’ Camplins, perhaps coming second to his great-uncle William who copulated with an unconscious child prostitute.  Although for Thomas at least there is the excuse of war trauma and the relatively recent loss of his wife. In 1929 he is charged with exposing himself on a tram:

Thomas Camplin of King William Street, was charged with having exposed himself indecently on a tramcar on May 4 and with having given a false name to a tramway official on that occasion. He pleaded guilty, and asked for leniency.
He said, he had a few drinks in when the offence was committed, and he was sorry it had occurred. He was a widower with five children. He was ordered to pay £6 12/ in costs and 28 days were allowed in which to pay.

He was drunk of course, in that great Camplin tradition. His wife Ella Wallis had died three years earlier, leaving him with five children Jean, Ray, Ron (whose life would end tragically as would that of his baby daughter), Harold and Frank. A year after the tram incident, Thomas (Sonny) would lose his father. Ebenezer died at the home of his daughter. It is nice to think that despite his wildness he had a good enough relationship with at least some of his children to be cared for at the end.

CAMPLIN.—On the 9th December, at his daughter's residence (Mrs. Brown), No. 3. Sheldon Street. Norwood, Ebenezer Camplin, late of Kensington. Aged 75 years.

My great-grandmother and her brother Thomas were now on their own. William is also alive but it looks like he was no longer living in Adelaide, or at least saw little of his family. In 1930 Sarah had another seven years to live, Thomas had nine and William had twelve.
Apart from an ancestral ‘inheritance’ for hard work, drunkenness and aggression, it looks like there was one for resilience and strength because all three of the Camplin brothers lived to a decent age despite their excesses or perhaps because of them given that most of their sisters died relatively young, at least in comparison to their brothers. No doubt child-bearing and child-raising and 'husband-bearing' takes a greater toll than hard drinking and fighting does.
The ‘handing down’ of Isaac’s alcoholism and aggression to most of his sons and then to many of his grandsons, suggests that the inheritance was a strong one and perhaps exacerbated by the fact that Isaac married a woman who also had addictive tendencies. There is no doubt that alcohol and anger were two powerful forces at work in the Camplins.
And the genetic inheritance may have been magnified from the Ash-Wilkins side of the family about which we know little in any personal sense. The London Camplins, poor William aside, seemed relatively sober and hard-working although William and Isaac may not have been the only hard-drinkers in the family, just the only ones who got into trouble because of it.
Photo: Adelaide in the 1880's.
It may also be a question of how much more stable people were when they had an extended family to rely on for support. Eliza and Isaac were very much alone and given the drinking and the crime, albeit petty but crime all the same, one wonders how many friends they really had. They had both left their families far behind and from what we can see, there was little or no contact. If Eliza and Isaac were dysfunctional, through excess and addiction, their children would have been pretty much left to their own devices with no grandparents or aunts and uncles to whom they could turn. There is also a good chance, given the reports of brawling between brothers that their children were not particularly close. I may well have heard nothing about my mother’s Camplin ancestors because when Sarah married Johann she turned her back on all of them once and for all. In the same way that it seems her father had done with his family.
The lack of a supportive immediate family and an extended family to call upon would have encouraged certain levels of independence. But it would also have bred a tendency toward being a loner and perhaps lacking trust in family in general. The only way we learn that a family can be relied on is by experiencing that fact. From the look of it my great-grandmother could rely on neither her father nor her mother, or any of her brothers. How close the sisters were remains in question.
I am beginning to see why Sarah may have chosen a sober sort of man for a husband and why her daughter Hilda was drawn to a man who was a teetotaller. In that way of things however, my mother married a man who not only drank but who became nasty with it. There are patterns in families of that I have no doubt.
Sadly, for the Camplins they were often tragic ‘patterns.’ They drank, they fought, they lied, they stole and they endured. Although the crime factor did diminish, having reached a height with Isaac and Eliza’s children, and the last record of Camplin crime is in 1921 when Ida Camplin, of Bridge Street, Kensington, one of their grandchildren, is fined along with a ‘large number of girls and boys employed in the manufacture of confectionary at Walton’s factory in Grote Street’ for pocketing chocolates and sweets to take home. Of the forty-seven employees some thirty-one were dismissed but Ida got away with a fine because she confessed and no doubt, in that Camplin way, was a hard worker.
But beyond the petty crime and the alcohol and aggression there seemed to be a tendency toward accidents, particularly involving their children, suggesting some less than careful parenting, and perhaps related to alcohol and aggression. Little Rosemary Camplin was scalded and died; her three-year-old brother Leonard drank poison and luckily survived; In 1952 Rosalie Ann, the thirteen month old daughter of Harold and Shirley Camplin was strangled by the straps of her high chair after being left alone in the back garden; in the same year, David Camplin, 20 months old rolled ten feet down the stairs at a city theatre and luckily survived. Two other descendants of Isaac and Eliza died young – Alice and Lewis – perhaps by accident and of course, Ebenezer’s nine year old son, Ernest was crushed by the tight-wire stand.
Eliza took her own life and so did her great-grandson, Ronald.  Untimely death and violence dogged the Camplins for many years. One thing we do know is that whatever the source, nurture, nature or a combination of both, Sarah Camplin grew up to be a woman with a powder-keg temperament which could be suddenly ignited at great cost to others. There is no doubt, looking back and scrabbling together the dross and dregs of her parent’s lives that she had much about which to be angry.  And, as a woman she would not have had the same freedom to express that anger, as her brothers clearly did, through drinking and at times, fighting.
That level of repressed rage, passion, energy is the sort of thing which, in a woman can easily manifest as depression, neurosis or madness – and they did, in at least one of her daughters and two of her grand-daughters.
We ‘learn at the feet’ of our mothers more than we know and women in particular, unconsciously, will mimic and echo what their mothers have been or ‘decide’ to be completely other than that which their mother was. But there is no doubt, without conscious attention and resolution, the same ‘sins’ will be handed down from one generation to the next. Rage and addiction were the two ‘gifts’ offered in the Camplin inheritance – of that I have no doubt.
There is reason to be grateful that each generation participates, given good choices, in a genetic dilution process which means that not only do the ‘sins’ not have to be handed down, they can actually be bred out. I would argue that conscious attention to such inheritances can speed up that process. But consciousness, or common sense, or the capacity for self-awareness are also things which one finds in families to greater and lesser degrees and no doubt accounts for why those who are in the former category, have a greater ability to grow beyond the worst of what their family might have been in ways that others do not. 
If we should be grateful for anything it is the wisdom, albeit mostly unconscious, which our parents and ancestors have made in their choice of marriage partners for it is  this ‘kiss’ that decides whether or not we becomes ‘princesses and princes’ or ‘frogs.’


Saturday, November 19, 2011

Chapters Four and Five

The latest posting is for Chapters Four and Five detailing the life of Eliza and Isaac and their children in Adelaide, particularly that of their eldest son, Ebenezer.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Chapter Two and Three have gone up

I am adding to the original blog so it can be read in sequence. But that means each time I post it does not register as a new entry. Otherwise, if I make separate posts it means the blog will read backwards in essence - from the latest to the earliest - from the last chapter ultimately to the first which does not make sense.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

The Blossom Collector: The mystery of memory

The Blossom Collector: The mystery of memory: Memory is a mysterious and often unreliable thing. Ancestry research has shown me that many times. Our memories are very often more 'stories...

Princess of the Waters - my mother's biography

At last I have started on my mother's biography which I shall post as I go along as both a record and a resource for other family members. 


CHAPTER ONE:

 
Photo: My mother and I, in early 1950.  

The greatest constant in my life with my mother was tears – her own and mine. My tears began I am sure with my birth and have not ended with her death, although these days, when they come, they are not just about her, but sourced in other losses, in the way that grief has of piggy-backing on the past.
But I know that at core, the first was of her and all other grieving since, is rooted in that place. And that is why I am writing her story. In seeking to understand myself and my relationship with her, I must have some understanding of who she was. In truth, that understanding will be limited, because so much is filtered both through a child’s perception and the years. And those perceptions remain when we are adults unless we work to see beyond them. Although even as I say that I wonder if we can.
The image we form of our parents comes from forgotten, remembered and half-remembered experiences; stories we have been told by others and those we tell ourselves; photographs, jottings and sometimes diaries … a collection of ‘petals’ from the past. It is rare to find much which is tangible, or material, and understanding is by necessity sourced in something akin to an archaeological ‘dig’ where I dust clean the shards which are revealed and try to make sense of them. Like the professionals, kneeling in the sand, brush in hand to whisk away the layers which conceal, hoping for insight and understanding, conclusions will be based on a reasonable amount of knowledge and experience, a great deal of conjecture and assumption and breath of intuition.
The parent we know as a child remains with us at unconscious and subconscious levels, as does the parent we know as an adult, but neither of these ‘parents’ are necessarily the person. We inherit half of our DNA from our mother and half from our father but there is no doubt, that in many cases, and certainly in the past, it is the mother who is the centre and source. Many men have died in war with the word ‘mother’ the last to leave their lips; it was the mother both personal and archetypal to whom they called.
Who was my mother? I do not really know but I would like to find out, or at least to give a truer ‘shape’ to whom and what she was. In tracing her story I hope to do that.  While we are all born with our own unique ‘imprint’ there is no doubt that we come bearing the ‘gifts’ or ‘curses’ of our parents and their parents and grandparents before them. Perhaps the truth of fairy tales and myth is that the ‘wicked witches’ are no more than the characters in our ancestry who come offering the inheritance which is ours and from which we have no escape – our cellular memory.
There was more than a touch of the princess about my mother – this sense she gave to her children that we were akin to courtiers; there to do her service. It was an attitude she took to more than her children, which no doubt aggravated them as much as it did us. She had grace and style and charisma when she was at her best and enormous destructive power when she was at her worst. But it was not a conscious or pro-active destructive power – rather it was unconscious and re-active and while it impacted her family, the greatest destruction was wrought upon herself - in both body and mind.
Hers was a life of emotion; a ride through the deepest and most tumultuous waters and the rivers of tears which followed her are symbolic of that. She was a princess of the waters. The fact that she spent much of her life ‘submerged’ in this sea of emotion and did not drown is a testament to her courage, strength and determination.
Perhaps, although we did not know it at the time, the greatest gift she gave to her children was a demonstration of those qualities. Whatever our parents were will be a part of who we are, whether we know it or not.
The ‘sins of the mothers and fathers’ which we inherit are no more than the worst of what they were; the weeds which sprouted from their woundedness. Whether we work to be what they were not or are content to be what they were - who and what we are is sourced in our parents and their parents and all those who went before them.
Even more, our family stories are embedded in our DNA and the more we know of those stories the greater the chance we will ‘live them’ instead of having them ‘live us’ in line with the saying –‘Those who will the Fates guide; those who won’t the Fates drag.’ It reminds me of one of my mother’s favourite sayings – ‘it’s a great life if you don’t weaken, once you weaken you are gone.’ It reflects the constant level of fear with which she lived and how terrifying it must have been for her when she ‘weakened’ and was ‘gone’ as she did psychologically and emotionally many times in her life.
To know ourselves well we need some understanding of our parents in particular and our ancestors in general. Gaining that understanding is one of the most important, and most difficult things we can do. There are few facts on the path of knowledge and barely enough of the tangible to enable us to ‘touch’ them or their times. The road which leads back through the past is a narrow one and it traverses strange and empty places where the vegetation of ‘truth’ is always sparse and the landscape as strange and confusing as that of any myth. There will be guides and there will be monsters, of that there is no doubt, and it is likely that nothing will be known until I return to the place where I started and see it, like Ithaca, with fresh eyes and the realisation that it was the journey which mattered, and not the destination.
In truth, understanding our parents as people may be impossible given the power of the parent/child dynamic which comes into place at the moment of first breath, particularly with the mother; she who has held us beneath her heart for nine months and whose body brings us to birth. Our relationship with our mother not only exists before birth but it lasts beyond her death, for better or for worse. In fact, when relationship remains unresolved, that growth can escalate after death, because the power of the parent becomes even more mythic and archetypal when it is not grounded in physical form.
The mother, because she carries us in her body as we take slow, sure form and brings us to birth is the most powerful of relationships for all of us, but even more so for daughters. We ‘draw’ ourselves in the shape of the parent of the same sex and we draw ourselves from them as well. Sometimes we draw ourselves in a shape which is opposite, and that was the case for me until I was in my thirties and came to understand that is what I was doing.
The question I then put to myself was: am I only that which is not my mother or is there a real me to be found who is sourced in my truth as opposed to a reaction to my mother’s truth? At that point I set out on a journey of self-discovery which still continues. I doubt it was a journey my mother ever took, at least not consciously, nor her mother or grandmother from what I was told. Which wasn’t much on reflection and therein lies one of the greatest ironies and tragedies of self-understanding… when we are told things which can help such a process we generally do not care enough to listen or remember and when we reach an age when we want to hear such things, those who could speak are dead and gone.
But perhaps it is the journey, undertaken through choice, which really matters.  It is ironic that by the time I complete this exploration I will know more about my mother’s parents and grandparents than she ever did, at least consciously.  However vague the shape of my mother might be, it is the images of those who went before her which are truly ephemeral. It is the ghosts which have the greatest capacity, and perhaps the greatest need, to haunt us.
And here I am now, with my mother dead for six years and knowing there are times when tears are sourced in old wounds and wondering if it would help to ‘get to know her better’ by tracing her path. And also to have reached a point where, beyond knowing myself better through knowing her better, I can offer something in return – an honouring of her life
 The part she played in my life was enormous; more so for challenges than for love and support. In many ways she has been my greatest teacher and perhaps that is how it was meant to be. She died at the age of eighty having lived a life of suffering, pain and frequent torment. It would be too easy to look at her life as ‘wasted,’ because for much of it she did little more than survive. And yet that in itself, given what she faced, was epic and admirable.
She left little which was tangible beyond a small collection of note-books into which she wrote lists – tiny, crabbed writing which detailed her tiny, crabbed days and the things she needed to do or to buy. How do you judge the value and worth of a life? I believe that everything has meaning and purpose. I think my mother believed similar things but in very simple terms, even during the worst of it when survival was almost impossible to bear, she never considered killing herself she said because she ‘might miss something.’ Perhaps those words, that attitude say more about her than anything.
Her natal birth chart shows Moon in Scorpio and Leo Rising with her Virgo Sun ‘holding hands’ with Saturn, as does mine. I did not discover astrology until I was in my thirties, and so this greater understanding of her nature was intuitive until that time. She certainly had the sunny persona of a Leo and the powerful, brooding emotions of Scorpio – a heady mix for the staid, obsessive Virgo at core.
And her insistence that she preferred to be called Dorothy and not Dot… the latter suggesting that she was insignificant; no more than  a pinprick… a dot… is just so Leo! She was mostly called Dot though, for as long as I knew her, at least by family and friends. Her brothers called her Dot, as did her sister, so I am assuming that her parents did as well.
Not that even as a Dot she could be insignificant… she was a powerful presence in many ways. She was beautiful as a grown woman – slender and tall, with her soft, brown hair rising up with leonine confidence from her broad, smooth forehead. The colour was not particular, but her hair was soft and gently waved if left to its own devices and not tortured into the sort of spiteful curls which perming demanded.
 I don’t have many pictures of her as a child but it is clear, in the face of the adult, is a mix of her dark, brooding mother and her sharp-nosed, hard-eyed father. Her hair, like that of all her children, was blonde until adulthood. She stands, in a photograph taken with her parents and small brothers, at the age of five, looking every bit the princess. Although it was not a life she was destined to live, despite her hopes at the time.
Photo: Jack and Hilda Belchamber with Dorothy aged about five, Max aged two and baby Ken.
 Her first name Dorothy meant ‘gift of God’ and her second, Jean, meant ‘God is gracious.’ Given the life she lived there was a sad irony to both of them. In another, more whimsical irony, her first name Dorothy has a Greek and Christian origin and her second a Hebrew or Jewish origin and the man she would marry, Sydney Charles Ross, had both in his ancestry.
But when Dorothy Jean Belchamber arrived in this world on September 15, 1923 such things were far in the future. She was the first-born child of John Henry William Belchamber, who had emigrated from London as a teenager, twelve years earlier, in a bid to escape grinding poverty, and Hilda Gertrude Hasch, a second generation Australian who had grown up in solid working class comfort.
The name Belchamber is said to come either from the French for ‘bell-keeper’ or the name of a French village, Bellencombre, but whatever the source the first recorded spelling of the family name is shown to be that of Thomas Belchambre, which was dated 1369, in the London Letter Book List, during the reign of King Edward 111.
Ancestry records throw up various spellings including two ‘l’s’ and an ‘s’ at the end, but John Henry, known as ‘Jack,’ spelled it as Belchamber. What my mother hated most about it was that at school she was called ‘dingle-jerry.’ Her creamy cheeks would have flamed at such an insult I am sure, given that many, many years later she would be devastated at having been moved from A Ward to B Ward – the former clearly superior, being first in the alphabet, and where she belonged. Both experiences constituted an affront to Dorothy Jean who knew her own worth even if others did not. Although she did laugh when she told the ‘dingle-jerry’ story and her sense of humour, always good, was a constant, except when she languished in the dark pits of psyche.
Her mother’s name, Hasch was German, from the Slavic and is an aphetic form of the personal name Johannes, which was in fact her maternal grandfather’s Christian name. I suppose in essence he was ‘Hasch-Hasch’ or ‘Johannes-Johannes’ which is synchronistic given that my mother called me Roslyn with a surname of Ross! I did ask her why she gave me a Christian name which was virtually the same as my surname but she had no answer.
Years later I realised, as I was driving past the small George Street cottage in Parkside where my parents had been living when I was born, that it was next to a block of flats called Rosslyn Court. This may well have been the source of the name with one ‘s’ dropped so it was not too similar to the surname. Knowing my mother I suspect she would not have admitted to me the source of my name.
As it was, unknown to her or my father, at least at a conscious level, ‘double names’ are quite common in Greek society and my paternal great-grandfather, Charles Ross (Rossilimos) was Greek. Being Ros Ross then was not unusual for the Greeks with their David David’s and George George’s and the like.
It was probably inevitable that I was also given the middle name of Hilda – after my dead maternal grandmother Hilda Gertrude and my very much alive, paternal grandmother, Hilda Rose. I am sure the name meant nothing to my mother other than in a familial sense and I hated it until I grew up and discovered that it was sourced in legends of feminine warriors like the Valkyrie Brunhilde and others of Norse, German and Saxon legend. Looking at my maternal line I can now see I would need all the help I could get.
Or perhaps my mother, insightful and intuitive as she was, wanted me to have a middle name which would empower me in a way that hers did not. Or in a way that she wished it had empowered her own timid mother. My paternal grandmother was the very essence and spirit of a Valkyrie, much to my mother’s cost at times.
So Hasch in essence has the same meaning as John which is common in English, Welsh and German and comes from the Hebrew yohanan, or Jehovah has favoured me with a son, or may Jehovah favour this child. The name was adopted into Latin, via Greek, as Johannes. It is also the source of my mother’s middle name, Jean.
Was it Jack or Hilda who chose the names for their daughter – their firstborn?  There was Dorothea in Hilda’s father’s family, the Danish-German, Kohlhagen-Hasch’s,  but no sign of any Jean. Although it was awash, if not submerged, in Johann’s or John’s which amounts to the same thing. Perhaps they were less hide-bound by tradition than they appear in photographs and family stories and Jean was a more modern name. Or perhaps they saw it in the newspaper, as they did the middle name of Marina which they chose for their second daughter, Joyce born on September 4, 1934, just two months before Prince George, Duke of Kent, married Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark. It was a story which made the papers in quietly slumbering Adelaide, the name Marina, being recorded for the first time! Jack and Hilda may have been more avant-garde than we know or their children realised.
Hilda’s mother, my great-grandmother, Sarah Ann Camplin, was certainly an independent spirit and her strength and determination is palpable in the photograph above. The fifth of eight children, she was born on January 3, 1866 at Magill, Adelaide.  Sarah was a Capricorn, with the tenacity of the sign of the goat and with her Moon in Leo and Taurus Rising.  Strong, powerful, emotionally fiery and with Pluto in the First House a dangerous force with which to be reckoned, as her daughter would know all too well and as family stories would attest.
 Her parents, Isaac and Eliza (Ash) Camplin had arrived in South Australia on the Punjab, on May 25, 1855. The ship had left Southampton on February 12 on a journey that would take three and a half months.  The length of the voyage was dependent upon weather and wind. And so was the experience – somewhere between holiday and nightmare or something in between and usually a combination of all. If the weather was good there was dancing on deck. At least for those who were not seasick and most were, a lot of the time.
 Photo: Sarah Camplin Hasch c. 1882.
The loss of life was often very high as they must have known before leaving England. It was the women and children who were the most vulnerable with casualty rates sometimes reaching ten percent. A competent surgeon-general could make all the difference as so many shipping records of the time reveal.
Along with hundreds of others Eliza and Isaac would have travelled steerage, crammed between the upper deck and the cargo hold. Emigrants had become profitable and in that never-changing way of the world, ship owners had found ways to cram more in, fitting a temporary floor beneath the main deck. As often as not it was so low that water seeped constantly. Ventilation and light were poor and only available when the hatches were open, which they were not in bad weather. During a storm, which could last for a few days or even weeks, the hatches remained closed. They would huddle in darkness, along with the scurry of rats, with candles being too dangerous in the conditions and the threat of a fire engulfing the sailing ship more important than days or weeks spent in darkness and damp.
The closer the ship got to the equator the hotter it got and dehydration could cut swathes through the ranks of small, fragile bodies - those in the first months or years of life. But often the food was reasonable and plentiful. There had been enough outrage before Eliza and Isaac set sail about deaths and disease en route for the ship captains and the ship owners to do what they could to keep their cargo alive. In the days before refrigeration the basics were salt meat and fish, lentils and other legumes, picked cabbage, suet, bread and oatmeal and coffee, tea, mustard and sugar. There might be fresh food taken on board when they stopped in ports along the way but those travelling steerage would be the last to get any of it. Cabin class passengers would eat with the captain and get not only fresh meat but milk and eggs.
Fresh water was for drinking only and sea water was used for personal hygiene. Women with their menstrual cycles would have greater need of this and no doubt, within days, their skin would be encrusted with salt. It must have been incredibly uncomfortable when combined with the hot, damp conditions below decks.  You had to be tough to survive such a voyage and if you did not start out that way, you would be tough by the end of it.
Isaac is listed as aged thirty-two and Eliza twenty-nine although this age does not fit with birth records which show her born at Woburn, Bedfordshire in 1833. Ages are something of a moveable feast with 19th century records and given that her age at death fits with a birth in 1833, it is probably as good a choice as any although her age, given in the 1851 census would have her born two years later. So, she was either twenty, twenty-two or twenty-nine when she left England. Eliza would be pregnant by journey’s end. They had sailed from England with a freezing winter at their backs, heading south to the great unknown. There had been heavy snowfalls in the February of that year when the ship left dock and England was abuzz with tales of the Devil afoot, his cloven prints being found in the snow in more than one place in the south of the country. It is the sort of story which may well have made the emigrants glad they were leaving even as they crammed into the fetid quarters below decks.
Did Eliza and Isaac look back, wiping tears and shivering in the grip of a chill wind? Or were they huddled below decks with dozens of others, trying desperately to keep warm – wondering what they had done? By the standards of the day it must have been a reasonable voyage with only one death - an eight month old baby who had died of croup and been buried at sea. How awful it must have been to drop such a small bundle over the side to be swallowed by an icy gulp of ocean. But the cramp and stink and damp of such ships would test the strongest of characters. However, by the time they faced the reality of their test, there would have been no choice but to endure. Perhaps that too is something which is a part of the legacy of my family- with so many ancestors making the difficult and hazardous journey from Europe and England to Australia.
While they would arrive penniless and have a difficult start, things would have been more settled by the time Sarah was born. Or as settled as it was ever likely to be. But that was years away and as their ship rocked and surged on the chop and swell of oceans, Isaac and Eliza could only dream of what the future might hold.
 Isaac was a butcher and gardener, born in Middlesex on June 9, 1822 and Eliza, had been born in Woburn, Bedfordshire on December 2, 1833-ish. She worked as a domestic servant in London before her marriage. It was probably a reasonable job as such jobs go given that her employer was a doctor. It suggests that Eliza was presentable and reliable enough to gain employment at a middling social level.
When they arrived in South Australia Eliza was three months pregnant with their first child Ebenezer. It would have been a good day’s walk from Port Adelaide on Spencers Gulf where the ship docked, to the city, but Eliza was young, not too pregnant and the weather in May would have been mild. Those who arrived in the fiery depths of a South Australian summer would have been sorely tested. Although, as often as not the ship would arrive late in the day and the walk would be done at night with only the dawn bringing the sight of Adelaide and their new home.
There were Aborigines in the area and more than one new arrival had been attacked and speared on their way to Adelaide. Those who had money could get their goods carried on a bullock wagon or even ride themselves – everyone else walked and if they were lucky, pushed a wheelbarrow carrying all they possessed. A steam railway between the port and the city would be operational within twelve months but when the Camplins arrived, given they were penniless, it was walk and carry your goods on your back.
Were Eliza and Isaac just so grateful to be off the stinking, rocking ship that they had no other sense but that of freedom and solid ground? Or did they stare in wonder at the broad expanse of clear, blue sky and smell the sharp, red earth and pungent perfume of the crushed eucalyptus leaves? It would have been all so very different to the solid stone, heady stink and noisy bustle of London. Koalas would have watched in soporific cling; kangaroos and wallabies bustling through the still-dry bush; magpies would have sung and scattered in the trees, their soulful, deliquescent, carolling song unlike anything they had ever heard and far off in the distance, they would have seen the shadowy blue rise of the Mount Lofty Ranges; remnants of mountains which are amongst the oldest land on earth.
The Camplins arrived in the same year that the Adelaide Central Mosque was opened. It is Australia’s oldest mosque and in the late 19th century Moslems would gather from all around Australia for the annual Ramadan. Most of them were Afghans, brought out to the colonies in its earliest years as camel drivers. When railways were established the camels were set free and Australia is now home to the largest (and healthiest) herds of wild camels in the world. Today their numbers are around a million but in the right conditions they have the capacity to double their numbers every nine years. It’s is a relationship of mutual appreciation where the environment suits the camels and, in the main, with their soft padded feet, as opposed to destructive hoofs, the camels tread gently on the ancient land.
 While Adelaide in 1855 had some substantial buildings and homes, the new arrivals would be unlikely to have had much provided in the way of accommodation. Although no doubt, given the enlightened values upon which the colony had been founded, they would have had a roof over their heads and food to eat at least. Their first home would probably have been a tent and their second, if they were lucky enough, would have been a hastily constructed bark hut. Whatever the accommodation it would most likely have been primitive – however, compared to being cooped up in the hull of a ship for weeks on end, all things are ultimately relative. Records for the Adelaide Destitute Asylum show that six months after stepping onto Australian soil the family received a week’s ‘outdoor relief’ because Isaac was unwell and Eliza was recovering from her confinement.
South Australia was a free colony with no convicts past or present. When the Camplins arrived it had a population of just over 85,000 people…. excluding the indigenous Aborigines who would be gradually moved north, killed in attacks on settlers or by other Aboriginal tribes,  or assimilated.  Those who did not die of European diseases that is, and, as with all other colonial enterprises, that was the fate of many. Although in many ways the approach of the earliest settlers was quite enlightened. In fact, in the early years of the colony there had been an office of Protector of Aborigines…. but it was abolished in 1856 when principles were sacrificed on the altar of economics and personal need. As they have been and are in every colonial enterprise.
PHOTO: Adelaide Destitute Asylum.
The fledgling State had been planned according to the Wakefield principles where there were to be no poor or destitute. As the theory went, if the correct proportions of capital and labour were applied to emigration there would be a society free from social, political, economic or religious problems. It would be a self-sustaining society, prosperous and virtuous without the need to provide for the poor. But they were prepared all the same and there was need.
The Adelaide Destitute Asylum had mainly taken care of single women who had arrived alone in the colony but by the time Isaac and Eliza arrived there were some 3,000 men, women and children in need of support.  Four years earlier the Asylum, which had been set up in 1849, was providing support to just over two hundred people. No doubt the drought which had hit the new colony the year before played a part in the escalation of numbers. But so too did desertion of husbands, who left their families behind in droves to seek fortune on the goldfields. For a man looking to leave home, gold is as good an excuse as any, but not it seems, despite his other failings, an option Isaac considered.
The Asylum was never a pleasant place and it was even worse when it was overcrowded. Like the poorhouses of England, stringent regulations and sub-standard accommodation were maintained in order to ensure it was a place of last resort and that the poor should not be ‘encouraged’ to seek shelter. Men and women were segregated and once admitted inmates could leave for only five or six hours a week. When ‘indoor relief’ was no longer available and the building crammed to the eaves, those in need would be given ‘outdoor relief,’ as Eliza and Isaac and their small baby were which meant they did not get accommodation but they did get help with money, food and clothing.
It is indicative of their resilience and independence that such help was required only for a week. Life was not easy but it had to be better than what they had in England. Or at least one likes to think so. Given that the chance of them ever returning to the land of their birth was negligible, they would have had to make the best of it whatever they felt or thought.
Having arrived in South Australia in Autumn and probably having faced a difficult winter, although nothing compared to England, the Camplins would have been experiencing Spring and no doubt hearing stories of the heat of an Australian summer while getting used to the idea of being parents. It must have been barely weeks after Ebenezer's birth that they were in need of help. Given that later records show Isaac had a bit of a fondness for drink, perhaps his un-wellness was self-inflicted. She was recovering from childbirth and he may have been recovering from the same thing, albeit in different form - an epic ‘bender’ …. possibly triggered by the birth of his first child and, the gift so greatly valued in the times, and for more than a century to come, a son. What matters is that it was the first and last time they needed relief of this kind and their circumstances, while they would never constitute middle class, did gradually improve.
There is quite a bit of information about Isaac and Eliza’s family for the worst of reasons…. they appear frequently in police records and none more so than Ebenezer. However, it is these ‘pieces of the past’, the solid fragments of their story, which help to build a picture of the sort of life and world in which my maternal great-grandmother grew up and which made her into the kind of mother her daughter knew and the kind of grandmother, my mother would know. Ebenezer and Isaac, to a lesser degree, would prove to be our ‘portholes’ to the past – as would the manner of my great-great-grandmother Eliza’s death.
Like most couples of the times, the children arrived soon after marriage, often very soon, and then regularly, averaging two years in between with breast-feeding providing reasonably effective natural contraception. Ebenezer was born on November 4, 1855 and died in 1930; Mary Eliza was born on August 10, 1858 and died August 11, 1886; Louise Jane was born June 12, 1859 and died December 23, 1951; William Henry was born in 1863 and died 1942; John Thomas was born August 16, 1868 and died in 1939; Emily Edith was born in 1871 and married James Dynon in 1892 and died August 9, 1906 and Esther was born November 9, 1875 and died ten days later. Eliza was forty-two at this time and not surprisingly, Esther was her last child. Given the times, losing two children out of eight was better than many experienced and perhaps better than if they had remained in England.
They had left behind a London of struggle, filth and poverty. Between 1800 and 1850 London’s population doubled to 2.6 million. It was a city knee-deep in manure from thousands of horse-drawn vehicles; where the sky was thick with coal smoke from chimneys and where raw sewage emptied into the streets – a recipe for disease which was ever-constant and for the sort of terrible cholera epidemics which killed thousands in 1833 and hundreds in 1854. Almost half of the funerals in London were for children under ten and half of all poor children born in London died before the age of one. Most of it was caused not by a lack of modern medicine but by a lack of adequate nutrition and sanitation. Cleanliness is next to godliness they said, whilst living in unimaginable filth.
The church yards were filled to over-flowing with bodies buried on top of each other; workhouses were full and crime was endemic. Isaac Camplin’s father, James was a brick-maker and the family lived in Camden Town, a district of inner London which these days is known for its flea markets.
When the Camplin family arrived in London it is hard to say but James’s father, Thomas, born 1743 and his wife Elizabeth,  whom he married in 1776, were living in London when James was born. My daughter Morgan shares a birthday with Thomas, albeit, some 230 years apart exactly. And she named her second son Thomas which is a nice touch of synchronicity despite the fact that neither she nor I knew anything about the connection until years later.
James later worked as a gardener, when he perhaps did not have the strength for brickmaking, as would Isaac in his last years, and no doubt taught his son the trade. Butchering was also a family skill. My eldest brother Wayne, also became a butcher, not knowing there were links in the family line. Then again, on my father’s side at the same time, there were ‘dog-meat’ and ‘cat meat’ sellers, an adjunct to the butchering trade, so the genes had a double dose.
It is fortunate that Isaac’s family has been well researched by others and has brought forth a wealth of information, thankfully, in the case of the English Camplins at least, not mostly from criminal records, his poor brother William being a tragic exception, which gives insight into his life and times and the sort of family into which he had been born.
My great-great-great-grandfather James Camplin was born circa 1780 and died on September 10, 1849. This is one hundred years and five days before my birth in a country which offers one of the best standards of living in the world. I doubt, if he had looked forward, he would have seen such fortune for some of his descendants.  That is if he had looked forward at all. Hard physical labour and long days, combined with the time-consuming demands of life in a largely non-mechanised world, left little time for reflection, as we still see in the Third World today. Reflection is in very many ways, an indulgence of those who are financially secure and who do not have to chop wood and carry water, and while the London Camplins were in better shape than most, they remained as vulnerable as many given the unpredictability of the times and their social class. Without the security safety nets we see in place in the developed world today, when you fell, you fell into the gutter … or England’s 19th century equivalent, the bleak abyss of the poorhouse. A handful of James’s descendants would suffer such a fate and given the nature of the times, that’s not half bad. Needless to say the poorhouse would feature painfully in my mother’s paternal ancestry.
 Sometime around 1810 James took the plunge and married Mary Ann who was born in 1786 and who died in 1854, the year before Isaac took ship to the Great South Land and became one of South Australia’s earliest colonists. In the 1838 census, James senior is listed as a gardener, living at The Cottage, Camden Street. He must have had some skill as a gardener for the Camplin cottages became known for their gardens and Isaac in later years managed to make a reasonable living out of the profession.
The front garden would have been small but if it gained a reputation, it must have been pretty with scoops and cavalcades of shrubs and flowers; plants like cascading mauve phlox; bright-petalled zinnias; tumbles of pink and white asters; large-leaf, small flowered heliotrope; ageratum – those puffs of purple which always seemed to be in the gardens of grandparents - and of course roses. These would have been roses which possessed both perfume and beauty … my favourite. The 19th century did see the beginning of the enormous growth in hybrid development but I doubt such ‘exotics’ would be found in James Camplin’s gardens. I prefer to think, that he, like I would have no time for the hybrids, many of which were and are valued for their consistency of blossom and shape and are utterly devoid of perfume.  A ‘rose would be a rose’ by any other name but in my book it is not a rose without a smell. Or rather, not one worth having in the garden. Isaac would have been delighted, I am sure, at how well roses grow in South Australia with its Mediterranean climate – cold winters and long, dry, hot summers.
James would have sent his children out into the streets to collect the horse dung. Armed with a brush and shovel and bucket, or a wheelbarrow if they were lucky, the manure would be gathered and then dug into the soil. With horses the only means of transport there would have been no shortage of this ‘garden gold.’ Isaac would no doubt send his children on the same errand in Adelaide.
They would also have helped to collect the seeds for next season's plantings... reaping the harvest of nature's bounty without thinking of buying future food in a packet, even if it were available. Economy was the order of the day. Old jars, tins and paper bags would have been collected and held ready, to receive this precious gift, when the plants were withered of leaf and bountiful of seed. Perhaps some of the seeds were sold, or swapped with neighbours, to add something new to the garden and the table.
The back garden, a plot in a corner of the back yard which also by the middle of the 19th century would hold a privy, bringing to an end the need to queue for public toilets, would have had both flowers and vegetables. One can only think, given the prevalence of disease due to unsanitary conditions, that the lack of a toilet must have been a nightmare. It would have been saucepans, bowls and buckets at the ready for much of the time, given the inability of the ill to drag their way down the street to a public convenience! And then water would have had to be collected from a communal pump in the street to do the necessary cleaning up. It doesn’t bear thinking about!
Pondering plants is much more appealing. James and his family would have planted things which would provide as much protein as possible and which would grow easily in the climate. Potatoes, beans, tomatoes, broccoli, cucumbers, corn, lettuce, kale and cabbages were likely to be thrusting with leafy abundance in the back garden. It’s a reasonable leap to assume that the ‘success’ of James’s garden, for which he was known in Camden, also contributed to the ‘success’ of his child-raising, in that, comparatively, so few died in childhood. A nourishing diet is the foundation of good health and never more so than in-utero. One presumes the same factor may have applied to Isaac and Eliza’s children where the sons, despite heavy drinking, lived reasonably long lives.
James and Mary Ann’s first child James was born in 1812 but must have died before he was five because another James appears. William was born two years later on January 21, 1814. He died in 1845. In the 1834 census he is listed as a ‘cat’s meat seller’ living at 6 Archer Street, Camden; in 1841 he is a Cabman, living at The Cottage with his parents; in 1843 he is a marine store dealer and had moved to Bermondsey.
Sellers of meat for dogs and cats were common in 19th century London and made a good living. No doubt cats were popular in order to keep down rats and mice and dogs were useful for security with some breeds also excellent rat-catchers. The ‘sellers’ would purchase horsemeat from the knacker yards and prepare it in small portions for sale to households.
Charles was born on November 17, 1815 and died in 1862 having worked mostly as a labourer and lastly as a Journeyman - which was usually a travelling tailor, cobbler or carpenter - in Marylebone, Camden and Clerkenwell. The second James was born on October 12, 1817 and died in 1866 having worked as a labourer, horse dealer and general dealer in Camden and St. Pancras. Ebenezer was born on February 14, 1820 and died in 1890 having worked as a general dealer and butcher in St. Pancras and Camden. In the same year that James saw his fourth son born, he lost his father.
Isaac, my mother’s maternal great-grandfather, was born on June 9, 1822. He is listed in the 1851 English census as a butcher living with his brother Ebenezer, at 23 Upper Cambridge Street, Camden. In the 1854 census, the year before he and Eliza emigrated, he is working as a gardener and living in Dean Street, Soho which is close to where Eliza was working as a domestic servant.
There were four more children born after Isaac. Dinah born April 29, 1824 died in 1887; George born August 9, 1826 died in 1865 having worked as a butcher, horse dealer, marine goods dealer and general dealer in Marylebone; Henry born September 29, 1829 died in 1907 having worked as a Professor of Dog Meat, a Cat’s meat dealer, a Master Butcher, a Purveyor of Horse meat, a Pig Dealer living first at 5 Camplin Cottages and then in St. Pancras and Middlesex before being recorded in the 1901 census as living on his own means in Paddington and Frederick, born on November 30, 1834 died in 1902 after working in 1851 as a Dealer of Brushes in Marylebone, then a Cat’s Meat Seller, Dealer in Horse Flesh in St. Pancras, a butcher in Islington, then a stoker at the Islington Workhouse. He is also shown in 1891 as a patient at the Islington Workhouse but recovered and went back to work as a stoker at the Islington Workhouse Gas Works until his death.
The fact that the Camplins had their own cottages indicates the family did reasonably well and with Henry able to retire and live on his own means it looks like he did better than any of them. He clearly had a gift for the gab labelling himself a Professor of Dog’s Meat and Purveyor of Horse meat! Poor old Isaac seems a much less colourful character… unless he was drunk, when he was too colourful for his own or anyone else’s good.
But they did all seem to be hard workers and perhaps the fact that ten of James and Mary-Ann’s children survived childhood and the fact that nine of them were boys, meant that the Camplin family had plenty of ‘hands’ to put to the task of bringing in money. And because the Camplins lived in better conditions than the average, the survival rate of their children would have been increased.
 Many homes were ‘positively unwholesome, from the want of drainage and ventilation, and exposure to the weather,’ costing three to six shilling for a single room which compelled parents and children to sleep six, eight or even ten to one room. The surprising thing is that people had so many children in such conditions. But then that also applies to much of the Third World even today.  It doesn’t take much to make a child and sex may have been one of the few pleasures and releases, no matter how brief and furtive the act itself.
Victorian London was a dangerous place on so many counts and most of it was sourced in lack of sanitation and nutrition.  The unsanitary conditions meant rats were a common threat, not just as carriers of disease, an as yet unknown threat, but to the safety of babies and small children who could awaken screaming after having fingers and toes gnawed while sleeping. In normal circumstances the rats would be content with the pantry and its food but no doubt, when times were tough and there was little to be found, they would resort to eating what they could, including their own young and the vulnerable extremities of any available and helpless small child.
 Rat catching was a regular profession amongst the poor in 19th century London and even Queen Victoria had her own rat-catcher, the heroic Mr Jack Black, who, it seems, chose to dine as often as not on his catch! They were, he said, ‘moist as rabbits and quite as nice.’
Needless to say, while lack of sanitation was not the issue, my father spent more than one night sitting in wait, his rifle at the ready, for rats to appear, when I was a baby. I remember shuddering every time I was told the story. The small cottage in George Street, Parkside, down the road from where my mother and grandmother grew up, was close to a creek and no doubt they were water rats, but rats all the same and liable to chew a helpless infant if they could. Or perhaps I had inherited a cellular memory of something far worse.
But, the Camplins were not the poorest of the poor and having ownership of a number of cottages to house the various families, they were in fact, by local standards ‘pretty well off.’ Their cottages were situated between Great Camden Street and Little Camden Street and were held freehold. Mary Camplin’s Will, dated September 1853, states:
‘that my body be laid in the same grave as my poor departed husband ……that all my property, the cottages in Great Camden and Little Camden Streets be divided equally amongst my children, with Mary, my grand-daughter having an equal share with my children.’


Photo: Isaac Camplin c.1890.

By 1760, twenty years before James was born, this area was described as being a mix of cultivated fields and open drains and dust heaps.  It was about this time that the population of London began to explode. As did crime with highway robbery a risk that people took when travelling from the city to their homes in the newly developing suburbs.
For the working class London was a place of possibility. Camden and Somers Town were both experiencing major building booms, partly driven by the need for homes for refugees from the French Revolution, but also by the growth of London as the world’s most powerful city. Brick-makers were in high demand which was fortunate for James, who worked at the trade in the early years.



CHAPTER TWO
Isaac was born into a time of change, both for the world in general and London in particular. His was not the only cry of protest at where he found himself.  He was a Gemini with his moon in Aquarius, and probably with Cancer Rising. He would have been restless with an inquiring mind and drawn toward the unusual. In many ways his nature reflected that of the times. And, with a Twelfth House Sun and Eighth House Moon he would have had more than a few demons snapping at his inner heels.
There were calls for reform throughout every aspect of English life from the church, parliament, judiciary, prison systems, education, medicine, architecture, town planning and manners and customs. It seemed everything was to be condemned for being outmoded and inefficient. The world wanted to be other than what it was and probably, so did Isaac.
The old order was under strain and nowhere more than London which had seen its population increase from less than a million at the turn of the century to more than one and a half million. Isaac’s parents, James and Mary would have been a part of this great surge of humanity toward the lure of London and its ‘streets paved’ with metaphoric gold.
About half of the population of ‘poor’ London was literate but they still left little behind. In tracing their stories and fleshing out the substance of their lives there is little beyond the general to be found – unless of course they were particularly unfortunate or involved in crime. Victorian criminal records are very informative, both for the criminal and the victim, and, as we see with Isaac and his sons, offer small ‘windows’ onto the past.
Where Isaac’s parents came from is unknown but they must have arrived in London by 1812, the same year that Napoleon retreated from Moscow, for the christening of their first child James was recorded in St. Pancras. Given that another James was born in 1817 it is clear that this child did not survive beyond the age of five. The first son was generally named after the father and if he did not survive, as so many did not, the name would be handed on to the next son to be born. It was not a given but it was common.
For the working classes and the poor the easiest way to be ‘remembered’ across the centuries is through official records. We probably know more about convicts and criminals than those who lived good ‘Christian’ lives. Most of the information which can be found in newspapers is also generally of this ilk – for once one can be grateful to have ancestors who ‘broke the law’ although, as an Australian, where convict ancestry is now honoured, it is perhaps less of an issue. If nothing else, the insight provided by such records is invaluable and unexpected.
James was a brick-maker and given that his son Ebenezer is recorded in the 1861 census as being born at King’s Cross in 1820, it looks like the family was growing up in the heart of the noxious brick kilns of Battle Bridge.
 PHOTO: The Brickfields where the James Camplin Senior worked.
London bricks are made of clay - a type of soil for which the town is famous - and are characteristically yellow in colour. In April the clay was tempered with water and kneaded with bare feet, or in pug mills driven by horses, to soften it. Children were often employed to barrow the clay to the moulding benches where wooden frames or moulds were set up. Each mould was damped with water and a lump of rolled clay was thrown in hard to fill it. Excess clay was then trimmed off the edges of the mould with a wire bow and smoothed with a ‘strike’, a stick moistened with water. It was laborious physical labour.
The bricks were turned out and then left for a day to dry a little, before the moulder's boy could stack them ready for hardening off. They had to be thoroughly dried out, for a period of three to six weeks according to the weather, before they could be fired. A ‘bearer-off’ was employed to lift the bricks from the stack, between pallet boards, and set them to dry in rows on timber platforms in open-sided sheds. The bricks were moved and turned as they dried, so the process was a labour-intensive one.
To harden the bricks sufficiently for building purposes they had to be fired at a temperature of 1742-2102 degrees Fahrenheit - depending on the final colour required. Skill was needed in stacking the bricks correctly in the kiln (wood or coal fired) for the heat and gases to circulate. The firing process itself could take a further two to six weeks. Brickmaking appears to have been a seasonal job with most work stopping in the Autumn until the Spring, because of the risk of frost damaging the bricks as they dried.
No doubt this accounts for James Snr being multi-skilled and able to turn his hand to more than one trade. Perhaps his children also helped with the lighter work demanded by the brickmaking business.
Childhood for the poor was as brief as it remains today in the Third World. As soon as a child could work, they did. And in fact, as the industrial revolution took hold, children were exploited as fodder for the mills and factories. There is no doubt that Isaac’s children, growing up in Australia, would have had more time to play and to be children. Unfortunately they also had more time for less honourable activities but at least they were not hunched at a bench in noisy, filthy factories or dropped down soot-caked chimneys.
But despite the smoke and stench of the tile and brick kilns the area surrounding it was still a place of green fields and virtually rural. Isaac as a little boy would have sat no doubt by the side of the river Fleet and watched men and boys fishing and perhaps even swimming although swimming was not a common skill to be found in the English, at least, not in the way it would be found in Isaac’s Australian descendants.
Development was at a cracking pace and cottages and small workshops would spring up, as if in an instant, to meet the needs of the middle class communities which were building and growing up around London. There would have been cows to milk, pigs to eat, chickens and ducks for eggs and for dinner and donkeys to carry goods to and from markets.
The Regent’s Canal was a watery highway running around the top of Regent’s Park before skirting to the north of Camden Town and drifting down past what would become Agar Town to Islington. Horse-drawn barges and steamboats would traverse locks and towpaths as party of the marriage between industrial and rural which typified the part of London where Isaac grew up.
 As a boy Isaac may have been aware of the world beyond Camden or he may not. During the reign of William IV, 1830-1837 there was great unrest as the middle classes, empowered and energised, sought to take power from the church and the aristocracy. The nouveau riche who had dragged themselves up on the boots of the industrial revolution and the tradesman and bureaucrats who were carried along with them to maintain the ‘new world order’ were changing the face of England and ensuring rights for themselves; with little thought for the rights of the poor who would have to wait more than a century to see justice.
I can only wonder if a desire to free himself from the choke of England’s class system played a part in Isaac’s decision to emigrate with his new wife.  There was, from what I can see an independence of spirit in many of his children and given what appears to be a ‘vulnerability’ on the part of Eliza, which ultimately leads her to take her own life, it is easy to presume that this was something which came from Isaac. Even looking at the stories of some of his siblings gives promise to this assumption. Although assumption is always a perilous course.
But even as life would have changed for Isaac’s father and his growing children, it would not bring the rights for which they perhaps hoped. The 1832 Act gave the vote to just one-seventh of the adult male population and the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 would see all those who sought relief from their parish, locked away in institutions, or Workhouses – establishments which were in essence prisons for the poor and places of punishment as much as assistance.
The lot of the lowly in what was then the richest nation on earth was a source of shame for any English man or woman of conscience. Not that there were many given that in the times, poverty was seen as a moral failing and the result of laziness and a lack of responsibility.
It is interesting that this view of poverty being self-inflicted and some sort of moral failing should be retained in only one developed nation in this day and age – the United States. Perhaps the egalitarian nature of Australia and its diluted religiosity suited Isaac even more than he might have hoped. There is no doubt that despite the problems he faced and the challenges he created, that his descendants went on to live far better lives.
The power of the church in 19th century England was great and yet it was also a time of innovation and exploration with various sects springing up, led by charismatic men and sometimes women, who promised great rewards in the hereafter for those who survived the terrible struggles of daily life. It was more than religion, it was entertainment. One of the most popular was the Catholic Apostolic Church which encouraged its followers to speak in tongues and to make the divine manifest in any way they chose. In many ways it was church as entertainment and the latter, like laughter, was a quality which enabled people to survive the drag and drudge of their lives.
The man behind it was Edward Irving, a Scotsman with a charismatic presence and a gift for the theatrical. He had been excommunicated which made him even more interesting and appealing to those who sought to protest, safely, against society. He established his breakaway group in an old artist’s studio in Newman Street, just a stone’s throw away from where the Camplins lived.
Word got around fast and the Camplins were no exception. Perhaps it is also a sign that they were ‘open’ to the unconventional because in 1835 when Isaac was nearly thirteen, his brothers and sister, William, Charles, James Jnr., Ebenezer, Dinah, Henry and Frederick were all baptised into the Catholic Apostolic Church. William was married by now and his three month old daughter Mary Ann was baptised with him. His wife however was absent and may well have been dead – or dissenting. Although given that Mary Ann is taken in by her grandparents ten years later when her father dies, it’s a good bet that her mother was dead and not standing her ground against the family baptism.
Isaac is actually not around for the mass baptism and he would be baptised in October of the following year. The disappearance of Isaac is interesting. Perhaps he was away working. Perhaps he was away drinking. Perhaps it was both. Given the closeness of the family, or the apparent closeness revealed by their proximity in housing and their frequent sharing of space, it says something profound that for a time Isaac ‘disappeared.’ One wonders, given that none of his family were present as witnesses at his marriage, and usually there would be a witness from each side, if he even told them he was marrying and leaving England forever.
But just as Isaac’s life would be irrevocably changed so too was life in London when the railway line was pushed through Camden Town and the green peace of Regent’s park, toward Euston Station in 1836. Not only that, England officially entered what would become known as the Victorian era when the young seventeen-year-old Victoria became Queen. There was a sense of order in the air and Victoria, with the help of her ever-efficient German consort Albert, would prove to be one of the most ordered of monarchs. This was also the year which saw the start of central registration for all births, marriages and deaths.
Within four years the authorities would seek even greater ‘control’ over the population with the introduction of a detailed Census of the British Isles. The British love of order, detail and structure would create a wealth of knowledge for scavengers in the future – both personal and professional. On a personal note, the records revealed various members of the Camplin family spreading out in Camden Town. Three more of Isaac’s brothers, James Jnr. Charles and Ebenezer married between 1837 and 1841 and started families.
In the late 1830’s James and Ebenezer are registered as butchers. Charles is recorded as a labourer, like his father in records of May 1839 but his father-in-law was a bricklayer and had no doubt met James Snr. through the trade. When Ebenezer married he put his father down as a brick-maker. No doubt James Snr alternated between both trades depending upon how much work was available.
At the time of the family baptisms, the Camplins were living at ‘The Cottage’, Great Camden Street, except son William, who lived close by at 6 Archer Street with his little daughter. It seems likely that James Snr built The Cottage and subsequently others. By 1851, two years after his death, there were several, known as Camplin Cottages, and at her death in 1854 Mary left ‘the Cottages in Camden Street and Little Camden Street’ to her children and her granddaughter Mary Ann.
When Census night came around on June 6, 1841 Ebenezer was staying with brother James and his wife and baby son William, in Camden Street. Although they had worked previously as butchers, which had also been brother William's trade, they both described themselves in the Census as general dealers. The word general is the important one here because these dealers bought and sold anything and everything and they did so from a barrow wheeled through the streets or from a shop, crammed to the gunnels with second-hand goods. For good reason, such shops were common in the poorer areas and known as marine stores – perhaps because sailors heading off to sea and when returning, would always have something to sell. An advertisement in November 1830 in The Times reveals a Camplin in the business: ‘Sales by Auction: mahogany and other bedsteads, furniture, china, glass, etc. Catalogue on the premises and at Mr Camplin's, 170 Bishopsgate Street.’
While the particular Camplin selling by auction is not known, records do show that Ebenezer’s son, Ebenezer Jnr was born in Bishopsgate Street in 1842. This is revealed in the 1861 census when a Charles Druitt, another general dealer was living with them.  They may well have been in business together or Druitt was a colleague who happened to be passing through and was given lodging for the night. The census recorded who was in the house on the date in question, not who lived there permanently.
Further along the street, in The Cottage, were James Snr, then a gardener, his wife Mary, with William (27), a cabman - and Mary Ann (6) - and the rest of their brood Dinah (17) George (14) Henry (12) and Frederick (6). Isaac, now 19, was again elsewhere. Was he perhaps something of an outsider in the family? Or did he live with a relative perhaps? There is an itinerant quality to Isaac’s life.
Many working people changed jobs a number of times throughout their lives, depending on the availability of work, or their success or lack of it in any particular occupation. Age, illness, or incapacity, could also bring about changes. Sometimes they hired themselves out for work by the day, in which case they were called journeymen; from the French ‘jour’ for day, meaning they were hired by the day.  What we would call casual labour.
 If he was hired as a journeyman, he may have stayed in the household where he happened to be working. He did not learn to read or write during his childhood, and as the fifth son he may have been all too easily overlooked. But once again Isaac has disappeared. If he is in a distant county it would be almost impossible to trace his path. All we can say is that at the time he was not with his family and he was not in trouble.
In 1844 Dinah married William Kilpen, a gardener, in Clerkenwell and again, perhaps a contact made through the work James Snr did as a gardener or even Isaac himself.  With so many sons, there is no doubt that the arrival of a daughter would have been a boon to Mary Ann Camplin, although she did have her grand-daughter and namesake to help her as well.  But with all those sons there is no doubt that the birth of Dinah would have been a time of rejoicing and her marriage and moving out, a time of mourning.
The outer suburbs of North London were gracious and replete with parks and public areas. Although James and his children had only the most basic amenities, they were only a short distance from the delights of Regent's Park and its mansions. This park had been planned for the Prince Regent by the great architect John Nash, in a bid to protect the area from encroachment by the little houses spreading inexorably towards it.
Gardening was not the preserve of the wealthy.  Perhaps it was a testament to James' (and William Kilpen's) gardening skills, that at the time of old James's death in 1849 The Cottage was one of several known as ‘Garden Cottages’. In that same year George, twenty-two was married. He too started off as a butcher, like his brothers. There was plenty of livestock about since there were still extensive areas of fields and common land only a short distance away. Cows and sheep being driven through the streets to market were a common sight.
The main live meat market was right in the city at Smithfield (once the Smoothe Field). In the 1820s some one and a half million sheep, 150,000 cattle and 60,000 pigs were driven to Smithfield every year to be sold and slaughtered. These days Smithfield is trendy and boasts a large number of excellent restaurants.
The animals came from all over the country with drovers walking them 15-20 miles a day. It was a skilled job to manoeuvre a herd of up to 1000 beasts across the country and many came from as far away as the Scottish Highlands. An ox could lose up to 20lbs in weight for every 100 miles it walked, and cattle driven down from the north were rested in pastures along the route to fatten up.
The last stopping place was the meadows of Islington before the final drive, for which the London drovers took over, down St John Street and into market. After sale, a butcher's drover would drive a beast to its place of slaughter. On market days the noise and smell was indescribable. Thousands of cattle jammed the narrow streets, the drovers shouted and cursed, the cattle bellowed and panicked (often encouraged by pranksters who did their best to add to the chaos). Traffic accidents of one kind and another were frequent and the animals were whipped and goaded with a cruelty that would be counted as criminal today.
But this was a world where life was cruel to human beings and that no doubt made them less conscious of cruelty to animals. Such attitudes are still common in the Third World where people live lives not dissimilar to the poor in Victorian times.
Once they had been sold for slaughter, conditions became worse than ever, with no regard whatsoever for the welfare of the animals to be butchered for meat, and still less if they were destined for the knacker’s yard. The slaughter itself frequently took place in the cellars or back yards of houses with no particular adaptation for the trade. People passing the courts or alleys could easily find themselves witnessing a killing. This was one of the many areas where there were calls for change, and legislation began to modify the treatment of animals, together with a slow change in the perception of cruel behaviour - which extended to what was considered acceptable in the treatment of women and children.
To put it into context it was not so long since the last female felon had been burned – 1790’s and only decades since Britain abolished the slave trade. Hanging, drawing and quartering had been common punishments until 1814 and heads were still being chopped off until 1820. And all of it was public spectacle and given the popularity, what amounted to public entertainment.
Isaac could not read and may have known little or nothing about such world-changing events. He may have cared even less. Life, at the bottom of England’s class system, even if better than most, was always a struggle. The days were long and the labour hard and when the sun went down most people went to bed. Only to rise at dawn and begin all over again.
Life was may not have been a matter of ‘tooth and claw’ but it was raw. Rudimentary drainage and polluted water supplies were part and parcel of life. As population numbers rose and houses were built, effluent flowed through streets and into streams and rivers which overflowed creating toxic, stinking pools. Where sewers were built they were often random and pretty much everything went into the Thames and its tributaries, including the Fleet. By the middle of the century the grand old Thames was well described as a Stygian Lake. All of this had been made worse because the nightsoil trade had been largely destroyed by the importation of guano from South America in 1847.  The ‘soil of the night’, the waste, had been a valuable fertilizer, too valuable to be left lying around or washed into rivers and streams. But no more.
This meant that the sewage produced by some 2.5million Londoners had no use and was tossed into the street as often as not, to go where it would – which was into the water which people drank, there being at the time, no comprehension of bacteria or disease sourced in filthy water. In 1848-1849 there was a nationwide cholera epidemic in which 60,000 people died. Old James was one of them. After suffering from ‘Diarrhoea 9 days’, he died of ‘Cholera Spasmodisa - 18 hours - Certified’. A slow and miserable death for anyone, and one which his wife and family must have watched.
 Despite growing evidence, the connection between clean drinking water and health was denied by many reformers. The theory of airborne infection still prevailed, with high-profile figures, including Florence Nightingale believing that all diseases came from the atmosphere.  They were a product of their times and change is often slow when the first requirement is a changing of minds.
 It is a reminder that however ‘primitive’ things may have been in the steadily growing city of Adelaide, it would never have been as bad as the crush and spread of humanity produced in the city of London. More to the point, for most of the time, even in winter the skies would be blue and the sun would shine… it must have been a shock after the drizzled grey of English skies.
 Photo: Aborigines were hit hard by European diseases against which they had no resistance.
It was not that life in the colonies was free of such diseases nor of epidemics although there is no doubt there were less of them. And often it was the indigenous Aborigines who fell by the hundreds at the feet of European diseases. In 1789 a smallpox epidemic had reached South Australia from Port Jackson, New South Wales, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Aborigines. A second smallpox epidemic arrived in 1829 and lasted for more than a year. In 1836 there were just over 500 colonists and 12,000 Aborigines – within a few years the latter number would be halved. By the time of Isaac and Eliza’s arrival there would be 85,000 colonists… excluding Aborigines. By 1876 there would be 6,000 Aborigines living in South Australia. Across Australia the biggest killers were smallpox and syphilis. As the latter is a sexually transmitted disease it is obvious that ‘relations’ between many of the early settlers and the local people were close.
In 1866 typhoid would kill 209 settlers and the following year 240 would die of diphtheria. Such outbreaks hit indigenous communities even more savagely because they had no resistance to such foreign diseases. But cholera, thankfully, was rarer than in London and did not hit with such deadly force when it did appear. Although typhoid continued to kill around 140 a year until the early 20th century, including a few ancestors on my father’s side.
James's death was registered by his daughter-in-law Elizabeth (either Elizabeth Emma nee Price, wife of Charles, or Elizabeth nee Blagdon, wife of James). Her home was just round the corner in Caroline Street.
By the time the 1851 Census came around, widowed Mary is being supported by her son Henry, who is living with her and her granddaughter Mary Ann at 5 Camplin (formerly Garden) Cottages, Camden Street. Henry either had ‘tickets on himself’ as they would have said at the time, or a great sense of humour describing himself as a Professor of Dog’s Meat to indicate his profession. He probably had a good sense of humour because he went on to be one of the most successful Camplins and hubris is not generally a good ingredient in the recipe for success.
He and another of Isaac’s brothers did rather well in their chosen professions, one ending his life as a man of reasonable means. The common thread between all of the Camplin’s seems to be a capacity for innovation and hard work – they seemed ready to turn their hand to anything and to work consistently and to work hard. This is something which has been evident in the family throughout all of the generations and along with common sense, must be one of the most valuable ‘traits’ a family can inherit.
Not that it guarantees success as Isaac’s poor brother William was to learn before his untimely death. William had started out as a ‘seller of cat’s meat’ in that fine Camplin family tradition, in the 1830’s.  But, unlike the Professor of Dog’s Meat, life did not bring rewards for poor William, whose story, while sad and involving the law, provides one of the most detailed insights into Camplin life.

PHOTO: cat’s meat dealer circa 1850.
William, who had been born on January 21, 1814 steps onto the pages of notoriety in January of 1834 when a newspaper report in The Times links him with ‘an extraordinary sensation.’ William, a marine store dealer and cats' meat seller, in the great Camplin tradition, was arrested, and charged at Kentish Town station-house with assaulting two policemen. This was remarkable to those who knew him since they considered him to be ‘of the most mild and inoffensive disposition’. And they knew him well, since he had been selling cats' meat in Camden Town ‘for many years’.
Witnesses stated that the policemen had been completely drunk and had treated William with great brutality. This seems to have been quite true since the policemen were so inebriated that they were not in a fit state to appear at the police station on the evening when William was charged, and one of them was still too ‘ill’ to attend court the next morning.
Mysteriously, William was said to be ‘a complete cripple in the hands’ and I am wondering if he may have suffered from rheumatoid arthritis as my mother did – a disease which twisted and savaged her body for the last half of her life. It is a disease which is believed, if one approaches illness symbolically as I do, to be sourced in repressed rage … a clear factor in my mother’s life and perhaps that of her great-grandfather’s brother. The ‘mild and inoffensive disposition’ was a part of my mother’s character as it was with William, and with her it definitely hid deeper and more powerful emotions, including rage. A rage, which unlike her grandmother Sarah, would be inflicted within.  It is worthy of note that William is selling from a barrow which would be an easier task than preparing the goods for sale.
Perhaps his brothers provided him with things to sell and his hands were functional enough to wheel the barrow and conduct sales. Rheumatoid arthritis also develops slowly, in fits and starts and as is the way with all disease, affects people differently. William died relatively young, barely into his thirties, and the disease may not have had a chance to affect much more than his hands, although it would be his hands, exposed to the vicious English winters as he plied his trade outdoors, which would have suffered the most. By the time my mother died, after more than forty years of the disease, her fingers were no more than floppy, soft pads.
But clearly William had some capacity to defend himself and his dog, which the policemen were said to have kicked. The dog no doubt defending its master. The policemen had originally objected to the dog standing beside William's barrow in the street, and one of them had knocked off William's hat.  From the sound of it the police took poor William in hand and beat him up. One of the policemen hit William ‘a tremendous blow with his fist, while two other constables held him so that he had no means of defending himself’. However, William ‘on rising, attempted to return the blow’. A crowd had gathered and tried to rescue the prisoner - they ‘kicked the officers about in all directions’. ‘The police, and also the prisoner, were much bruised’. William was said by a witness to be sober, but ‘violent in his attempts to get away. He had cause to be so as the police used him so very cruelly’.
What is clear is that William had many supporters and his trial provided as much entertainment as process of law. William's hearing lasted several days and the courtroom was thronged with spectators of all classes. Several gentlemen stepped forward to offer bail for William when he was released overnight. Three magistrates and a jury were involved in hearing the case, which was eventually dismissed with fines and cautions for all concerned.
The fact that William had several offers of help to pay his bail is a sign that he was well regarded and an amiable sort of person. This trait seems also to have been a part of Isaac’s son, Ebenezer, who, despite being a serial law-breaker, appears to have been an engaging character. So far it is Isaac who looks to be a more sullen, sorrowful sort. There is a somewhat startled look to Isaac in the photograph taken in his old age, as if he were permanently surprised. He may just have been permanently inebriated however.
 PHOTO: A cell in Newgate prison.
But life had even greater trials in store for William. Having apparently worked as a cabman for a while (1841) and then, perhaps to get a break from the increasingly smog-ridden air of Camden Town, he moved south of the river to Bermondsey where, in 1843, he is listed as the proprietor of a marine store (or junk shop) at 17 Star Court, Grange Road.
On December 31, 1844, clearly planning to bring the New Year in with style, he visited a brothel. He had been drinking heavily and so had the very young lady, Jane Matthews, who left the brothel with him. She was only thirteen and after she had passed out dead drunk, William had his way with her. He was subsequently indicted for rape, though it was not clear who brought the prosecution. He was tried by jury, convicted, and on March 3, 1845 sentenced to Transportation for Life. His barrister appealed against the sentence and the appeal was heard in the Central Criminal Court on March 7, 1845. Once again, it is the criminal records which tell us more than we would otherwise know about our ancestors.
This became a test case and is still used as an important precedent in English Law (Regina v. Camplin, 1 Den 89 - i.e. cited as a precedent by Lord Denning in 1989). William's barrister appealed on the grounds that he could not be guilty of rape because he did not use force and Ms Matthews did not object; not surprisingly given that she was unconscious at the time. It was not an argument which swayed the judges and on June 28 they upheld the sentence
At this point in time being charged with raping an unconscious prostitute, who was little more than a child, but who probably had a year or two in the trade ‘under her belt’,  is the most colourful story to come out of the Camplin family. It fits with the sense that they were opportunists… taking advantage of any situation as and when they could. However, I doubt that this would be an unusual trait for Londoners living at the time… or perhaps even now. And of course William was drunk… one of the strongest Camplin traits by the look of it, although interestingly not one which was passed down to my grandmother, Hilda. Although I do wonder if her mother Sarah’s ‘moments of rage’ were the result of her taste for a regular ‘tipple.’ Anger seemed to walk hand-in-hand with alcohol for the Camplins as it does with so many people.
Since the March hearing, William had been living in Newgate Gaol next door to the Central Criminal Court in an area known for two public houses where body-snatchers or ‘resurrection men’ congregated to drink and plan the next step in their lucrative trade, of supplying bodies to the medical schools for dissection. Not that they would have been interested in William – healthy corpses being what was required and William, admitted to the infirmary pretty much immediately, was a very, very sick young man.
His condition was not improved by the long wait for the judges' decision. Meanwhile, his friends were campaigning on his behalf and when the verdict was upheld they mounted a petition with numerous signatures from Camden Town and from Bermondsey. Again this indicates that Isaac’s brother was well regarded and I would even say, much loved. It says a lot about a man who has been accused of raping a drunk, child prostitute that despite the severe and somewhat ludicrous nature of his crime, he has a band of friends who are prepared to help him. You can’t help but like William although I can’t say I feel the same about my direct ancestor, Isaac. Perhaps in time I will. Not that those who were trying to save William from prison could save him from what really threatened him.
The Petition explained the circumstances under which the offence was committed. William pleaded that he never meant to rape the young lady, who after all came from a brothel. The reason he did not notice that she was very young (and unconscious) was that he too was drunk at the time. He asked for his poor health to be taken into consideration and that the sentence at least be deferred until he could get together further mitigating facts. He signed the Petition with a wavering hand.
Medical reports stated that William was suffering from advanced disease of the lungs and dropsy. He was not given any hope of recovery. On July 17, the original judge in the case recommended reduction of the sentence to Transportation for 10 years. Everyone concerned must have known that it was extremely unlikely that this sentence would be carried out given that he could not have had long to live. Nevertheless, William's many friends mounted a third appeal. The Petitioners stated that William had previously been of unimpeachable character and honesty and they suggested that he had been the victim of a diabolical plot for the purposes of extorting money and for revenge in some trifling business dispute.  There is a touch of the dramatic about the Camplins given their religious persuasions and professional descriptions which is also revealed here in this ‘explanation’ for William’s ‘crime.’
The taste for drama certainly filtered down through the familial cellular inheritance… my mother had a finely tuned sense of the dramatic and so did Isaac’s daughter, Sarah, from what I can gather. The Camplin’s were a colourful lot from what we can see in these ‘cameos’ which have come down to us. Eliza Ash on the other hand looks to be a much duller sort although perhaps she and Isaac were suited perfectly and he really was the ‘black’ or rather, the ‘grey’ sheep of the family. Although Eliza’s end was certainly ‘colourful’ or at least, far from dull.
 Not surprisingly, William's physical and mental health had deteriorated under the shock of the trial and imprisonment and he was now clearly dying. Among the approximately one hundred signatures on William's last petition were those of Jane Matthews herself, her mother and her aunt..........Would this last Petition have secured a Pardon for William? He died in Newgate Infirmary on 16 September 1845, aged 33, finding peace at last.
Poor William. It says a lot for him however that the child he ‘abused’ should seek to save him. Interesting that she does have a mother and an aunt and yet she is a prostitute. It was probably the family business. If she was lucky her mother or aunt would have been the pimp. For all the agonising about sexual abuse these days it is easy to find by trawling through history that the young are far better protected today than they ever were.
As family researcher, Jill Barrett records, many of the papers in the case are held in the Public Record Office at Kew in HO18/156 - a bundle of original documents of which William's are no.19. ‘These documents include a statement signed by his mother, no doubt demanded by the prison authorities, saying, ‘I have seen [my son] a great many times during his illness I was with him when he died -- He did not complain of any want of attention I am quite satisfied with his treatment.
The surgeon Gillen McMurdo, and George Wright Deputy Governor of Newgate, also made brief statements. The surgeon's statement says that William complained of rheumatism, though what killed him was advanced disease of the lungs. It also includes these poignant words, ‘[The prisoner] had been aware of his state some time I told him he would not recover and he always thanked me for my attention.’ George Wright's statement is equally sad, ‘....I believe the Sheriffs [prison officers] have applied for a full pardon to enable him to die at home The result I don't know, but in fact he could not have been removed anywhere.’
Now this is interesting. William complains of rheumatism so my earlier, intuitive assumption may be right. His ‘disease of the lungs’ may have been tuberculosis … the all too deadly, and almost fashionable disease of the times. Not that there is any sort of family record of this disease for the Camplins and it did tend to be something which had a genetic link. And we know the conditions of housing were better for the Camplins than most. Perhaps William had been born with a weakness of the lungs… possibly exacerbated by asthma. The choking smog of London would have been a death sentence. Perhaps if William had been transported he would have lived longer. But it was not to be and remains a salutary reminder that sometimes the ‘best’ of things bring the ‘worst’ results. He was clearly less robust than the other Camplins and paid the price by dying young.
With William’s death ten-year-old Mary Ann became an orphan. She may well have been living with her grandmother for some years but from this point on, she was a permanent member of the household. Life went on in ways both predictable and unpredictable.
As William died, London was being born again with the powerful rise of the railways and with it, the rapid expansion of suburbia and its commuter class. Where houses rose, fields were lost and even parts of the Regent’s canal were filled in and built over in the name of progress. With the railways and their appetite for coal came billowing clouds of black, sooty smog. William even if he had lived, would have been a chronic invalid given the state of his lungs. And he would not have been alone.

PHOTO: The photographer James H. Lee was living in Marylebone in 1881, in Holloway Road in 1891, and in East Ham in 1901. This photograph was probably taken in the late 1880s perhaps in 1887 for Queen Victoria’s coronation. IN THE FRONT: the two most successful of the Camplin brothers: Ebenezer (right) and Henry (left). Ebenezer's estate amounted to One thousand and three pounds, ten shillings… a goodly sum in those days. The young men in the background are  probably Henry's four sons: Henry, Robert, George and William, and Ebenezer's son Charles. He is most likely to be the one leaning affectionately on his father's  shoulder.
During the 1850s Isaac's brothers and sisters generally remained in Camden Town with their families. Isaac's third brother, James, was a horse-dealer in Grove Street in 1851 (with his wife and his son William). Henry, with his tendency toward either hubris or humour, was living with and supporting his widowed mother in one of the Camden Street cottages. He was then working as a labourer, and given the amount of building going on in nearby suburbs like Agar Town, it was probably a more profitable trade than selling dog meat. In that year he married Elizabeth Paine of Little Camden Street, the daughter of a shoemaker and perhaps the first contact for Isaac and his future wife – Eliza, the daughter of a shoemaker. Ebenezer and his wife Louisa were their witnesses. Ebenezer and Louisa, after a brief time in Agar Town, were back in Little Camden Street by 1861.
Frederick and his wife Jane had a daughter at 5 Garden Cottages (mother Mary's old house) in 1859. George seems to have moved west into Marylebone (St John's Wood) just north of Regent's Park. In 1851 Charles was in Agar Town working as a general labourer. 
The Camplins were establishing themselves sensibly and solidly and making their way in the world.  In the family photograph, the two elder Camplins do look very pleased with themselves as no doubt they had every right to be. Their achievements may not be memorable by modern standards but in the world in which they lived they were doing well and had every reason to be proud of the fact.
I don’t have a photograph of Eliza but there is a sense that she is something of an outsider. Although given that great-grandmother Sarah looks nothing like Isaac I am assuming that she takes after her mother.  Perhaps she and Isaac looked at each other and saw reflected, the inner image. But she must have been gutsy to agree to emigrate. Or desperate! Perhaps Isaac looked at his siblings and saw in himself only failure. They were working hard, marrying, having children and getting on. And they were doing it earlier than Isaac. William had married in his early twenties and so had James. Isaac would be thirty-one when he married. It was not so much that it was old for the times because often people did not marry until their thirties because they could not afford it. But Isaac’s siblings had not waited so long which suggests that ‘lack of money’ was not the reason.
The third child of James and Mary, Charles had been born on November 17, 1815 and at the age of twenty-three, on May 26, 1839 he married Elizabeth Emma Price, a bricklayer's daughter. Marriages usually took place in the bride's parish and since Elizabeth Emma lived in Bayswater, they were married in the parish of Paddington. Charles's father-in-law William was a witness with Ebenezer's wife Louisa for the Camplins. This raises yet again the question as to why no Camplin witnessed Isaac’s marriage to Eliza Ash.
Charles, like Isaac was illiterate and made his mark but Elizabeth Emma was able to sign her name. Charles gave his address as Chapel Side which is perhaps Chapel Street, leading into Brill Row in Somers Town.
By 1842 the couple were living in Grove Street, Camden Town, near Regent’s Park, where their son Charles James was born on the first of March, at No. 61. Cecelia followed on February 2, 1843. By 1851 Charles had moved to Salisbury Place, in the new but still very basic streets of Agar Town, close to his brother Ebenezer who was in Cambridge Street. They lived right beside the Great Northern Railway terminus at King’s Cross, near the lower reaches of the Regent's Canal which, given the 19th century habits of waste disposal was unlikely to be as pretty as one might think.
Charles was still a general labourer and Ebenezer was a butcher yet again. Councillor Agar, the force behind the establishment of Agar Town, took a fairly cavalier approach to standards, and there was no drainage, paving or lighting and this development sealed the fate of the southern part of St Pancras, which was already blighted by the brick kilns and the railways. Fortunately, the slums of Agar Town only existed for about twenty years until they were swept away in the 1860s by the construction of St Pancras station and its goods yards.
The fact that Charles had plenty of work, and like Isaac, was illiterate suggests that there were other reasons for Isaac delaying marriage. From what we can see he was a hard worker and there was work to be had. Again it indicates a character who is somehow ‘different,’ or ‘other,’ and who perhaps saw himself as something of an outsider. This sense of being an ‘outsider’ which Colin Wilson explained so well in his seminal first book, is a trait which I can trace down through the family. Was my mother a ‘princess’ because she felt superior, or was it because she felt different, other …. something of an outsider? It wasn’t a question I thought of while she was alive and now it is too late to ask her. In fact it wasn’t a question which occurred to me until I began tracking the storylines of her family.
Not that it was important beyond gaining a sense that there was something different about Isaac – a difference which may well have been found in a bottle of beer! The same ‘difference’ which may have seen him working hard and saving nothing – certainly not enough to take on a wife in his twenties.
Whatever the cause of his ‘late maturing’, and that may also be a Camplin trait, it did not mean he was unhappy. While life was hard, it was for most, and particularly the Camplins, reasonably fulfilling and rewarding. They knew nothing else. The life they lived as the life they knew and in its own way, enjoyable.
Did Isaac watch all this happening and feel even more of a failure, given the apparent, albeit limited, successes of his own family? The Camplins were growing in number and busy with their own lives. Perhaps too busy for Isaac and his ‘odd’ ways. Or had the death of his brother William grieved him more than he expected and made him think about what he was doing with his life and what he would leave behind if he died? In 1845 he was twenty-two. It would be nine years before he married and ten before he set sail for a new life in Australia.
 ABOVE: The Camplin Shield according to Burke’s General Armoury. I am struck by the three ‘heads’ which, while referred to as Moors, look African to me and having spent more than a decade living in various African countries this has resonance. Not that any other Camplin descendants have lived in Africa so it is a whimsical kind of resonance.
In 1851 Charles had four children living with him, Emma (11), Mary (6), Louisa (3) and Charles (10m.). Little Charles James and Cecelia, who should be there between Emma and Mary, both died - Charles James soon after birth and Cecelia in the winter of 1843. New baby Charles is followed by William, who also died in September 1855, aged only seven weeks. It is remarkable, in fact, how many of the children survived - a tribute to the efforts of their families.  No doubt the talent for gardening played a part, ensuring diets more nourishing than most would have had. At the time of little William's death, Charles was working as a journeyman butcher, with the encouragement of his brothers perhaps, at 22 North Street, Clerkenwell. He died in 1862 and seems to have been one of the poorer members of the family.
Again there is a strong sense that the Camplins pulled together and looked after each other. It raises even greater questions as to why Isaac is the one who repeatedly ‘disappears’ and then re-appears. The fact that when he re-appears he is living with a family member suggests that the leaving is done of his own accord. Was there a mental dysfunction at work in Isaac, which, was exacerbated by drinking? Mental illness was clearly present in my grandmother, my mother and my aunt Joyce and shadowy traces of it have been seen in later generations. From the look of it Eliza also had some ‘strange ways’ and perhaps she and Isaac were drawn together by these traits… a mutual ‘oddness.’
  On August 12, 1838, James aged twenty, married Elizabeth Blagden/Blagdon/Blaxden. He was the first of the brothers to marry and gave his address as Brick Lane, Finsbury (near the Gasworks). He was able to sign his name in the register, while Elizabeth made her mark. Her illiteracy no doubt accounts for the varied spelling of her name over the years. Elizabeth's father was a carpenter.
James was in the meat trade, saying that he was a butcher - perhaps in Brick Lane, but more likely in Camden Town with one or more of his brothers. He was probably living with Elizabeth in Brick Lane for a few weeks while banns were called in the nearby parish church of St Luke. When their son William James was born the couple were living at 1 Lower Bayham Street, Camden Town, close to the grandparents, James and Mary.
On September 25, 1862, William James would himself be married in St Pancras at the age of twenty-three to Harriet Bernard of College Street West. William James was living in Priory Street and working as a French polisher, perhaps putting the finish on the many pianos made in the factories for which Camden Town became well-known. Every family with a pretension to gentility would have an upright piano in the front parlour - and impoverished genteel ladies could make a living as piano teachers.
William James has moved beyond the marine dealer/cat and dog meat sellers/butchering and gardening trades of most of the other Camplins. Perhaps he had a talent for music, discovered perhaps through church involvement, although one British family legend has Isaac as a music teacher.  There is no ‘oral’ history in Australia of this side of Isaac and like many things in ancestry research, it is probably a story which belongs to another Camplin and which has been conveniently draped around his shoulders. It seems hard to believe that if he were illiterate he could be a music teacher. Surely one would have to ‘write music to teach music’ and if he could write music then he had to be literate.
What is interesting about the family is that Isaac aside, the children of James and Mary Camplin remained in London. In some ways this is unusual for when one emigrated in a family, often others followed. And it is not as if all of Isaac’s siblings were doing so well making their way through life, which suggests that when he left England, he left their lives completely.
As to his evangelical nature, I suspect it is far more likely that however much he may have dabbled in the church in his teens, his ‘God’ was more likely to be the demon drink than any other force at work in his life. But this remains merely one assumption amongst many. Perhaps he ultimately rejected Edward Irving’s Catholic Apostolic Church and the rest of his family remained converts.  He had after all, joined the church as a child. Although no doubt, a thirteen year old in Victorian England would have had greater maturity than thirteen year olds today. Or perhaps Isaac became so much of a convert he was almost a fanatic.
There was a prophetic theme to the CAC and it had much in common with the evangelical churches we see today with ‘speaking in tongues’ and being ‘taken by the spirit to prophecy’ part and parcel of worship. Although I doubt this given that he married in an Anglican church. And given his propensity to drink, a Camplin trait along with hard work, which is established in South Australian court records, I suspect his ties to the evangelical church were loose indeed and would eventually be broken and the only times he would ‘speak in tongues,’  probably frequently on reflection, was when he was blind, staggering drunk.
We must also wonder, given that Isaac arrived in Australia penniless, whether or not he was left out of his mother’s will. Whatever the answer, Isaac looks like a man of definite views and determined independence. Perhaps the alcoholism and aggression which is revealed in his later years was already evident.
But love is blind and no doubt for Eliza Ash, Isaac was a reasonable catch although over the years to come there would no doubt be many times when she would regret her choice. They married on October 2, 1854 at St. Anne’s Soho, which is just off Dean Street where Isaac was working at the time. Let’s hope it was a sunny Autumn day in London and the birds were in song, although given London’s record it was probably grey, cold and foggy and sadly symbolic of much of Eliza’s future life.
 
CHAPTER  THREE - 
Saint Anne’s Church, in Soho, was nearly four hundred years old by the time Isaac and Eliza stood in front of the altar and made their vows.  She was following in the footsteps of her mother and maternal grandmother and, possibly in those of some others who had gone before them. Her sister Sarah had been married in the same church just two years earlier on Christmas Day – not uncommon for the times because Christmas Day was one day servants were likely to have off.
Was she nervous? Probably. She would have worn her best dress, if she had one, and possibly carried flowers – violets bought from a local barrow – and worn her best hat, if she had one. Standing there, making her vows – words tied together with the smell of heavy wood, endlessly polished, drifts of incense, wax and smoke – was she sure about what she was doing? Was there much choice? Her employers, the Graces were en route to the other side of the world and her parents possibly hiding away in Bedfordshire to escape the cholera epidemic. She may have been grabbing the only opportunity she believed she had to escape the constant drudgery and unchanging nature of her life.
Access to the church today is through a gate at the Shaftesbury Avenue end of Dean Street, where Isaac was working as a gardener in 1854. For all we know he could have finished work and headed for the church to get married, as I would do more than a century later when I married in Adelaide. The last-minute sprint to the church was my choice in a way I suspect it would not have been his, given that individual freedom for the working classes was no more than a dream at the time.
St. Anne’s was the church which Eliza and her family attended and Isaac was the only member of his family to marry here; another indication perhaps that he rejected the church which his family had embraced and into which he had been baptised at the age of twelve. By the time Isaac married, The Catholic Apostolic Church was in its prime but membership would slowly decline over the next forty years until the church and its prophetic teachings would disappear with the death of its last apostle, two years before Isaac’s own death in 1903. However committed to the expression of his spiritual gifts, as encouraged by the Catholic Apostolic church, Isaac may have been, it is a clear sign that his marriage in St. Anne’s meant the commitment had waned, if not become non-existent.
Eliza’s uncle William Bailey witnessed the marriage and while Eliza could sign her name, Isaac left a mark. He was not the only one of his siblings to be illiterate. Nor was he the only one to marry a woman who could sign her name. Whether Eliza was more literate than that, there is no way of knowing.
Eliza’s father John Thomas Ash (1808-1874) was a boot and shoemaker of Middlesex Street, Somers Town, just around the corner from Wilstead Street.  He would probably have learned his trade from his father or an uncle and at least until 1850 would have been making shoes on straight lasts, where right and left shoes were no different and the term ‘breaking in’ a new pair of shoes had a meaning we can only imagine.  Or rather, one we would prefer not to imagine. The hand tools that John Ash would have used could have been found in the hands of any ancient Egyptian shoe-maker going back as far as 1300BC; the chisel-shaped knife, the scraper and the curved awl had made their useful way across the centuries with the only recent additions being a lapstone (a stone on which shoe-maker’s beat leather), hammer, pincers and sticks for rubbing a finish onto heels and edges.
My father’s side of the family, along with ‘cat and dog meat’ sellers and ‘marine dealers’ also had a smattering of shoe-makers, these trades no doubt being a ready recourse for the working poor. But John Thomas must have been doing reasonably well to be able to afford to marry at the age of twenty.  He had married Elizabeth Wilkins, born 1813 in Chelsea, London, in December 1828, also at St. Anne’s Soho. Her mother Martha Roberts had married William Wilkins at the same church in 1803 marking a family tradition which would last for half a century.  I went to St. Anne’s while living in London some years ago. In that synchronistic way of things, I did so while living off Sloane Square, a skip away from Chelsea, where, unknown to me at the time, my great-great-great grandmother had been born. But the church was closed and I did not get a chance to return before we left. I will make a visit there again, if only to stand in the church where three generations of my ancestors had been married.
Although, even then, it would be more metaphoric than literal and there would not be much that any of my ancestors would recognise given the destruction of the church during the Second World War.  On September 24, 1940 a direct hit at the height of the blitz destroyed everything but St. Anne’s Church Tower which dates from 1803. While worship continued at St. Thomas’s, Regent Street, now no longer in existence, and a number of other places, it was not until 1991 that the church was rebuilt, and opened again for worship.
Photo: St. Anne’s, Soho.
Eliza, like Isaac, had been born into an era of great change which would gradually see an improvement in the living conditions of the working class. She shows up in the 1841 census living in Brill Row with her parents. She was six.  It would not be something which she would experience to any great degree while growing up, but as an adult she would live in a country which in the 19th century would be seen as a ‘worker’s paradise’ to many in England and Europe. The ‘rights of workers’ and improved conditions for the poor would be the theme of this century in England, which had begun the exciting and terrifying ‘ride’ known as the Industrial Revolution. Like all revolutions it would bring competing forces of construction and destruction. In the way of the omelette, a great many ‘eggs’ would be broken along the way; some necessary, some not, some useful, some wasteful and yet all a part of a process of becoming through pain and through pleasure.
How much Eliza or Isaac knew or cared, we have no way of knowing. At their level of society there was not likely to be much time for pondering or even much hope of planning. For those at the bottom of the social ladder, life made its way through a succession of days, most tumbled one upon the other in the same shape and form, offering little opportunity for change or control. The most important, and probably the most frightening decision, that Eliza and Isaac would make, would be to emigrate. And even then, the forces propelling them beyond the borders of their homeland may have been so great that there was little decision to be made … merely acquiescence in the embracing of opportunity. Few people leave the land of their birth unless they are forced to do so and the reasons were always sourced in religious, familial and political freedom, which I doubt applied to Isaac, or financial and material security, which I suspect did. Although there is a question mark around the issue of familial freedom.
Between 1801 and 1901 Britain’s population would rise from nine million to forty-one million, despite the tens of thousands who chose to emigrate. In the same period Australia’s population would grow from a few thousand to five million … more than a million less than the population of the London the Camplins had left behind.
When Eliza was born most people still worked at home or in small workshops but the rattle and choke of factories could be heard, and smelt, in the metaphoric distance. She was lucky in a way that many children were not, in that she did not end up spending 12 hour days working in Stygian factories. The first law to curtail child labour was passed the year after her birth but this law was aimed at the textile factories. It would be another ten years before children were prevented from working underground in coalmines – often from the age of five, their small bodies being useful in cramped conditions. And, their small bodies becoming stunted by the experience. Enlightenment took greater hold in 1844, when Eliza was eleven when a law was passed banning all children under the age of eight from working. However, Eliza may well have had a couple of years working as a domestic servant under her belt by this time.
 Her parents were living at Woburn, Bedfordshire when she was born and her grandmother, Martha Wilkins, worked at Woburn Abbey. There are no records which show exactly what she did and she may not have been working in the Abbey itself, but merely on the estate, but whatever the connections may have been, it’s about the closest any of my ancestors ever got  to money or nobility. Eliza may have been born somewhere which had an ‘exotic’ name but that would be the first and the last time she touched the hem of anything other than the mundane.
John and Elizabeth Ash may have been living in Woburn at the time because they had fled the terrible cholera epidemic of 1832 which killed thousands of people in East London and which ultimately killed close to 10,000 in London as a whole. There is also a chance they fled to the same place when the 1854 epidemic hit Soho, two months before Isaac and Eliza married.
Although there may have been an earlier family connection with Woburn because in 1818, John Ash, shoemaker, is listed as living in Great Russell Street, which at the time would have been on land owned by the Russell Family. He later lived in Somers town which was also Russell family land. This John Ash, shoemaker, may well have been the father of our John Thomas Ash, shoemaker although given how common are the names John and Ash and the profession of shoemaker, it remains conjecture. Then again, one flimsy ‘thread’ to tie it together is the tenuous link to the Russell family and Woburn Abbey.
Eliza’s grandmother, Martha (Roberts) Wilkins, had been born on June 6, 1784 in Bray, Berkshire… making her a Gemini with a Capricorn moon, a solid sort emotionally, with a knack for making her way through life. She was the daughter of Martha and Bartholomew Roberts and in that way of the times, her mother’s surname remains a mystery – such information considered to be unimportant and often omitted from birth and marriage certificates. The ‘invisibility’ of women would remain a fact until well into the 20th century. But given the links with Bedfordshire for Martha Wilkins and her daughter it’s a good bet that her ‘nameless’ mother had family in the area.  Up until the end of the 19th century when people moved from one place to another they generally did so knowing there would be some sort of family support at the other end.

Bartholomew Roberts may have been a descendant of Robert Roberts, whose daughter, Elizabeth Roberts, was baptised on March 10, 1671, in Bray, Berkshire. Bartholomew is thought to have been born around 1705 and he married Ann Terry, on May 27, 1730. They had a daughter, Ann, who was baptised on March 15, 1731 in Bray. A son, Bartholomew was born to Bartholomew and Anne on November 14, 1733.
Bray is a small town which perches on the side of the slowly winding River Thames, between Maidenhead and Windsor, within a stone’s throw of Windsor Forest. It was settled in the late 13th century and at its heart sits St. Michael’s Church, built in 1293. These days the claim to fame for Bray is that it has two Michelin starred restaurants! As a keen cook and food-lover I like to think this ‘connection’ across time has meaning.
Woburn Abbey is around eighty miles from Bray but people went where there was work and the Duke of Bedford’s great estate certainly provided that for many.  Martha Wilkins may also have had family in the area, often the major drawcard when people moved away from their birthplace. She would follow her daughter and son-in-law to London and may well have been widowed by this time.
Woburn Abbey, the home of the Dukes of Bedford for 400 years, is one of England’s greatest stately homes. The Abbey, for that is what it originally was, dates back to 1145 and was a religious house for Cistercian monks. In 1538 the Abbot, Robert Hobbes was found guilty of treason – a very convenient way of organising wealth transfer – and the monastery was confiscated.  Edward VI granted the estate to Sir John Russell in 1547 but it would not become a family home for another seventy-two years. The grand series of state rooms, which may have sparkled and shone under Martha’s work-worn hands, were built in 1747 and remain as stunning today as they were always intended to be. Elizabeth I stayed here and so did the ill-fated Charles I and the young Queen Victoria would stop-over on her honeymoon with Prince Albert, but the likes of Martha, inconsequential for her time and valued only in the light of the moment and easily replaced, would disappear like so much dust blown from the pages of history.
            And there is no record of a Roberts working at the Abbey around the relevant period according to staff lists, tax returns, rates of pay etc., although Martha may well have been so low down on the ‘ladder’ that she did not register. Or perhaps she never worked at the Abbey, simply in Woburn where her relative lived and the assumption was made that because Sarah and Elizabeth were born in Woburn that the family worked at the Abbey
Bray is a small town which perches on the side of the slowly winding River Thames, between Maidenhead and Windsor, within a stone’s throw of Windsor Forest. It was settled in the late 13th century and at its heart sits St. Michael’s Church, built in 1293. These days the claim to fame for Bray is that it has two Michelin starred restaurants! As a keen cook and food-lover I like to think this ‘connection’ across time has meaning.
Woburn Abbey is around eighty miles from Bray but people went where there was work and the Duke of Bedford’s great estate certainly provided that for many.  Martha Wilkins may also have had family in the area, often the major drawcard when people moved away from their birthplace. She would follow her daughter and son-in-law to London and may well have been widowed by this time.
Woburn Abbey, the home of the Dukes of Bedford for 400 years, is one of England’s greatest stately homes. The Abbey, for that is what it originally was, dates back to 1145 and was a religious house for Cistercian monks. In 1538 the Abbot, Robert Hobbes was found guilty of treason – a very convenient way of organising wealth transfer – and the monastery was confiscated.  Edward VI granted the estate to Sir John Russell in 1547 but it would not become a family home for another seventy-two years. The grand series of state rooms, which may have sparkled and shone under Martha’s work-worn hands, were built in 1747 and remain as stunning today as they were always intended to be. Elizabeth I stayed here and so did the ill-fated Charles I and the young Queen Victoria would stop-over on her honeymoon with Prince Albert, but the likes of Martha, inconsequential for her time and valued only in the light of the moment and easily replaced, would disappear like so much dust blown from the pages of history.
Eliza’s sister Sarah was also born while the family was living at Woburn, but by the time William, Charlotte and Thomas arrived they were back living in Brill Row. Was Woburn just too quiet for John Ash or had he found it difficult to make a good enough living to support his family in the small village which sat just outside the Duke of Bedfordshire’s estate? If he was making shoes, and he probably was, because that was his given trade, they would only have been for the working folk and a city like London would always offer more feet than a tiny village like Woburn. The nearest town of any size would have been Cranfield, but even there, his chances of making a living would never equal that of East London and so to St. Pancras they returned.
Both Eliza and Sarah worked as domestic servants, as their grandmother did and probably as their mother had. Sarah worked with her grandmother Martha Wilkins in Middlesex Street, before marrying Joseph Henry Grace (painter) and having six children.  Eliza appears in the 1851 census, at the age of fifteen, working for Doctor John Grace, a general practitioner and his wife Ann, in Tottenham Court Road, Marylebone.
For something like ten pounds a year domestic servants would spend their days making beds, changing linen, dusting and sweeping, cleaning fireplaces and polishing grates, hauling coal and lighting fires, scrubbing stone and wooden floors, beating rugs, brushing carpets, cleaning and filling lamps and soaking and washing laundry by rubbing it clean on boards, before hanging it to dry and then ironing. The days were long and exhausting and the lucky ones would be well fed, not over-worked and might get a few hours off each week. But they would be a minority given the attitudes of the time to the lower classes.
Eliza may however have been one of the luckier ones given that Dr Grace had clearly worked to better himself and who may well have grown up in the same sort of environment as had his servant. There is no way of knowing other than the fact that J.F. Grace appears to have been a responsible man and perhaps even an enlightened one.
There is also a question as to whether or not there was some sort of connection between Joseph Henry Grace, Sarah Ash’s husband and Dr John Grace. Given the times it is both likely and unlikely although I am presuming that Sarah’s husband was a painter of houses as opposed to a painter of canvas. The daughter of a shoemaker and the brother of a doctor was an unlikely combination although no doubt such things happened and young people ‘met’ as and where they could so it is perfectly possible that Sarah came to meet Eliza on her ‘day off’ if she had one, or to deliver a message, and in the doing, met Dr Grace’s brother. And if John Grace had ‘pulled himself up by the bootstraps’ by becoming a surgeon’s apprentice it is likely he could have a brother who had remained living and working within a ‘lower’ social class.
 Not that doctors were so highly regarded, given the prevalence of quackery at the time and the abiding flaws in medicine as it was practised by the ‘trained professionals.’ Doctors had only just begun to drag themselves from the lower rungs of society and would not achieve any serious level of respect until near the end of the 19th century.
There was good reason for this. While there is no doubt that ‘quackery’ was alive and well in the healing professions in general, there is also no doubt that qualified doctors relied upon a whimsical combination of both quackery and chance in treating their patients. Medicines were awash with potentially lethal doses of mercury, arsenic, iron and phosphorous. Not to mention laudanum which if not a ‘cure-all’ although no doubt prescribed as such, was definitely the ‘one size fits all’ comforter for the ill. It was also potentially deadly as our Eliza knew, or would realise.
The fall-back if you survived the medicine which doctors provided, but did not get well, was purging, either through something to make you vomit or something to make your bowels run, or, from time to time, even in Victorian England, a little bit of blood-letting was thought to ‘do the trick.’ Those who were lucky were prescribed the fall-back of the fall-back – a ‘change of air.’ There is always the chance that Isaac’s disappearances were for this reason.
Traipsing through the disease-ridden corridors of the past it is hard not to feel that the most dangerous thing you could do was see a doctor. They certainly killed more than they cured and in fact, spread death to thousands, with the touch of a hand, particularly to women, once men as doctors, took charge of the birthing process.   
But the evidence is there to say that John Frederick Grace was a very competent doctor and by the standards of the day and his profession, eminently respectable. A number of records reveal MRCS London, after his name which means he was a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons. Our Eliza had found herself, or had found for her, a good job, although it is reasonable to assume it might bring darkness with the light in later years, for it is here, more than anywhere else, that she could have been first exposed to the drug which would kill her.
While Dr John Grace and his wife Anne were probably balancing on the middle class rungs of the social ladder by the ‘standards’ of the time, it suggests that Eliza was worthy of hire at a respectable level and probably receiving reasonable pay and treatment.
Within four years of the census, the Grace household in Tottenham Court Road would be broken apart. For not only would Eliza be marrying and planning to sail for South Australia, but the good doctor and his family, what remained of it, would be stepping foot on Australian soil. The Grace’s took ship just five months before Eliza married and perhaps presented her with the impetus to do so and the encouragement to make the same brave leap across the world.
John Frederick Grace and Anne Faulkner had been married in 1842 and by the time of the 1851 census which lists Eliza living with them and working as a servant, they also have five year old Annie and one year old Cora, as well as Frederick Gibbs, sixteen, a surgeon’s apprentice. Dr Grace was doing well enough to hire an apprentice. However, practising as a surgeon he would have been lower on the medical ladder because he performed what was seen as physical labour, therefore a trade. While he would have been well above Eliza’s shoe-making father, he would be on the bottom rungs of middle class society. And he probably would have worked from home on occasion, which means Eliza would have had some seriously unpleasant cleaning up to do, given the gruesome nature of surgery at the time.
The top of the doctoring tree was inhabited by physicians who were university educated and considered to know the most about medicine. They were not allowed to act as surgeons or dispense drugs before 1858. It was all very refined. They examined, diagnosed and prescribed. It was medicine as ‘clean’ and as ‘elegant’ as it could be for the era.
A surgeon came next on the medicinal rungs. They performed operations, treated accidents and skin disorders and set broken bones. The physical nature of the work made him, and it was him, because there would be no ‘hers’ for quite some decades, a craftsman. The job needed not only dexterity but speed, physical strength and expertise – as well as a strong stomach! The biggest difference between a surgeon and physician was education. Surgeons were apprenticed, just like any other craftsman. This made it easier for the lower classes to become a surgeon because apprenticeship did not involve the cost which a university education did. Surgeons, because of the nature of their ‘trade’ were also licensed as apothecaries – surgery and pain going hand in brutal hand.
Dr John Grace, it seems, would have dragged himself up in the world by taking an apprenticeship as a surgeon, gaining later, when he could afford to do so, qualification as a general practitioner and membership of the Royal College of Surgeons which, following a Royal Charter in 1800, could only be had through study. No doubt taking on apprentices himself also helped given that it cost as much as 500 guineas to purchase an apprenticeship. And even then, such young boys had often not completed primary education. Then again, the standard of education of those at university was hardly impressive either.
Photo: The Geelong Orphan Asylum.
But Dr Grace must have been a well-qualified and capable doctor, offering both skills as a general practitioner and as a surgeon and apothecary in the application which secured him the job as Surgeon Superintendent and Medical Officer at Geelong Hospital and Geelong Orphan Asylum in Victoria. Geelong, about forty miles west of Melbourne, was a steadily growing port for the wool trade and the whaling industry but with the Gold Rush of the 1850’s it boomed. John and Ann Grace would have arrived to find a bustling, energetic and thriving city. Perhaps one of the reasons that he sought employment in the colonies was to ‘better himself’ - Australia never having the same rigidity of class that England had and being the sort of place, as all colonies were, where an intelligent, hard-working young man could do well.
 He and his wife Ann arrived at Geelong, on the Bride of the Sea, August 11, 1854, sadly minus two of their young children – eight-year-old Annie and three-year-old Marion, both of whom had died in June, just weeks after setting sail. How hard it must have been for a doctor to lose two children. How hard it must have been as parents to wash and wrap those small bodies and watch then dropped over the side into the salty mouth of a churning ocean.
It must have been even harder for John Grace given that he was one of two surgeon-superintendents on board; the role accepted perhaps in lieu of payment for passage.  Not only would he see his failure as a doctor in protecting the lives of those on board, but he would see it cruelly reflected in his failure as a father to protect his children. There were ninety-seven children in the group of 458 ‘souls’ as they were recorded and three children would die on the 77-day voyage – two of them his. Two more daughters born in Australia would die before the age of two. Such was the tragic irony and the unpredictability of life.
Cora, four and Catherine, one, survived the voyage to Australia and a son, John Frederick Faulkner would be born the following year and follow in his father’s footsteps as a doctor. John Fredrick Faulkner Grace appears on the 1871 England census at St Mary le Strand, London (Surgeon's pupil).
 His would be a more  conventional career than that of Eliza’s eldest, Ebenezer, who would be born the same year, but unlike the hard-living, hard-drinking Ebenezer, John Grace would die young, at the age of twenty-nine, in Queensland, in 1884; the same year which would see the death of his sixty-three-year old father in Melbourne. Although, what is interesting is that an inquest was held into his death so he either ‘took his own life’ as would Eliza, or had a pre-disposition to violence, like our ‘Eb’ which got him into trouble.
I am beginning to think the former given that he is listed in the 1882 Victoria Gazette, two years before his death far to the north of Australia, as appearing in the insolvency court. He is working as a chemist and druggist in West Melbourne which is interesting given that he trained as a surgeon, which would also have qualified him as an apothecary, and yet ends up working at the latter, less respected and no doubt more poorly paid profession. Perhaps like Eliza, he had habits which impacted his life.
Eliza would probably never have known that her previous employer and his family were living just across the South Australian – Victorian border, barely 500 miles away. Dr Grace went on to become one of Australia’s respected medical pioneers becoming assistant surgeon to the Victorian Volunteer Mounted Rifles in 1861 and moving to Melbourne as a surgeon working for the Victorian Medical Department, by 1878.
It is not a given, but considering Dr Grace’s competence and position one can presume that Eliza was responsible enough to both get and keep such a position. She may however have been taken on as young as ten – recommended as was so often the way by someone, perhaps even a patient.
The question is whether or not her later close relationship with opium was sourced in these times. Even more so because he was trained as a surgeon and would have had on hand the only relief doctors could offer at the time – alcohol, mandrake, cannabis and of course, opium.
Was ‘Papaver Somniferum’ a ‘friend’ to Eliza before she left England, or was it something she discovered on Australian soil? There is no doubt that opium, cultivated since ancient times, and I mean really ancient, probably 30,000 years, from the poppy was a big ‘hit’ with the Victorians and used as a medicinal ‘fix-all’, found in countless medicines and ‘health tonics.’ It was considered harmless and non-addictive and opium-based medicines were regularly fed to babies. Perhaps the only blessing if they found themselves as an ‘appetiser’ on the rat’s menu!
The Victorians took pretty much the same view as the ancients had as to the qualities of opium – ‘...resists poison and venomous bites, cures chronic headache, vertigo, deafness, epilepsy, apoplexy, dimness of sight, loss of voice, asthma, coughs of all kinds, spitting of blood, tightness of breath, colic, the lilac poison, jaundice, hardness of the spleen stone, urinary complaints, fever, dropsies, leprosies, the trouble to which women are subject, melancholy and all pestilences.’
It was Paracelsus (1490-1541) who concocted the Victorian ‘drug of choice’ laudanum. The name means quite literally, ‘something to be praised’ and Eliza Ash Camplin would not be the first or the last of her generation to praise and rejoice in it. Laudanum was prepared by extracting opium into brandy, producing a tincture of morphine in essence. Paracelsus, who dubbed opium the ‘stone of immortality,’ and who was obviously besotted with the stuff, if not permanently off his head on it, was lavish with his first concoctions. He also added frog-spawn, crushed pearls and henbane but he had the basic recipe pretty right and that is what was handed down and picked up, time and time and time again in Victorian England and the world beyond.
If gin was ‘mother’s helper’ for the desperate poor on London’s streets, laudanum was ‘everyone’s helper’ everywhere else. Thomas Sydenham, however, went on to standardise laudanum in the now classic formulation: 2 ounces of opium; 1 ounce of saffron; a drachm of cinnamon and cloves - all dissolved in a pint of Canary wine.
In Eliza’s time vials of laudanum and even raw opium were readily available not only at any English pharmacy but also any grocery store. It was easy to get, easy to take, easy to abuse and so easy to love. One nineteenth-century author declared: ‘[Laudanum] Drops, you are darling! If I love nothing else, I love you.’ Another user, the English gentleman quoted in Jim Hogshire's Opium for the Masses (1994), enthused that opium felt akin to a gentle and constant orgasm.’ How could you not become addicted? Although it also became clear that there was a tendency to ‘gastric un-wellness’ in those who took large amounts of opium or laudanum. But, no doubt, drifting as they were in the soporific halls of addiction, this was easily ignored or overlooked.
Opium, while masquerading as medicinal also conferred that of which Homer wrote in The Odyssey:
     ‘Into the bowl in which their wine was mixed, she slipped a drug that had the power of robbing grief and anger of their sting and banishing all painful memories. No one who swallowed this dissolved in their wine could shed a single tear that day, even for the death of his mother or father, or if they put his brother or his own son to the sword and he were there to see it done...’
Opium became the ‘darling’ of the age and perhaps given the limitations of their lives, it was women who became more often and more easily addicted.  However, given the sort of treatments provided by the medical profession in general – and women were probably more often in need of them than men- this is hardly surprising. No doubt this offering from opium was something of which Eliza was definitely aware – certainly by the time of her suicide.  But she would be finding the gift in the same sort of medicinals which would take her life so there may well have been more upset stomachs than delicious escaping.
The irony was that as concerns grew over the ‘evils’ of opium, morphine and laudanum, so did efforts to find a non-addictive alternative. In 1874 an English pharmacist C.R. Alder Wright hit ‘gold’ and came up with what would become the best-selling drug of all time – heroin! Eliza however, like most, would make do with a little laudanum from time to time, or at least, any remedy for any condition which contained a dose of opium. And in time a growing assortment of medicines to ‘numb mind, soul and body’ would become available, leading to various kinds of addictions, as bad, if not worse as that which opium offered to the Victorians.


CHAPTER FOUR
The narrow street where the Ash’s lived was situated at the north end of Skinner street and was part of an area of ‘lanes’ full of costermonger shops and barrows; sellers of fruits and vegetables who often sang to attract attention and who had been a part of London life since the 16th century. Most of the area disappeared, as did The Brill Tavern, during construction of the St Pancras Railway Station in 1868. The Brill was probably the local for Eliza’s father and her husband-to-be, Isaac, when he came courting. Although this presumes that Eliza got to go home at weekends while she was working as a maid in Soho. Life was not easy as a servant and she may well have started working as young as eight as so many did. And, like so many, got no time off at all. But clearly she managed to meet Isaac and establish a relationship although that may well have been done while buying the mutton for her master’s dinner.
There was a strict set of rules which servants had to follow in Victorian England including standing still, with ‘quiet’ hands and looking at the person when being spoken to – sullenness clearly being a trait in the lower classes and for reasons we can understand today; don’t let your voice by heard by the ‘ladies and gentlemen’ of the household unless spoken to directly and then say as little as possible; in the presence of your mistress do not speak to another servant, or a child, unless absolutely necessary – no doubt, your skirt is on fire would be one instance – and then as little and as quietly as possible – in other words whisper, ‘fire, skirt’ and point; never initiate a conversation unless you have to deliver a message and then do it as quickly and quietly as possible – I would have been an absolute failure as a servant; when returning dropped items to the owner do so on a salver – presentation is all it seems; never offer your opinion to your employer – god forbid you have one; always make ‘way’ for your ‘betters’ when encountering them in the house or on the stairs by turning yourself toward the wall and averting your eyes – in other words, make sure you work like a slave but be invisible; if you have to walk with a lady or gentleman, carrying packages for instance, always walk behind a few paces – no doubt with head lowered; no visitors, relatives or friends to be allowed in the servant’s hall; followers are strictly forbidden and any hint of a romantic relationship brings dismissal – Eliza must have had an enlightened employer unless she kept her relationship with Isaac secret; any breakages will be deducted from salary – which as often as not amounted to around ten pounds a year!
Given the fact that people accepted employment with such petty and vindictive rules, is an indication of how desperate people were for work – who would take on such a job unless it was a choice between the job or starvation?  No wonder so many young women turned to prostitution. No wonder so many of the working poor turned to drink! Or to laudanum for that matter. While recounting Isaac’s lapses it is important to remember that he was no ‘orphan’ for the times. Alcohol, for men anyway, although no doubt some women also drank, dulled the rage and pain of their lives.
Photo: Victorian domestic servants. Eliza was unlikely to be as ‘well dressed’ as these.
Does such an environment breed ‘selectively’ a measure of success in those who are compliant? If you don’t fit in with the system you don’t work and if you don’t work you die… or you are transported which may well account for the independent spirit of Australians. So many of those who were sentenced to be transported, were people desperate to survive in any way that they could. Anyone who reads the convict records is aware of just how young some of these offenders were and how petty their crimes. You could be sent to Australia for stealing a ribbon, a crust of bread, a few straws of hay - and perhaps some did just that in order to get free passage to another life. Just as a family is ‘flavoured’ by the experiences of its ancestors, so too is a nation.
But Isaac and Eliza would not have to break the law to get a new life although Isaac and his sons would certainly make a habit of breaking the law once they had a new life. And alcohol would be behind much of it. Isaac may never have put a foot inside The Brill, his father-in-law’s local, but he would certainly step into his fair share of pubs over the years in Australia. Perhaps like my maternal grandfather he started out as a teetotaller and lapsed badly. All we do know is that within a few years of arriving in Australia he is in court on charges of drunkenness and assault. And he would continue to appear in court on drunk and disorderly charges for decades to come – as would his eldest son, Ebenezer.
There is no doubt being a servant was a grim sort of life and if Eliza did live in, with young Dr Grace and his wife, her ‘bed’ would have been on the kitchen floor or under the stairs. Life as a servant in 19th century England was akin to life as a servant in India today. Australia would never see the system of servitude which had been so entrenched in England and within half a century of Eliza leaving London, things would also begin to change there. The Industrial Revolution brought enormous changes to society as a whole and by the mid-20th century, England’s ‘servant’ system would be pretty much dead and buried. The days of a society divided into superior and inferior - ‘betters’ and ‘lessers’, were numbered, at least in the developing world. And the egalitarian nature of Australian society, sourced in rebellious, independent convict stock, would ensure that such ‘distinctions’ while present for a time, would never take hold in the way that they had in the ‘mother country.’
Whatever regrets Isaac and Eliza may have had about what they left behind, the English class system would not be one of them. And their children and their children’s children, if they heard any of the stories about life ‘back home’ would be glad they had been born in the new world and not the old.
Photo: Adelaide, circa. 1880.
Perhaps one of the things they did notice living in Adelaide was a slower pace of change from that of London, one of the fastest-growing and fastest-developing cities in the world. From a barren brick-field at the turn of the 19th century, Somers Town soon became a lively place of dog-fights, bull-baiting, gambling and sports as well as a market where anything could be purchased …. even on a Sunday morning. At least in the early 1800’s it was. However, the devout ultimately won the day and such Sabbath frivolity was done away with by the time Eliza and Isaac were growing up.
It is possible that Isaac had fallen out with his family and when he read a poster, or rather, when someone read it to him, advertising free emigration to Australia, he decided to make a new life for himself and his young wife, far away. It is indicative that he was the only one of a large family to emigrate when the family, comparatively, can be seen to have done pretty well and two sons, extremely well. Abject poverty was the biggest driver behind emigration although there is no doubt that some also fled religious persecution, or England’s iniquitous class system and some were just looking for adventure and a ‘better life’.
What everyone looked for in the 19th century when it was all too easy to end up in the ‘poorhouse’ was support and Isaac’s family was certainly capable of providing that. His mother had taken in her grand-daughter, Mary-Ann, poor William’s child when she was orphaned and ‘house-sharing’ was as common for the Camplins as it was for anyone at the time. So Isaac must have had his own reasons for leaving his family behind and given the fact that he arrived penniless, it is reasonable to suspect that he had been ‘disowned’ or at least, not included in his mother’s will. Or he had drunk it all or spent it all!
Or perhaps, given that the will leaves everything to be ‘divided equally’ amongst the children and grand-daughter Mary Ann, it was Isaac’s older brothers, one or more of whom would have been executor, who left him out or refused to pay his share. Then again, if he was something of a ‘black sheep’ he may have disappeared from their lives and not even been considered a child to Mary Ann, and included in the will by the time that she died. On the other hand, he could have received his inheritance and used it to pay massive debts.
One can only presume that life in Australia, no matter how hard, was better than life in England but if Isaac had been rejected by his family and rejected them in turn, there may have been no communication from him again, nor, from them to him. Eliza did keep in touch with her family at least for a few years but given that the contact lapsed after about six years one can presume she was not particularly close to her sister Sarah, who did try to find her, or to any other living family.
The question as to why Isaac chose to emigrate given the relative ‘wealth’ of his family is an important one. Another factor could have been the terrible cholera outbreak in Soho, where Eliza’s parents lived, in August of 1854. She and Isaac were married just two months after some 127 people died in the period between August 31 and September 3 and which led to three-quarters of the residents fleeing the Broad Street area. By September 10 some five hundred people had died and the mortality rate was 12.8 percent in some parts of the city. Given that some 10,000 people had died in the previous epidemic in 1832 it is not surprising that there was absolute panic. Ultimately the outbreak killed 616 people and it is possible that Eliza’s parents were amongst them, or were at least ill. This might explain why Eliza’s uncle, William Bailey, the husband of her mother’s sister, and not her father, signed as witness at the marriage.

John Thomas and Elizabeth Ash may have fled the city, as thousands did and went to live elsewhere with friends or family - perhaps back to Bedfordshire where Eliza and her sister Sarah had been born and where they had sought refuge following the 1832 cholera epidemic. Perhaps that is why William Bailey signed and not John Thomas at his daughter's wedding.

John Thomas and Elizabeth Ash may also have left the city for a time because of the epidemic - perhaps back to Bedfordshire where Eliza and her sister Sarah had been born. They do appear in the 1851 Census living at 4 Middlesex Street, St. Pancras with the younger children and they are at the same address ten years later. However, the fact that John did not sign at his daughter’s marriage, does suggest either illness or absence.  Although there is always the possibility that they disapproved of the marriage and the absence indicated disapproval.  It seems unlikely though that an uncle would step in if that were the case.
Records also show that John and Elizabeth may have lost a daughter before the births of Sarah and Elizabeth. An Elizabeth Charlotte Ash was buried at Woburn on May 13, 1831, aged twenty months. A child of this name had been baptised on February 6, 1831 at St. Luke’s, Chelsea, the daughter of Thomas and Elizabeth Ash.  She had been born on September 6, 1830. The fact that my Elizabeth was born after this death and the fact that they had another daughter called Charlotte some years later, suggests this child was theirs.
As to why they moved to Woburn it is not possible to say although the link between Elizabeth’s mother Martha and Woburn is clear. It was easy enough to take a coach to Woburn from London and back again and perhaps there was a job on offer. Although no evidence of a John Thomas Ash working in Woburn at this time has been found. But work he must have because his two daughters were born there and he would have been supporting a growing family. Sarah Ash was baptised in Woburn Church on December 2, 1832 and Elizabeth on December 28, 1834.
And there was a John Roberts living in Bedford Street, Woburn – no doubt a relation of Martha (Roberts) Wilkins. He is registered as occupying a house and garden on Lady Day 1828 – March 25.
At the time of the 1851 Census, Elizabeth and her sister Sarah were in service and not living in Middlesex Street. John is forty-five and Elizabeth is forty with William aged twelve, an errand boy, Charlotte aged eight and Thomas aged one. Given that the family is recorded at the same address ten years later it seems likely that if they did leave during the epidemic it was not for long.
In 1861 John Thomas, boot and shoe-maker is living with his wife and three younger children.  William is no longer an errand boy but a Tea Grocer Assistant which is a step up in the world. Charlotte, eighteen by now, is not living at home and while she may be in service there is also the chance she has died.  Thomas is now eleven and living with them is John Bailer, Lodger/Orphan, aged twelve, who, given the surname, is probably a nephew – a son of Elizabeth’s sister and her husband William Bailey.
Life remained relatively stable for John Thomas and Elizabeth because they are still in the same house in 1871.  By this time they are on their own with their children fully grown and independent.  He and his wife had just three more years to live.  In 1874  deaths are recorded for a John Thomas Ash aged 68 and an Eliza Ash, aged 63.
            The origin of Eliza’s father is not clearly established but he gave his birthplace at various times as St. James, Middlesex and Southwark, Surrey. Southward is in a district of South London. It is 1.5 miles east of Charing Cross and forms one of the oldest parts of London and fronts the River Thames to the north. While originally designated as Surrey it later came under the jurisdiction of the City of London. Whatever the truth he was born and lived a Londoner.

 By 1874 Eliza and Isaac had been in Australia for nearly twenty years. Perhaps John and his wife returned to St. Pancras only to die in another epidemic, which the double death record suggests.  In that year London recorded severe scarlet fever and smallpox epidemics.
It was actually the terrible Broad Street outbreak which led to the understanding that cholera was water borne and not sourced in ‘bad air.’  An investigation was carried out by physician, John Snow who had long been a sceptic of the ‘miasma theory.’ He had published a paper in 1849 titled, On the Mode of communication of cholera which was re-published in 1855 and included the Broad Street results. It was not that Snow or anyone else understood the true cause of cholera, there being no wide acceptance at the time of ‘germs’ but it certainly made it clear that cholera was a water-borne disease.
Cholera was also a particularly nasty way to die. It would begin with extreme diarrhoea and vomiting and agonising abdominal cramps and over time, which could be a few days, death would come from complete dehydration of the body. Not everyone died however, but obviously the very young and the very old were at greatest risk. Cholera epidemics were also common, particularly amongst the poor who lived in cramped, unsanitary conditions and Eliza would probably have seen more than a few loved ones die of the disease in her short life. If she was as sensitive as my mother was this could have played on her mind terribly and increased the anxiety with which she already lived.
 

Eliza was used to hard work, like most women of her class and generation. One hopes that arrival in the colony meant a better life than that which she had left behind. Although from the look of a notice in a newspaper in 1893, Eliza and Isaac not only left family behind, they did not keep in contact.  This is not surprising given that Isaac was probably illiterate and Eliza semi-illiterate and they may not have had the time or money to pay for letters to be written and sent back home.
In 1893, some thirty-nine years after she had left London, Eliza’s sister Sarah tried to find her.  Perhaps Sarah was unwell and wanted to make contact before she died. Perhaps she had tried before without success although there is only one such record of her search. Whatever the reason, she took advantage of a service offered by Lloyd’s London Weekly Newspapers:
HELPING TO FIND LOST RELATIVES.
(The following is a list, taken from Lloyd's London Weekly Newspaper, of persons who left the United Kingdom for Australasia, or were last heard of in   these colonies, and who are inquired for by friends in Great Britain. Answers to inquiries should be sent to the editor of Lloyd's, who has the addresses of the inquiring friends, and it is requested that in these answers mention should be made of the newspaper   through which discoveries are made.)   
DECEMBER 10, 1893.
CAMPLIN, Mrs. Eliza, nee Ash, left England about thirty-nine years since to go to Port   Adelaide, Australia; last letter from Adelaide Creek in 1867. Sister Sarah would be glad of any news.  (Adelaide Creek is actually in the Northern Territory and I doubt Eliza took a quick trip up there so one presumes that this was a term used for Adelaide in the early days of the colony.)
I am struck by the fact that the notice says sister Sarah would be glad of any news. It does not say ‘family’ or sister Sarah and mother or father or parents, which makes me suspect they were dead by this time and perhaps they did die in the 1854 cholera epidemic. Did Eliza reply? Perhaps, perhaps not. She may never have seen the notice. Her last letter had been written or sent a year after my great-grandmother was born and Eliza would have been pregnant with John Thomas. Ebenezer, the eldest was eleven and given that two years later he would be in Reform School, perhaps he had already become wayward. Why contact suddenly ceased in 1867, some twelve years after arriving in South Australia we do not know. But it did. It is another indication of just how very much alone Eliza was.
By the time Sarah put her notice in the paper her sister was living apart from her husband, her sons were a constant source of worry and her health may have been poor. There is a good chance that even if she saw the plea from her sister she did not reply. Within seven years she would be dead.
By 1893 Eliza had been an Australian for most of her life. If she and her sister met they would have had far less in common than either might expect. The freedom of life in Australia in terms of the ability of people to be upwardly mobile, and the lack of the sort of rigid class system which suffocated the poor and working class in England may well have surprised Sarah. But perhaps what would have caught her attention even more was the amount of meat that her Australian relatives ate.
The diet for the working classes in England was largely bread, vegetables and occasionally meat. By the end of the 19th century, around the time Sarah put her advertisement into the newspaper, Australians had become probably the biggest meat eaters in the world, consuming as much meat per person each year as the residents of both England and the United States. The favourite was mutton and it was not just the upper classes who ate it, with records of the time stating there was very little difference in the diet of poor and rich, ‘except as regards the mode of cooking and the condiments used.’
The Australian Camplins would have had a yard big enough to grow their own vegetables, keep a couple of chickens, and salaries good enough to buy whatever else they needed. The menu would be supplemented by rabbits, pigeons – in the case of two of Eliza’s young grandsons the subject of attempted theft – and even possums, galahs and kangaroo or wallaby for anyone with a gun and the time to travel north, east or south for a few days or perhaps hours. There would also be fish with the waters of the Gulf providing two of South Australia’s greatest delicacies, then as they do now – St. George Whiting and Garfish. 
Improved sanitation and good nutrition no doubt contributed to the chances of Eliza and Isaac, and their children, leading generally long lives for the times. Who knows how long Eliza might have lived if she had not chosen to cut her life short.
Photo: Adelaide Town Hall.
In the quarter of a century since Eliza last wrote to her sister life had changed dramatically for her but even more so for the city of Adelaide. In the year that Sarah was born the Italianate style Town Hall was opened and then, the following year gas street lights appeared and the residents of the city turned out to welcome Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh on his first royal visit. And, even more important than a royal visit, Eliza’s children had survived the diphtheria epidemic of 1867 which took 240 lives. It was a disease which would nearly kill my mother as a child and which took the lives of two of my paternal great-aunt’s small daughters during the same outbreak. Laying out those tiny bodies on the kitchen table to wash and prepare for burial, as they did in the 19th century and in the early part of the 20th, must have broken hearts into the most terrible of pieces.
In 1869 the city market opened in Grote Street and remains today as one of the best food markets in the world, with hundreds of Eliza and Isaac’s descendants shopping there, even now, and across nearly a century and a half. Two years later the records show just over 185,000 people are living in the city of Adelaide – still excluding Aborigines.  Within a year there would be the Public Health Act and an eight hour working day, six days a week. It would be another twenty years before English workers got the same rights – another indication that while Mother England may have considered the colonies to be ‘backward’, they were in many respects more advanced and more enlightened than the land they had left behind.
There has also been a powerful ‘Jack (or Jill) is as good as his (or her) master’ mentality at work in Australia and one which perhaps fuelled the rebellious spirit of Isaac’s first-born, Ebenezer who by this time had established his almost annual court appearance and record of law-breaking with his brothers not far behind. Ebenezer did however set something of a ‘racing trot’ at the game which, thankfully, neither his younger brothers nor his sons managed to best.
In 1872 the General Post Office opened and Adelaide also became the first Australian capital linked to London when the Overland Telegraph was completed. There really was even less reason now for Eliza not to keep in touch with her family. When the University of Adelaide was founded in 1874 there was little chance that any of her children, or possibly grand-children would attend but there would be numerous descendants in later years who would study at what became one of Australia’s best universities.
Photo: Adelaide Children’s Hospital circa. 1880.
The Adelaide Children’s Hospital opened in 1876 and if Eliza did not have need of its services her children and her descendants would all be grateful that it was there. I know my mother was when I developed a serious mastoid infection at the age of one. Usually caused by untreated acute middle ear infection – and my earliest memories as a child are of agonising earache, and something my daughter inherited – it was a leading cause of death in children until the development of penicillin in the 1940’s. My mother took me to the hospital where, she recalled, what horrified her was when they lanced it and wiped the pus on my clothes. Neither the mastoid infection nor the following three or four years of frequent ear infections with little or no treatment had any impact on my hearing. The memories of crying on my bed in pain are however amongst my earliest. But, at the age of one, I had my first and probably most traumatic separation from my mother.
Photo: Children’s ward circa 1950.
They kept me in hospital because I had developed pneumonia, which, like my mother’s bout of diphtheria, took me close to death but not too close, both for my constitution and the medical skills of the time. Diphtheria was once called ‘the strangling angel of children,’ common as it was as a cause of child-death and killing as it did by suffocation as the throat swelled through infection. It was only in the late 1930’s that diphtheria, once only second to pneumonia in its child-killing capacity, began to release its deadly, choking hold. I think my mother was six or seven when she fell ill – within a year of the birth of her second brother.
 I am wondering if my mother was hospitalized when she was sick and if, as often happens, we had a shared experience, almost a literal inheritance of the ‘sins’ of the mothers and fathers where families ‘repeat’ traumas, down through the generations. And one I would unwittingly repeat with my son when I left him in the care of my parents at the age of seven months, when a six-week trip overseas was offered through my husband’s work. Just as there had been no comprehension of maternal bonding in the early 1950’s within the medical system, so there was little or no recognition of it in 1971 amongst parents. I look back now and am horrified, but then, as did others, I acted in accordance with the beliefs, however unenlightened, of the times. As did those who cared for me in the hospital. They were a product of their times and they acted accordingly.
In 1950, and for some years to come, when babies and children were hospitalized their parents were bustled away and told that they would be notified when the child was well enough to be collected and taken home. Although I have since read that in the early 1950’s parents were allowed to visit their sick children at the Adelaide Children’s Hospital, on two days a week – but that was not the story my mother told me. However, my brother was two and a half at the time, my mother was pregnant and my father was sick with polio, from which he recovered completely, so she may simply have been unable to get back to the hospital for those brief, infrequent visits.
 If brushing off the layers which hide the past does anything, it reveals how far we have come in so many ways. In this day and age and in fact, for quite some decades, the trauma for a child of such an experience is well recognised. But not then! Doctors and nurses had the task of healing and parents only got in the way. For the child, particularly when pre-verbal there was only the simple reality that your mother had gone, never to return and you were left in the care of strangers and subjected to experiences which were at best confusing and uncomfortable and at worst, painful and terrifying. The subject of ‘maternal deprivation’ would become increasingly discussed within twelve months of my experience. Freud and others had first raised the subject but it was psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, John Bowlby, who turned a critical mind and steady eye on the effects of separating infants and young children from their mother, or primary carer.
His work on delinquent and affectionless children and the effects of hospital and institutional care led to his being commissioned to writing the World Health Organisation’s report on the mental health of homeless children in post-war Europe while he was head of the Department for Children and Parents at the Tavistock Clinic in London after World War Two. The culmination of his efforts was the Maternal Care and Mental Health report published in 1951 which clearly detailed and established the maternal deprivation hypothesis. It was published in fourteen different languages and sold over 400,000 copies bringing changes in the care of babies and small children to hospitals around the world.
What added ‘grist’ to Bowlby’s compassionate and wise ‘mill’ was a collaborative documentary made by the social worker and psychoanalyst, James Robertson, who filmed the distressing effects of separation on children in hospitals in 1952 – A Two-Year Old Goes to the Hospital. Needless to say the demonstrable trauma and hysteria of the terrified child had the sort of impact which images can give and from this time hospitals began to allow frequent and longer visits for parents. Until the medical system and social attitudes became truly enlightened and the parents of hospitalised children were allowed to visit whenever they wished, for as long as they wished and often to stay in the hospital with their child.
Looking back it seems incredible that people could be so ignorant, stupid and unfeeling. But they were and the changes came too late for me. And my understanding came too late for my son. Two weeks or so  after she had walked away and left me in the care of ‘great white monsters,’  my mother re-appeared as if by magic, to take me home. I must have looked as shocked as a one-year-old can, given that babies and small children treat the disappearance of a parent for even a few days, let alone a few weeks, as ‘death’ and final.  They either die literally or experience a psychological ‘death’ and find the strength to survive, despite such epic loss, as I clearly did. I was, she said, standing in my cot eating a banana when she walked in.
 To this day I loathe the smell and taste of ripe bananas which of course is how they were, and still are, given to babies. It was a dislike I did not understand until many years later when I recalled the story and made the association. What is interesting is that my oldest grandson has always loathed bananas and he certainly had no such experience, except perhaps as one inherited at a cellular level. I also developed an allergy to penicillin shortly after giving birth to my daughter – perhaps another subconscious connection, and one which re-appeared in one of my grandchildren. There are literal and symbolic ‘lines’ which link us; a cellular ‘song-line’ in the body ‘map’ which is handed down as our emotional inheritance.
By 1878 there was a bridge across the Torrens River and horse-drawn trams were clipping and clopping their way through the city and down to Port Adelaide. Within a few years, telephones were in the homes of the wealthy, the premises of the most successful businesses and post offices. In the same year Adelaide saw the opening of the Art Gallery of South Australia – one of the country’s most charming and well-stocked galleries, now as it was then.
Photo: Art Gallery of South Australia.
Perhaps even more important was the first water-borne sewerage service in Australia which came into operation in 1882 – another first for South Australia in a list which would grow admirably long. By 1887 Adelaide had a railway express running to Melbourne and a bustling Stock Exchange. The School of Mines and Industries opened in 1889 on North Terrace (now the University of South Australia) – the institution where Jack Belchamber, Sarah Camplin Hasch’s future son-in-law would study book-keeping as part of a Government support scheme for returned serviceman after the First World War.
And, in that avant-garde way which Adelaide has always had, the possibly controversial for the times, statue of Venus, the city’s first public statue, was unveiled on North Terrace in 1890. It is appropriate that the statue of a goddess, and one so sensual and feminine, should be first choice for a city and a state which would notch up another remarkable first, just four years later when women were not only given the right to vote, they were given the right to stand for election.
 In the year that Sarah Ash Grace tried to find her long-lost sister, Adelaide played host to The Australian Association for the Advancement of Science. How much Eliza knew or cared about such things it is impossible to say, but they were indicative of the city and the State where her children would be born and grow up and where most of her descendants would continue to live, and perhaps a part of the reason that so many stayed.


CHAPTER FIVE
Sarah Hasch was thirty-four when her mother committed suicide, dying in the Royal Adelaide Hospital of opium poisoning, at the age of sixty-seven. 
She is listed as a widow but Isaac would not die for another three years so clearly they were separated and this was very unusual for the times despite the fact that divorce legislation had been introduced in England in 1857 and South Australia, leading the way for Australia, was the first to follow suit in 1858. The other states followed with Tasmania two years later, Victoria in 1861, Western Australia in 1863, Queensland in 1864 and New South Wales trailing behind and not acting until 1873.
And while things may have been ‘better’ in Australia the social morés of the times between the colony and the ‘old country’ were pretty close. Their state by law amounted to little better than slavery; their task was to marry and produce children. And when they did, everything they possessed, although not an issue for Eliza at the time, but it would be later, went to their husbands. And if they worked, their wages also automatically belonged to their husbands. As did their bodies, a ‘gift’ enshrined in law and the marriage vows when they promised to ‘obey.’ It would be late in the 20th century before women had the right to omit that promise from their wedding vows.
It is ironic, given the independent young woman I was and the supporter of women’s rights I still had to be in the seventies, that when I married I forgot to take this vow out of the service. It was a busy time and the wedding was agreed, planned and done in a fortnight and the ‘obey’ only registered as I said it. My fingers were however crossed at the time. As a ‘vow’ by 1970 it was utterly symbolic although one I would have preferred to have had removed… if I had thought of it.
In 1890, probably some years after Eliza and Isaac had separated, Florence Fenwick Miller (1854-1935), a midwife turned journalist, described the position of women in society with stark clarity:
Under exclusively man-made laws women have been reduced to the most abject condition of legal slavery in which it is possible for human beings to be held...under the arbitrary domination of another's will, and dependent for decent treatment exclusively on the goodness of heart of the individual master. (From a speech to the National Liberal Club)’
Men had the right to demand and get sexual intercourse and children. He also had the right to take away children and send them to be raised elsewhere although one suspects this was an ‘upper class’ power which the poor and working class would not have utilised given that children could work and that meant more money. A man, in short could do as he pleased and a woman could do little about it.
In one famous case, Susannah Palmer ran away from her adulterous husband in 1869 after years of brutal beatings. She worked hard and established a new life for herself and her children, but, her husband found her, took it all and left her destitute and the law was on his side. In a fury she stabbed him and ended up in gaol. Luckily, we presume, she wounded him and did not kill him and was released a few months later – still penniless. It was a time, as still happens all too often in the Third World today, when it was not uncommon for a man to beat or kick his wife to death. That is not to say such domestic violence is not still present in the developed world, but rather that it was common in the 19th century in developed countries in ways it is not today.
Not just husbands but fathers and also brothers had every right to crush any sign of rebellion. Husbands were entitled, as is still argued in Indian culture today, to beat disobedient wives. A woman who ran away, or who wanted independence, could be captured and incarcerated in a lunatic asylum.
Even though a divorce act was set in place in 1857 it was very rare for a woman to obtain a divorce before 1891 and if she ran away the police could find her and her husband could have her imprisoned. The full weight of English law, custom, church and history was on the side of the husband and that weight, while possibly lighter in the young and vibrant colony of South Australia, was still in force.
It was only the very wealthiest of women, independently wealthy that is, with full control of their wealth, or those from the most enlightened of families who could live as they chose in 19th century society. It says a lot for Eliza Ash Camplin that she lived alone and survived, although it is likely that her children helped her to do so.
But this is conjecture and there is also the chance that Isaac left her… a much more common pastime. Isaac’s death record lists cause as ‘intestinal catarrh and exhaustion.’ He is recorded as seventy-six at death which would make his birth date 1827 but birth dates in ancestry research are a moveable feast. It matters only that he would be six years older than his wife instead of eleven.
In reality Eliza’s life had not been easy and perhaps she decided to kill herself because she had just had enough. Her oldest son Ebenezer would grow up to be in and out of the courts and gaols and his brothers, William and Thomas would also be in trouble more often than not. Her three sons, as the records show, were violent drunks with questionable morals… at least in their youth. There are either hereditary factors at work here or a seriously dysfunctional family environment – or perhaps both.
The lure of ‘free emigration’ may not have brought Eliza and Isaac the life that they wanted, or rather, that of which they dreamed, but their children would know nothing different and despite the dysfunction, would lead better lives.  Their grand-children and great-grandchildren would certainly benefit from being born Australians. There is no denying that compared with today, life and working conditions were harsh and often dangerous, but Australia even in the 19th century had a reputation as a ‘working man’s paradise.’ The working class in Australia had a far better quality of life than any of their peers in England or Europe. Australia has often been called ‘the lucky country’ and while this is not the origin of the term, there is no doubt that Eliza and Isaac and their children would have seen their new country as a place of fortune, despite the difficulties.
Photo: Louise Camplin Hodge with her husband Edmund and children.
Life for Eliza however, seemed to be a succession of disappointments and trials. Perhaps it is little wonder that my great-grandmother grew up to be a short-tempered, angry woman. And the scattering of ‘clues,’ as to Isaac’s unpredictability, are swept into clearer focus within six years of their arrival in the colony. In 1861 when Eliza had six year old Ebenezer, three year old Mary Eliza and two year old Louise Jane, Isaac Camplin ended up in court charged with being drunk and disorderly and with assaulting and damaging the clothes of Police Constable Cavanagh while in the execution of his duty. It was a performance which he would repeat, as would his three sons many times and one in which some of his grandsons would indulge.
The constable said he arrested the defendant for drunken and disorderly conduct: and while conducting him to the station he bit his hand, kicked him, and damaged his trousers to the extent of 1s. The defendant expressed his sorrow at having committed the offence. He was ordered to pay the damages, 1s. and a fine of 5s.
But Isaac did say sorry although twenty-three years later he is in trouble again so one wonders if anything ever changed.  Although his name does appear on March 11, 1870 as a signatory with Norwood electors on a petition and, in that Camplin way, he seems to keep on working and to keep on getting into fights! There seems to be quite a bit of the devil/saint dichotomy at work in our Camplin men. Isaac and two of his sons would be up before the judge in 1884.
In January of 1884, Isaac aged sixty-one is charged with assault. He must have been tough.   He was in his sixties and just seven years earlier he spent six weeks in the Royal Adelaide Hospital. One wonders if he was injured in a fight which did not end up involving the law. Perhaps a fight with one of his sons?
Whatever the reason for his hospitalisation between August and October of 1877, Isaac was as ready for a fight in 1884 as he had ever been. It appeared from the evidence that defendant, on the day in question, without any provocation, committed an assault on Howard, the injuries inflicted being so severe as to confine him to his bed the next day. Fined 10s. and costs. Camplin was further charged with using threatening language towards Howard, and was bound over in his own recognizance of £10 to keep the peace for three months. The story went as follows:    Complainant stated that he   was sitting on a fence on the morning of the day in question, when the defendant came up, hit him in the eye, knocked him off the fence, and tore his coat. Defendant then threatened to "give it to him "the next day. Defendant was sworn, and stated that he went up to complainant and asked him where his, wife was, when Camplin hit him with his stick.— Camplin was then charged with threatening Howard fined 10s. in the first case and on the second charge he was bound over in his   own recognisance of £10 to keep the peace for three months.
I find it interesting that Isaac is asking about Howard’s wife and then there is a fight. Was our Isaac a ‘player’ as well as a violent drunk? Poor Eliza. Goodness knows what she had to put up with. The description given in the Police Gazette on January 9 when it appears Isaac was ‘on the run’ is interesting:
Isaac Camplin, a wood-cutter, age about 60 years, height
5ft. 7 or 8in , fair complexion, full grey beard, whiskers,
and moustache, shabby clothes, for, on the 1st instant, assaulting
Christopher Howard, at Kensington.--(C.35.)
           
So he was a reasonable height, not overly tall and despite his years in the Australian sun, of pale complexion. And given that he is not captured until some weeks later, it is pretty clear that Isaac was also on the run at this time, or moving from house to house staying with family until January 23, 1884. Although the interesting thing about this report is that it comes some weeks after the court case regarding his assault on Christopher Howard. Was there another assault? Given the record of our Camplin boys, probably.

Isaac Camplin, on warrant for assault , has been arrested
by Foot Constable Garland, at Kensington .-(C.35.)

The ‘shabby clothes’ suggests that either he was not looked after at home or was not living with a wife who could look after him. It could also mean he was an alcoholic living where he could, possibly on the streets. Whatever else was going on, it is clear that Isaac had a problem with alcohol and aggression and his sons would inherit the same traits. There is no doubt that Ebenezer grew up to be extremely wild and remained so for most of his life …. while continuing to work hard…but his brothers William and Thomas also spent their fair share of time in trouble with the law and so did some of Isaac’s grandsons.
Whatever kind of father Isaac was during their formative years it is pretty clear that they became what he was, and perhaps that was the reason why he left England and his family in the first place and why his marriage broke down. Living with a violent drunk may well have turned Eliza toward the comfort of laudanum, or perhaps not and her death was simply the act of a woman who had had enough. By the time she decided to end it all she had been dealing with her husband and son’s criminal and violently alcoholic tendencies for forty years – perhaps for all of her marriage.
Photo: Emily Camplin who married James Dynon.
Ebenezer’s career as a petty criminal began at the age of thirteen when he was charged with stealing four rabbits.
Ebenezer Camplin, aged 13 years, was charged on the information of Josephine Geyer, with stealing four rabbits on November 14. Prosecutrix deposed that the rabbits produced belonged to her. They were safe in a shed on Sunday evening last. Knew them by their peculiarities. Never sold them or authorized any one to do so. Did not know the prisoner. Thomas Manuel, butcher, stated that he saw the prisoner in his shop on Monday morning Bought the four rabbits from him for 4s. Detective Keegan said he received the rabbits from the last witness and arrested the boy the previous dav. Prisoner said -'On Monday he was at home all day,' then that he was working with his father; and again that he was chopping, wood for his mother. He afterwards said he was working part of the day for his father and part for his mother. The prisoner's father attended and said that his son had been very wild for the last two or three months and he would like him to be sent to the Industrial School.
It does not sound as if Isaac was either patient or tolerant which is hypocritical given his own behaviour. Or perhaps, in the way of the times and for more than a century following, it was a case of ‘do as I say, not do as I do’ when parents instructed their children. He got his wish. His son was sent to a reformatory for two years. Within weeks poor little Ebenezer ran away. But he was found and sent back. Whatever Eliza may have thought or wanted, it was a time when women were little more than ‘possessions’ of men and a man had the final word. Ebenezer clearly did not have the moral fibre to take care of his son himself and neither, given his history, did he have any awareness or take any responsibility for the example he had set his children. Not that Isaac was unusual for the times but his inclination to alcohol and aggression marks him as a weak and frightened man. Fear is another family trait which would be seeded down through the generations and blossom terribly in my mother’s life, although weakness was not, bolstered as it must have been, and as such things are, by numerous other genetic injections and cultural influences.
Photo: Magill Industrial School.
A police report of December 2, 1869 has Ebenezer charged with absconding from the Industrial School …. which was a reformatory. It was probably the Magill Industrial School which was not far from where he lived. Established in the year Ebenezer was sentenced, the School was also the Government orphanage. The fact that Ebenezer was not made a ward of the state suggests he was seen as having adequate parental care, but, for the moment, rejected by his father, he was to all intents and purposes an orphan.  He was ordered to be sent back and privately whipped. Reform schools were bleak and punitive establishments and even as a child growing up in the fifties I remember being threatened with such a fate should I not behave.  
But, it was probably not as bad as it could have been.  The boys were trained in rifle and bayonet exercises and they were educated. While Ebenezer may not have liked the schooling, it would have stood him in good stead. However, the moral education classes appear to have had little impact. But no doubt the skills classes in things like carpentry would prove useful.
 From 1875 until 1899, the year before his mother died, newspaper reports have Ebenezer facing charges ranging from insulting language to assault on an annual basis. Clearly whatever the Reform School achieved it was not reform from a life of crime, albeit petty crime, and at least for these twenty years he was in and out of trouble with the law and in and out of gaol. Even the tragic loss of his nine-year-old son, Ernest, who was crushed to death in an accident in 1897 did not slow him down. Although such tragedies do seem to make people worse, not better.
Interestingly quite a few of the charges were for ‘minor’ incidents and sometimes he or his brothers were acquitted which raises the question as to whether or not the Camplin brothers were a ‘target’ for the police. But there is no doubt that all of them had problems with alcohol and aggression and they indulged in some ‘dodgy’ practices which while not major crimes, were against the law. They certainly indulged in a lot of larceny, a word used to describe theft seeking to masquerade as mistake.
On April 8, 1875, Thomas Smith and Ebenezer Camplin, young men, were charged with using insulting language in High-street, Kensington, on March 23;  Camplin was then charged with assaulting David Ferguson on the same occasion. It was stated that prisoner approached prosecutor and struck him violently on the face. The Presiding Magistrate said the assault appeared to be entirely unprovoked, and fined the offender £5, including costs; Ebenezer Camplin, wood-carter was charged March 4, 1876 with aiding and abetting one William Smith to sell a load of wood which was represented to weigh 24 cwt., whereas its true weight was 13 cwt,, on the 3rd of June, 1875; June 20, 1876 Camplin, labourer, was charged, on the information of Edward Laughton, of Messrs. Dean & Laughton, with stealing 52 yards of fencing, value £5, on May 4, at Kensington. Ordered to pay the value of the fence, fine £5, and costs £1; £11 in all; November 4, 1876 was charged with defendant was fined 10s. and costs, 17s in all,-disturbing the peace of the King's Head Hotel, King William-street, on the 2nd November. The defendant was fined 10s. and costs, 17s. in all— Camplin was also charged with using threatening language on the same occasion. The information was dismissed; in September 1877, Ebenezer Camplin, labourer, was fined 10s. and costs for using indecent language in High-street, Kensington, on September 21; October 1877, Ebenezer Camplin, labourer, was fined £1 for using indecent language in the Bath Hotel, Norwood, on Saturday night. For hindering Police-constable Martin whilst conveying the previous defendant to the Police-Station he was further fined £2; November 1880, Ebenezer Camplin, labourer, was fined 2s. 6d. for driving a wheelbarrow along the footpath of Osmond-terrace; May 1881 Ebenezer Camplin was charged with throwing stones, to the danger of passers-by, in High street, Kensington. Remanded till next day; March 1882 Ebenezer Camplin, Charles Gymer, Thomas Duff,   and William Camplin, labourers, were charged, on the information of Le Gong, a Celestial, with breaking 16 panes of glass, value £1 4s., and damaging vegetables to the extent of £1 4s, at Paradise, on Sunday evening, March 26. There was another information against the defendants for assaulting the prosecutor, which was heard at the same time. A   number of Chinamen gave evidence, that defendants., came into their garden at Paradise (quite some distance from Kensington so he may have been working out there) on the evening in question, and, after damaging a lot of cabbages and turnips, they broke the windows of the house. On Lo Gong going out to remonstrate with them they knocked him down and pelted him with stones. Defendants were ordered to pay 12s. each damage, and £5 each for the assault ; £7 7s. in all.
 But the most serious charge came in March 1885 when he was accused of attacking an elderly woman with an axe.
Ebenezer Camplin was charged, on the information of Mary Smith, an elderly woman, with wounding her at Marryatville on March 24. Dr. Sprod said that at 1 o'clock on Tuesday morning Mrs. Smith came to him with a wound on her left arm. It was two inches in length and extended from the forearm upwards. Believed, although he could not swear, that the wound had penetrated to the bone. Did not think the axe produced could have caused the wound, as the instrument was not sharp enough. Mrs. Smith knew prisoner, who was in the employ of her husband. On Monday night, at about a quarter to 12, Camplin came home from work. She paid him his days wages, and he went   away. She heard cries shortly afterwards, and found prisoner beating his younger brother. He said he would kill him, because he had stolen an axe in his possession. Her husband interfered, and Camplin desisted. Prisoner then took an axe belonging to a Mr. Smith from a dray and went to his own house. With her husband Mrs.  Smith went to Camplin's house for the axe. Prisoner seeing them swung the axe with both hands, and brought it down close to Mrs. Smith's head. She put up her band to save her head, and the consequence was that the back of her arm was cut. She said ' You, have chopped my arm, Eb.' He replied, 'A good job if I had cut your head off.' John Smith said that on the date, in question Camplin took away two axes. His wife, cried out to him that one was stolen. He said you are a liar, and with that aimed a blow at her bead. When arrested prisoner said that the wound was accidentally   inflicted by Mrs. Smith endeavouring to drag   the axe away from him. Committed for trial.
Ebenezer pleaded not guilty to this charge and on the evidence was found not guilty but clearly my great-great-uncle was an angry young man. Although the fact that she used a familiar and even ‘friendly’ name for him like ‘Eb’ suggests that he was something of an engaging character despite the ‘anger issues’ which may well have always been sourced in drink.
 Perhaps after this more serious incident ‘Eb’ did calm down a bit but within three years he was at it again. In May of 1888 he and some others were charged with using indecent language and drunkenness at High Street, Kensington where Ebenezer lived and which is now a very swish suburb. He could not pay his fines and so went to gaol for two months being recorded by the court as ‘an old offender.  Six months later he was admitted to Royal Adelaide Hospital with an "incised wound to right foot" and released two weeks later. It was no doubt, an injury gained in a fight and a serious one although to be fair, it could have been something suffered in his line of work as a wood-carter – a difficult and at times dangerous job.   In September of the following year he was charged with damaging a pane of glass but the charges were dismissed although he had to pay a 5s. hearing fee.
In September 1889 he was in court again, then December 17 1892 for indecent language in Kensington when a warrant was issued for his arrest. Ebenezer went into hiding but eventually surrendered to police in the January following and pleaded guilty. He was fined 20s. and costs.
While Ebenezer may have continued to ‘put bread on the table’ there is no doubt that his wild ways were having an impact on his children. In February of 1890 his ten year old son William went missing from his Kensington home:
Information is requested of William Camplin, age 10 years
(small for his age, fair complexion and hair, dark eyes, long
nose, native of South Australia. He left his home at Kensington,
February last, and has not since been heard of.
William was literally following in his father’s footsteps by running away and also by heading north. He was found at Boliver, now called Bolivar, in June, some four months later and returned to his family. Bolivar is now a northern suburb of Adelaide and home to a sewage treatment plant and there was not much there in 1890 apart from a pub and a few farms. Young William must have found somewhere to live during that time, perhaps, in the Camplin way trading labour for food and being a hard worker he was kept on until the police found him.
In November of 1894 Ebenezer is back in the Royal Adelaide Hospital for nearly three weeks with a fractured fibula.  Whether this had an effect on Ebenezer it is hard to say but his next court appearance is not until December 1896 when he is charged with assaulting Job Chambers at Stonyfell Gulley and ordered to pay 40s. costs and spend fourteen days in gaol. This was nearly two years after the death of young Ernest and perhaps that triggered another bout of law-breaking for Ebenezer.  Stonyfell Gully is in the foothills of the Mount Lofty Ranges, an area where Ebenezer seems to have frequently worked.
Although, in January 1898 it was Ebenezer who was on the receiving end when Henry Roberts was charged with assaulting him at Norwood when they had argued about money from a woodcutting deal and Roberts threw a piece of wood which struck Camplin over the eye; September 1899 … something minor and one hopes that Eb was calming down, but he was fined 5.s. and costs, one pound eight shillings in all, for having neglected to have his full name and other particulars painted on a dray which he was driving in Waymouth Street in the city. In the same year Ebenezer’s wife had given birth to a stillborn child.
Ebenezer’s wife must have been tearing her hair out and so was his mother who was also watching her younger sons, William and Thomas following in his troubled footsteps.  I am wondering just when Eliza left Isaac. Given that a marriage notice appeared January 3, 1883 for Louisa Jane’s marriage to Edmund Hodge, at Holy Trinity Church, Adelaide and she is listed as the second daughter of Isaac Camplin, Kensington, with no mention of her mother it’s a good bet that they were living apart by this time. The omission of Eliza’s name on the marriage notice is highly significant because she was most definitely still alive.
 Their last child had been born and died shortly after in 1875 so the years between 1876 and 1882 must have seen the breakdown of the marriage. I would lean toward the latter end of this because leaving one’s husband in the late 19th century was no small decision. And the fact that her death record lists her as a widow when those providing the information to the police, presumably her children, would have known that her husband was very much alive, suggests there was a level of ‘shame’ involved.
Whatever her hopes may have been when she set sail for South Australia, Eliza’s life had not been easy. The family had also moved around with births recorded in Mitcham, Adelaide, Magill, Norwood, Marryatville and Payneham Road … six moves in twenty years, almost a move per child. Eliza not only had to care for an ever-growing family, she had to keep moving as she did it and from the look of it, without the support of a husband who was often drunk, violent or both. But he did keep working – that was the Camplin gene. Although not one my mother inherited given that her preference was always to have others do the work for her.
Given Isaac’s history of drunkenness and assault it is surprising that he is not the object of shame and yet it is his name which appears on his daughter’s marriage notice and that of her mother is markedly absent. Although in the true spirit of patriarchy a father’s name was more common on such records with the mothers generally ignored, even if they remained faithful wives and attended their daughter’s wedding. But, given the times it was easier to retain a drunken father than a ‘bolting’ mother and the ‘shame’ of a woman leaving her husband would be far greater than that of a man who gets drunk and violent, even if the violence is directed against his wife. Something made Eliza leave and we know enough of Isaac’s bad habits to guess what it was.
Eliza must have agonised for at least a few years before making the decision that she did. Although there is always the possibility that Isaac threw his wife out or demanded that she leave. Did Eliza succumb to post-natal depression and take to laudanum as a comfort, leaving her children to run wild? It’s possible. All we do know is that William’s name begins to appear in court records from 1877, as does that of Thomas and within eight years Eliza’s second daughter would be married and her mother would not be mentioned. Although the fact that Emily married James Dynon in St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic church may also have something to do with it. Whether Emily had converted to Catholicism prior to meeting James, or after they became engaged, the reality of the times is that ‘separated’ parents would be considered ‘sinful’ and if Eliza had done the leaving, which seems most likely, she would not have been acceptable to the church, let alone to be mentioned on the marriage certificate.
She may also have opposed the marriage. Eliza was an Anglican by birth and marriage, however substantial or not, her devotion may have been. Anglicans were in the majority in 19th century Australia and Catholics were considered almost a ‘class’ apart. It would be well into the 20th before followers of either faith would easily step foot inside the other’s church.
Perhaps at this stage Eliza was past caring. Disappointed in both sons and daughters she may well have been living alone, hearing only occasionally of what they were doing and as often as not, wishing she had not heard.
William never quite managed the same ‘form’ as his older brother but he spent a goodly amount of time ‘socialising’ with the constabulary. And he drank too much and he got into fights…..a true Camplin it seems, much to Eliza’s shame we could suppose. In May of 1877 William was amongst a group of boys fined 10s. each for using indecent language in a public place; in March of 1881 he was charged for driving without lights and had to pay one pound costs; in June 1883 charged with lying about being a bona-fide traveller in order to be served beer, when he lived barely five miles from the Marryatville Hotel; in March 1884 he was charged with being drunk while in charge of his horse and dray at Marryatville and also for assaulting the police officer. He also had no lights and was fined 10s. for being drunk, 10s. for no light and 10.s for the assault; in July 1885 charged with stealing clothes but acquitted; May 1886 for exposing meat for sale after 6p.m. and fined … and his brother Thomas charged at the same time for exposing wood for sale after 6p.m. and fined 5s. and costs; August 1887 William charged with being drunk in charge of a horse….and on it goes.
And to end Ebenezer’s ‘story’ on a positive note, the last report  which mentioned him was for May 1912 when the court was hearing a claim as the result of a major fire at Devil’s Elbow, a dangerous turn on the long winding road from the Adelaide plains up into the hills where my German ancestors had settled and where we now have a farm.  Ebenezer is cited as a labourer, living at Marryatville and must have been working in the area. Given the distance between his home and Devil’s Elbow, he was probably staying on the property for the duration of his employment. Despite years of drinking and excess he was still fit enough to work as a labourer at the age of fifty-seven and to help beat out a bushfire. The country around Devil’s Elbow is heavily timbered bush, even today, and with no attempts made to reduce underbrush and dead leaves, as is done now, fires in the early part of the 20th century would have been both furious and deadly.
But Ebenezer must have had a reasonable relationship with his mother. He and his wife Emily (Highet) called their daughter born in April 1876, Eliza. Sadly she died in June, just nine weeks later. This must have added to Eliza’s grief having lost her own baby daughter just a year before.  In 1886 she would lose another daughter, with Mary Eliza dying at the age of twenty- eight. My great-grandmother Sarah was twenty when her sister died.
On January 5, 1876 Ebenezer had married Emily Highet in Saddleworth, in South Australia’s mid-north. He was twenty years old. He was also on the run from the law as entries in the Police Gazette indicate.  He would be arrested barely eight weeks after his wedding, having used a false name – Fred Denton – while working in the north. Given that he put his real name on the marriage certificate we can only presume that Emily knew the truth.
The previous year he had disobeyed a summons and done a ‘runner’ to Riverton, north of Adelaide, and not far from Saddleworth.
July 7, 1875
Ebenezer Camplin, aged 21 years, 5ft.7in. high, sallow
complexion, dark hair, dark thin whiskers and moustache, is
charged, on warrant issued at Adelaide on the 1st instant,
with disobeying a summons from the Adelaide Police Court.
Supposed to have gone to Riverton.

Their daughter Eliza Emily was born on April 18 of the same year… just three months after the wedding so it’s reasonable to assume it was a ‘shotgun’ wedding for Ebenezer. Tragically it was also short-lived, for Emily died on May 21, just over four weeks after her daughter’s birth and little Eliza, possibly born frail anyway, joined her mother barely a month later. 
Exactly a month after the death of his baby daughter Ebenezer was arrested again, this time for larceny from Dean & Laughton; fined £ 11. If it were not for past and future behaviours this crime could be attributed to the effects of grief and trauma, but there is too much evidence that Ebenezer Camplin and petty crime went hand in hand.
On August 15, 1877, three months before his twenty-second birthday, Ebenezer married Alice Bennet who was nineteen. They would remain together until her death forty-two years later … except for at least one period of desertion in 1882, the year that his baby son Isaac died. Ebenezer left his wife and two small children in August and was arrested three months later – whereupon he returned to his wife and family. In the same year he is sentenced to seven days hard labour for larceny.
Ebenezer Camplin, a labourer, a native of South Australia aged 32 years, height 5ft. 8in., dark-brown hair, dark-brown eyes, scar across nose; sentenced to seven days hard labour for larceny from John Mack, at Stirling West.
We don’t have a photo of Eliza but we do of Isaac and we know from police records that he was fair. The dark-brown hair and eyes then, most probably have come from the Ash side of the family. The scar across the nose however was not genetic but the mark of a man inclined to brawling. Like his father he was a reasonable height and not overly tall. My great-grandmother Sarah, whose photograph we do have, was dark of hair and eyes with a long nose and sallow complexion and it’s a good bet she may have been the spitting image of her mother. She certainly does not look like her father.
What was my great-grandmother Sarah thinking about all this? She was three or four when her big brother Ebenezer disappeared… at least that is how it would have felt to a small child even if her parents explained he had been ‘bad’ and so had been sent to Reform School. Ebenezer would have been in trouble for most of her childhood and perhaps, when he left his wife and young family, she was hardly surprised. Her sister Mary was twenty-four, Louise was twenty-three and at the age of sixteen, she and her sisters would have been doing all they could to support their mother. 
We can presume, given his history that Alice had no illusions about her husband’s inclination to crime. The first of their eleven children would arrive the year following their marriage – eight would survive to adulthood. William Albert George 1878 died 1948, Isaac 1881 died 1882; Albert Ebenezer 1883 died 1959; Ernest Edward 1885 died 1895; Isaac Harold 1887 died 1977; Edward Ernest 1890 died1942; Alice May 1891 died at three months; Thomas, 1893 died 1944; Eliza 1895 died 1951; Walter 1897 died 1898; an unnamed child stillborn in 1899; Alice May 1901 died 1977; Daisy 1904 died 1968. Two of their sons and one daughter died before they turned one and little Ernest died in a tragic accident at the age of nine.
Interestingly given his fondness for the demon drink – and it would have been  a raw and fiery brew in those days, at least for the working man -  Ebenezer was still able to produce a large family, most of whom, at least the sons, lived reasonably long lives. The last was born when he was near fifty. Ebenezer’s son, Isaac lived until ninety and two of his brothers into their seventies but the daughters fared worse with deaths in their fifties and sixties. Then again, women worked harder than men and bore babies as well. But one has the sense that Ebenezer was nothing if not strong in constitution as well as opinion.
By 1892 he may have calmed down a little with a description in the Police Gazette indicating that he was reasonably well dressed when he appeared in court for disobeying a summons over an indecent language charge.  He may still be swearing like a trouper and drinking like a fish but at least by this stage it isn’t larceny!
Ebenezer Camplin, a laborer, age 39 years, height 5ft.
8in. or 9in., dark hair, dark complexion, and dark moustache
only, wore white moleskin trousers, navy blue sac coat, and
black soft felt hat, for disobeying a summons of the Norwood
Bench, to answer a charge of using indecent language,
the 15th instant.-
By the time that Ebenezer’s wife Alice died, he would have calmed down a little but his sons would be following in his footsteps as aggressive trouble-makers. Alice may well have been worn out through child-bearing and bearing her husband’s drinking-fighting approach to life which she could see that her sons had inherited. She was sixty-one.

CAMPLIN. -The FRIENDS of Mr. EBENEZER CAMPLIN are informed that the Funeral of  his late WIFE (Alice) will leave his residence, 2, Dudley-road, Marryatville. WEDNESDAY, 2 p.m., for Payneham Cemeterv.
PHOTO: Ebenezer’s Dudley Road, Marryatville home as it is today.
Ebenezer had another eleven years to live and despite his turbulent past seems to have inherited the Camplin gene for hard work and in the doing managed to keep his Marryatville home.  However, the Camplin gene for violence had also been inherited and in October 1919, Albert Camplin is charged with assaulting his brother, Edward Camplin at Kensington. Alice had died on August 11, just two months prior and Albert, aged thirty-six and Edward aged twenty-nine were fighting just as their father had done, before their mother’s body was even ‘cold.’
For Eliza Ash Camplin the themes of poverty, violence and death were well established… as they were for Sarah Camplin Hasch. There is no doubt that the Camplin Boys would have had a reputation for petty crime and drunkenness and knew the inside of gaol cells better than their mother would have wished. One presumes given the severity of the fines that all Camplin boys spent quite a bit of time in gaol simply because they would not have been able to afford to pay them. Although perhaps they were doing so well at the petty larceny game that fines were not an issue.
And death remained a constant for my great-great-grandmother. In January of 1895 she would have mourned deeply when her grandson, Ernest was killed in a tragic accident.  Nine-year-old Ernest, Ebenezer’s son, died while playing with other boys on a structure erected for a performance by a local tight-wire artiste, Alexander Laurie., who saw himself as South Australia’s answer to the famous Charles Blondin.
PHOTO: Charles Blondin was world famous. In this photo he is carrying his manager.
As the report records: The accident being caused by a number of boys swinging on the guy ropes and bringing down the staging. Alexander Laurie, who is known as "The South Australian Blondin has been giving performances lately on a piece of vacant land off High-Street, Kensington, and for the purpose of his exhibition be has a tight wire erected. Great trouble has always been experienced by the proprietor and his men in keeping the boys off the apparatus. On the previous evening Laurie's assistant had about finished fixing the apparatus for the performance when he was called in to tea. Shortly afterwards he heard a humming noise coming from the apparatus, and the standard running down the wire, and he rushed out to see what was the matter. It appears that while he was away a number of small boys started to play on the various fixtures. Some of them made a swing of the guy ropes, and while they were causing the apparatus to move by the shaking and straining the deceased was playing; in the vicinity. The wooden standard suddenly fell and knocked the lad down. When he was picked up the youngster was found to be quite dead. He was bleeding from the mouth and ears. John Malted, Laurie's employee, having placed the body in a van, went for a doctor…who examined the body and said the boy must have been killed instantly. The body was then removed to the parents' home. At the inquest held by Dr. Whittell at the Rising Sun Hotel, Kensington, on Tuesday afternoon, the jury returned a verdict of accidental death, with no blame attachable to anyone.
PHOTO: The Rising Sun, Bridge Street, Kensington in 2011.
Poor Ernest, poor Ebenezer, poor Eliza ….what a troubled family and this is only a part of it. If I am picking up themes in my mother’s ancestral inheritance they are poverty, violence and death! Not that such things were necessarily rare for the times. One of the reasons for the growth in the Temperance movement was the fact that drunkenness was all too common. I wonder if Sarah approved when told her son-in-law would be a teetotalling member of The Rechabites?
It is strange reading the inquest report on young Ernest’s death because I have a friend who lives in Bridge Street, Kensington, today an upper class suburb and The Rising Sun Hotel is a trendy place to drink and eat, serving fantastic food in historic surroundings. We have eaten there many times and I have driven up and down Bridge Street many times delivering and collecting my grand-daughter Kaela to and from primary school – without ever knowing of the family links.
And I am beginning to have greater perspective into my great-grandmother Sarah Hasch given the stories my mother told about her hitting her grown daughter and leaving her with black eyes. If Ebenezer was prone to beating his brothers he may well have done the same to his sisters. And there is every chance that all of the children were beaten by Isaac. Such levels of violence do not appear in a vacuum!
Isaac and Eliza’s family must have been both violent and dysfunctional. Did Eliza leave Isaac because of his violence? Given the paths which her sons followed it is likely.
William clearly had a drinking problem just as his father and his brothers did.  In November of 1915 a newspaper report mentioned the arrest of a William Camplin for drunkenness, at Stirling West, near Crafers. He had been found lying in the middle of the road and when the police tried to move him he had violently resisted. This sounds a lot like our boy and his place of residence is given as Dunrobin, Victoria so William may well have left town to work interstate for a time.  This is the same period, during which Ebenezer was working and putting out fires not far from here … Crafers being up the road from the Devil’s Elbow where Ebenezer was working.
Given the clear demonstration of Ebenezer’s capacity for hard work one can only wonder at the propensity for larceny. Was it opportunistic or a tilt at anyone or anything which represented authority? There is in my mother’s family a strong strain of independence of spirit and opinion and a belief in human rights and justice. It is a mix of the conservative and the rebel where respect is paid where it is due, but only where common sense and justice prevail, and where they do not, then measured rebellion is the chosen course.
Ebenezer may have leaned more toward the rebellious than the conservative but there is no doubt that throughout his long and colourful criminal career he continued to work hard and when he was facing the judge, his punishments, given his form, seemed relatively lenient. There were a lot of fines for a boy and man who was a serial offender and only occasional stints in gaol, which suggests that the court took into account factors which mitigated his criminal tendencies.