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.
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.
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.’
