While I breathe, I hope.

The village of Goosnargh, which lies in Lancashire, in the north west of England, is situated seven miles from Preston the nearest market town. It is a very old parish first named in the Domesday Book of 1086. It has an ancient church, the village inn (there once was two) and a village green, the archetypal English village scene, hardly changed today.

In the north eastern part of the Churchyard are tombstones which mark the family vault of the Oliverson family, built in 1846 by Christopher Oliverson, a Yeoman of Westfield House, who died in 1852.

One such inscription reads:

Sacred to the memory of Richard Oliverson, late of Goosnargh, who departed this life on the 24th of November, 1799 in the 53rd year of his life.

Such was their affection for the village, those members who had long since moved away had chosen Goosnargh churchyard for their final resting place such as

Sacred to the memory of Richard Oliverson, late of Portland Place, London, son of Richard and Elizabeth Oliverson, who departed this life on the 28th of February, 1952 in the 77th year of his age.

Who were this family so revered in this small village? The first recorded Oliverson in the parish records is the burial of Elizabeth Oliverson, daughter of Richard Oliverson on 2 December 1644. There may have been Oliversons in Goosnargh before this as the first recorded Oliverson in the lineage in Burke’s Family Records is Richard Oliverson who died before 1668 who could have been her father. Their line of descent goes down to the twentieth century in Goosnargh. The parish records show their occupations as yeomen, husbandmen and gentlemen and in 1778 Christopher Oliverson is listed as a churchwarden. Christopher and Richard Oliverson were also members of the 24 sworn men in 1877. In the 1851 Barrett’s trade directory, Christopher and Thomas Oliverson are named as two of the principal landowners of Goosnargh along with such worthies as Thomas Batty Addison, the Recorder of Preston and James Sidgreaves Esq. The Oliverson family were known as the “Patrons of Goosnargh” as they were constant donors to the church and the school which was eventually named after them. In the church tower was a clock given by William Shawe Esq. and Richard Oliverson in 1846. An organ was presented in 1856 which bore the inscription:- “This clock erected AD 1861 at the joint expense of William Shaw Esq. of Preston and Richard Oliverson of Goosnargh and by them presented to Goosnargh Church. Simpson Makers, Preston."

The largest benefactor to the village was Richard Oliverson of Portland Place, London but formerly of Goosnargh, one of the five sons of Richard and Elizabeth Oliverson. He gained an MA at Exeter College, Cambridge and was a Director of the Scottish Fire and Life Insurance Company. Although he was based in London he was the principal benefactor of the family, one of his achievements being in 1840 he founded a school for girls at Goosnargh funded by subscription and the list included donations by his siblings Christopher, Agnes, Richard, Thomas and Robert Oliverson of London of £94 10s. The total amount raised amounted to £324 8s 0d. Back in 1834 he purchased land on the north side of Goosnargh Lane near to the church for the erection of a school house and prior to his death in 1852 he had conveyed to trustees for the use or benefit of the Master of the Free School for the time being. The subscription list for the girl’s school included donations by his siblings Christopher and Miss Agnes Oliverson of Goosnargh, and Richard, Thomas and Robert Oliverson of London, amounting to £142. Richard also made generous contributions to the establishment of a School Lending Library, adding 400 volumes of books from his own library. Further donations included a dwelling house for the use of the mistress of Goosnargh Girl’s School and about 12 months previous to his death he proposed to invest money, the interest of which to be applied in purchasing reading books for the use of the scholars of the Masters’ Free School. Although his life and work was in London, he never forgot the education he received at the school and his gratitude can be summed up by the impressive total of £2334 19s 1d he invested in the village.

His brother Robert was one of the largest brokers and underwriters in the city of London, his connection with the Lloyds establishment going back to 1817 and his wealth was estimated as about a million sterling.

In 1867 when the church was in much need of repair a subscription list was raised to fund the necessary work and three of the Oliverson family, Robert and his nephews Richard and Thomas were the main donors, their donations amounting to £250.

In 1869 there was great excitement in the village when Christopher Oliverson, the 34-year-old son of the late Christopher and Elizabeth Oliverson was to be married in the local parish church. The Preston Chronicle in an article headed “Marriage Festivities at Goosnargh” said that “there were great rejoicings in the village ... Early on the Wednesday morning the place assumed a lively aspect, and as the day advanced, affairs wore quite a holiday appearance. At half past ten several persons-principally females were in the church; and as the hour approached the sacred edifice was comparatively crowded.” One of the reasons for the rejoicing was that Christopher was to marry Jane Graham, the fifth daughter of John Graham, the Governor of Goosnargh Hospital. The paper went on to describe the scene: “From the steeple of the old church the union jack floated bravely; from each gable of the church yard there was an arch of evergreens, flanked with banners, and bearing in the centre the motto ‘May they be happy’. People had come from Preston and other parts of the district. The church looked especially well as it had recently been much improved, much of it from the benefice of the Oliverson family. The bell ringers were mentioned; five having been in the ‘trade’ for between thirty and forty years pulled bravely at the ropes. And if the chimes they rung out were not very harmonious, they were at least strong and hearty.

“Mr R Cookson, the schoolmaster who had helped to ring the bells when the first child of Mr Graham was born, pulled ‘jubilantly’ for a time one of the ropes in the ancient steeple and infused a spirit of festal hilarity into the school children who gathered to witness the marriage. At eleven the wedding party appeared, five bridesmaids who were the sisters of the bride were attired in lavender coloured silk dresses. The bride wore a dress of white silk; upon her head was a wreath of orange blossoms. In the chancel were Mr & Mrs Graham, Mrs Oliverson, Mr R Oliverson, London; Captain and Mrs Berry, Canterbury; Mr Alderman Arkwright, Preston; Mrs Hudson, Preston and others. The service was officiated by the Rev. Thomas Benn, vicar of Inglewhite. The organist for the day was Jane’s brother, Daniel Graham who played an appropriate musical prelude on the organ – a neat instrument given by Mr Robert Oliverson (uncle of the bridegroom) in 1836.”

It was said that a spirit of festivity prevailed in both the Hospital and the village, and there was no doubt that in the nineteenth century Goosnargh was renowned for its festivals which attracted people from the surrounding districts and beyond.

Christopher was the only one of the younger generation to settle in Goosnargh. After attending school in London he returned to marry his wife Jane and in 1871 is a landowner living at Whittingham House. After his death in 1877 at the age of 41, his widow moved to Goosnargh Lodge with her three children. Goosnargh Lodge was once the summer seat of the Oliverson family. She did not stay long, moving first to Blackpool and then to Southport where she died in 1918. Christopher’s brother Richard Oliverson was educated at Oxford and was barrister at law of the Inner Temple and married in 1863 Frances Ellen, daughter of Richard Almack of Melford Suffolk. He was also a JP in Lancaster. One of his sons Cecil Henry, was also a barrister at law of the Inner Temple and gained a BA Christ Church, Oxford.

Towards the end of the 19th century the last of the Oliverson family left Goosnargh, leaving behind a lasting legacy to the village and as Richard Cookson writing in 1887 in “Goosnargh Past and Present” said “When will we see their like again”.

For such a prominent family who had such an influence in the area it seems strange that no photographs appear anywhere of any of their members and they seem to have disappeared without trace after leaving the village. I have scoured family trees but information on the Oliversons is very scant indeed.

The tombstones in the churchyard and the village school to which they gave their name “Goosnargh Oliversons C E School” are the only permanent reminders.

Janet Rigby
Member 1314

Teresa Edenborough nee Persiani

On 4 June 1881 Edwin EDENBOROUGH of Stanley Street, Darlinghurst, Sydney and Teresa Ann PERSIANI of Palmer Street, Darlinghurst were married. The marriage took place according to the Rites of the Church of England at St Peter’s Church, Darlinghurst. Both parties were under age and the consent of Jane Edenborough, mother of the bridegroom, and John Pye, guardian of Teresa Persiani, was given to the marriage.

I have been very fortunate that descendants of the couple have retained a huge amount of ephemera including family bibles which confirms the marriage. However, while the ancestry of Edwin has been easy to research, that of Teresa has resulted in a couple of major stumbling blocks.

The death certificate for Teresa Edenborough (nee Persiani) states that her parents were Peter Persanna (sic) and Eliza Rollins. But the only birth certificate that has been found for this couple is for that of a Pleasance Elizabeth Persiani born 11 March 1862 at Palmer Street, Darlinghurst. The birth date has been confirmed by the grandchildren of Teresa as being correct. But nobody has been able to supply the reason why Pleasance changed her name to Teresa Ann.

Her father, Peter Persiani, was involved with seafaring: family lore being that he was a sea captain who went down with his ship. He certainly disappeared after his daughter Teresa was born in Sydney in 1862 but whether he perished at sea or deserted his family remains a mystery.

I have tried to research this Peter Persiani but he remains a huge brick wall of mine. At the time of Teresa’s birth on 11 March 1862 he was 30 years of age, a sailor, and stated he was born in Leghorn, Italy. The previous year, on 17 June 1861, he stated on his certificate of marriage to Eliza Rollins, that he was a mariner, of full age, and was born in Stockholm. I believe him to be the Peter Persiana, an able bodied seaman, who had deserted from the ship Hollinside while docked at Sydney in 1859.

Oil painting of Peter Persiani, undated, held by family descendants.

Notice of his desertion appeared in the New South Wales Government Gazette of 1 Aug 1859 which recorded him as being 5ft 2in high, of dark complexion, black hair and dark eyes. It would appear this wasn’t the first time that Peter Persiana had deserted. An earlier notice appeared in the NSWGG of 5 Sep 1855 listing his then desertion from the ship Euphrates. That time a £4 reward was offered to be paid if he was apprehended while the ship was in harbour.

Using the Mariners and Ships in Australian Waters website, I located Peter Persiani on the 1862 crew lists of March and May for the steamer Eagle although he gives his birthplace variously as British or New Orleans! The Eagle appears to have plied its trade between Sydney and Rockhampton. And there the trail goes cold. I have searched Trove and other websites for any shipwrecks or related happenings but haven’t been successful in finding anything more on Peter Persiani. So, was he lost at sea? Or did he once again desert ship (and family) this time in another state or country?

Peter Persiani’s disappearance supposedly happened when his daughter Teresa was a baby with family lore stating that Eliza Persiani nee Rollins married again but that Teresa’s step-father was very cruel to her so she ran away to her Auntie Pye who looked after her and brought her up. It is also believed that she was brought up in the Roman Catholic faith but switched to Church of England upon her marriage to Edwin Edenborough.

Sadly, Teresa’s death, at the age of 57, was on 1 July 1919 – one of the many thousands of people who succumbed to the worldwide Spanish flu epidemic.

Jennie Fairs
Member 1006

William Edwin Geoffrey WAYCOTT 1918 – 1941
William Hugh Percival WAYCOTT, DFM 1922 – 1944

Earlier this year I was intrigued to receive an email from a Frenchman enquiring about an airman with the surname WAYCOTT who had died when his Lancaster bomber was shot down over France in 1944. I had the basic details of this man (who is not in my own family tree), but my attempts to uncover his history and contact relatives revealed a much deeper story.

Over a hundred years ago two brothers, Cyril Caldwell WAYCOTT (1878-1968) and Percival Guernsey WAYCOTT (1884-1937) were born in Frindsbury, Kent. The family had originated (as all WAYCOTT families do) in Devon, in this case in the Tavy Valley north of Plymouth. Two generations earlier their grandfather Richard WAYCOTT (born 1802 in Bere Ferrers) had enlisted in the Royal Engineers as a sapper and miner and found himself at the huge military base in Woolwich, Kent where he married a local girl and eventually settled there, having meanwhile baptised children in Barbados, New Brunswick and Quebec as well as Kent.

Cyril Caldwell WAYCOTT obviously had engineering and the sea in his blood, and in 1911 he was an Inspector of Fitters at HM Dockyard, Chatham in Kent. He had married Edith GITTINGS in 1907, and two daughters were born in Kent. However when his only son William Edwin Geoffrey WAYCOTT was born in 1918, Cyril was Foreman at HM Dockyard, Malta. The Mediterranean island acted as a refuge and hospital during WWI and tens of thousands of wounded servicemen from the Dardanelles and Salonika campaigns were treated there. The dockyard would have been full of hospital ships, with German U-Boats prowling the seas outside.

Percival Guernsey WAYCOTT, meanwhile, became a carpenter and joiner and was working as such in HM Dockyard, Chatham in 1911. Something, probably WWI, took him north to Scotland where in 1919 he married Annie LEE in the port town of Inverkeithing, Fife. Tragedy struck when Annie died in Inverkeithing of pregnancy-related heart problems after the birth of their only child William Hugh Percival WAYCOTT early in 1922.

Little more is known of the brothers until 1934, when they appear in Plymouth, Devon to set up a building firm, the Eagle Joinery Company Limited, intending to “carry on the business of joinery manufacturers, builders, building contractors, builders’ merchants, contractors for aeroplane woodwork construction etc.” Both brothers were directors, giving an address at 1 Alma Road, Plymouth. Business would have been good; no doubt both brothers had plenty of contacts in the dockyard and indeed it seems that Cyril was still working in the dockyard as in 1937 he was awarded the Imperial Service Medal as Foreman of the Engineer Branch, HM Dockyard, Devonport. Unfortunately in the same year Percival fell from the top of a boiler he was working on, fracturing his skull and later dying of pneumonia.

It is probable that after this tragedy, the orphaned fifteen year old William H P WAYCOTT was taken in by his uncle and aunt to be raised alongside their own son, William E G WAYCOTT. Then the Second World War broke out.

On 13 November 1941 Lt W E G WAYCOTT was on board HMS Ark Royal when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat off Gibraltar. One rating died, and the crew were evacuated before the ship sank under tow a day later. Having survived one sinking, it was a cruel irony that barely five weeks later, on 19 December 1941, Lt William Edwin Geoffrey WAYCOTT should die along with 125 others when the destroyer HMS Stanley, on convoy escort duty, was sunk by a U-Boat torpedo off the coast of Portugal.

Meanwhile his cousin Sergeant William Hugh Percival WAYCOTT, 101 Squadron, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal “for gallantry and devotion to duty in the execution of air operations” in 1943. He was re-posted to 550 Squadron and granted the rank of Acting Flight Lieutenant w.e.f. 20/12/43. He was Senior Gunnery Officer from 25 Nov 43 to 10 Apr 44, but was reported missing when Lancaster LL836 was lost on 10/11 April 1944 on an operation to Aulnoye. All the members of the crew were killed and they are buried in the cemetery at Achiet le Petit in northern France.

Lt W E G WAYCOTT is remembered on the Plymouth Naval Memorial, and both young men are named on the War Memorial in St Andrew’s churchyard in Whitchurch, Devon.

Last year the village of Achiet le Petit organised a memorial service to honour the airmen who are buried there - http://www.550squadronassociation.org.uk/pages/550-sqdn-achiet-le-petit-commemoration-2015.php

The organisers were able to contact relations of some of the crew and invite them to the ceremony but had found no information on William H P WAYCOTT, hence the email to me. I had already reconstructed the family tree and knew there were no immediate relatives, but I was surprised to find that the closest relatives were 4th cousins! I am pleased to report that I was able to contact one of them who was surprised but grateful to learn the story of his gallant cousins.

Maureen Kenchington (waycott@one-name.org)
Member 1264

Researching:
Waycott, Fewings, Piper, Burgoyne, Johns, Phillips, Paddon, Streat;
Morrish, Rowd*n, Pike, Lowder, Flood, Parsons and others.
All in glorious Devon!

When I trawled newspapers online for any Winningtons, my surname study, I was somewhat surprised to see this man’s name. It did not feature in the database of Winningtons that I had, but there was a John Myles Wennington from a north Lancashire and Cumbrian family. This illustrates a common problem as the two surnames are often mixed up. Even more fascinating was the fact he was called Sir, as far as I know there were no knights or baronets in this family. So, intrigued, I dug deeper and came up with a fascinating tale, which is not yet complete.

John Wennington was baptised at St John’s, Liverpool on 27 May 1797, the son of Miles Wennington, Gent, and his wife Jane, of Ulveston, Lancashire. However, it also records he was born on 15 November 1794. Ulveston registers have a baptism for him on 22 November 1794, so why was he baptised twice? Both churches were the Established church so he was not changing sect. The Wenningtons can be found in this area of north Lancashire and the southern Lake District for two hundred years before this and were of middling wealth. John’s father Miles Wennington died in Liverpool and is buried the same day his son was baptised, 27 May 1797, and he is described as Gent. of Union Street, aged 30 years.

The next paper trail for John Miles Wennington is when he is articled as a clerk to Thomas Windle in 1811, and is described as the son of Jane Wennington, widow, of Devonshire Street, London. On 18 November 1816 Samuel Austice, Attorney, Tavistock Place, London, files Articles of Clerkship for John Miles Wennington. This is the last time he uses Wennington as his surname. He appears to have finished his articles and to have practised as an attorney.

On 23 August 1820 there is a newspaper report of a marriage at St Margaret’s, Westminster, between Sir John Miles Winnington and Miss Henrietta Antonia, second daughter of the late Bedingfield Pogson Esq, and great niece of the present Earl of Glencairne. However, in 1823 she is suing for divorce in the Consistory Court in London on the grounds of her husband’s adultery. They apparently only lived together for a few months. This case drags on for several years and it is not entirely clear whether or not she gets a divorce. She keeps returning to the Court because she gets no alimony. He pleads poverty. But he is also cited in the divorce case in 1831 brought by Mr Le Fevre, as the guilty party and has to pay 600 guineas.

The next occasion he can be found in public documents is his conviction for theft in 1842 and being sent to Australia for seven years, arriving in Tasmania in mid 1843. He was also an insolvent bankrupt partly because of the debts contracted over his contested divorce from Henriettta, although these were discharged in 1848 after a relative left him £1600. This may have been his mother but no record of her death as been found yet. It is not clear if John Miles Winnington remained in Australia after he served his term, but he is still there when he is declared solvent in 1849.

A tree on Ancestry offered another clue to John Miles Winnington’s later life, as it has him marrying a Jane Nash, date unknown, and having a daughter Maria Nash Winnington, born 1828. This can be partly verified by documents from Australia. Maria married John Gemmell, a surgeon, of the Ovens River, on 5 September 1848 at Parramatta, New South Wales. In the newspaper notice of this event she is described as the grand-daughter of Mr Andrew Nash, of Parramatta. After John Gemmell’s death, date so far unknown, she married Grainger Muir Brough, son of Constantine Brough, on 7 January 1868 at All Saints, St Kilda, Victoria. She is described as Marie Laura Gimmell in the transcription of this record but her parents are John Myles Winnington and Jane Nash so it is obviously the same woman.

So far I have not found a death for John Miles Winnington, but the fact that he keeps using both John and Miles has allowed him to be followed more easily than if he were just John. And the knighthood? He says he was awarded one by Pope Pius VII but I suspect this was a fiction as there is no indication he was ever a Roman Catholic and in the early nineteenth century Pope Pius was having a great deal of trouble with Napoleon Bonaparte, so was unlikely to be honouring a Protestant Englishman. The other notable thing about this tale was that the divorce proceedings were reported in many of the regional newspapers across Britain. It obviously was seen as good copy to fill up any spaces in a newspaper.

Naomi Tarrant
Member 1119

From Gloucester to the Gold fields

Frances Jane Morris Morse was the second daughter of Richard and Ann Morse and was born in 1846 in Gloucester, a city in the south west of England about twenty miles from the Forest of Dean, where her father had originated. In 1862 her eldest sister Emily Anne had married and soon after emigrated to Australia with her new husband Charles Jennings. Three years later, in 1865 at the relatively young age of nineteen, Frances took the bold step of following her sister to Australia. She sailed alone on the Montmorency intending to stay with Emily in Sydney but disembarked at Bowen, thinking she was in Sydney. Realising her mistake she had no option but to stay there. Luckily she had met a family on board who had befriended her and they offered her a job as governess to their children. The Montmorency was the first official immigrant ship to sail to the new state of Queensland in 1860 and did four other voyages.

This was to change the whole course of her life down under as it was in Bowen that she met a young American, Richard Bradby. Richard was originally from Virginia, in the United States of America but was now resident in Australia and a year later they were married. Frances went on to have several children but family rumour, which has not been proved, is that three of them, Roynon, Sterling and Florence, who died as an infant, were fathered by Richard but another child, Joseph Nash Harland, was given away and raised by his father of the same name. He was said to have returned to the family when he called himself Ryan, the surname of his stepfather David Joseph Ryan. It is of course possible that not all the children were illegitimate and Frances put them down as such to keep Richard’s whereabouts hidden and only Vida was David’s. Joseph may have been adopted because of financial difficulties and the Harlands had no children of their own.

Richard Bradby known as “Black Jack Bradby”, was an inveterate gambler who turned to horse stealing amongst other things to pay his debts. Disaster was to strike the family when Richard upped and left and no more was seen or heard from him again. The family was left to survive in the goldfields, a truly desperate time and it was a full seven years before he was declared dead and Frances could marry again.

It is possible that Richard Bradby, who was born in 1830 in Virginia, USA was linked to a Richard Bradby entered in the 1870 USA census as living on an American Indian reservation with a Frances E Bradby (widow of a Sterling Bradby (1825-1864) and her children, Charles and Virginia.

There were many inhabitants on this reservation with the name of Bradby, and it is interesting to note the Christian name of Sterling which is the name also given to Richard and Frances’s son, Sterling Etheridge Bradby – the Etheridge refers to the mining area near Chillagoe in North Queensland where they lived. Sterling drowned in the Tate River whilst attempting to cross it on his way home for Christmas in 1917 at the age of 46. His brother Roynon also came to grief in a flooded river. Although rescued, he died of pneumonia a few weeks later, in 1899 at the age of thirty one.

A condition of the 1870 US census was that Indians resident on a reservation had to be present at the time of the census if they wished to retain their right to land ownership. This could be a possible explanation for Richard’s disappearance. The husband of Frances Bradby, Sterling Bradby, was killed by his brother William Terrill Bradby supposedly in a drunken fight. Richard may well have taken up with Sterling’s widow when he returned to America. As for William Terrill Bradby, who was in the Union Army when he killed his brother, he was subsequently court-martialed and received a light sentence. Richard’s exact relationship to him is still not certain.

James Mooney of the Smithsonian states that the numerous Bradbys of Pamunkey and Chickahominy tribes all have descent from a white man, William Terrill’s great grandfather who about the time of the Revolutionary period married a Chickahominy woman. It is quite possible that Frances might not have known Richard was a native American.

In 1887 Frances married David Joseph Ryan and by this time they had had three children, Alice Mary Frances, William Patrick Francis, and Vida Emily. Alas, history was to repeat itself as David Ryan, a heavy drinker, also disappeared around 1887 in the Palmer river goldfields, with speculation that he may have been killed by Aboriginals. This part of the world was definitely frontier country, a tough place for a woman to survive with a family and no reliable partner.

Frances’s eldest child by her second husband, Alice Mary Francis Ryan was born in 1880 and at the age of nineteen (the same age as when her mother had emigrated from England) married Frank Armstrong Hargreaves, an Englishman from Congleton in Cheshire, who had arrived in Cairns in 1892 at the age of seventeen on the Jeluga.

Alice Mary Francis Ryan

Frank Armstrong Hargeaves

It is believed that his uncle (Captain A Mann from London) captained the ship. Frank supposedly got off the ship without his uncle’s permission on Thursday Island (situated at the top of old Queensland) and swam to the Jardine river where the Jardine family took him in. He got a job with the legendary stage coach firm Cobb and Co. and eventually got a coach of his own, carrying supplies to mining settlements in Outback Queensland. He became a cattle grazier with a large property (147 square miles) called Amber Station in Fossilbrook, described as the wildest country imaginable. Frank and Alice reared a large family of five sons and four daughters. The running of Amber Station was a family affair, Alice’s sons were all stockmen there. Two of his sons predeceased him, Francis Roynon died in 1942 and William Henry in 1922 at the young age of seventeen.

Alice’s sister Vida Emily was living with her husband John William Leonard and family at Sunnymount, Chillagoe until the 1930s, when they took over the Espanol Hotel at Lappa Junction.

Vida’s husband died in 1937 so she earned her living as a hotel proprietor right until her death in 1969.

Joan Bell (nee Broadley) in front of Auntie Vida's hotel in the late 1990s

The following is an extract from the Cairns Post, Saturday, 20 October 2001.

The timber and corrugated iron pub was built in 1901 by a Spanish teamster known only as Mr Barbra, whose love of his homeland is reflected in the hotel’s name. Espanol is Spanish for Spaniard. The pub must have seemed like a little slice of luxury for the miners and their wives from the local mining camps. Their tough homes consisted of a bit of tin perched on top of a few kerosene drums with hessian bags for walls. People would come to the Espanol for their honeymoons. It must have been pretty flash – good beds with mosquito nets and all the meals provided. For any woman out here at that time, not having to cook or carry water would have been a big treat. As well as the miners, Barbra’s pub catered for the 500 or more railway workers who serviced the Mareeba line, which reached Lappa in 1900 and the copper rich nearby town of Chillagoe the following year. In 1902, Lappa became an important rail junction when a branch line was built south to Mt Garnet to service its new copper smelter. The town’s mineral rush was short lived and the line was eventually removed in the 1960s.

Lappa takes its name from nearby Lappa Lappa Creek (Aboriginal for permanent water) where famous Afghan cameleer Abdul Wade watered his camels as he hauled minerals out of Chillagoe and Mt Garnet. In its hey day in the early 1900s, Lappa was home to about 1000 people, with the hotel the centre of the town’s social life and the venue for all the local weddings, parties and dances.

In 1923, the Espanol was bought by William and Vida Leonard who built an adjoining house in the 1940s and ran the pub until Vida’s death in 1966, when the licence was surrendered. One of the highlights of this period was during World War 2, when the Leonards ran tearooms next to the railway station to cater for the 30,000 allied troops using the line. Anyone in uniform scored a free cuppa. The Lappa Leonards also built an air raid shelter under the big mango tree behind the hotel. The Leonards were forced to grow all their own food as the road to Mareeba was so rough. What is now a forty minute journey used to take six hours and was impassable in the wet season. The Leonards kept chickens, cattle, goats, pigs and horses and had a large vegetable garden. Tobacco was also grown near the creek until the crop was washed away by floods.

The “William” referred to is John William, “Willie”, eldest son of William Leonard, the storekeeper at Sunnymount, not far from Lappa Junction on the Mt Garnet line.

Built in 1901 the Espanol Hotel served the travellers and locals until 1966. It was constructed of round bush timber and galvanised iron, the Lappa (bring your own) bush pub still remains as the only example of a once common mining town building. It still survives as a museum and BYO and advertises itself as “a century old tradition of bush hospitality amongst the stark beauty of the outback.” A real wild west town.

Despite its remoteness the Cairns Post regularly reported functions held “at the residence of Mrs V E Leonard at Lappa Junction. In 1935 a dance was held in aid of the Petford Cricket Club and described as “A Happy Occasion” and “A dainty supper was supplied by Mrs Leonard” and the description of the beautiful dresses worn and waltzes to the music of violins, concertinas and flageolet paints a picture far removed from the harshness of the outback.

The Australian media in the first half of the twentieth century regularly reported the social activities and comings and goings of the ordinary citizen much as they do for celebrities nowadays. Visits between the Hargreaves and Irwin’s Amber Station and Kuranda (Frank Hargreaves’s daughter Minnie Jessie and her husband Joseph Nicholas Irwin.) were a regular feature of the gossip columns. In 1937 the Cairns Post reported that “Mr & Mrs R Hargreaves who were married at Amber Station last week, spent a few days with Mr & Mrs Irwin, Kuranda and left by Tuesday’s boat from Cairns for Magnetic Island, where they will spend part of their honeymoon.” 

Grace Hargreaves

Even visits to hospitals were recorded; the Cairns Post reporting in 1948 that “Mrs F Hargreaves of Amber Station, Fossilbrook, leaves by this afternoon’s plane for the south to seek medical attention. She will be accompanied by her son Norman, who will return by tomorrow’s plane.” Five years previously, in 1943, it reported that “Miss Grace Hargreaves of Amber Station, Fossilbrook left last Wednesday for Brisbane where she will visit her sister, Mrs Kelvin Grainger-Smith who has been seriously ill in a private hospital for some weeks”. Frances Vida Grainger-Smith at one time ran a beauty salon in Darwin called Valmae Frocks and Beauty Salon.

Weddings and funerals were also widely reported, because of the vastness of the country and communications in those days, the newspapers would perhaps be the only source of information for local inhabitants.

As well as losing children in their infancy, Frances lost two children in adulthood. Roynon Morris Bradby her first-born died at Irvinebank in 1899 at the age of 31 leaving a wife and two children. Another son, Sterling Etheridge Bradby died on 1 December 1917 drowned in the Tate River at the age of thirty six.

Frances died in 1922 at the age of seventy six at the home she had lived in for most of her married life with her large family, children and grandchildren around her. She had had a life tinged with sadness but was evidently a strong yet loving woman, a pioneer in every sense of the word choosing to spend her life in the Australian outback, far removed from her home city of Gloucester in England. It is not known whether she had any contact with Emily before she and her husband W J Holloway retired to England or her younger sister Maria Margaret who came to Australia towards the end of the nineteenth century and married an ex pat Englishman, before herself returning to England for the rest of her life. One thing is certain Frances adapted herself to life in the Australian outback, never venturing out of the country of her adoption again.

Janet Rigby
Member 1314