The short life of James Arthur Wilkey

James Arthur Wilkey was my great grandfather. He was born in Burwood, Sydney in 1877 to John and Mary Ann Wilkey. Comparatively little is known about my great grandfather, because he only lived to 30 years of age. For him there was no sitting around with the grandchildren, regaling them with stories of "When I was young...."

James Arthur, known just as "Arthur", was the seventh of nine children of John and Mary Ann Wilkey, though he only knew two of his older siblings because the others died in infancy or childhood.

James Arthur Wilkey on his wedding day.

The next event that history records in Arthur's life was his marriage, aged 25, to Ellen Paterson Macindoe in 1902, at Petersham, Sydney. They lived in a house in Wyatt Avenue, Burwood, and started a family - their first child, Helen Genevieve, was born in 1904. Arthur worked as a clerk. Then, in 1907, when Ellen, known as Nell, was newly pregnant with their second child, named James Arthur Macindoe Wilkey (known as Arthur, like his father), tragedy befell the family.

Evening News, 16 Sep 1907. Accessed via Trove on 21 Jun 2013. Note that Arthur's name is quoted incorrectly.

The accident occurred at about 8am on Monday 16 September. Nell sat up all Monday night, praying for her husband, with her mother, sister Maggie, brother Norman, and a few friends. I cannot begin to imagine her emotional state at the plight of her husband, especially in her pregnant condition, but her brother Norman described it thus in his diary: "Remained up all Tuesday night sharing Nell's heart agony, also portion of Wednesday night". Tragically, Arthur died the day after the accident at about 1pm. He was buried at Rookwood Cemetery on 19 September 1907.

Witnesses at the inquest into his death described how, after his train had left Burwood Station on its journey towards Sydney, as he stood on the platform of the train, his hat blew off when another train passed, and in a effort to catch it, he fell from the train. A verdict of accidental death was recorded.

Life for Nell after her husband's death was hard, though her family was there to help her. She gave birth to their son Arthur in the following April. Some of Nell's brothers took a particular interest in young Arthur as he grew up, to provide him with a father figure.

I've often wondered how the family survived financially after Arthur's death, as there was no longer a breadwinner in the family. This question was answered when I looked at Arthur's deceased estate papers at State Records: on the 31 Dec 1898 when he was 21, Arthur took out a £100 life insurance policy with the Australian Mutual Provident Society. When he died, the policy paid out £111. That would certainly have helped provide for the family.

Completely disinherited

I was out at State Records the other day, looking at probate records. One of the families I looked into was the Macindoes, as a result of this post. I will write about the results of that investigation another time, however this current post deals with one of the biggest surprises of the day.

Ruth Bevan Macindoe (1899-1979), my first cousin twice removed, was the second child of Norman and Mary Macindoe. She studied medicine at the University of Sydney during the late 1910s, early 1920s. She travelled to England in 1922 with her mother Mary (and presumably back again because she died in Australia), and then the trail goes cold.

The family story goes that, with her medical training, she diagnosed herself with a severe mental illness and had herself committed. I've not been able to find any record of her residence in a mental institution, but that's unlikely anyway because health records are closed for 110 years. Certainly, she disappeared without a trace. All her siblings, male and female, voted in elections (voting in elections is compulsory in Australia), Ruth did not. If she was in a mental institution she may well have been exempt from voting.

Her father's will provided for all his children except her. In fact, the typed will has a handwritten addition to it where, in setting out the share for each of the daughters and sons, it says "except for my daughter Ruth Bevan Macindoe who is to be completely disinherited".

Was it because she had brought disgrace to the family by having a mental illness? One could expect that it might be a very good reason to actually provide for her and for her care, but apparently not. If you were worried that she wasn't of sound mind and therefore unable to look after any money she might inherit then surely you could provide for her care. One family member who I talked to about this said that there were certain things in the family that just weren't spoken of, and so she didn't really have much of an idea of what became of Ruth Bevan Macindoe.

Ruth died in 1979 at the age of 80. There was no death or funeral notice published. Unlike her unmarried sisters she was not buried with her parents.

I don't know that I will ever find out exactly why Ruth Bevan Macindoe was completely disinherited by her father. It is a very sad tale and I guess we can only hope that attitudes to mental illness continue to change for the better.

The issue of the court case over Thomas Macindoe's will

It has long been assumed by living members of the Macindoe family that the court case over Thomas Macindoe's (1841-1901) will - being about the appointment of the executors - frittered away most of the money in the estate, and this was why the mysterious death bed message, that Thomas set aside £100 for the publication of, was apparently never published. Although the court case made the papers, it did not appear to be a long and protracted affair which might have sucked up all the money. Was it only the absence of the publication of the death bed message that made us all think that?

The other day I was looking through the probate records for Thomas' daughter Margaret Kirkwood (Maggie) Macindoe (1883-1929), and now I'm really wondering if all the money did disappear into legal coffers. Because when Maggie died she owned one of the properties that her father Thomas had in his estate i.e. it was most likely part of her share of the inheritance. So now I wonder, did any of Maggie's siblings own properties listed in their father's estate as well? I haven't seen the probate records for any of Maggie's siblings, but State Records holds a number of them: Thomas Macindoe jnr (1870-1947), Walter Walker Macindoe (1866-1955), Andrew Paterson Macindoe (1868-1956), and Norman Macindoe (1874-1956). As well as that, though Stewart Macindoe's (1872-1944) probate records are not held, his wife Mattie Carr Macindoe's (1875-1962) are, and considering she died after him, any property in his name may have been willed to her.

So that's another trip to State Records required. It will be interesting to see if any of the other children owned properties listed in their father's estate as well. Perhaps it was just that none of his children wanted his death bed message published, even if there was enough money there for it. I wonder what it said!!

Farming in the Macleay region

I was out at State Records again this week. I looked up a whole lot more probate, deceased estate and primary application (a land ownership process, by which owners could convert land granted before 1863 to the new land title system) records.

One of the probate packets I looked at was for Thomas Wickham, who I have previously written about here - going to the Macleay region, rather than the Mackay region which I originally thought.

I found out what he was most likely doing in the Macleay region when I was at State Records, from looking at the probate packet: he was farming. He, unbeknownst to my living family, had two bits of land up there, one part way between the NSW towns of Gladstone and Belmore River, of 44 acres, and the other, less than 10kms away, near Kinchela, of 75 acres. I've managed to find both of them on original parish maps, using maps from the Parish Map Preservation Project of the Department of Lands. The thing is, as a bit of a novice at this type of thing, I'm now not sure whether there is any more I can find out - I'd be hoping that there might be original purchase documents and that sort of thing, but I don't know whether they would still exist... Can anyone help?

Searching through historical newspapers on Trove I found that it is likely that Thomas Wickham was a sugarcane farmer - though I don't know whether the articles referred to Thomas Wickham junior or senior (as both lived in the area). I was quite surprised at this - I didn't realise that sugarcane was farmed that far south on the east coast of Australia - I would have thought Queensland was more the domain of the sugarcane industry.

In the historical newspapers I also found a long listing for title deeds, ready for delivery from the Surveyor General's department, including part of Thomas' 44 acre property - "2057 Thomas Wickham, Kinchela, 22 acres 3 roods, portion 27", from The Empire newspaper, 21 May 1860. I can't find any notices for the other bits of property Thomas owned.

A number of Thomas Wickham's sons lived in the Macleay River region, but I am not sure who moved to the region first from the family. According to a notice in the paper about his death, Thomas Wickham jnr lived at "Belmore River" and I think that this may have been Thomas Wickham snr's 44 acre property, which he would therefore have taken over from his father.

Thomas Wickham

Thomas Wickham (born 23 August 1888, Newtown, NSW, died 22 Feb 1973, Waverley, NSW) was my great great uncle. He was the brother of my Great Nanna.

Thomas was an officer in the NSW Police. I looked up the Registers of Police while I was at State Records the other week. Thomas' service number was 9094. He was accepted into the foot police i.e. not mounted, he was 5'11", 12st 2lbs, blue eyes, fair hair, fair complexion. It was originally noted that he was single, later this was crossed out and "Married" entered instead. His previous calling was wool packer, 6yrs. Religion: Church of England. District: North Eastern. He was made a probationary constable on 26 Apr 1910, an ordinary constable on 28 Apr 1911. He was moved to the Metropolitan District on 6 Jan 1911.

And that was all it had. I assumed that he'd stayed an ordinary constable for the rest of his police career. I was wrong.

Yesterday I decided to delve a little further into his police career because I have a family anecdote about him that I wanted to post. I thought I'd just see if he came up in the historical newspapers on Trove. Yes he does. A lot. It turns out that Thomas ended his police career in 1947, after rising to the rank of Chief Superintendent, and retiring from the position of Chief Superintendent of Crime, Vice and Court Staffs. So he wasn't quite just an ordinary constable for the rest of his police career!

It wasn't until 1921 that Thomas Wickham turned up in the newspapers in relation to his job as a police officer. I'm not sure exactly what path his career took until this time, but by this stage he was already a detective. In 1926 he was one of two detectives appointed to the newly formed Drugs Bureau. He appears to have been promoted to Detective Sergeant later that year. He worked for a good number of years in the Drugs Bureau, and made many many arrests, including Kate Leigh, known as Sydney's "Queen of the Underworld". By 1934 he was in CIB teaching police recruits about court procedures. 1938 saw him promoted to assistant to the chief of CIB, as an Inspector. He was made Chief Metropolitan Licensing Inspector in 1939, and then took charge of the Morality Squad in 1940. He was promoted to Superintendent and became the Chief of the Western Police District, based in Parkes, in 1942. He returned to Sydney in 1942 as Chief of CIB. In 1945 he became Chief Superintendent of Crime, Vice and Court Staffs and was awarded the King's Police Medal for distinguished service in 1946. He retired in November 1947.

After finding all this information on Thomas Wickham in the historical newspapers I decided to Google his name with "police". One of the results that came up was for Underbelly: Razor - my response: "You've got to be joking..." Yes, my great great uncle is being portrayed in the latest series of Underbelly! I haven't watched any of the Underbelly series, Razor being no exception. But apparently Sergeant Tom Wickham, as he is known in the series, is represented as an incorruptible police officer. Glad to hear it! The book from which the series was written, Razor by Larry Writer, gives him a pretty good wrap too. Incidentally, I am quite sure, from the description given in the Registers of Police and knowing the family facial features, that the actor they have playing him looks absolutely nothing like him!

So, finally to the anecdote that Mum told me which first got me looking into Thomas Wickham, NSW Police officer: he shot a hole through the ceiling of my Great Nanna's house at 2 St Clair St, Belmore, when his gun accidentally went off. I'll bet that's one story that wasn't told at his retirement!

Wealthy butchers?

As I mentioned in my last post about the Wickhams, I needed to work out how they got to Australia. I had searched the Assisted Immigrants list at the NSW State Records but they did not come up. There were a number of Wickhams listed in the Unassisted Arrivals records, but there is very little information on those - it's mostly "Mr and Mrs Wickham" with a few initials for some records. It could have been any or none of them.

Amongst the records that Mum had there was a sheet of paper on which someone, in lovely loopy handwriting, had recorded the dates of birth of the Wickhams - parents and children. They had also written some other important dates in the life of Thomas Wickham underneath, including "Sailed for Sydney Dec 20th 1852, arrived at Sydney April 29th 1853" - this was new information to me. I checked the ships of Assisted Immigrants for around that arrival date (just in case there had been a spelling error in the records) but they didn't appear. Then I checked the Unassisted Arrivals and amazingly Mr and Mrs Wickham were there, arriving on the Chandernagore on April 29, 1853.

I am still surprised at this because that meant they would have had to pay their own way. Thomas was only a butcher and he had a big family - I can only assume that all 11 of their children came out on the boat with their parents. Who knows how he managed to afford it.

I looked up the Chandernagore in the historical newspapers. Evidently it was a controversial voyage as there was quite a bit of correspondence in the Sydney Morning Herald Letters to the Editor after it arrived. It appears that the voyage of the Chandernagore was supposedly for "Emigration upon Christian principles, unconnected with sectarian character". All the passengers were supposed to be "persons of respectability and moral character". And whilst some were "evidently well connected, and of gentlemanly education, and the majority respectable tradespeople" some supposedly were not. Letters flew back and forth in the Herald, accusing various passengers of immoral conduct etc and eventually the editors seemed to get sick of the fighting between the passengers and refused to publish any more letters on the matter!

I have also discovered that Thomas' brother Edward came out to Australia with his family. I can't definitely find them in any shipping lists, but can only assume they came out as unassisted arrivals as well. Edward was a butcher too. There must have been some money in the butchery business in Kent, where they both came from!

The Wickhams

Mum has a whole lot of original birth, death and marriage certificates that have been passed down. There was a marriage certificate for Robert Wickham, fireman, who married Ann Jane Smith, "in private life" on Oct 12, 1876, at the bride's residence. Mum was aware that Robert Wickham died in an accident on the Railways here in Sydney, so I set about looking for him. A search of the historical newspapers at Trove found a funeral notice for a Robert Wickham, Enginedriver, in the Sydney Morning Herald in June 1896. The funeral notice said he was to be buried at the Necropolis cemetery (Rookwood). I looked up the cemetery records for Rookwood and found him listed as R Wickham, buried 14 June 1896, aged 44. In the grave beside him was A Wickham, buried 16 April 1931, aged 76 - if the grave beside was Robert Wickham then this would be his wife Annie. Further searching on Robert Wickham in 1896 showed that this was indeed the Robert Wickham I was searching for:

FATAL ACCIDENT TO AN ENGINE DRIVER. HORNSBY JUNCTION, thursday A fatal accident happened at Beecroft this morning. While the down Northern express, due at Hornsby Junction at 9.44a m. was passing Beecroft, the driver, Wickham, who had been oiling his engine and was returning to the cab, slipped and fell from the engine, breaking his neck. The body was brought on to Hornsby Junction, where an inquest will be held to-morrow. Wickham was highly spoken of by the railway employees, and was generally respected. He was the driver of the train that ran through the slip points at Carlingford about four years ago. Sydney Morning Herald, Friday 12 June 1896.

So now I had the right Robert Wickham. NSW BDM revealed that his parents were named Thomas and Rachel Wickham, but had no record of his birth. So he wasn't born in NSW. The best guess was that he immigrated here, so I checked the NSW Government State Records for him. There was a convict Robert Wickham listed there, who had arrived in NSW in 1830 on the Lady Feversham. Ancestry gave me a hint of a number of family trees with parents Thomas and Rachel Wickham, but of the family trees listed, despite there being many children in the family, none of them contained a Robert Wickham. Although I had no evidence that Thomas and Rachel came out to Australia I did find a death notice in the Sydney Morning Herald for Thomas Wickham in September 1897, so cross-checked it with the Rookwood Cemetery records. There was a T Wickham buried there in September 1897 (with an E Wickham) and an R Wickham (with a D Wickham) buried in the plot beside. On a long shot I rang Rookwood and asked if it was possible to find out who owned a burial plot... depends... (presumably on privacy laws). She looked it up for me. "Those two plots were owned by a Mr Robert Wickham." Bingo! She looked up the names: Rachel (with Dorothy) and Thomas (with Emma). Double bingo! Dorothy and Emma were two of their unmarried daughters.

Robert was part of the family I had hints for on Ancestry. I still don't know why Robert wasn't listed in those family trees on Ancestry - presumably the first one missed him and everyone else copied that tree and missed him too, never bothering to check if there were any more children.

And it's still a mystery to me how the Wickhams got to Australia, so that's some research for another day.

The Beringers

I first started working on my family history at the beginning of last year. My husband and our (then) two kids were living in Freiburg, Germany over the six-week Christmas holidays, and while I was there I decided to start looking into the German branch of the family, the Beringers. I signed up to Ancestry.com.au (the non-subscription bit at that stage), probably because that was the only program I had heard of for family treeing - from watching Who Do You Think You Are? on telly. I didn't get very far before we came home to Australia, partly because I was relying mainly on memory and what I could get from my parents while I had limited access to email over there.

One of the first things I researched with the Beringer family was finding out how they got here. Mum knew the name of the ship they arrived here on - the Abergeldie - and I worked from there. We are pretty lucky here in the state of New South Wales that our archival records are reasonably good. The passenger lists for many of the immigrant ships have been digitised and are available at the NSW Government State Records. I found the passenger list for the correct journey of the Abergeldie (it brought immigrants here on a number of voyages) and found them.

Adam, aged 28, a locksmith, and Caroline M. Beringer, 27, arrived in Sydney on December 23, 1884. They brought with them their two children, Matilda, 3, and Adolph, 1. Also on that ship was a Valentine Beringer, 26, a cabinet maker, also from Germany.

What was their voyage like? And where did they go, disembarking on a Tuesday, two days before Christmas? I know from the last page of the ship's list that the voyage took 52 days. I found an article from the Sydney Morning Herald, on Trove (which has Australian historial newspapers digitised) which gave me some idea of what they did on the voyage, but not really any idea of where they went after they disembarked from the ship. I'll never know how they found lodgings, and how they went about finding work, and generally beginning life in a country so foreign. However, Shaun Tan's graphic novel, The Arrival, does give some idea of what the new immigrant faces on arrival.

The next record I could find of the Beringers was in the NSW Births, Deaths and Marriages records. There was a record of Matilda, the daughter, dying in 1885, in the country town of Uralla. It does list her mother as "Matilda", but that was Caroline's middle name, and although the Beringer family did not ultimately settle in Uralla, Valentine Beringer, who changed his name to John, did. So I can be reasonably sure that it is them, because although I only confirmed this morning for sure that John Valentine was related, it was a reasonable guess to assume he was, with such a uncommon surname, coming out to Australia on the same ship. Imagine coming all the way to Australia to have your eldest child die within a year. Surely you'd wonder what kind of God-forsaken place you'd come to...