Menu
- Home
- Search▼
- List▼
- Add▼
- My Relate▼
- Admin▼
ViewsWatchersBrowse |
Article Covers
Extracts from http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~mwi/wells/
AUSTRALIAN DESCENDANTS OF THE NOTTINGHAM LACE MAKERS
Originally they are British, mostly from the Nottingham area,but a few can be traced to other areas of the British Isles.At some time in their lives all of them went to live and work in France, mostly in Calais, but a few can be found in other areas of France. In the first half of the 19th century expert machine makers had cleverly devised machines capable of making lace, formerly only slowly produced by hand. A booming industry grew up in Nottingham. Traditional hand making lace areas began to suffer. Northern France was one of these. To survive they needed to make their lace also by machinery. Not unnaturally the British were anxious to preserve their monopoly of the trade and made it as difficult as possible for their ideas and par\tents to be copied. But in any walk of life, at any time in history, a form of espionage can apply. Parts of machines were transported from England to France by all manner of means. Once there, they needed experts to reassemble them.Then some more experts either to train the French operatives, or move to live and work in France carrying on an industry learnt in England. Many thousands moved. Calais became known as the Nottingham of France. In the year of the revolution in France in 1848, life was disrupted for everyone, but especially for the British Foreigners. The closing factories threw many hundreds of people out of work. All suffered, from the top owners to the lowest operatives-those in the bottom being nearest to desolation the fastest! In 1848 the machine lace trade in Nottingham, quite simply, could not absorb this kind of influx. The poor rate, always stretched to the limit anyway could only provide for numbers on a vast scale by one method- increase the rates!The city fathers put their heads together to devise a way out of this dilemma. "Collections" were made. But this wasnt a small disaster like a shipwreck or fire, this involved enormous numbers of people. A one off payment would not suffice, their were long term problems looming here. Mass emigration seemed to offer a remarkable solution! Not only would this lift the burden completely from the shoulders of the Nottingham Poor Law Administrators, but it would also preserve the livelihood of the many thousands of workers already in the machine made lace trade there; an industry which could in no way absorb so many hands without threat of financial collapse. More than this, this solution could offer hope to this mass of people who were otherwise faced with very great hardship, if not ultimate destitution. Immigration to Australia offered them a chance to build new lives for themselves and there families. This is the bones of the story of how these three boat loads of remarkably skilled immigrants arrived in Australia within a three month period in 1848. But there is even more to this story. Not all these "French Deportees" agreed to be shipped to Australia, many were absorbed back into their own families and struggled until they reestablished themselves. They were not only lace makers and they did not only originate in Nottingham. Welsh iron workers, Lancashire cotton weavers, and Midlands publicans and general shopkeepers to name a few had been found. Then there were soldiers of all trades from all parts. The original first move-across to France from England offered an opportunity not always available in England. Many couples, marrying in their twenties in St Marys church in Nottingham, left directly after,for this adventure in France. Connections between Nottingham and France were so close that many families already had kin or very close friends over there. There was a great deal of coming and going-evidence of this is easily spotted in the Nottingham Census returns where in a long list of children, Nottingham and France are dispersed as given birth places. It would almost appear that some workers went on contract that is home based but serving a term while in France only. Recruitment was actively carried on in Nottingham. Others went privately, the beer house keepers for instance. Many family fortunes were both lost and won in France. The exodus in 1848 was only an episode which resulted in the mass emigration to Australia of so many Nottingham folk, but after the trouble died down, large numbers of English drifted back to France and continued to work there and commute back to Nottingham as before. When the government of Louis Philippe collapsed in Feb 1848 there were all kinds of ramifications throughout France. All banking was frozen, all industries[including lacemaking]was stopped, and there was fair amount of ill feeling towards the British and other foreign populations employed in France.Thousands and thousands of Britons went home from all kinds of industries...textiles, steel and road building in particular. It would seem that in some places there were actual threats against the English, and while this doesn't seem true of Calais, we do know that a lot of French Masters had a lot of pressure on them to employ only French. The state of the lace trade in Nottingham at that time was abysmal and thousands of the population were in poorhouses. There was no way that the families of Calais would find employment in Nottingham which is where they mostly came from. A group of 113 families held a meeting in a church in Calais and decided to petition the British Government to allow them to migrate to Australia. The petition was drawn up, and eventually passed by the government, and with the help of a group of do gooders, the families came on the aforementioned ships. Although the petition stated that they would like to go to Australia, the Harpley was the only one that did. It was actually a general immigration ship that they got passages for the families in direst need on. It is of some interest that those families broke every rule that applied to assisted immigration, bar being of good health. Thomas was 42 and Sarah 36...40 was the maximum age on general runs. They had a large family, also against the rules because experience had taught that large families often carried the kids diseases that spread like wild fire through other large families, and were, of course, deadly, and secondly because large families of small children gave the small colony no return for their investment for a year the needed manpower, and right that minute. Thomas Wells, his wife Sarah(nee Creswell), and their 10 children arrived in Adelaide on the Harpley in 1848. Both the Wells and Creswell families can be traced back to the Nottingham area to at least 1700, the Wells then living at south Wilford. Mary Flower, later Thomas's maternal grandmother, was also a member. It is not clear when the Wells family migrated to France or which members made the move. David and Rebecca Creswell and family, of which Sarah was the eldest, probably arrived around 1825, as their second son, William was born in Sneinton, near Nottingham in August 24 and their last child, Elizabeth, at Montreuil in France in 1826. It is probable that the family was living in Calais 2 years later when Sarah eloped with Thomas Wells, The couple had been forbidden to marry as Sarah was barely 16 and Thomas was twice her age. David and Rebecca suffered a crushing blow in 1833 when they lost three of their children during the months of May and June. Thomas and Sarahs first child, Richard was born in Caen in Normandy at the end of March 1829. The birth certificate states that Thomas was a lace worker and that he and Sarah were married in Normandy. A witness was Thomas Peet, and English fabricant residing in theRue de St Jean. The Wells were then living in the Rue de Bretagne, close to where William the conqueror, Duke of Normandy is buried. Two further children, Thomas and Rebecca, were born in the same town. Sarah was born in Havre de Gras(now Le Havre) in 1834. Though the birthplaces of Emma and William, who followed in the next four years, are not known, the family was living in Calais before November 1841, when John, the seventh child was born. A month later, Sarahs father, David Creswell, died at the age of 50. The Creswells address at the time was La Grande Rue. James Wells was born in Calais in 1843 and Anne in 1846, when the family was living in the Rue de la Fayette. Elizabeth, the tenth child was born at the Rue de Four a Chaux just a few weeks before the Harpley sailed for South Australia. Little is known of their time in South Australia except that 3 more daughters, Eliza, Alice, and Fanny were born there between 1848 and 1854. It is believed that Thomas obtained some land and ran dairy cattle, perhaps along the banks of the Torrens, near Thebarton, where many of the Harpley passengers are reported to have settled, or possibly by the Sturt river closer to Glenelg. Rebecca, their eldest daughter, worked for a time as a ladies maid, and married William Burroughs Bradshaw, her employers son at Morphett Vale in February 1849. The family moved to the Ballarat goldfields some time after the birth of their second child in November 1851. Rebeccas older brother, Richard married Ann Cope, the daughter of Henry and Ann Cope at Morphett Vale in 1853. The Cope family had also arrived in the Harpley. Anns uncle was a reciver for the gold sent back to Adelaide by the diggers who had gone to the Victorian Goldfields. There is an uncormfirmed report that some of the Wells men were involved in the first gold escort to leave Mt Alexander with gold consigned to Adelaide in early 1852. Richard and Ann Wells moved to Ballarat where they opened a bakery some time before the end of 1854. Their first child was born the following year. Thomas, Sarah, and the rest of the family in South Australia appear to have made the move to the Ballarat goldfield some time after the birth of Fanny, theit third Australian child, in June 1854. James, then about 11 years old claimed to have watched the battle of the Eureka Stockade in December 1854 from a nearby tree. Richards bakery was at Specimen Hill, somewhere nearby. Legend has it the family drove their cattle overland to Ballarat, losing some on the way to aboriginal spears, and on arrival they camped on the pastures around Yuiles swamp(Lake Wendouree). From there they appeared to have followed the gold leads down the Yarawee in the area around Magpie, where Thomas set himself up as a dairyman on Winters Flat, supplying the miners in the area. Their second son, Thomas, who married Catherine McIntyre at Geelong in 1855, took out a miners right at Magpie. Catherines first child was born there in 1856 and on Christmas Eve the same year Sarah gave birth to her 14th and last child Frederick Flower Wells. In February 1859 Sarah married Matthew Hutchinson, a widower at nearby Bunyinyong and the following year her sister Emma married Isador Yde at Bunyinyong. Both families selected land in the district when it was opened up for small scale farming around 1863 and continued to live there for 20 more years.. Initially both Hutchinson and Yde both had trouble gaining title to their lands because miners petitions held up their applications. Mathews grant was finalised in 1873, subject to mining rights, but Isadors land was not surveyed until 1880. Thomas senior also took advantage of the new laws and selected land on the banks of the Leigh River at durham lead some miles south of Bunyinyong in 1863. Here he built a home for his family, which still included nine unmarried children. This farm was to remain in the hands of the family for approximately 100 years. Richard and Ann left Ballarat and opened a bakery in the small township of Durham Lead, not far from the Wells farm. In June 1866 Ann died, leaving one surviving child Richard Loscoe Wells just turned 11. Richard senior was able to continue running the bakery, his son doubtless brought up by his uncles and Aunts. Richard Loscoe was a little older than his uncle Frederick. In 1868 Richard was married for the second time, to Alice Dutton in Ballarat. Descendants of their 4 children are still living in the area around "the Durham". Richard lived there until his death in 1880. In the ten years after Thomas and Sarah settled at Durham Lead six of the remaining children married, either at Durham Lead or in Bunyinyong, and continued to live in the area, as did the older ones. The Wells seemd to have been a close knit family. Only one, John, left the area in this period. About 1865 he went to New Zealand, married at Woodstock, a small gold mining town in the South Island, in 1871, and begat a large family, descendants of whom still live in the district. He died there in 1925. Of the family who emigrated to South Australia in 1848, Anne was the first to die. In 1847 she died in childbirth leaving her husband, Dionysius Wallis, with two young children to care for. Two years later, Sarah, the mother of the Wells family, died in Ballarat at the home of her daughter, Alice, the West Ballarat fire Station. Alice had married William Perry, the station keeper, in 1873. The Perrys continued to live in Ballarat until Alices death in 1896. After Sarahs death in 1876 the family started to disperse. Apart from the loss of their mother it is probable that changes in the economy of the district played a part in this. Gold was no longer available at shallow levels and work on on or connected with the mines was more difficult to obtain. In that year James took his family to Barrys Reef, a gold mining town near Ballarat. Elizabeth with husband Henry Waters and a young family, also moved there. The Waters, however did not remain long but migrated to Tasmania where they settled. Some of their descendants still live in Waratah. Rebecca Bradshaw bore her 16th and last child at Bungaree near Ballarat in 1874. Subsequently the family moved to Gol Gol near Wentworth where Sarah and her 3 year old son died in 1877. At Wentworth where they are buried, William erected a worthy monument to his wife. William Wells, after his marriage to Kate Bland had settled at the Durham and worked as a carter in the mines. In 1880 William and Kate loaded their 6 children and all their possesions ionto a horse drawn dray and travelled overland to Gol Gol, where irrigation was opening up prospects for orchardists. They arrived after the day the Bradshaws oldest son Charles was drowned in the Murray River. One of their own sons was to drown in the river some years later. William worked hard to establish a farm, supplementing his income with whatever work came along, including trapping rabbits to help out the housekeeping. Kate, or Nurse Wells as she was called, gave her services as the district midwife, often rowing across the river and walking miles through the bush, usually without payment. William and Kate remained in the district until their deaths in 1924 and 1935. Towards the 1880s Melbourne was becoming a magnet not only for overseas immigrants but for people from former goldmining towns where work and money had become harder to come by. Eliza and her husband James Geddes left Sebastopol where they had been living, around 1877 moved to Melbourne and settled in Carlton. Eliza died at Fitzroy in 1936. Fanny, her youngest sister, and the only one not to marry, moved to the city not long after the Geddes, possibly about the time that Frederick, who was till on the farm married Sarah Louise Lloyd. Fanny seems to have made her living as a dressmaker. She was living in Prahran when she died in 1889 soon after her 35th birthday. Thomas Junior had jopined the railways and had also shifted to Melbourne by this time. He was living in South Melbourne in 1894 but moved soon after to West Brunswick where he died in 1900. Landsales boomed in Melbourne during the 80s and enormous sums of money were invested by overseas financiers. Standards of living where high and the magnificent buildings erected at that time spoke prosperity and confidence. Emma and Isador Yde gave up farming and moved to Melbourne this period. Isadore died at Richmond in 1895 and Emma in Croydon in 1919. Sarah Hutchinson left the farm amd Mathew, who did not want to leave the land, and moved into a home built for her in Essendon by 2 of her sons. She died there in 1910 and is buried in Coburg. James and his family remained at Barry's Reef until 1887 then moved to Ascot Vale, a suburb of Melbourne. They arrived a day before the fireworks to celebrate Queen Elizabeths Jubilee took place. With work hard to find in the depression years of the early 90s when the land boom had come to a sad end, James and his eldest son, Herbert, tried their luck in Queensland for a short while, but evidently without much success. They returned to Melbourne and sonn afterwards Herbert borrowed enough money for a steerage passage to Western Australia which was booming due to the discovery of gold. In 1896 James, with financial help from Herbert brought his whole family to the west and they settled in North Freemantle. James died in Freemantle in 1924. Father Thomas moved to Melbourne around 1890 to live with his daughter Sarah Hutchinson at Essendon. He died there in 1894 and is buried in the Melbourne Cemetery. Frederick, the youngest member of the family, stayed on at the farm. He and Sarah Louisa had seven children. The oldest son was drowned in the Leigh river in 1894 at the age of 12. Sarah Louise died in childbirth in 1897. Frederick, with the help of his eldest daughter, brought up his family on the farm. He died in Ballarat in August 1942 and is buried in the Bunyinyong cemetery. The farm remained in the family until 1966 when after a succession of drought years it was sold. Descendants of Frederick and Sarah still live in Bunyinyong. Funeral details of Thomas Wells. The follwing is taken from an extract of the funeral records of Joseph Allison, Funeral directors. The company is currently operated by W Rose in Burwood, Victoria.
WELLS- The friends of the late Thomas Wells are respectfully invited to follow his remains to the place of Internment- The Melbourne General Cemetery. The funeral will leave the residence of his daughter, Mrs Hutchinson, Agatha St, Essendon, this day, Tuesday, at 3.30pm. Age- 2 October 1894 |
