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| ISBN-13: | 9781775581529 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 330 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
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Sir Joseph Ward
A Political Biography
By Michael Bassett
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 1993 Michael BassettAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-152-9
CHAPTER 1
Several miles southwest of Kilkenny on the road to Callan, Clonmel and Fermoy there is a small road sign. It reads 'Famine Graveyard 1km'. Down the road which turns into a slushy cart track one comes upon a silent field with a stone wall. Nothing distinguishes it from any of the surrounding fields except a sign on the gate which tells of 'the uncounted victims of famine and poverty' who are buried there, all from the Callan Workhouse. Most died during the Great Famine of 1845–49. The field is a vast paupers' graveyard.
The story of the famine has been told elsewhere. Ireland, which has always been notable for its fecundity, was carrying a population of eight million when, in the first weeks of September 1845, the leaves on the potato crop blackened and turned into an evil-smelling pulp. During the next five years lack of food gave way to listlessness, starvation, pestilence and death. By the beginning of the new decade, when the great migration to the new world was well under way, Ireland's population had already dropped to 6.6 million. A new slimmed-down Ireland would emerge, but not before nearly three million of its people had crossed treacherous seas to participate in social experiments in other parts of the world.
Two such families caught up in the famine and its consequent exodus were the Wards and the Dorneys of Cork. Little is known about the origin of William Thomas Ward, the father of Joseph Ward, except that he was born on 31 December 1829. Even his place of birth is in doubt; some reports speak of Dublin, others of Cork. The name Ward, meaning a bard, is common enough in England, but less common in southern Ireland. Nor is it clear where William Thomas Ward first met the woman whom he was to marry, Hannah Dorney. Her origin is more definite. There were Dorneys in Cork throughout the eighteenth century, and on 9 February 1823 a Thomas Dorney married Elizabeth Lynch in St Finbarr South Catholic Church, Dunbar St, a small, simple Georgian-style chapel, in the crowded central part of Cork. Their third child, Joanna, who later came to be known as Hannah, was Joseph Ward's mother. She was probably born on 14 July 1829 and was baptised at the same church six days later. Another six children were born over the next few years, although they were not baptised at St Finbarr South, suggesting that the family had moved. Extensive searches of church records in adjoining parishes have not located where, precisely, Thomas Dorney and his family were living in the 1830s and early 1840s. The 1846 Directory for Cork City, however, says that a Thomas Dorney, a boot and shoemaker and leather cutter, lived at 35 North Main Street, Cork. Ward family inquiries in the 1960s, both of the Chief Herald in Dublin and of Australian cousins, led to the conclusion that this was Hannah's father.
A graphic description of this section of Cork in the middle of the nineteenth century is to be found in Anthony Trollope's Castle Richmond. 'Main Street has but little honour. It is crowded with second-rate tobacconists and third-rate grocers; the houses are dirty, the street is narrow; fashionable ladies never visit it for their shopping, nor would any respectable commercial gent stop at an inn within its purlieu.' The Dorneys, according to family legend, were among the better-off residents of the street — Hannah's niece was later to describe them as 'fairly comfortable'. The children all received some education, and music was a constant part of their lives. Hannah's oldest brother, Thomas, was said to be an accomplished musician. Hannah was taught to sing as well as play the piano. At a time when only 60 per cent of Cork city children became literate, Hannah learned to read and write, although from her only surviving letter it is clear that both her writing and spelling were more shaky than her devout yet simple Catholic faith.
The precise whereabouts of Joseph Ward's parents throughout the Great Famine is in doubt. Hannah would have been sixteen when the potato crop, the staple food of Ireland's teaming masses, failed. It is possible that for a time she, and some of her brothers and sisters, went to stay with relatives in the Cork countryside. Certainly Hannah learned early that in times of disease there were advantages in spreading the family about to ensure that not all succumbed. Family stories say that she was back in Cork by 1850, where on 7 October she married William Thomas Ward, a man who possessed some literacy as well as experience in bookkeeping and retailing. No evidence has been found of where the marriage took place. In the years before the famine it was common for women to marry at sixteen or seventeen. Postponement of marriage was a post-famine phenomenon. By 1850, Hannah was twenty-one and seems to have decided to understate her age for the rest of her life, possibly in an attempt to minimise the perception that she was on the shelf. The married couple must have settled around Main Street, for their firstborn, Mary Elizabeth Frances Ward, was born in the area on her mother's twenty-second birthday, and baptised at St Finbarr South Church on 17 July 1851. Another child, William Thomas Vincent Paul Ward, was born on 27 September 1852. There is no record available of his baptism.
By this time the subject of emigration was being much discussed in Cork. The front page of the Cork Examiner daily carried news of pending sailings from Cork, the point of embarkation being just up the road from where Hannah and W. T. Ward were living. Ships sailed directly from Cork to New York, and there were some that went to Australia. It was more common, however, for those emigrating to southern latitudes to make the uncomfortable 23-to-36-hour crossing to Liverpool in open paddle steamers, there to embark for Melbourne, Cape Town or New Zealand on more substantial vessels. The lure of Australia that induced 101,000 Irish immigrants to go there during the 1850s was gold. Patrick O'Farrell describes them as 'a much more accomplished, venturesome and happy lot than those the Famine had dumped on America'. It was a longer trip to Australia, more hazardous and expensive, and required a 'very deliberate and considered decision'. Besides the lure of gold, the passage, while longer, was generally felt to be safer. The ships to Australia were better than the 'coffin' ships on the American run. They were less crowded, and their conditions more firmly regulated. Ward and his wife seem to have been considering Australia by the end of 1852, and several of Hannah's brothers and sisters were also interested.
Leaving Hannah pregnant again, Ward went across to London in March or April 1853 where he, and possibly two of his brothers, boarded the Lady Flora bound for Melbourne. The ship of 756 tons, captained by John Parker, left London on 19 April with 236 passengers, all unassisted. Henry, William and Samuel Ward appear as one group on the passenger list. They were listed as English, but such mistakes in passenger lists were common. The ship arrived in Melbourne on 18 August 1853. Hannah had decided to travel on a bigger ship and to arrive some time after her husband in the hope that accommodation in Melbourne had already been arranged. In July 1853 with her two babies, she made the crossing to Liverpool with the intention of boarding a ship to Melbourne. No record exists of the conditions Hannah actually experienced, but Terry Coleman has described such crossings, noting that the steamboats from Cork to Liverpool at this time sometimes carried as many as 1200 passengers at ten shillings a time, crammed together on the deck with no shelter except an inadequate tarpaulin. Sightseers in Liverpool would come to watch the arrival of the 'Irish steamers' and the soaking wet emigrants who would stumble ashore, sometimes covered in one another's vomit. Liverpool, with its population of 370,000, at this time was England's second largest city and by far the most important emigrant port. Intending passengers to Australia or the United States would crowd into the squalid waterfront boarding houses awaiting their passage to the new world.
On 22 July 1853 Hannah and her children boarded the Goldfinder, a substantial ship of 1380 tons under the command of the experienced Captain Hugh Stewart. The ship left with 534 passengers; only six died on route to Melbourne, where 454 adults, 60 children and 14 infants under the age of twelve months arrived on 24 October 1853. All passengers were unassisted migrants. Again the information on the ship registers was inaccurate. Hannah was listed among 305 English passengers rather than the 41 Irish who, along with 88 Scots, were the passengers whose origin was noted. All except seven, and Hannah's family were not among the elite, travelled steerage.
Melbourne in October 1853 was crowded with immigrant ships, sometimes as many as 300 being in port at the same time. In the ten years 1851–61 the city's population multiplied more than five times from 23,000 to 127,000. Immigrants resorted to desperate measures to acquire a roof over their heads. J. M. Freeland describes the scene on the south side of the Yarra River: 'Tens of thousands of people hudded uncomfortably in a sea of tents called Canvas Town. Many solutions were tried and most of them abandoned in an attempt to meet the ever-rising call for houses ... Ingenuity brought forth canvas, hessian, mud, grass and, the oldest of emergency answers, prefabrication.' The absence of a water supply or sewerage system meant that epidemics and a high rate of infant mortality were a constant feature of Canvas Town. It was here that the Wards almost certainly first found accommodation. Over the next few years they moved about, first to Hawke Street in North Melbourne, then back to Emerald Hill, where they lived for a time in a zinc house of 'inferior' standard in Bank Street, and then to Abbotsford Street in North Melbourne.
During the 1850s Melbourne was in the grip of gold fever, where 'toughness, determination and luck' in almost equal rations was necessary to survive. While immigrants dreamed of success on the fields at Ballarat and Bendigo, 'gold was more easily won behind the counter than in the clay'. At first William Ward found work as an accountant for a retailing firm that was selling basic supplies to needy immigrants. By 1856 he was describing himself as a clerk, and the following year he appears as a 'gentleman', suggesting that he had been caught up in the unemployment of that year. It seems certain that he had taken to the bottle. Hannah, meantime, was trying to rear her family while increasingly being required to earn money as well. Melbourne turned out to be a nightmare for her. The baby, Charles Dorney Ward, that Hannah carried all the way from Ireland died in December 1853 after living for only five minutes. In November 1854 Michael Jerome Ward was born, and seventeen months later Joseph Ward was born in Hawke Street, North Melbourne, on 26 April 1856. The birth certificate makes no mention of the other name, George, that he carried throughout life, perhaps due to an oversight by his father, who registered the birth many months later. Ward was not present at Joseph's birth. Joseph turned out to be the only one of eight children born in Melbourne to survive, and was his mother's favourite throughout the rest of her life. In July 1857 another boy, Alfred John Ward, was born, the family now consisting of four boys and Mary, or Mina as she was now known, who was a robust child of six. The year 1858 was a tragic one for Hannah. Her husband was still out of work and drinking heavily. At the end of April Alfred died, aged ten months, of dysentry. On 13 June Hannah bore twin boys, Peter Joseph and Paul William, who promptly died. And then came a terrible blow; the four-year-old Michael died on 1 November. In January 1860 Hannah produced yet another boy, Henry Paul. By this time they were living in Abbotsford Street, where Hannah was running a small hotel close to the main road out to the goldfields. William Ward's health was declining, however, and on 4 November he died, aged only thirty-one. The death certificate says he died of 'softening of the brain' and 'Delerium Tremens'. The claim that he had been thrown from a horse appears to have been Hannah's story, perhaps covering over the multiple misfortunes of her marriage.
Hannah's Melbourne tragedies were far from over. A posthumous child, James, was born in March 1861 but lived only until June. A month before, Henry Paul had succumbed to diphtheria. By the middle of 1861 the widowed Hannah had only three of the ten children she had produced during her ten years of marriage still alive. Mina and Joseph both recovered from diphtheria, and Willie, who was now nine, had escaped infection by being sent to live with one of W. T. Ward's brothers.
By this time Hannah seems to have been looking after her children on her own with occasional help from her brother-in-law. Her younger brother, George Michael Dorney, had been with her for a time in Melbourne but in April 1860 he signed up with the British 40th Regiment to fight in the New Zealand wars. Two of her sisters would eventually find their way to Australia, but not until November 1863. Hannah was ambitious for her children and the three survivors were all at school. Joseph had been enrolled at a small private school, Spring's Academy, in Spring Street. Home was Hannah's small pub in Abbotsford Street where there was usually a meal, a drink and a bed available to diggers on their way to, or from, the goldfields. With a regularly changing clientele, the children learned social skills and would have heard many stories about success and failure in Bendigo and Ballarat as they participated in the singing of Irish ballads. Hannah was a stern disciplinarian and thrashed both Willie and Joey when she discovered they had been smoking. She was an attentive mother, however, especially to her children's religious education. The parish priest was as often in their house as they were at the local church of St Francis.
On 31 December 1862, on what would have been W. T. Ward's birthday, Hannah remarried. It is not clear where she met John Barron. He came from farming stock in Northumberland. On the marriage certificate Barron claimed to be thirty-seven, a bachelor, and a butcher by trade. However, the Index to Unassisted Passengers for the year 1858 indicates that Barron, a wife called Jane, a sister Christina, and two children — a daughter, Christina, aged eleven and a son, John, aged seven — had arrived in Melbourne in October 1858. Barron's wife, son and daughter seem all to have died in 1859. Why he then proposed to Hannah as a bachelor rather than a widower will always be a mystery. This might not have been the only falsehood he told. In any event, the marriage to Hannah lasted only a few months. It seems that he deserted her. She then decided to leave Melbourne for good. On 17 September 1863, a Mrs Barron said to be thirty years old, with a daughter Minnie, listed as five, Joseph as seven and William as three, sailed to Bluff, New Zealand, on the 239-ton ship Edina, arriving on 23 September. There is no record of any John Barron having come to New Zealand in or around that time. Nor is there any further mention of Barron. In legal documents signed in 1879, Hannah described herself as 'living separately from her husband' and in possession of a protection order under the Married Women's Property Protection Act 1860, an Act that guaranteed a wife ownership of property acquired after her husband's desertion, so long as such desertion was 'without cause'. Not until the 1880s did Hannah begin describing herself as a widow. Her religion would have prevented remarriage while Barron was alive, and she did not remarry after his death. She called herself Hannah Ward Barron during the rest of her life, and was quite particular about the 'Ward' in her name.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sir Joseph Ward by Michael Bassett. Copyright © 1993 Michael Bassett. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
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