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"Working class" organisations in late 19th Century Fremantle
Bob Reece
Reece, Bob 2022, '"Working class" organisations in late 19th Century Fremantle', Fremantle Studies, 11: 28-40. [presented Fremantle Studies Day 2017]
The mechanics institutes, literary institutes and schools of arts movement flourished in Britain from the early 1820s, numbering no less than two hundred organisations with a membership of 25,000 by 1841. 1 Quickly taken up in the major towns of the Australian colonies, Hobart (1827), Sydney (1833), Newcastle (1835), Adelaide (1838), Maitland and Melbourne (1839), Brisbane (1840), Perth (1851), Fremantle (1851), East Fremantle (1901), with Guildford, Albany and Greenough (between 1853-1867), it was fostered by upper class urban elites for the ‘improvement’ of the more aspirational members of the working class.
The institutes did not act like craft guilds or trade unions to further their members’interests by negotiating minimum wages and hours and conditions of work with employers. Their upper class founders were strongly opposed to what had been called ‘combinations’, or trade unions, membership of which had not long since been a hanging offence in Britain. They wanted to improve the technical knowledge of the working class in a fraternal social milieu in which ‘Jack’ did not need to prove that he was ‘as good as his master’. Ordinary membership tended to consist of those more skilled workers and artisans who aspired to self-employment and the social respectability that went with it. At the same time, management committee membership brought prestige for those members of the social elite who
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regarded leadership of organisations like these as their prerogative.
It was hoped by their founders that these organisations would bring together employers and workers in a mutually respectful relationship conducive to social and political harmony. Political discussion was quietly discouraged, but it is difficult to say to what extent this prevented the airing of views on the more controversial subjects of the day, such as responsible government, women’s rights and overseas shipping cartels. Beyond membership lists, annual reports and other newspaper accounts of their activities, there are few records extant and almost none of a personal nature.
Working Class
The use of the term ‘working class’ in relation to Fremantle’s population during this period is problematic, as indeed is ‘upper class’. Fremantle was primarily a port and services centre where employment was mostly in lightering, wholesaling and retailing of consumer goods, and in the hospitality ‘industry’ catering mostly to seafarers. Masons and carpenters were in keen demand, with something like 90 per cent of the town’s buildings constructed of local stone and timber. These skilled ‘operatives’ or ‘mechanics’, some of whom became prosperous building contractors (notably, J.J. Harman), were relatively secure in their employment and ability to command good wages. They would have been seen by their 'social betters’ as the most promising recruits for membership of the bodies set up on their behalf.
Ward and Nadel
Historian George Nadel, author of Australia's Colonial Culture (1957), pointed to the institutes movement as part of a strong urban sodal tradition in colonial Australia that preceded the ‘bush’ or ‘outback’ tradition outlined by historian Russell Ward in his influential book, The Australian Legend (1956). Focusing on the egalitarian ethos of miners, shearers and other itinerant, semi-skilled bush workers, the ‘legend’ was seen by Ward as being boosted during the late 19th century by writers of the Sydney Bulletin ‘school’ intent on emphasising what was unique about Australia’s physical environment and the social values of its by then majority native-born population. Nadel, on the other hand, believed that the urban social elites in colonial Australian society were intent on reproducing the British class system with its deferential ethos of‘knowing your place’ and other mechanisms of social control.
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The three self-styled ‘working class’ organisations that waxed and waned in Fremantle during the second half of the nineteenth century have not attracted much interest among historians of Western Australia. Even Fremantle’s first historian, J.K. Hitchcock, had little to say about them, due no doubt to the paucity of sources and the challenge of disentangling their complex inter-relationships. 2 A notable exception was the survey of early Western Australian literature by B.J. Smith, who claimed in his 1962 article that they were ‘the most outstanding cultural achievements of the 1860s’. Further contributions were made during the State's Bicentennial in 1979 by Bruce Bennett in his edited collection, The Literature of Western Australia, and C.T. Stannage in his The People of Perth, which explored the history from 1851 of the Swan River Mechanics Institute, portraying it as an expression of the need for ‘free’ workers to differentiate themselves from the ‘bond’population once convict transportation had got underway. Strongly supported by senior government officials like Surveyor-General J.S. Roe, ‘it aimed to provide facilities for the ‘improvement and recreation of mechanics, excluding from its discussions all questions ‘of controversial theology, party politics, or of an immoral tendency’. By the end of 1852 it could boast a fine building in Howick (later Hay) Street, providing a hall, meeting rooms, library and minerals museum.
Fremantle
Patricia Brown in her The Merchant Princes of Fremantle: The Rise and Decline of a Colonial Elite (1996) looked at the three Fremantle bodies in the context of the port town’s merchant elite, but under-played the significance of the Working Man’s Association. 3 More recently, former Fremantle Local History Librarian, Pam Harris, has shown that they formed the nucleus of what became the Fremantle City Library in 1958. 4 The absence of the association’s early minute books limits what can be said about the discussions that took place, but a good deal might be learnt from the diaries of the Congregational Church’s Reverend Joseph Johnston, one of the formative influences of the Mechanics Institute and a key figure in its merger with the Working Man’s Association in August 1868 to form the Fremantle Literary Institute. The subject calls for more detailed study, but in the meantime it will be useful to survey what is known about the Fremantle organisations.
Fremantle Mechanics Institute
The earliest of these was the Fremantle Mechanics Institute, which was
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established at a meeting at the long room of Wellard’s (later the Cleopatra) Hotel in High Street on 30 July 1851, just six months after the Swan River Institute was formed in Perth. The meeting was chaired by the Surgeon to the Convict Establishment, Dr Shipton, while Government Resident, Richard McBryde Broun, was nominated President and Governor Fitzgerald Patron in their absence. 5 These senior officials, together with members of the town’s commercial elite (popularly known as ‘The Merchant Princes’), who dominated its economic, political and social life, saw it as their duty to ‘uplift’ the more skilled and literate members of the working class. They were encouraged to improve themselves by attending lectures by experts on mostly practical subjects and by consulting books and magazines held by the Institute’s modest library.
According to Fremantle’s senior ‘merchant prince’, Charles Alexander Manning, the Institute was to have as its objects
the improvement of its members in the various departments of science in which they are employed, by the establishment of a suitable Library and Reading Room, the delivery of Lectures on the Mechanical and Fine Arts, and the exhibition of models and drawings, illustrating them, and the formation of a Museum. 6
Significantly, the Institute did not refuse membership to ticket-of-leave men or expirees, as the Swan River Mechanics Institute had done. Nor did it explicitly forbid discussion of a theological or political nature.
At one of the Institute’s early meetings in November 1851, which was graced by the presence of Governor Fitzgerald and the Comptroller of the Convict Establishment, Capt E Y W Henderson, and their ladies, The Reverend Dr Barry lectured the audience on works of art exhibited at the Crystal Palace in North London which he had recently visited. 7 The meetings were first held in a warehouse rented from Captain Daniel Scott, on the corner of Cliff Street and Dalgety Street (now Croke Lane) and next to merchant Lionel Samson’s house. The Institute was later allocated Lot 564 on Adelaide Street, by the colonial government, which it then exchanged for Lot 433 on the corner of South Terrace and Collie Street.
The exodus of workers to the Victorian gold fields over the next few years meant that membership of the Institute fell off dramatically and virtually collapsed in 1854. Its activities were revived in 1857 when membership and resources were boosted by absorbing the local book club and its thirty or forty members. In November there were lectures on the ‘Fourth Estate’ (i.e., newspapers and journals) by James Kemp and the ‘Steam Engine’ by
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Assistant Surveyor William Phelps.
Edifying and ‘improving’ as these lectures may have been for some of those attending, but, the Fremantle correspondent of The Perth Gazette was critical of the lecturers as public speakers. Kemp’s ‘powers of speech’, he complained in November 1857, were ‘rapid and he was therefore imperfectly followed’, while Phelps’ ‘delivery did not appear to give general satisfaction, and the audience was very small - not half the attendance of the former lecture’. 8
English literature was introduced into the Institute’s programme in January 1858 when L.Y. Coleman gave the first of a series of lectures ‘to a numerous and respectable audience’ on the works of Shakespeare, providing anecdotes from his own travels. The Perth Gazette also reported that ‘a large quantity of popular works’ had been ordered from England, including books by Captain Frederick Marryat, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, William Harrison Ainsworth, Benjamin Disraeli, William Thackeray and Charles Dickens. A series of fortnightly lectures was planned for the winter months and a decision was made to erect the Institute’s own building at an estimated cost of £260. 9 The ‘gentrification’ of the working class was already proceeding within the Institute, leading it to resemble what its critics dismissively referred to as ‘a gentlemen’s reading room’. 10 By then, the upper class membership of the Institute had virtually taken over control of its Management Committee, leading to a loss of working class support. Colonial Secretary Frederick Barlee consequently withheld part of the colonial government’s modest annual grant of £50 to the Institute on the grounds that it had become ‘a book club and reading room for the upper classes’.
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Image 1: Fremantle Working Man’s Association building, late 1860s, LH00812, FHC
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The Working Man’s Association
The split in Institute membership that led to the formation of the Western Australian Working Man’s Association in May 1862 reflected the organisation's dysfunctionality produced by class differences. This is how its Committee explained what had happened in a memorial presented to the Governor:
The direction of the Fremantle Mechanics’ Institute being at present greatly swayed by the upper classes, the lower [classes] do not feel for the Institute as theirs - thus antagonism or indifference spring up, producing apathy in those who stand aloof and discouragement in those willing to act.
Experience teaches [us] that the higher and lower dasses never do work well together in the conduct of Public Affairs.
Harmonious vigorous direction in matters of an intellectual cast depends on unity of purpose, absence of reserve and unconstrained independence; these require that the managers feel themselves on a footing of equality directing that which concerns themselves. An efficient mixed management by both classes is impossible, tastes differ, the action of an inferior in the presence of his superior becomes constrained and degenerates into mere patronage on the one hand, dependence on the other, resulting in indifference. 11
The Institute subsequently gathered a healthy membership of 168 with its promise to ‘afford rational amusement, combined with information for the working classes, during their leisure hours’. One of its main attractions was a subscription library which made available 847 books to members.
Its first public function took place on 5 June 1862 at the Fremantle Boys School Room, with more than four hundred people present, including the Anglican Bishop of Perth, clergy of other denominations and ‘a fair sprinkling of the leading families’. So strong was the popular interest that many people had to be turned away. The entertainment featured readings by the versatile David Hancock from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Dickens, and Allingham’s Fortune's Frolic, a popular two-act farce first performed in London’s West End in 1860. Musical items were rendered by the Association’s Choral Society, accompanied by the Fremantle Volunteer Band, courtesy of its Commandant, Charles Manning. 12
The Association’s Committee of Management was to consist of ‘mechanics', but defined more narrowly now as those men whose chief means of subsistence is derived from the labour bestowed on raw products of nature or the materials elaborated therefrom, and on the various workings up of the same, artistic or otherwise, for the food, raiment, habitation, convenience and comfort of civilized life, whether as
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daily labourers therein or as the employers of such labour, in other words, as mechanics or master mechanics, also traders not being wholesale. 13
According to The Perth Gazette’s report of 8 September 1864, the association had been ‘based ... on principles of improvement and recreation for those who would otherwise squander their money in drink or play [gambling]’. 14 Its stated aims were ‘to afford rational amusement, combined with information, for the working classes, during their leisure hours’. Much of the initiative seems to have come from the Revd Joseph Johnston, who served as the Association’s treasurer, and the Reverend G.J. Bostock of the Church of England who served as President. Its first quarters were in a building in Pakenham Street, moving to a new building on the corner of Cliff Street and Croke Lane and, finally, to a sizeable, purpose-built premises on the corner of Market Street, South Terrace and Collie Street in late l899. With an early membership of 151 members, no fewer than forty-four of whom were of the ‘bond’ or ex-convict class, the association’s membership grew to three hundred within a couple of years. 15 Enjoying the patronage of Charles Manning, who had also supported the Mechanics Institute, it received a subsidy of [amount missing] from the government to support its library. This became a bone of contention in July 1863 when another leading merchant and member of the Legislative Council, Lionel Samson, complained to Colonial Secretary Frederick Barlee of the Governor’s refusal to give the Institute its customary grant. According to The Inquirer,
The Colonial Secretary replied that the latter was now merely a reading and Book Society, the former being the only association approaching to a Mechanics Institute. Further, the Governor considered The Working Man’s Association, though not exactly a Mechanics' Institute, more nearly approached it than the other Society, its object being to assist the lower class of people, a class whom it seemed were not acceptable to the Fremantle Institute. 16
Among the association’s most popular activities were ‘Penny Readings’ held every month on a Friday evening and drawing on the association’s library. This was a form of popular entertainment which enjoyed a vogue in mid-Victorian England with the rapid increase in popular literacy. Among the association’s early offerings was W.J. Robson’s ‘Chat about London and London People’on 5 September 1864. The evenings were so well-attended that the Fremantle correspondent of The Perth Gazette wondered why the Mechanics Institute, by contrast, seemed to be moribund:
What are the committee of the Mechanics Institute thinking about? The whole winter has passed away without a single entertainment being given
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by them. Are there now no lecturers in our town, or any one that will kindly assist them? Surely they are not in the same fix as the wise man of Athens who about the city ran, with a lantern in the midst of the day, to find an honest man. 17
Nevertheless, things had not been going so well for the association, either. The Fremantle correspondent of The Perth Gazette reported as early as September 1864 that there had already been a division in the Committee, leading to the resignation of the President and ‘a number of its most influential members’. 18 There had been instances of such ‘instability' before and the correspondent put it down to ‘the want of that essential knowledge and aptness for business on the part of the majority of the committee, to regulate and manage such an Institute’. He suggested re-modelling the body and appointing a new committee. 19
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Image 2: Pencil sketch of Leopold Redpath, attributed to William Egley, 1839. National Portrait Gallery, London.
Part of the ‘instability’ referred to resulted from the unexpected loss of its Secretary (and one of its principal founders), the celebrated convict expiree, Leopold Redpath (1816-1891), who had been sent back to the Convict Establishment on 21 September 1864 for some unstated ‘misdemeanour'.
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Redpath was a former London lawyer’s clerk and Great Northern Railway shares swindler who defrauded his employers of more than a million pounds over eight years before being caught in Switzerland and sentenced at London’s Old Bailey on 5 January 1857 to transportation for life to Western Australia. 20 Redpath had picked up a good working knowledge of the law and court procedure in his time, frequently appearing as a litigant in the Fremantle magistrates court. All this made him a thorn in the side of the local magistrates who were none too gentle in their treatment of convict ticket-of-leave men and expiree offenders whose ‘bond’ status rendered them ineligible to represent themselves in court. 21
In his letter of 10 October 1864 to The Perth Gazette, association Chairman William Brown took the opportunity to cite the Governor’s grant and the interest taken by him and Barlee in the association as
the first occasions in which the desire of the really Working Men of Western Australia, for moral and intellectual improvement, was officially recognised by those who have the rule over them, and these therefore will form the brightest landmarks in the memories of those who, after all, are the backbone of the colony. The working men have not the tongue of the learned, neither can they obtain easy access to the great to plead their own cause.
Ending this peroration with a rhetorical flourish, Brown promised that despite all efforts to ‘check’ the progress of the association,
we will still endeavour, under Providence, to keep the sturdy little vessel afloat, even if others should be found insufficiently infirm of purpose, uneven in temperament, or timid of heart, to abandon a cause which has for its ultimate object one of the greatest successes which can crown a lifetime of anxiety, viz., the moral and intellectual improvement of the most isolated portion of mankind.
As we have seen, the association was more authentically working class in its stated aims than the Mechanics Institute had proved to be, boasting in its Fifth Annual Report in 1867 that
although at first many opponents had publicly prophesied that this association, arising like the fungus from an unhealthy soil would only appear upon the Surface of Society for a brief space, presently to sink into its original obscurity.
Nothing of the kind had happened. By then it possessed a collection of 4,000 books, while 2,274 newspapers and journals had been used in the Reading Room or in members’ homes. It had also organised an ambitious programme of lectures and entertainments, including the ever-popular
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Penny Readings, ‘for the benefit of the community at large’. The second of these evenings in February 1867 featured the gifted local mimic, David Hancock who, ‘as usual, delighted his audience with his clever delineation of Irish character and English rustic humour’. 22
The Fremantle Literary Institute
On 10 August 1868, the year after convict transportation to Western Australia ceased, Fremantle’s recently-established Herald newspaper announced the formation of the The Fremantle Literary Institute,‘being an amalgamation of the two cultural bodies existing in the town’. Most likely engineered by William Pearse, part-owner and manager of The Herald, who had served four years as Secretary of the Working Man’s Association, the merger of the two bodies brought to an end their uneasy co-existence. The Herald also reported that the new body would be offering two evenings each week from 31 August. 23 An ex-convict himself, Pearse was so determined to cast off the ‘leper spot’ of convictism that he successfully sued the proprietors of The Inquirer newspaper, the Stirling brothers, for libel when they published the well-known fact that he was of ‘bond’origin. 24
During the first decade of its existence, the Literary Institute held its meetings in the old Working Man’s Association rooms at the corner of Cliff Street and Croke Lane where a semi-retired solicitor, H W Young, acted as honorary librarian. According to local historian J.K. Hitchcock, an avid auto-didact who used the library extensively during those years,
he [Young] was rarely in the Institute owing to other engagements. Anyone wanting a book had merely to walk in, take it from the shelf, and enter it in a book kept for that purpose. 25
In 1879 a modest building intended to serve as a permanent headquarters for the Institute was constructed at a cost of £l,000 on Lot 217A, a triangular piece of land situated on the comer of Market Street, Collie Street and South Terrace. As well as providing a paid librarian, reading room and meetings room for members, the Institute was able to lease parts of the building to the Fremantle Town Trust, the local Road Board and other semi-official bodies until the completion of the Town Hall in 1887 made alternative premises available.
After the Institute’s fifteen years of existence, The Herald (which had been initially supportive because of Pearse’s key role in the merger and his work as its first Secretary) suggested in March 1883 that its early promise had not been fulfilled:
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[The] Fremantle Literary Institute is ... noticeable for the indolence and apathy of its management. It consists of a little cheap lending library and an untidy table strewn with periodicals of the nursery-maid [i.e., Mills and Boon] type.26
No new books had been purchased during the previous year, only 2369 books and 1258 magazines had been issued and membership was static in a community of four hundred people.
In April, The Herald observed testily that despite a well-publicised ‘shake-up’,
The recent... flourish of trumpets produced nothing. The only way open to the committee is to get out and be replaced by more energetic members. 27
The Fremantle Literary Institute had gone the same way as the Mechanics Institute and the Working Man’s Association before it, becoming ‘gentrified’ at the hands of its more cultivated and socially influential members who were more interested in ‘rational amusement’ (i.e., genteel entertainment)! than practical self-improvement. By providing a programme of fortnightly ‘shilling concerts’ during the winter months, it developed a popular following. A moderately favourable review appeared in The West Australian on 30 August 1886 of a concert presided over by Mr Justice Alfred Stone and featuring piano solos and duets, recitations and readings. Committee member Michael Samson read ‘one of Mrs Caudle’s ‘famous curtain lectures’ on the vicissitudes of married life and Mr. Nugent ‘earned some merriment by a recitation in which he expressed his determination to live and die a bachelor’. The programme was something between a penny readings and a glee club or ‘old village choir’, including comic songs of a sometimes risqué flavour. 28 The fortnightly events continued to be a success and were an important source of income for the Institute. 29
The gold rushes and subsequent influx of workers from the eastern colonies and overseas stimulated membership for a time, but by the late 1890s the Institute was in a bad way. Dr Richard Rendle, its Vice-President and Resident Medical Officer of the Government Hospital in Fremantle, complained in a letter to The West Australian of 9 July 1898 that he was unable to fulfil his duties properly because the organisation had departed from its original objects:
Instead of being an institution to help the masses in acquiring technical and scientific knowledge, it has degenerated too largely into a circulating library for novel readers.
Nor was this necessarily the fault of the Committee:
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The general public has regarded it throughout more as a circulating library of light literature, and has taken little interest in its efficient management. On this account the control of its affairs has repeatedly been allowed to fall into the hands of its poorly paid officers, with the result that the papers, magazines and books have been appropriated by members and others, its subscriptions have been allowed to fall into arrears or have been misappropriated.
Consequently, Rendle added,
The Institute has been repeatedly insolvent and would have died out more than once but for repeated grants from Government and the perseverance and generosity of a few public spirited men. It is now in a fairly prosperous condition, and it seems a pity that some determined attempt should not be made to develop in some degree its original good objects.
The Literary Institute took on a new lease of life as a library with the laying of the foundation stone of a fine new two-storey headquarters on the South Terrace site on 15 March 1899 by the new President, Elias Solomon, MLA for East Fremantle. Setting a new, more genteel tone for the Institute as a cultural body was a chamber music concert in October of that year that featured the Misses Parsons performing Haydn, Schumann,
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Image 3: Fremantle Literary Institute, n.d, LH001401, FHC
Mendelssohn, Brahms and other composers, supplemented by more popular songs such as ‘Because ofThee’andThe Spanish Gipsy’rendered by Miss Louie Legge and ‘Thour’t Passing Hence’ and ‘Ailsa Mine’ by Mr. J. Ernest Andrew. Nothing could more clearly have emphasised the
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Institute’s abandonment of its working class character for something unmistakeably middle class.
Charles Frost, Fremantle branch manager of The West Australian and The Western Mail from 1901, who was elected President in 1911 after serving nine years on the Institute’s Committee, was able to expand its collection of books to more than 10,000 by 1912. From then until the late 1930s they were looked after by its secretary, Harry Raymond, who continued to live rent-free with his family at the rear of the building after retirement and was one of the town’s best-known ‘identities’. 30
In 1947, Fremantle City Council took over the assets of the by then moribund Institute, notably the building which became known as the ‘Evan Davies Library’ after the local councillor and Labor Party stalwart. He had instigated the move on the understanding that it would provide a comprehensive library service for the town’s rate-payers.
The Institute’s role as anything other than a subscription library and venue for genteel musical events had long since disappeared in Fremantle where working men now joined trade unions to further their interests and were more concerned with industrial issues and strike action than self-improvement.
Conclusion
Organisations dedicated to the ‘improvement’ of the working class, inspired and led by members of Fremantle’s upper class, were ultimately dominated by them for want of sustained working class interest and management ability. All three organisations had their origins in the well-meaning but patronising and self-serving philanthropy of the port town’s mercantile elite, but were doomed by the very class differences that they were intended to ease. Nevertheless, they were to provide the nucleus of Fremantle’s government-supported municipal library as well as technical, vocational and adult education services.
Reflecting rapid social change and the lessening of class differences by the end of the nineteenth century, the Evan Davies Library served as lecture hall and reading room, literary institute, public lending library and municipal library. More recently it served as the venue for Kulcha's musical entertainments, followed by a coffee shop franchise and up-market pub on Fremantle’s ‘Cappuccino Strip’. These different incarnations are all strands of Fremantle’s unique social fabric.
Fremantle Studies Day, 2017
1 George Nadel, Australia's Colonial Culture: Ideas, Men and Institutions in Mid-Nineteenth Century Eastern Australia, Melbourne: Cheshire, 1957, p.286.
2 J.K. Hitchcock, The History of Fremantle: The Front Gate of Australia, Fremantle City Council, 1929, p. 37.
3 Patricia M. Brown, The Merchant Princes of Fremantle: The Rise and Decline of a Colonial Elite, 1870-1900, Perth: University of WA Press, 1996, pp. 136-38.
4 Pam Harris, ‘From catalogue cards to ebooks’, Fremantle Studies, Vol. 10, pp. 59-70.
5 The Perth Gazette, 29 August 1851.
6 The Perth Gazette, 29 August 1851.
7 The Perth Gazette, 7 November 1851.
8 The Perth Gazette, 27 November 1857.
9 The Perth Gazette, 25 June 1858.
10 Peter Rose, Wendy Birman and Michael White, ‘ “Respectable” and “Useful": The Institute Movement in Western Australia’, in Philip C. Candy and John Laurent, eds, Pioneering Culture: Mechanics' Institutes and Schools of Arts in Australia, Adelaide: Auslib Press, 1994, p 135.
11 CSO Societies, Memorial of Fremantle Mechanics’ Institute to Governor; 8 June 1864, cited by Rose, Birman and White, ‘ “Respectable” and “Useful”,’p 135.
12 E. Clifton, ‘Music and the Stage in the Early Days. No. II’, WAHS, Journal and Proceedings, Vol. 1, Pt. IX (1931), p. 23.
13 Fremantle Mechanics’ Institute Report No. 1, Colonial Secretary’s Records, State Records Office of Western Australia, 549/240/63, cited by Rose, Birman and White, ‘“Respectable” and “Useful”’, p. 135.
14 Perth Gazette, 18 September 1864.
15 The Inquirer, 11 November 1863.
16 The Inquirer, 1 July 1863.
17 The Perth Gazette, 21 October 1864
18 The West Australian Times, 8 September 1864, pp. 2-3.
19 Ibid.
20 Leopold Redpath, pencil sketch, c. 1837, attributed to William Egley, courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London. The shares had been intended to finance London’s Underground Railway.
21 David A. Hayes & Marian Kantlish, The King's Cross Fraudster: Leopold Redpath, his life and times, London: Camden History Society, 2013.
22 The Inquirer, 24 July 1867, p 2.
23 The Herald, 15 August 1868.
24 See Bob Reece, ‘Fremantle’s first voice: The Herald (1867-1886)’, Fremantle Studies, Vol. 9, 2010, pp 57-58.
25 J.K. Hitchcock, ‘Early Days’, Fremantle Times, 25 April 1919.
26 The Herald, 3 March 1883.
27 The Herald, 7 April 1883.
28 Older readers may remember the ABC’s ‘Village Glee Club,’ a weekly Sunday night wireless programme broadcast from May 1942 until March 1971 under the firm direction of ‘Mr and Mrs Crump’. See K.S. Inglis, This Is The ABC, Melbourne, 1983.
29 The Weekly Times, 21 January 1886.
30 See John Raymond, ‘Library lives on’, Fremantle Herald, 24 September 1994.
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