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Freotopia > People > John Bruce > Williams
‘Ned’s Land’ And The Bruce Family
A.E. Williams
Chapter Six of A.E. Williams 1984, Nedlands: From Campsite to City, City of Nedlands.
It is to the esteemed Bruce family that the City of Nedlands owes its nomenclature, and even then only by a joking association with what was considered to be a worthless piece of real estate. The land in question was Swan Location 86, which thrust like a scimitar into Melville Water, stretching inland north and west to meet the old Perth-Fremantle Road. All told there were 320 acres, but its bush and scrub looked pale in comparison with the more illustrious Gallop Gardens, Swan Location 85. It had been bought by Captain John Bruce on a sudden impulse, thinking of it as a possible patrimony for his son and heir, Edward (Ned). Hence the family coinage ‘Ned’s Land’, even though the latter never appeared to have directly concerned himself with the estate, which was to remain completely undeveloped until 1907.
In fact there were two owners before the Bruce family. The original grantee was a Thomas Bailey who, like Adam Armstrong, had come to Western Australia on the Gilmore to be part of Thomas Peel’s Land Settlement Scheme. Bailey has been called an agriculturalist,' but more likely he was a labourer. Although the Crown Grant was not issued to him until l6 November 1830, documents in the State Archives strongly suggest he was camping on the site even before this date. No doubt he was cutting timber. Certainly, as one of Peel’s impoverished and unfortunate migrants, he was in receipt of Government assistance.
However, less than one month after the issue of his title deed, he sold out to Mr Edward Hamersley for £250. Obviously he had no real interest in the property and saw the opportunity of making some easy money. Bailey took his wife and three children to the hills east of Guildford — their last listed address was Mahogany Creek.
Hamersley was the scion of a wealthy well-known titled English family, one of whose forbears had been Lord Mayor of London as in the East Perth pioneer cemetery can still be seen the family coat-of-arms inscribed with the motto ‘Honore et Amore’ - ‘By Honour and Love’.
Hamersley was an influential colonist who quickly acquired important interests. He helped to establish the Western Australian Bank, becoming a founding director of it in 1837, and at one time actually held a first mortgage over Mr William Kernott Shenton’s flour mill at Point Belches.
His own Guildford property, Pyrton, was one of the best to be found along the Swan River.
When he sold Location 86 to John Bruce, to be held by him in trust for his son Edward, Hamersley received a mere £200 for it. Thus, after holding this land for fifteen years, he disposed of it for £50 less than the initial price.
Certainly Swan Location 86 could not be compared with Location 85 and Gallop’s magnificent vineyard and orchard. The former had to be crossed by visitors wishing to inspect Gallop Gardens; they did so only after passing along foreshore lined with straggly paperbark trees and unprepossessing heavy sand.
Captain Bruce, the third owner, held important and senior posts in the colonial administration - Officer Commanding the Pensioner Forces in the Swan River Colony from 1850 to 1870, Military Commandant from 1853, and Acting Governor for twelve years from 1858 until the day of his death. Indeed the call of arms features strongly in the background of the Bruce family, whose name derives from the Norman-French (Le Brus) and can be traced to the district around Falaise in Normandy. A famous Scottish ancestor, of course, was Robert the Bruce, King of Scotland, who lived between 1274-1329, and who soundly defeated Edward II and his English army at the Battle of Bannockburn, thus securing Scottish independence in 1314. Captain John Bruce’s grandfather is reported to have fought for Prince Charles Edward - ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ - at the bloody Battle of Culloden in 1745. The Jacobite cause was a lost one, but the family survived, and, fortunately for it, its wealth and prestige largely remained intact. It possessed valuable estates in Northern Ireland, and it was here in County Athlone that, in 1808, John Bruce was born.
Opting for an army career, he graduated from Sandhurst, and in 1828, as an ensign, saw active service in India. Later he visited and fought in China. From ensign he rose to the rank of lieutenant, from lieutenant to captain. He became a staff office specialising in army administration at Tilbury Fort, London, and while there received his next promotion, that of staff officer for all the Pensioner Guards being sent out to the Swan River.
These Pensioners were so called because they were retired ex-servicemen recruited in England for the task of guarding convicts who, it had now been decided, would be sent out to the Colony to alleviate the pressing labour problem. Between 1850-68 a total of nearly 10,000 male convicts were thus transported and in the same period, no doubt as a healthy boost to the Colony’s population, more than a thousand Pensioner Guards came out, many of whom had seen service in the Crimea, India or the West Indies.
Bruce and his family arrived on 24 October 1850 in the convict transport Hashemy. His wife, whose maiden name was Johanna Jacoba Henklotz, was the daughter of a Dutch judge he had met at Trichinipoly, India. They had seven children - five girls, Jane Mary, Mary, (who officially opened Nedlands School on 18 January 1913), Charlotte Elizabeth, Caroline Clarrie and Emily Helen, and two boys, Edward and Urban. (Appendix C).
Bruce’s role was to organise various effective convict depots and establishments in such agricultural settlements as Newcastle (Toodyay), York and The Williams, and in and around the capital at various places like North Fremantle, Freshwater Bay and Guildford.
The Freshwater Bay convict establishment was assigned to the Pensioner Guards and the eighty convicts who arrived on the Robert Small, their task being to redefine and form the Perth-Fremantle Road. West of the bay were allotments for cottage quarters to house the guards and their families. These ran down to the river and formed a line of settlement which soon became known as Pensioners Row or Pensioners Way - better known to residents of Nedlands today as Victoria Avenue.
Early colonial records show that in 1853 Bruce bought two Perth town blocks in Irwin Street. Subsequently this land became part of the campus of a new University of Western Australia - a motley collection of wooden huts and galvanised iron sheds nicknamed by the students ‘Tin Pot Alley’.
Eventually the Bruces settled down in a townhouse erected on two acres of vacant land west of William Street, between St Georges Terrace and Hay Street. The site, said to have cost him only £30, later became occupied by Foy and Gibsons and David Jones. When the Barracks, Perth’s military headquarters, was erected at the west end of St Georges Terrace (between 1856-63) Bruce found it very convenient to walk to work.
The Bruce family house in St Georges Terrace. It stood on the site where later Foys and David Jones did business.
A prominent establishment figure, Bruce in 1854 became a member of the Legislative Council appointed to assist the Governor. And when regular British protecting forces were withdrawn from Western Australia in 1863, Bruce, as Military Commandant, organised Volunteer Defence Forces to take their place. In 1860 he became their Lieutenant-Colonel and Colonel.
He travelled throughout the Colony, organising and directing these new mounted units, whose red and white military uniforms, spiked helmets, long steel spears and light swords were widely admired. Bruce also opened a rifle range on Mt Eliza and established a powder magazine near the old Perth Causeway. Twice he acted as the Colony’s Administrator, and had the honour of sending the first telegram from Perth to Fremantle. He was responsible for the installation of the Perth Town Hall’s four-sided clock.
Mt Bruce in the North West - the second highest point in the State - was named after this erstwhile colonist.
< The Bruce family grave in East Perth Pioneer Cemetery.
Bruce became a founding member of the Perth Building and Benevolent Society, now the Perth Building Society, which began operating on 17 October 1862. He was Chairman in 1865. He also helped to form the Perth Mechanics’ Institute. When he died on 5 November 1870, after a three-month illness, Colonel John Bruce was buried at East Perth cemetery with full military honours, the second highest ranking officer ever to have been laid to rest there.
After his death Mrs Bruce returned to England where she died in 1904. But three of the girls had already married in the Colony, and the Bruces were now connected with the Lefroy, Wittenoom and Lee Steere families. For thirty-six years a son-in-law, Anthony O’Grady Lefroy, was to serve as Colonial Treasurer. Between 1917-19, a grandson, Henry Bruce Lefroy, was to become the State’s Premier.
For a short time Edward Bruce, the son and heir, attended Perth Boys’ School (now the headquarters of the National Trust in Western Australia), and also Bishop Mathew Hale’s school, The Cloisters, in St Georges Terrace. At his father’s death he was already in England and being privately educated. In 1883 he paid a brief visit to the Swan River Colony. Swan Location 86 by this time was absorbed into the Bruce Estates Trust, and was just one of several other properties he owned in England, Ireland and elsewhere.
Like his father before him he opted for a military career, attending Sandhurst and serving in the Indian Army. He was a major (later colonel) in the l9th Bengal Lancers, and in the unruly northern Indian borders came under two distinguished commanders, Lord Roberts of Kandahar and Lord Kitchener of Khartoum. In 1901 he retired from active army service to England and died in I917.
Swan Location 86 was developed into a Nedlands Park Estate after 1908, and cut up into its various building blocks. Bruce family names were then, naturally enough, placed on the master plan. Bruce Street, today one of the finest thoroughfares in the City of Nedlands, commemorates John Bruce and the family. Originally it was named Dixon Street after a Claremont Road Board Secretary, who served that Board admirably and well from 1915 to 1921. Edward Street was named after Edward himself. Stanley and Thomas Streets were named after two of Edward’s sons who were killed in action in World War I. Webster Street recalls Christine Bruce, née Webster, Edward’s wife. She was the daughter of a General Webster, once his commanding officer in India.
Nedlands Council records also show that today’s Vincent Street was originally a Johannah Street, obviously named after Mrs John Bruce. 8 At North Fremantle, near the site of a former convict establishment, there is still a Bruce Street, a John Street and a Johannah Street. These all recall the Bruce family and its association with the Swan River Colony.
Swan Location 86 now makes up only a small portion of the City of Nedlands, much of it being in Melvista Ward. Part of it falls within the City of Subiaco and part even belongs to the City of Perth. Some of it is occupied by the campus of the University of Western Australia.
When the history of development of Swan Location 86 is reviewed today - Broadway and its environs, the Nedlands riverfront, the University campus - the Bruce family must be considered, with the Armstrong and Gallop families, as true early pioneers of the City of Nedlands.
==== Footnotes
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Williams, A.E. 1984, Nedlands: From Campsite to City, City of Nedlands.
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 6 March, 2018 and hosted at freotopia.org/people/bruce3.html (it was last updated on 23 January, 2024). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.