Ray takes us back to the extended family tree in late 19th century.
And we have a retiree announcement at the end.
Enjoy.
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Introduction
This article continues on from previous articles about the children of Alexander Nicoll, otherwise known as Nicoll the Tailor, the great great grandfather of many of our United States readers. In the previous article we left Thomas Bellair leasing the Ballarat Theatre Royal. Thomas’s connection with Nicoll the Tailor was somewhat oblique, because his son married Jeannie Leonard, who was the daughter of Nicoll’s daughter Emma. My previous articles, and this article, draw on Thomas’s obituary which was published in the Wagga Wagga “Express” of 16th May 1893. Extracts from the obituary are shown in italics. |
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Thomas marries
In a curious oversight the obituary did not mention that in late 1861 Thomas married Sydney-born Rachel Proud (shown in the above photo) in the village of Buninyong, a short distance south of Ballarat. She was 20 and he was 36.
Perhaps the attraction of Buninyong was that it had a hotel where the married couple could have a celebration without the whole of the population of Ballarat wishing to attend. Established in 1842, it was the first inland hotel in Victoria to be issued with a licence and is the oldest continually licensed hotel in regional Victoria.
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Thomas takes on a hotel at Ballarat
“After that Mr. Bellair was the first lessee of Lester’s Hotel, Ballarat, which he kept for eight years,”
The above magazine pictures show the hotel in 1860 (bottom) and 1904 (top).
The top picture is a view of a very ornate building with an inscription “Lester’s Hotel 1904”. The bottom 1860 photo shows a quite spartan-looking building having a sign “Bellair’s Rainbow Hotel” on the side.
Thomas must have had an eye to the picturesque. According to Mr Google there are very few hotels with the name “Rainbow”.
Although the 1860 building is much smaller than the extended version shown in the top photo it is still quite large for its time. It demonstrates a preoccupation with two storey buildings which were far more expensive to build than single storey buildings. One reason could have been that the “upstairs and downstairs” tradition had been imported from England, where the first floor was used for accommodation and the ground floor for everything else. As with the Theatre Royal, obtaining bricks or stone for the hotel would have presented a challenge.
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Thomas challenges the Ballarat Council
Firstly, a warning to parents that this item may not be suitable for children under the age of 15!
Thomas was not averse to challenging authority. In a quaint but very well written 1862 open letter to the Council published in the Ballarat newspaper he challenged the wisdom of the Council’s action of building a public urinal in the street in front of the theatre. He concluded the letter scathingly with “In conclusion…I hope the town surveyor will look to the present beastly and disgraceful building.”
My first reaction was that the Council had built a pissoir. If this is correct it would be particularly notable because it would be the first reference to a pissoir I have ever heard of in Australia! On the other hand, the fact that I could not find any examples of pissoirs in Great Britain (the birthplace of most residents of Ballarat at the time) or Australia could indicate that the Ballarat edifice was not a pissoir after all.
The above photo of an 1876 French pissoir (I will leave the origin of the name to your imagination) gives an idea of the general principles of such a public urinal.
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What else could it have been?
On further reflection, I am somewhat confused by Thomas’s reference to it as a “building”. Was it something of a different construction that had raised Thomas’s ire? Perhaps it was made of iron, stone or brick like the above London unisex building, complete with electronic entry (just joking!).
A downside of any urinal would have been that there were no sewers. I will leave it to your powers of deduction (taking into account the laws of gravity), as to where the effluent went.
Regardless of its method of construction readers can understand Thomas’s indignation at the construction of any incompatible “beastly and disgraceful building” outside his beloved theatre, which many Ballarat residents would have considered to be the major cultural attraction of the town.
The fact that Thomas took up the cause of the theatre several years after he had bought the hotel indicates that he had probably retained his financial interest in the theatre.
Thomas takes a dramatic company to Calcutta
Managing a theatre in Ballarat (regardless of whether it had a urinal near it) had obviously not dampened Thomas’s thespian enthusiasm. When he left Ballarat he, according to his obituary, “took a dramatic company to Calcutta”.
This was surely a measure of his enthusiasm for live theatre. Like the earlier trip to Auckland this would have been a complex exercise, with the added complication that a sea voyage to the Indian port of Calcutta (unlike the direct trading route to New Zealand) would have been long and very circuitous. In fact, I am completely puzzled as to how Thomas would have pulled it off using recognised trade routes. He must have chartered a ship.
But why such enthusiasm for taking a dramatic company to Calcutta?
Perhaps the reason was a feeling of patriotism. Not many years earlier, in 1858, British Crown rule was established in India, ending a century of control by the East India Company. Two years later Queen Victoria was declared “Ëmpress of India”. Calcutta was the fourth largest city in India and would have had a fair sized population of British people, whether as administrators or traders. Maybe Thomas wanted to indulge them with a theatre production which would remind them of England.
The Black Hole of Calcutta
Calcutta had achieved notoriety a century earlier, owing to what became known as the Black Hole of Calcutta. This was a small prison/dungeon in Fort William in Calcutta, where troops of the Nawab of Bengal held British prisoners of war after the Bengali army captured the fort in 1756.The surviving British soldiers, Anglo-Indian soldiers, and Indian civilians were imprisoned overnight in conditions so cramped that many people died from suffocation and heat exhaustion, the result being that 123 of 146 prisoners of war died.
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Thomas moves back to a hotel in sunny Melbourne
“On his return, he occupied the Pastoral Hotel, at Newmarket, near Melbourne, for 11 years. During this time he was for seven years a member of the Essendon and Flemington Municipal Council and for three years was unanimously elected Mayor, or Chief Magistrate, of the municipality. On the 27th of February, 1885, he was entertained at a banquet by the members of the Essendon Dramatic Club, to whom he had often given valuable assistance, and presented with a very flattering illuminated address, written by the well-known litterateur of Melbourne, Mr. R. P. Whitworth”.
The above photo shows the grandiose Essendon Town Hall in 1886. It was originally built as the Essendon Mechanics Institute, opening in 1880, when Thomas would have been on the Council. In 1886 it was officially rechristened as the Essendon Town Hall.
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Thomas moves to rural Wagga Wagga
Here is a photo of Millenet’s Criterion Hotel and Bellair’s Commercial Hotel in Fitzmaurice Street, during the 1891 flood.
According to historical records Thomas and Rachel moved for the final time in 1885 to Wagga Wagga, a large town in south western New South Wales on the Murrumbidgee River, and bought the Commercial Hotel. Buying a hotel was scarcely a surprise because Thomas and his extensive family seemed to have always lived in hotels.
The hotel was built in 1857 on the corner of Fitzmaurice and Sturt Streets, close to the river. Over a period of time this area became the commercial centre of Wagga Wagga.
Wagga Wagga is a major station on the Main Southern railway line which runs from Sydney to Melbourne, that line having reached Wagga Wagga in 1880.
Flooding in Wagga Wagga
Wagga Wagga was originally a village on a crossing of the Murrumbidgee River. Originally its major attraction was its assured water supply and its fertile river flats fed by periodic floods, similar to the lower Mississippi River. Later, after the railway arrived, it became a major centre for the pastoral industry, where valuable wool clips were bought and sold. Thomas had arrived at the right time to share in the town’s burgeoning prosperity.
Perhaps the novelty of periodic floods had worn off by the time Thomas arrived there. Still in the memories of older residents would have been the catastrophic 1852 flood, where 80 residents of the upstream town of Gundagai had died when their village was swept away in one terrible night. This was by far the worst flooding disaster in Australia’s history.
There had also been the severe 1870 flood.
I wonder whether Thomas was unduly surprised when Wagga Wagga was flooded once again in 1891. As shown in the above photo, the cellar, including his beer barrels, and the ground floor, including all the bar area and dining area, were inundated.
History was to repeat itself with later floods in 1925, 1931, 1956, 1975 and 2012. However, levees had been built to protect the city after the record 1956 flood, so later floods were kept at bay.
Thomas’s family
Meanwhile, Thomas and Rachel had also been busy raising thirteen children, as follows (note that some of the places of birth do not necessarily stack up with the newspaper obituary):
* Rachel Mary Fanny Bellair (b Ballarat) 1862 – 1889
* Thomas William Bellair 1864 – 1918
* James Alfred Warner Bellair (b St Kilda) 1867 – 1911
* George Whiteman Bellair (b St Kilda) 1868 – 1942
* Blanche Bellair 1870 – 1944
* Richard Bellair 1872 –
* Ernest Bellair (b Flemington) 1874 – 1926
* Margaret Alice Bellair 1875 – 1877
* Ethel Bellair (b Flemington) 1877 – 1899
* Edith Bellair 1879 – 1942
* Adelaide Bellair (b Moonee Ponds, near Essendon) 1881 – 1882
* John Berry Bellair 1883 – 1940 (b Moonee Ponds, near Essendon)
* Thomas William Bellair 1886 – 1918 (b Ballarat)
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Thomas dies, funeral
Thomas died in 1893 after a period of poor health. Rachel died three years later. The Commercial Hotel remained in the family until 1928, when it was sold.
Briefly, Jeannie Leonard (Nicoll the Tailor’s granddaughter) married Thomas Bellair’s son James Alfred Warner Bellair in 1907. Sadly, James died in 1911. Their son James Leonard Bellair married twice and died in 2006.
Conclusion
This completes my articles about the children (and their families) Nicoll the Tailor left behind in Australia.
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Leila Menzies: Charter Subscriber and Long-time Contributor to the The Jerrems Journal … Retires!
Wanted to let you know that I just retired June 30, 2017 from Los Angeles Community College District. So now I have only one home email address.
Hope to continue to work on research with you and Ray. I will get newsletters as you publish them!
Leila Menzies, Ret. |
