The Poacher And The Sunday School Teacher

William GRAY [1833-1922] & Charlotte FAYERS [1835-1911]

* William and Charlotte Gray (nee Fayers) are the parents of Isaac Robert Gray.

* Isaac Gray married Elizabeth Pearce in 1875, and were the parents of Margaret Gray.

* Margaret Gray married Herbert Osborn in 1898, and were the parents of Ella Osborn.

* Ella Osborn married Jack Edmonds in 1934.

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William 'Dobbin' Gray

Charlotte Fayers

      Any photos that still exist of this pioneering generation of our forebears were inevitably taken in their latter years, and while this denies us the opportunity to see them as they were in the heady bloodrush of their youth, when horizons were distant and all things were still possible, the upside of these old snaps is that the character that they accumulated as they grafted-stumbled-laughed-grizzled-cried through Life gets to shine through. Bill and Charlotte Gray are no exception.
 

      One of the pitfalls of genealogy is that researchers may, from unwitting personal bias, colour their interpretation of the often limited hard data of their ancestors’ lives. The other danger is in leaning too heavily on good old ‘oral history’ to flesh out the story, as these inherited narratives are never less than third hand, and as they were often heard when the listener was quite young, were prone to misunderstanding. I only say this here because the Grays seem to have their fair share of handed-down stories that I’ve picked through as best I can.
 

      Until I sat down to actually write this, I have to admit I had always tended to think of Bill and Charlotte Gray in the vein of ‘Father Xmas and the Sunday School Teacher’, which unfairly smacks at cliché and caricature and doesn’t do justice to two people who, while being remarkably mismatched, somehow lasted the distance together with apparent good grace and created a minor workingclass dynasty along the way.
 

      So, as best as I see it, this is their story...

 

CHARLOTTE FAYERS’ YOUTH

      Unlike most of our migrating forebears, these two did not arrive already married, but emigrated separately and met out in the colony. And I know it’s sort of expected that you begin with the man, probably because he carries the more well-known family name, but as they were single (and Charlotte’s beginnings set the tone of their differences much better) this time she gets to go first.
 

      Charlotte’s father Robert Septimus Fayers was a carpenter/wheelwright, but her mother (also a Charlotte, nee Atkinson) was Robert’s second wife, his first having died in childbirth in 1830, leaving him with six children under 15. As a good spouse (and the extended family) in those days was the nearest thing to a welfare system, typically Robert remarried within two years.
 

      Charlotte Atkinson Fayers was born in the Fayers home village of Bildeston in Suffolk, late in the November of 1835, destined to be the only child of Robert and his new wife. But Charlotte wasn’t baptised in the Bildeston Anglican parish church where her parents were married, but in the Independent Chapel in Hadleigh some eight kms away, and I can only assume that this had something to do with her maternal grandfather being the Revd Charles Atkinson, a long time minister of the Tackett Street Independent Church in Ipswich, and a director of the London Missionary Society. And her maternal grandmother was of the Suffolk and Somerset Notcutts, well-known Dissenter ministers for many generations. Possibly a little Anglican/Congregational family pushing and pulling?
 

      But, in the February of 1839, when Charlotte was not much more than three years old, her mother died in Bildeston (I don’t know the cause) and was laid to rest in the Fayers family vault in the churchyard, leaving a very small child without a memory of her mother, and a man still with three teen-to-young-adult daughters from his first marriage living at home, as in the 1841 Census of Hadleigh Street in Bildeston ("all that part which lies on the East side of the road from Hitcham to Hadleigh", which is today’s main B.1115 through the town) there was Robert (aged abt 50), and his girls Julia (20), Margaret (13), and Elizabeth (10), as well as six year old Charlotte.

      With the eldest daughter Julia undoubtably acting in the capacity of home-manager, assisted by the younger girls, Robert apparently remained single but continued to earn his living in the village as a carpenter, until in the winter of 1847, when Charlotte was still only about twelve, but her half-sisters all fairly much able to have independent lives, her dad succumbed to illness and was laid beside both of his wives in the Fayers family vault.
 

      Charlotte was then an orphan, and while blessed with an extended middleclass-ish, God-fearing, very missionary-inclined Dissenter family, and as such not under any threat of Orphanage or Poorhouse, she was still a young girl without means, and as such was subject to the will of well-meaning relatives.
 

      This is where Charlotte’s story has tended to be coloured at times by some oral history that I’m sure the re-tellers believed to be true. And if there is one thing I’ve learnt about oral history, is that there is always at least some truth to it. Often obscure, but usually able to be sifted out.
 

      There is one such piece that says Charlotte was at this point placed under the guardianship of, and was educated by, her mother’s brother the Revd Theophilus Atkinson of Ipswich, a dedicated missionary to the God-less of far-away places. The latter part is true but the Revd Theophilus and his wife were in the heathen wilderness of South Africa - except for a short visit back home in the 1870s - from 1829 to his death, and it would be hard to see him being made her guardian with so many other close relatives nearer at hand. (I have a wonderful description of Theophilus “…of contemplative habit… immaculate in the old style… wore only black, coat was swallow-tailed… stockings white as snow… sunny hopefulness lay in those deep grey eyes...”, but alas he and his colourful life and times don’t play anything but a background bit part in Charlotte’s life, although I guess he does at least illustrate the kind of cultural environment the young orphan girl found herself in.)
 

      Another piece of oral history says that Charlotte was put under the guardianship of “...the Hon Joseph and Lady Margaret Ashton...”, and that Charlotte’s mum was actually the sister of the Hon Joseph and she was also “...the sister of Lord Ashton of Ashton Hall...”, and typically some of this is actually true. But not much.
 

     Young Charlotte was put into the care of a Joseph, but his name was Aston and his wife was Phebe, and Phebe  was Charlotte’s aunt (that is, her mum’s younger sister), who would have been about 40 at that time, and had a clutch of children of her own. And maybe in need of some domestic help, as Joseph Aston was only a grocer from Ipswich and not even close to being of the titled gentry.
 

      So Charlotte settled into the Aston household, but in less than two years, for whatever reason (usually economic) the Astons decided to emigrate to South Australia, and early in Nov 1848 they had their latest child baptised in the Tackett St Independent and (with Charlotte in hand, and Phebe two months pregnant with the next) the following day they set off for London and the docks, and on the 16th, as self-funded passengers, they boarded the ‘Sir Charles Forbes’, which then took some six weeks just to get to Falmouth in Cornwall, before they finally set sail for the colonies.
 

      There are no diaries of the trip that I’ve found, and all that’s known is that they lost the chief mate and a young boy overboard during the trip, and that the Aston party comprised Joseph and Phebe and their children (one source says four, another seven), plus fourteen year old Charlotte, all travelling not in the “private cabins” but in the general passenger “steerage”, with their “6 boxes, 2 bundles, 1 cask” in the hold. And in early April 1849, after nearly five months aboard ship, as they sailed into Pt Adelaide, if the patchy records and the uncertain oral history are correct, the first thing Phebe did was have her baby, naming her Adelaide Pryn Aston, after the town and the highly regarded ship’s captain respectively.
 

Hindley St Adelaide c.1849

      The Astons (with Charlotte as an integral part of the family) then set about making a life for themselves in the ‘city’ - still a town with a long way to go, as the 1849 drawing suggests - living for a while “...in a bark hut in Hindley St, but they later ran a boarding house for young ladies on the corner of South Rd and Manton St Hindmarsh...”, although it’s most likely that these two phases on the Aston’s colonial life were many years apart, as they are said to have joined the Revd T Q Stowe’s congreg-ation soon after arrival, and the Revd Stowe had a farm property in the Glynde market gardens area at the time, so the chances are that the Astons lived out there for a while in the early 1850s (where young William Gray was working) and they settled in Thebarton much later.
 

      So much for Charlotte, by then the emerging young woman, said to be “...a thorough lady and always wore a lace bonnet... [who later] ...worked for Gwynnes Store as a bookkeeper as she had a very good education...”, clearly someone with good Christian middleclass prospects, under the care of a respectable colonial family. 

WILLIAM GRAY’S YOUTH 

      William’s family and beginnings were somewhat different than Charlotte’s (chalk-and-cheese springs to mind) as the Grays, the Moores, the Hunts, the Ryalls, and the Hannams had been of that ‘cannon fodder’ class of the English countryside - the Agricultural Labourer - and had been marrying (and/or co-habiting with) each other in the small rural village of Thornford in Dorset for many generations. I’ve read a bit of Thomas Hardy but I sense that life for these people wasn’t a whole lot like that. Few were literate, the womenfolk had babies and kept them alive as best they could, the menfolk mindlessly slogged it out on the local farms and were serial poachers on the side, with varying displays of aptitude.
 

      William’s parents Sarah Hunt and Isaac Gray (alias Moore when it suited) were no exception. (‘Alias Moore’ because Isaac’s mother was Mary Gray but his father was an Abel Moore, some 16-18 years older than Mary and actually the husband of Mary’s mother’s sister. They shared a long unmarried relationship, she is quaintly described in the 1851 Census as “Niece & Housekeeper”, and they had eleven children).
 

      In 1820 Isaac Gray (alias Moore) was only 15 when he was up before the Dorset magistrate for the first time for poaching, for which he got 6 months. From which he learnt nothing. A few years later his mother and one of his brothers were up together, and got 3 months each, and not long after that Isaac was up again, this time for ‘night poaching’, an activity which always carried stiffer penalties than standard poaching (possibly something to do with exercising an unfair advantage but eternally angled to the maintenance of the Squire’s peace of mind and little else!), and then his brother again, but this time wisely as Thomas Moore because “...they sometimes try to confuse the records under a totting up system used for poaching offences...”, and while this may all sound a bit lawless, as one historian wrote “...it is worth bearing in mind the extreme poverty in Dorset at this time, and the fact that poaching included any rabbit running over the land...”
 

      Isaac Gray and Sarah Hunt had their first child Samuel in Feb 1832, were married the next Oct, and in the July of 1833 William was born, undoubtably in a tied cottage, on a farm on the outskirts of Thornford. This was soon followed by the joint baptism of William and his slightly elder brother Samuel, in the parish church.
 

      If you are into such stuff, GoogleMap (maps.google.co.uk) “Kings Road, Thornford, Dorset”, select “Satellite”, max zoom in, and the site of the family’s old thatched cottage (long gone) was on the edge of the big green field to the left of the junction of Kings and Langdown Rds, on a track called Kilter Lane, now just a hedge-line. Off to the right of Kilter Lane was the now hard to make out Mutton Lane (which features later).
 

      William and his parents and their steadily growing scurry of kids (they eventually had 20, 13 of whom survived to adulthood, all starting employment from about age 7), lived and worked on the local estate in Thornford (and yes, went on poaching with fairly uneven degrees of stealth) until about 1840, when the family moved to a farm in Easton in Surrey, a village just NE of Winchester, presumably chasing work, moving on again to Farnham in Surrey soon after, back to Thornford by 1844, down to Didling in Sussex by 1848, and back once more to Thornford in about 1850 (having children as they went) where William’s dad, now aged 39, and William’s elder brother Samuel (18), were once more up before the Dorchester Quarter Sessions for poaching which got them 5 weeks and 3 weeks hard respectively and together fined £4-1-0. Getting to be expensive rabbits.
 

      In the 1851 Census of Thornford, all in the one cottage was Isaac and Sarah, and their current ten children, aged 19 down to 1 - Samuel, William, Sarah, George, Abel, Arthur, Herbert, Noah, Susan, and Frederick. (The first eight of these are sort of seen as the ‘top half’ of the family, who all emigrated fairly early. Susan and Fred and the next three to come are like a second ‘half’, including a Samson William who was always also called ‘William’ just to confuse genealogists).
 

      More oral history cuts in at this point. The story goes that, aged about 19 and 18 respectively, Samuel and William (allegedly) stole a whole sheep, and as technically this was still a Hanging or Transportation For Life offence (never tested under Queen Victoria) Isaac Gray (allegedly) buried the evidence down ‘Mutton Lane’ aforementioned, had a whip-round amongst the neighbours (never keen to see too much poacher hullabaloo stirred up) and got the boys a fast ticket on the next boat. It’s also said that the boys denied everything but because of their track record with the odd passing rabbit or pheasant, thought it prudent to not stand around to argue their case. Allegedly.
 

      The truth we’ll never know. There’s no record that they were sent out under the poacher “totting up” system, and they do appear to have been “Govt Assisted Immigrants” of some kind, and one researcher says that Grays had actually been transported for sheep theft, but probably from an earlier generation.
 

      So, for whatever reason, and willingly or otherwise, in early June 1851 Samuel and William boarded the ‘Reliance’ at Plymouth under Capt Fell, and sailed for South Australia.
 

      This was not to be a fun voyage, with the deaths of 10 children and 9 adults (mostly from pneumonia, TB, dysentery, and ‘fever’, but including one suicide), and described  later as "...three months, with nothing but water around them, living on pickled pork, salt junk, bouilli soup, and a cupful of pure Jamaica lime juice (sweetened with black sugar, to prevent scurvy), once a week...”, during which the captain, seeking the ‘Roaring Forties’ (see the map reconstructed from the log) “...went too far south... icy tangles half a yard long hung from the shrouds, the halyards were frozen till they were like solid wire... some of the passengers who had too little clothing had to go to bed to keep themselves warm... the passengers were called up to help the crew set the sails to 'bout ship...”.

The 1800s emigration route - England to
South Australia

      But, on Sept 11th 1851 the log entry was “Made Kangaroo Island about 7.15pm but owing to the strong N.W. wind, with a very high sea, had to stand to the southward all night” , followed by -

   “September 12th - made Kangaroo Island at daybreak next morning.

   “September 13th - came on the south side by Backstair passage and got a pilot on board at 10.45am and anchored at the North Arm [of Pt Adelaide] about 5pm.”

      Samuel’s life is worth including here as an example of the kind of adventure and opportunity that colonial Australia presented to these young men from the grinding poverty and cultural suffocation of early Victorian England.

      For a while he worked for a market gardener at The Reedbeds (then a fertile swamp, now expensive Cowandilla real estate cut by the artificial sea mouth of the Torrens) then headed for the goldfields of Victoria, did some bare knuckle fighting, made some money, came home, took up land at Walkerville, went back to the goldfields, did well again, came back to work in the Montacute copper mines, got married, back to the goldfields again, lost everything, made another stake prospecting, bought a farm at Ox Creek near Bendigo, made a living timber-cutting, left the wife and six kids there and headed for the new rush at the Harrow Diggings in New Zealand which included a 300 mile walk from Invercargill, didn’t do well, walked back again, sailed home, picked up the missus and kids, came back to SA by driving a team of horses overland along the Murray, tried a few more parts of SA, eventually settled down in Walkerville, died there in 1910 leaving ten kids and a dynasty of Gray descendants!
 

      Another of the boys - George - also had a colourful youth, joining the Army's Land Transport Divn when only 17, and in early 1855 he was sent to the Crimea and saw service moving supplies between Balaklava and Sebastapol, where he was wounded by overhead shrapnel and sent home in 1856 on the man-o-war ‘James Watt’ before being discharged.
 

      William? - a much more of a settle-down sort of a bloke, but still with a good story, a lot of it via oral history that I’ve tested as best I can. The big difference from his elder brother Samuel’s colonial adventure was that William married within two years of arriving in the colony, so best to merge his and Charlotte’s story at this point. 

WILLIAM AND CHARLOTTE

      How any couple might have met in the first place - their ‘common ground’ -  is always worth the digging and the speculation. Especially when it’s two young people who were about 17 and 19 and from opposite sides of England and the cultural and educational divide, but bumped into each other somewhere in the wilds of the Adelaide Plains in about 1852 and apparently set sparks flying from the outset. If you can believe the gossip.
 

      My guess is that the Astons (with young Charlotte in tow) had settled in Payneham soon after their arrival in 1849, as Charlotte was said to have been one of the first scholars of the Payneham Methodist Sunday School, having been first connected with it as early as 1850, and that she was a bookkeeper at ‘Gwynnes Stores’. Add to this the fact that William was at some stage the coachman for Justice Edward Castres Gwynne, who had purchased land and built a cottage in the Payneham area in 1840 which he called 'Glynde Place' (where he later set out the village of Glynde), and there’s a good chance that this is probably where William Gray the illiterate labouring sheep (alleged) stealer and Charlotte Fayers the well educated bonnet-wearing and Sunday School teaching product of preachers and missionaries met. But for some reason not to the total delight of the Astons.
 

      This is where the most charming bit of their oral history cuts in. And it has so often been repeated, and from at least two different sources, there has to be a goodly element of truth in it. It says that the Astons didn’t approve of William as a suitable match for their ward, and “...in her teens she was locked in a room with an arranged suitor and after she was let out she ran away to marry her true love William Gray...”. This has a rather Dickensian flavour to it, and while it could have literally been the case, I find it hard to imagine the Astons doing anything quite so medieval. But you never know. And the story is fairly persistent. I could accept that the Astons had another young man in mind for her, and maybe they actually had her under some kind of house arrest for a while in the heat of the moment, but I draw the line at enforced, compromising hanky-panky.
 

      The truth would have to at least be that these two under-21s were smitten, and on the 7th of December 1853 they were married at St George’s Anglican at Magill (a lovely little church that’s still there, lych gate and all), witnessed by two mates of William’s, Charlotte signed in full, and William did an “X - his mark”. They were off and running.
 

      While many of the other young emigrants of this period stumbled about the country, testing it and themselves for potential, William and Charlotte Gray settled early and pretty much stuck to their game plan, which tends to make the next near-sixty years of their married life a little more homogenous than other’s, although still scattered with enough fact and anecdote to maintain plenty of colour.
 

      Clearly these two made a good complementary team, Charlotte “...having had a religious upbringing and a high standard of education... was able to teach William to read and write...”, and you would have to think that William the Dorset farmboy was no stranger to hard work, and there in the new land of egalitarian opportunity (at least far more than what they’d left behind) these two set about turning their assorted assets into a future.

The Gray home at The Glynde, Sth Aust, late 1800s

      There is a story that Charlotte inherited money from (after being forgiven by?) the Astons and with it they bought several blocks in the Felixstowe area, and while this could easily be true, I haven’t yet seen the evidence of it. But the fact is that by some means they did settle on a property they purchased at ‘The Glynde’ - which they developed into a large market garden that for many years became known locally as Gray’s Hill - and there built their house, on a block that’s about the corner of Sunbeam and Payneham Roads today (I think there’s a Cash Converter on it now), where they were to live for all of their subsequent lives and raise their ten (of twelve) children.
 

      In 1859 the next four eldest of the Gray children (three boys and a girl) followed William and Samuel out to SA on the ‘James Jardine’, working in the Payneham area for a while, where one of them - 18 year old Abel - was soon in trouble with the law, along with two mates being charged with “...feloniously and maliciously setting fire to... a slab hut... now burnt to the ground.” The boys denied everything. They’d been cutting wattle-bark nearby and as the hut was empty and unlocked (and as they had permission to cross the hut-owners land) had sort of borrowed it for a few days and rather than cook out in the open had lit a fire in the fireplace. Which set the chimney alight. Which they put out. All swearing hut and chimney were still standing when they left.

      At this point one “...William Gray, farmer, Glynde, deposed that... he saw the defendants cutting down wattles, about a hundred yards from the hut in question... and after assisting them to get a load of wood... the youngest one [presumably his young brother Abel] slept at his house, and the other one came in to breakfast on the Thursday morning [that the hut went up]...”, all causing the beak to find there was no evidence it had been caused by them, “...or, even if it had been, that it was not the result of a felonious and malicious intention."
(Abel moved to Hindmarsh Valley after this, where he settled and lived till his death in 1919).
 

      Then early in 1863 the next two boys came out as well, on the ‘Mary Shepherd’, leaving Isaac and Sarah and the last five at home in Thornford, where the family seemed to have finally given up their old ways, as the parish magazine was to later say that “...Isaac Gray and his wife were constant communicants at home, and their children bore excellent characters in our Schools [and] the boys were in the Church Choir...”, while Sarah seems to have taken up some kind of child-minding role in her children’s school. Clearly their poaching and sheep (alleged) stealing days were behind them.
 

      But with the ‘top half’ of the family all in SA, and probably heavily encouraged by them, Isaac and Sarah decided to follow (they were about 50 and the ‘bottom half’ were about age 6-16), and it’s said that William and Charlotte mortgaged their farm at Gray’s Hill and put up the cash for their passage, all arriving on the ‘Adamant’ late the same year, to settle in the Port Elliott area, where a letter was sent home to the parish magazine, from “...a clergyman of the village near Adelaide in which Isaac and Sarah Gray have settled, giving a good report of their children... I feel quite an accession of strength in the arrival of your late parishioners the Grays.” Sarah died in Pt Elliott in 1875, but Isaac (the old dog!) was to see off two more wives before joining Sarah twenty years later aged 83.
 

      As much of William and Charlotte’s story from this point is anecdotal, I haven’t even tried to get the sequence right, but simply let these snippets speak for themselves.
 

      As well as having a successful marker garden, William ran a blacksmith shop on the farm for many years, worked parttime for a large local farmer (probably Justice Gwynne), along the way becoming a ‘special constable’, and by some uncertain mechanism acquired the nickname of ‘Dobbin’. No idea if this alludes to his origins as a Dorset plodder, his work ethic, his general velocity around the farm, or his preferred means of transport, but it stuck right to the end of his days.
 

      Their different approaches to temperence was fairly obvious as William was “...often seen riding on the horse tram or he would ride on a growers market waggon and would stop off at the ‘Duke of Wellington’ for a drink...” (his pub is still on the corner of Payneham and Wellington Rds, and apparently they had photograph of him on display for some reason, right up until it was rebuilt), while Charlotte was connected with the Womens Christian Temperance Union for some 17 years, some of which she was actually president of Payneham branch. (The SA branch of the WCTU was founded in 1889, to “...promote temperance and Christianity and so improve people’s lives...”, and were also involved in raising the age of marriage consent for girls, and for women’s suffrage. And apparently she was once visited by Lord Tennyson while he was Governor of SA, clearly a lady of some standing in her own way).
 

      But Charlotte did more than have children and promote temperence, as she wrote a book called ‘The Holy War’ (presumably a fairly limited edition as I can’t find anything on it) along with hymns and verse, one poem being penned for the coronation of King Edward VII in 1901, for which she received --- “York House, St James Pl SW 16 Aug 1902 - The Private Secretary to the Princess of Wales is directed to reply to Mrs C.A.Gray’s letter of the 2nd of July and to offer the thanks of the Princess for the verses on the Coronation which she has forwarded for the acceptance of Her Royal Highness, and also thanks her for the good wishes contained in her letter.”
 

      Then in their middle years (after some time with the Methodists) they became quite involved together in the Salvation Army, and William and his eldest son Isaac built a hall for them in Henry St Payneham (apparently long gone), but without a clear view of what the deal was, when it was finished the Army wanted him to make it a gift. Which William declined. Which caused a major barney. So they left and joined the Norwood Mission (where Charlotte was to become an active worker in their Sunday School to within a few months of her death).

William Gray and family on an outing,
early 1900s

      As he went into his latter years, William’s trademark flowing hair and beard became quite white, so much so that in 1910 he became the first Father Christmas for John Martins in Rundle Street, shown here in his (rather lowkey) yuletide regalia, with what looks like his wife and a daughter and a clutch of grandkids. (The setting for the original photo - here heavily cropped - is a mystery, as it looks nothing like the landscape between The Glynde and Rundle St, more as though its taken up in the Torrens Gorge somewhere).
 

      But, all good lives come to an end, and early in March 1911, aged 78, Charlotte died of cancer at home at Grays Hill, and was buried in the Payneham cemetery, leaving  “6 daughters, 4 sons, 57 grand-children, and 83 great-grandchildren” and a husband clearly not yet ready to lay down, as a couple of years later, aged 81, he reputedly fell out of an apricot tree while picking fruit.
 

      But late in 1922, now 91 and living with his daughter in Maylands, it’s said that when a “...sleeping cancer on his arm... awoke it took six men to hold him down... [and when] the doctor advised him to have it removed... his son said God must have put it there for a reason and talked him out of it...”, and on the 5th of Sept William died and was buried with Charlotte at Payneham, although his death certificate says “Senile Decay”, which I suppose in the end is simply “He had a good life but he got old and he just wore out”.
 

      And that’s the story of William and Charlotte, the Dorset farm-boy and the Suffolk orphan-girl who helped build South Australia. And the story of an era long gone.

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