Benjamin Hepburn 1826–1888
This blog entry is slightly different from the others that I have written so far. My relationship to Benjamin is less direct, he was my 3 x Great Uncle but his life was interwoven with my great great grandfather’s and he is someone whose life fascinates me.
This is a collection of information about Benjamin from Si Lilburne, Gabrielle Bartels, Neil McDougall, Anne Hone and me. I really enjoy sharing research with these people.
Benjamin was born on the first of March 1826 at Gateside Farm in Whitekirk and Tynninghame, East Lothian and baptised on the fifteenth of March in the same year.
He was the youngest son of Thomas Hepburn and his second wife Agnes Whitecross. Thomas had been an agricultural labourer, a fisherman and reportedly a naval captain in the Napoleonic wars. He had four children with his first wife Allison Stewart, the oldest of whom was John Stuart Hepburn who was born in 1803. Allison died four years later and Thomas married Agnes Whitecross.
They had eight children and one of Benjamin’s brothers was my great great grandfather James.
Benjamin appears to have worked with his father, according to the book ‘Here my Home’(1) he was raised by his father with the skills that would enable him to work in the colonies. He learnt farming after leaving school in East Lothian and then he learnt milling and mill management. (3) One of the few documents to record Benjamin while he lived in Scotland was in the 1841 census when he was the groom to George Aikman, a surgeon at East Linton. This information also appears in the book ‘The People of Prestonkirk 1851'
By 1841 Benjamin’s half brother, Captain John Stuart Hepburn, had already left Scotland and was settled in Australia with his family. Benjamin’s parents Thomas and Agnes were still living in Whitekirk with their daughter Elizabeth, working as agricultural labourers and five of Benjamin’s siblings lived within a four mile radius. William was married with children and working as an agricultural labourer in Prestonkirk, Janet was a servant to the local school teacher, James and his wife were living in the house of Sir Thomas Buchan-Hepburn at Prestonkirk, Jane wasn’t listed but married in Prestonkirk a few years later so presumably was still living close. There was no mention of their eighth child Margaret after her birth and so I have assumed that she died young. Only his sister Anne had left the area, she was married and had moved to Durham in England with her husband and baby.
In 1849 Benjamin travelled to Australia to join his half brother Captain John Stuart Hepburn, he was twenty three years old and John was forty five. He arrived on the 27th of October aboard the ‘Senator’ from London. (2) and disembarked in Adelaide but set off for his brother’s newly built home of Smeaton Hill near Creswick, Victoria (3).
Benjamin was only eight years old when John Stuart had emigrated to Australia. John Stuart had already had a successful career in the navy and had a home, wife and children in London so it is probable that the two men hardly knew each other when Benjamin set off across the world to join him.
Benjamin stayed with Captain Hepburn at Smeaton Hill for four years during which time he used his experience with milling to help set up a flour mill at Birch’s Creek.(3)
In about 1853 he left Smeaton Hill to try his hand at being a gold miner at Fryers Creek and although he did find gold he then changed tactics and sold cattle to the miners for which they paid him with their gold.
Leaving Smeaton Hill at this time coincided with the Captain and his wife taking their sons Thomas and George to England to enrol in school at Wesley College, Sheffield.
In 1855 the Captain’s son Thomas went to visit his grandparents Thomas and Agnes Hepburn and Sir Thomas Buchan-Hepburn in Prestonkirk, East Lothian before returning to Australia and so Benjamin’s family in Scotland would have had first hand knowledge of his life and successes in Australia.
After this Benjamin leased the Glendonald Station near Creswick from his brother where he set up abattoirs and then bought Forest Hill Farm where he lived and worked for two years before renting it out. (In an 1888 article about the estate of the Captain, Glendonald Estate was reported as being 2,089 acres) (5)
He then bought the Turf Hotel in Ballarat along with ten acres of land. He was the first auctioneer in the area and he set up the first stock sale yard in the Ballarat district. He also ran the first horse races in Ballarat and was on the council for five years.
He was a keen sportsman and the first to import greyhounds keeping them at the Corporation Cattle and Sheep Yards.(3)
In 1854 on the 4th of January he married an Englishwoman called Charlotte Bassano. The address given for Charlotte on the wedding registration was Melbourne, over eighty three miles from Smeaton Hill.
They married in the district of Bourke, Melbourne. He was twenty eight and she was forty two but her age given on their marriage certificate was thirty five, he was a stock agent and she was a governess. Charlotte (aka Ellen) taught for a time at the girls Boarding school, Cedar House, Hillingdon in England and had tried unsuccessfully to set up her own school. (There is evidence that at least one other student teacher from the school emigrated to Australia in 1855, her name was Elizabeth Bristol.)
Charlotte came from a military family, her father was Apothecary to the Forces, one of her brothers was an army surgeon and another was a Major General. There is a book written about the life of three of her brothers in India (4)
Less than a year after her marriage, Charlotte’s mother died in London.
In 1856 the electoral rolls show Benjamin living at Creswick Creek, Talbot and this is the year that he set up his stock agency at Turf Yards. This was also the year that Charlotte’s brother Christopher Bassano died at the battle of Balaclava.
In 1857 Benjamin’s father Thomas Hepburn died in Scotland, his death certificate said that he was an agricultural labourer. Captain John Stuart Hepburn arranged to have a gravestone erected for their father in Whitekirk, East Lothian.
In 1858 Charlotte’s seventy five year old father got married again, he married his wife’s niece who was twenty three years younger than him. The family were appalled about how this “…artful and bold woman… “ had been allowed “…to cajole him as she has” (4)
Benjamin appeared in the local papers hundreds of times, primarily in advertisements about the sale of cattle but also from his time as a councillor. There are also a few letters to the newspaper editors. These can all be found on the Trove site(6). Here are three examples of newspaper entries from 1858 of a different kind. A Barn Fire, a forgery and the disolution of his business partnership.
The following year he was granted an auctioneers licence
In 1859 the Captain’s eldest surviving son Thomas died at Smeaton Hill, Victoria when he was twenty two years old and a year later on the 7th of August 1860 Captain Hepburn himself died at Smeaton Hill, leaving a widow, eight children and a large fortune.
Five months earlier on the 26th of March, Benjamin’s mother Agnes Hepburn died in Whitekirk, East Lothian of ‘old age and gradual failure of the vital powers’. Her death certificate said that she was married to Thomas Hepburn (deceased), coachman, naming yet another job for Thomas.
Not everyone was a fan of Benjamin and his lifestyle, in March of 1861 there was a complaint in The Star Ballarat about the chaos cause by his company.
In 1861 or 1862 Thomas John Hepburn, (the son of Benjamin’s brother James) emigrated from Scotland to Ballarat. He was twenty years old and the eldest child of James and his wife Sibbella (my great great grandparents). Earlier in the year when the Scottish census for 1861 was recorded, Thomas John was living with his parents in East Lothian, on the Smeaton Estate of Sir Thomas Buchan-Hepburn. This was the estate that gave the name to the Captain’s estate in Victoria. In the same year Sibbella gave birth to the youngest of their ten children, they called him Benjamin (for the rest of the blog I will refer to him as Benjamin (*)for clarity) and his life was directly involved with his uncle Benjamin later in life.
In 1864 Benjamin was voted in as a Ballarat City councilor but in 1865 he had to give up the Turf Cattle Yards when ‘the Corporation’ set up their own yards. He and his partner had asked for £1200 when he was paid to close. The amount he was actually paid varies from £500 in the article below to £700 reported in the Jubilee History of Melbourne and Victoria. (3)
In 1866 Benjamin became a father but Charlotte was not the mother, he had a daughter called Agnes Mary Hepburn with an Irish woman called Mary Doodie (or Doody), Benjamin wasn’t mentioned on the birth registration and the baby was registered as illegitimate. Benjamin and Charlotte didn’t have any children.
There were several mentions of Benjamin keeping kangaroos in Drummond Street but one in particular was so famous that a report about it made the newspapers in England
His nephew Thomas John Hepburn got married in 1871 in Beaufort, Victoria, thirty one miles from Ballarat. Thomas John was a commission agent but appears to have left his uncle and set up on his own.
In 1872 there was a charge of assult brought against Benjamin
In 1873 on February the 15th Benjamin entered into a bigamous marriage with a Scottish woman called Margaret McKissock. They got married in Trinity Church in the port of Williamstown. (Willamstown is near Melbourne, roughly 70 miles from Benjamin’s home in Creswick.) (7) The marriage was clearly illegal since Charlotte was alive and Benjamin knew this (he named her as his wife in his will) but I have been unnable to find any evidence that there were any consequences, legal or otherwise.
On the marriage certificate for Benjamin and Margaret he was described as a widower whose wife had died four years earlier and they both declared that they had no children. Benjamin was forty five and Margaret said she was was twenty four but in fact she was twenty nine. Benjamin was described as a commercial traveller.
Margaret gave her usual residence as Sandhurst (she had a married cousin, Elizabeth Ward nee McKissock from Scotland living in Sandhurst) and Benjamin gave his as Melbourne with ‘another place’ in Victoria.
In 1873 five months after their marriage Benjamin and Margaret had a daughter called Jane.
Jane was adopted by Margaret’s sister Elizabeth Hirst nee McKissock and her husband Charles. Elizabeth’s only child, a daughter called Annie, died in 1874 in her teens.(9)
A newspaper article in 1873 reported the dissolution of the business partnership between Catherine Ann Campbell, Benjamin Hepburn and William Leonard
In 1874 Charlotte’s sister Melinda Bassano died in London and Benjamin’s nephew James Hepburn came over to Victoria to join his uncle Benjamin and brother Thomas John. Family accounts say that he was reluctant to emigrate, he was only fifteen.
In 1874 Benjamin was thrown out of the coursing club for ‘…the reflections he had cast on the club’ and there was also an article about an accusation of perjury against him but it was thrown out.
In 1876 Charlotte’s brother Thomas Bassano died in France and in 1877 her brother Walter Bassano died in London, he worked for the Army Medical Department of the War Office.
In March of 1882 Benjamin’s friends held a banquet in the Craig’s Royal Hotel before he left on an extended trip to Scotland.
Benjamin wrote a letter from Prestonkirk in May 1882 reporting that he had arrived back in Scotland.
Benjamin expected to be away for twelve months from March of 1882 and in January of 1883 there was a passenger list for a Mr B Hepburn arriving in Victoria aboard the Clyde. A report about coursing in the Australasian Newspaper 13 Jan 1883 mentioned that he had returned from England that week.
In 1882 he was made the President of the Ballarat and Buninyong United Caladonian Society as reported in the Thorpe, M.W. & Akers, Mary, An Illustrated History of Buninyong, Buninyong & District Historical Society, 1982
In the same year Charlotte’s brother Major General Bassano (Alfred) died in London and a year later Benjamin’s sister Anne Tait nee Hepburn died in Northumberland.
In 1884 some reports appeared in UK newspapers about the cattle that Benjamin had sent back to Scotland
Benjamin returned to Scotland in 1884 for the marriage of his daughter Agnes to her cousin Benjamin (*) Hepburn, son of his brother James Hepburn. Agnes’s mother Mary Hepburn ‘nee Hepburn’ presumably Mary Doody (or Doodie), was on the certificate and appears to have been in Scotland. Both of Benjamin’s illegitimate children kept his surname and there was no attempt to hide their parentage. Unlike his daughter Jane who had been adopted, Agnes appears to have stayed with her natural mother.
Agnes’s parents Benjamin and Mary gave the same address in Prestonkirk as the bridegroom’s parents. The implication is that they were all there on the day and that they were all staying at the farm house in Prestonkirk. It is impossible to know if Agnes came over before this date and met her future husband or if she was brought over to marry him, she would have known two of her future husband’s brothers in Victoria, Australia. (Anecdotal family evidence says that Agnes had developed a problem with alcohol at boarding school in Australia) James and Sibbella Hepburn must have known that Benjamin was married to Charlotte and that Mary wasn’t his wife. They knew that Agnes was illegitimate and this may be why the marriage took place in a hotel in Edinburgh rather than the local church.
In 1885 Benjamin’s nephew James Hepburn got married in Victoria and in the same year Benjamin became a grandfather, his daughter Agnes and son in law Benjamin (*) had a son called Benjamin Hepburn Hepburn born in Scotland.
Two years later in 1887 Benjamin became a grandfather again when Agnes had a daughter called Sibbly Watt Hepburn.
In 1887 or 1888 Benjamin opened up a mine in Green’s Paddock. (3)
Benjamin died in Tasmania on 20th Feb 1888 of congestion of the lungs. He died at the Launceston Hotel but his body was returned to Smeaton where he was buried in the family graveyard. He left all of his property to his wife Charlotte and left Margaret McKissock the rents and income from The Commercial Club Hotel (on Lydiard Street) where she was living and £1,000. There was no mention of Mary Doody/Doodie in the will (10)
In the newspaper articles above they mention Margaret McKissock but the local paper in Ballarat carefully doesn’t mention his two ‘reputed daughters’ despite the fact that they were described as that in the will. Benjamin also left money to Mrs Ballantine, this was Logan McKissock, sister of his ‘wife’ Margaret. The money that he left to his daughter Jane was dependent on her age and her choice of husband, so he was still in a position of control despite her life as an adopted child. He also left money to Henry Howard of Tynninghame back in East Lothian, Henry was a Naval man.
In the year of his death, three more of Benjamin’s siblings died in Scotland, William, James and Janet. Charlotte’s brother Philip Bassano also died in this year, he left her £4,029 2s 10d in his will as his only next of kin.
In 1888 Benjamin’s daughter Agnes had her third baby, a boy called James Hepburn and three years later she had her fourth and final child, a daughter called Violet Agnes Hepburn. Violet was born in a refuge for destitute women in Edinburgh, it was also known as a home for ‘inebriated’ women which appears to confirm the family story about her problems with alcohol in Australia. Both Agnes and Violet were still in the refuge a month and a half after the birth of Violet when the census was recorded. Agnes died in 1894 at the age of twenty eight at 2 Park Place, Lanark.
In 1892 on the 19th of July Margaret McKissock married James McKenna. There are some inaccuracies in the marriage registration, for example, Margaret gave her place of birth as Adelaide, not Scotland. She also gave her age as thirty three whereas she was actually forty eight but the most important part is the part where she gave her parents names, James McKissock and Annie Powell which is correct. James McKenna was Irish and served in the Artillery, her address was Chetwynd Street, West Melbourne and they got married from her house.
Benjamin’s wife Charlotte died on the 22nd of September 1893 in Drummond Street, Ballarat, she was eighty three years old.
She was buried in the cemetry at Ballarat at her own request, not in the private family graveyard at Smeaton Hill with Benjamin.
In her will (10), Charlotte left two bequests to her husband’s nephews who were living in Australia. Thomas John was given ‘the likeness of his grandmother’, James was given £10 and his uncle’s portrait. The Captain’s eldest surviving son was given the gold cup won at the Waterloo Meeting. She left a lot of money to charitable causes including the Benevolent Asylum which was run by Margaret McKissock’s brother in law,
In 1896 Benjamin’s daughter Jane got married, her surname was still Hepburn not Hirst. The guests at the wedding were listed, her Aunt Logan Ballantine nee McKissock was on the list as were Mr and Mrs McKenna, her real mother and step father who were last on the list in one newspaper and not at all in another. Jane’s new father in law had been the superintendent of the Melbourne Benevolent asylum. Jane married James Adam Howlett and they went on to have three children. James was a butcher and businessman and was involved in Victorian Cricket Association administration.
The open acknowledgement of Jane’s parentage appeared to continue after the adoption because Benjamin left Charles Hirst £200 in his will.
Benjamin had two daughters and seven grandchildren. After the death of his daughter Agnes Mary, her husband Benjamin(*) married his housekeeper Janet Scott Blair and the family moved to Ireland where Benjamin was Factor on the Corbally Estate and then worked as a timekeeper on the New Ross Extension railway. Benjamin died in 1903 and Janet took the four children back to Scotland.
The eldest son Benjamin Hepburn Hepburn joined the South African Constabulary and travelled to South Africa several times and then emigrated to New York. He married Theresa Buchioni and they had a son who was also called Benjamin Hepburn Hepburn.
Benjamin’s second grandchild Sibbly Watt Hepburn married James Scott Blair who was the youngest brother of her step mother. They had two sons, Benjamin and Alexander Blair and continued to live in Scotland.
The third grandchild James Hepburn died in the First World War at the Battle of Jutland aboard the Warrior.
The youngest, Violet Agnes stayed in Scotland living with her step mother and then sharing a home with Francis Scott Blair, the brother of her step mother and brother in law of her sister Sibbly.
Benjamin’s grandchildren in Australia were Charles Howlett who became a schoolmaster, Jean Elizabeth Howlett, and James Malcolm Howlett who carried on in the family business and was a wholesale meat salesman. Jean married a civil engineer called Henri Fouvy and they had four children,
Margaret McKissock/McKenna was widowed in 1918 and died the following year in 1919.
Benjamin’s daughter Jane Howlett nee Hepburn died in 1944 and is buried in Melbourne cemetery
(1) Here My Home by Lucille M Quinlan
(2) Information from the South Australia Passenger Lists site.
(3) The Jubilee History of Victoria and Melbourne, (Leavitt and Lilburn), held State Library of Victoria and online at http://digital.slv.vic.gov.au/view/action/nmets.do?DOCCHOICE=3063195.xml&dvs=1467890963431~227&locale=en_US&search_terms=&adjacency=&VIEWER_URL=/view/action/nmets.do?&DELIVERY_RULE_ID=4&divType=&usePid1=true&usePid2=true
(4) ‘Brothers in India The Correspondence of Thomas, Alfred and Christopher Bassano 1841–75’ Wainright MD
(5) Bendigo Advertiser 29 Feb 1888
(6) Trove http://trove.nla.gov.au
(7) Margaret emigrated with her family when she was 9 years old aboard the ‘Charlotte Jane’ in 1851. Her parents were James McKissock and Anne Powell. When they entered Australia James put his occupation as a carpenter but a few months earlier in the 1851/52 Post Office Directory for Ayrshire he was the Innkeeper at The Crown Inn in Dalrymple Street, Girvan and a flesher/butcher which may be a link ot the Howlett family. In his will James gave his address as The Tam O’Shanter Hotel Ballarat.
(8) The People of Prestonkirk 1851 by Diane M Nicholl
(9) Elizabeth was married twice. Her first husband was George MacIntosh, they married in 1855 and had a daughter called Annie but there are conflicting details about her.
One version is
‘Annie McIntosh Birth Date: Abt 1857 Birth Place: Ballarat East, Victoria Registration Year: 1857 Registration Place: Victoria, Australia Father: George McIntosh Mother: Elizabeth Mckissock’
In this version she was born two years into their marriage and died in 1847 as follows
1874 Victoria, Annie McIntosh Birth Year: abt 1861 Age: 13 Death Place: Victoria Father’s name: George Mother’s name: Elizabeth McKissock Registration Year: 1874 Registration Place: Victoria Registration Number: 8621
In both of these two records above Annie’s surname is McIntosh.
The second is for
Annie Hirst b. abt 1860 died 1874 as follows
There is no record that I can find of the birth or death of Annie Hirst, just a name on a grave and so I am assuming that they are probably the same person and there has been a mistake in the grave or the recording of the grave.
(10) Benjamin’s will can be found on the Public Records Office Site for Victoria at http://prov.vic.gov.au/search_results?searchid=54&format=freetext&Family_name=Hepburn&Given_name=Benjamin&Alternative_name=&Occupation=&Residence=&Year_of_death=0&Year_of_deathto=0&SearchRecords=25&x=33&y=26
Charlotte’s will can be found at http://prov.vic.gov.au/search_results?searchid=54&format=freetext&Family_name=Hepburn&Given_name=Charlotte&Alternative_name=&Occupation=&Residence=&Year_of_death=0&Year_of_deathto=0&SearchRecords=25&x=0&y=0
