Perth’s Truth, Saturday 12 September 1914, page 3 — an illustrated “Old Sydney” column a month into the Great War. Nostalgia sold as well as news. These clippings pick out Christ Church St Lawrence and the old Burrangong Inn among a list of buildings a Perth reader was supposed to recognise, or regret. That is the job of the page: Sydney as a memory from the west, already knocking bits of itself down.
Truth was John Norton’s scandal-and-sermon chain; the Perth sheet is looking east. Caption the named buildings from the scan; don’t turn five page-grabs into five heritage essays. St Lawrence already has its own post. The date is 1914, not a colonial view and not an anniversary liftout.
OLD SYDNEY.
A FAMOUS PARSONAGE—CHRIST CHURCH—ST. LAWRENCE—SOME EARLY CHURCH OFFICIALS—A JILT—THE OLD BURRANGONG INN—AT THE HEAD OF COCKLE BAY—IN OLD SUSSEX-STREET—AT BARKER'S MILLS—ROSLYN HALL—A GRUESOME DISCOVERY—A BUTCHER'S BUTCHERY—"CORNED BEEF"—AN ARTIST IN ANATOMY—WILLIAM HENRY SCOTT CHARGED WITH MURDER.
(No. 344.—By "OLD CHUM.")
Across the road from Hancock's Tower was a famous parsonage. It was not an old building, but it had old associations, the Christ Church Parsonage, which stood in the grounds adjoining the Benevolent Asylum, demolished with other historic buildings to make way for the Central Railway Station; but it was not the first parsonage in connection with Christ Church, which, at its foundation, was known as St. Lawrence's. Rev. W. H. Walsh was an early incumbent, if not the first. He lived in the parsonage, George-street, close to the church. About 1850 that parsonage was vacated, and Mr. Walsh went to live at Cleveland House, then in what was known as Cleveland Paddock, a solitary house then, not so now. About 1855 the parsonage adjoining the Benevolent Asylum was built, and Canon (as he had become) Walsh was the earliest occupant. Canon Vidal succeeded Canon Walsh in the parsonage, which stood within a pleasant garden, with grassy lawn, and shaded by leafy trees of great value, but they had to succumb to the axe of the woodman in the march of improvement. This parsonage, we are told, had nearly as many reminiscences clinging round it as the historic church, for from it Canon Vidal and his successor, the Rev. Charles Garnsey, dispensed hospitality and charity to half the countryside, rich and poor, gentle and simple. It was here the first Mrs. Garnsey died from typhoid fever, contracted in nursing the poor of the parish (and there were slums some in that parish in those days), and here, later—about 20 years ago—Mr. Garnsey passed away amid the regrets of his parishioners and friends. Christ Church has had many faithful adherents, who have stood by it in storms and stress. A writer eight years ago told us that many attended the services there who had travelled many miles to do so. Dinner and supper on Sunday nights at the parsonage was a great re-union of parted friends; sixty years of attendance nearly every Sunday was one lady's record; while the then Master of Blackfriars' School (Mr. Lees) remembered the earliest services in the parish, held in a barn where the brewery (?) now stands. Mr. G. Haviland, then (1906) well in his eighties, was one of the earliest church wardens. [The first trustees of Christ Church were Bishop Broughton, John Betts, sen., a merchant, of [illegible] Pitt-street, near the old Victoria Theatre, and Michael Metcalfe, Custom House agent, afterwards an underwriter and merchant. The churchwardens were Messrs. Betts and Metcalfe. The clerk was William Jones, the sexton John Wood, the schoolmaster J. McDonnell.] During early days many wedding breakfasts were held in the parsonage of people who, having been associated with it in youth, had removed into country districts, but desired the ceremony to be in the church of their bringing-up. A great society wedding will be remembered, when the bride was credited with jilting a well-known Sydney man, whose employees assembled at the church, and in the middle of the ceremony, which was at night, all lights were suddenly extinguished. A large black handmark was found, when the church was re-lighted, on the back of the bride's beautiful white silk dress, with fingers outspread. Superstitious people called it an ill-omen, but then, said the writer of 1905, the bride still lives happily, being one of the youngest-looking society women of her own time of life.
Not many years have elapsed since the old Burrangong Inn was demolished in order to widen the entrance to Sussex-street. Fifty years ago, where now are Lackey-street and adjacent thoroughfares, was simply swamp land, which was being reclaimed by street sweepings and dredgings, much in the same way as the heads of other coves or inlets in Port Jackson have been reclaimed and converted into recreation grounds, as witness Black Wattle Swamp, now Wentworth Park. But the head of Cockle Bay, its early name, was too valuable for factory sites and railway purposes to convert into a pleasure ground, even if it were suitable, which it was not. I think the first factory there, built some 40 years ago, was Biddell's, where "sweets" were manufactured.
Until very recent years there were two houses on the west side of Sussex-street, near Hay-street, one of which was the scene of a most diabolical murder, which, unfortunately for society, did not go unavenged. Old residents in the locality will remember that at the corner of Bathurst and Sussex-streets there used to be a vacant allotment, somewhat back from both street [sic], but in close proximity to what we knew as Barker's Mills. The owner was an old-time merchant, who occupied a fine mansion on the heights of Darlinghurst, known as Roslyn Hall. It stood within a large area of ground, which, in time, as property increased in value and population came, was cut up and sold in allotments, all now the sites of valuable properties, in the midst of which still stands Roslyn Hall, though shorn of much, if not all, of its former glory.
On the morning of September 15, 1866, the eleven-year-old son of Mr. James Kilpatrick, an ironmoulder employed at the foundry of Messrs. P. N. Russell and Co., Darling Harbor, and living in Sussex-street, made a gruesome discovery on the vacant land adjacent to Barker's Mills. It was not a joyful spot at any time, and the lad's discovery did not add to its joyousness. The boy, who said he went to church and Sunday school regularly, and repeated his prayers night and morning, was going an errand, accompanied by an old companion of his—a dog. These animals are notoriously inquisitive, and Master Kilpatrick's dog was no exception to the general rule as regards the canine race. The dog whined and scratched energetically at a heap of rubbish, which had grown apace, notwithstanding the energies of Dick Seymour, the nuisance inspector. The heap consisted of cinders, ashes, wool refuse, and other matter thrown out from Mr. O. E. Ebsworth's woollen factory (Barker's Mills), adjacent.
At the inquest, held before Henry Shiell, on the human remains scratched up by the dog, the boy Kilpatrick said:—"On Tuesday I found some ribs, which I thought were the ribs of a goat, and on Saturday, when going a message, I found a human skull in an open space on a rubbish heap behind Barker's Mills. My dog drew my attention to the heap by scratching a hole, when I saw a big bone, which I kicked over and then I saw that it was the head of a human being, severed from the body. The face was down when I kicked the 'bone.' When the dog turned up the head it was covered with woolly refuse from the factory. The ribs which I saw on Tuesday were still there, but at some distance from the head. I found the head at the place whereon, on the previous Tuesday, I had found the ribs. I went with my father, and showed him the head, and remained with it until he went for the police. I had been in the habit of passing the spot and had noticed my dog on other occasions scratching at it. The people in the neighborhood usually threw rubbish on the heap."
Mr. Kilpatrick duly reported the matter to the inspector on duty at the "Old Central" (which, it may be explained to strangers to Sydney, or new arrivals, stood on the site of the southern end of the Queen Victoria Markets), and the result was a general hunt in the neighborhood for other portions of the body. Senior-sergeants Waters and Taylor, well-known and highly-respected Sydney officers, who were subsequently promoted to sub-inspectorships, had charge of the case, and they, and the constables under them, spared no labor to make the case complete, and clear up the gruesome mystery.
The report of the finding of some human remains set certain parties thinking, with the result that Edgar Walter Weekes and David John Fitzpatrick supplied important information. Weekes was a pastrycook in the employ of Mr. Cripps—of a very old family of pastrycooks—and he informed the officers of police that he met a man coming down George-street between 10 and 11 o'clock on a certain night; that the man said, "My boy, would you mind helping me to carry a box?" The boy consented, and the man took him to a house next door to Linsley's store, in Sussex-street. Mr. Linsley was a grocer, whose place of business was four doors from Hay-street, and, I think, he was the same who subsequently became noted as a rifleshot, and lived at Windsor. The man opened the door with a key, and both man and lad entered the house. The box was of iron or tin, and in removing it the lad Weekes remarked that it smelt like a corpse. He knew the odor, having seen his father and brother lying dead. The box proved so heavy that the carriers had to rest every half-dozen yards. When they reached Goulburn-street the lad made inquiry as to the contents of the box, and the man replied, "It's only a lot of corned beef," and looked at the lad as if he could have devoured him for his inquisitiveness. The boy remarked, "It does not smell very sweetly," and the man replied, "No, I am afraid it won't keep till I get it down there." When asked where "there" was, the man first said Newcastle, and then Melbourne. When they got as far as Bowman's, at the corner of Goulburn and Sussex streets (Bowman kept the Coachmakers' Arms, on the north-west corner, a house originally kept by one of the Jilks' family), Weekes said that he could not carry it any further, as it was too heavy for him. The man said, "All right, I'll go and get someone else to carry it with me," and leaving the lad and the box in the centre of the road, with an injunction to stand by while he got someone to help, went into Bowman's hotel, and returned with a lad, saying to Weekes, "Here is threepence for you." Weekes then left, and Fitzpatrick took on the job. The young man Fitzpatrick was a shoemaker by trade, and between 10 and 11 o'clock had gone to Bowman's to watch a game of bagatelle, when a man—the man—came in, and said, "I say, young chap, will you help me with a box?" Fitzpatrick assented, and went with the man to the centre of the road, where stood Weekes in charge of the box. The man and his new assistant carried the box as far as Murphy's lime stores, in Liverpool-street, where the man tried to borrow a wheel-barrow, but failed. The two carried the box about for some time, and eventually, the man decided to leave it in the yard at the rear of Kelly's public-house, the Sir Walter Scott Inn, south-east corner of Bathurst and Sussex streets. The man remarked, "There's the damned pickle running out," and Fitzpatrick admitted that it was. The latter got one shilling for his trouble, and after leaving the box at the rear of Kelly's the pair walked along Sussex-street. The man went into a shop, and Fitzpatrick went home.
Sergeants Waters and Taylor and Fitzpatrick, on the morning of Sunday, October 21, went to the yard of the Sir Walter Scott Inn, and in the water closet found pieces of human flesh and a leg and an arm of a human being. They then caused the closet—or old-fashioned cesspit—to be emptied, and in the soil found another leg, from the knee down, another arm, and a number of pieces of flesh. The remains were removed to the dead-house of the Benevolent Asylum—which stood right opposite Hancock's Tower, the site being now a part of the Central Railway Station.
Sergeant Taylor had, on September 15, gathered up at Barker's Mill the trunk, head, and other portions of a human body. These had been interred after the inquest, and were now exhumed, and placed alongside the remains found in the cesspit at the Sir Walter Scott. The services of Dr. Arthur Renwick, then but five years in practice, were secured by the police, and on him devolved the task of fixing up the corpse. The result proved the little surgeon to be an artist in anatomy. When Dr. (afterwards Sir Arthur) Renwick opened the "shell" at the dead-house he found a curious jumble of sheep bones and human bones indiscriminately mixed up. The surgeon built up the body, which was then found to be that of a female, and, as the doctor said, the "dissection" had been performed by a butcher, or a person of similar occupation. Sergeant Waters and his colleagues in the police had now to find a butcher—a butcher in more senses than one.
It took exactly one month of patient inquiry before the police felt justified in making an arrest, and Inspector Reid, afterwards Superintendent, sent Constable Hogan to the lodgings of a journeyman butcher named William Henry Scott, at Paddington. (Constable Hogan was for some years sergeant in the Darlinghurst Division, and was concerned in the arrest of the Victorian criminal Morrison, who was executed for the murder of a constable at Mr. Jeremiah Rundle's, "Pomeroy," Potts Point, and was afterwards promoted to senior-sergeant in charge at Burwood, and died there, highly respected.) Constable Hogan's instructions were to tell Scott that Mr. Reid wished to see him. When brought to the Central Police Station, Scott was told the charge against him, when he merely remarked that he was surprised at such a charge being laid against him. The lads Weekes and Fitzpatrick were then confronted with him, and instantly and positively identified him as the man who had employed them to help him carry the iron box with the "corned beef" in it a month before.
Then the Police Court inquiry commenced. It was exhaustive. Bit by bit, link by link, the chain was fitted, and unless some extraordinary development took place, William Henry Scott was a doomed man. The detective-police, as a body, seem to have been non-existent in the year 1866, or if they were in existence they took no part in the investigation. I know that Dick Elliott, William Camplin, and one or two others were about, but Inspector-General McLerie was a leading witness. After all inquiries had been made, he gave orders to have the journeyman butcher, Scott, lately working for a butcher named Rice, in Lower George-street, found. Inspector Reid found him, and Hogan brought him forward. At the inspector's office, Scott asked why he was brought there. Mr. Reid replied, "The murder of your wife." Scott replied, "My wife is living in Melbourne. I was living with a woman in Sussex-street, but we quarrelled, and she left me." Reid expressed a wish to find her, aand [sic] after the usual warning questioned Scott, who said that he did not know anyone who was acquainted with the woman; he did not know where she came from; he never asked her; he first saw her in Pitt-street, near Phil McCarroll's butcher's shop.
(To be continued.)
No comments:
Post a Comment