EARLY BLANDY HISTORY.
Compiled by Craig Blandy.
Very slightly added to by Michael Tucker.
When Zephaniah William Blandy arrived at Port Phillip with his wife Hannah, and infant son, it was 1857 and the City of Melbourne was the fastest growing city in Australia. Gold was a glittering attraction to the world and men came to the goldfields of Western Victoria to find financial security. Only 22 years previous, in the year of Hannah’s birth, John Batman had sailed into Port Phillip Bay hoping to develop land in the southern parts of the Colony of New South Wales. Within two years the settlement took the name of the British Lord Melbourne and by 1947 was proclaimed a city. In the year of the first detailed census of English Counties, 1851, Queen Victoria proclaimed a colony with her name, separate from New South Wales.
Zephaniah William Blandy and Hannah Fisher married in St Giles Church, Parish of St Giles, Reading, Berkshire on 15 Oct 1855. (Note 1.) Zephaniah was 22 and Hannah 20. William Zephaniah Blandy was born to them in the last quarter of the following year, and the birth was registered in Reading, Berkshire. (Note 2.) Zephaniah’s father Thomas was from a large family of ten children including a brother, John Decimus Blandy.
Records held at the Melbourne Archive Office of assisted immigrants show that Zephaniah, Hannah and William embarked on the “Negotiator”, a medium sized steam powered vessel, in Liverpool on 3 March 1857. Their place of residence is listed as Berkshire. The passenger list states that both adults were able to read and write. The family is listed as Church of England.
These Blandys are my (Craig Blandy) direct ancestors and were the second Blandy family to travel to Australia in the 1850s. John Decimus Blandy arrived in Australia with his wife, Sarah and five children from England several years earlier. (Note 3.)
(As an aside, a Sarah Blandy was transported as a convict in 1811.)
Zephaniah and Hannah were assisted passengers but John and Sarah were full fare paying passengers indicating that John was of some means and possible affluence. John had married Sarah Dobson on 18 April 1837 in Hungerford, Berkshire and lived in that general area for many years. Details of the 1851 census (Note 4.), reveal John age 48, Sarah 33, Mary 11, Thomas 9, Arrabella 7, William 4 and Sarah 10 months. Nearby were a Thomas Blandy age 79, and Ann Blandy 78. (Could he be the brother of John and also that Thomas and Ann were the parents of Zephaniah?
(The then 4 year old William Blandy later married and had ten children, the 6th. child, Lilly May, was my paternal Grandmother. She had ten children, my father Austin Tucker was the second born, in 1910.)(Added by Michael Tucker.)
In 1850 Melbourne received ten ships per week with supplies outweighing immigrants. By 1852 the number had risen to thirty ships per week, and an equal number carrying supplies and labour for the gold fields. The level of immigration exploded from 16,000 in 1850, to over 40,000 in 1852, arriving from the various parts of the United Kingdom. The early arrivals paid their own fares and often sold up their worldly goods to make the journey.
John and Sarah Blandy arrived in Melbourne with their five children on the “Agnes Blaikie” in 1853. John, now aged 50, ventured into the chaos of the city with his young family to find that the roads were not paved with gold. Sleaze was dominant in Melbourne andthe general structure of the new society was threatened by the resignation of one third of the police force. Families were advised not to venture out after dark. It is unlikely that the family remained in Melbourne but there is no mention, in terms of major family events, until 1864 when a Sarah Blandy married Caesar Clarke in St Kilda, a Melbourne suburb. This certificate is John’s wife remarrying. John Blandy is 61 years old, perhaps he is dead, and Sarah says this is so on her new marriage certificate, but no record of his death can be found, not in the years preceding1864 and not in the years after Sarah’s second marriage. The death records of this time are considered to be reliable for all states and allow the conclusion that John Decimus Blandy did not die in Australia.
By the mid 1850’s the rush to central Victoria had stolen Melbourne’s labour force and assisted immigration with indenture was necessary to provide workers for the local industry that was developing in response to the gold. Melbourne was booming and the work was ready and paid well.
Zephaniah, Hannah and William disembarked in Melbourne after three months at sea, on the 3rd. of June 1857. They transferred to a nearby immigrant station, in the vicinity of the port, waiting the unloading of their belongings and their “disposal”, a term applied to assisted immigrants awaiting their employment contract. Mr. H. Barker of “Heidelberg” engaged Zephaniah on 08/06/1857 with wages for the years of 60 pounds. There were no other benefits attached to the contract of labour.
By 1857 the surface gold in Ballarat was in the hands of the dealers, sitting in vaults or transported back to England. Only deep shaft mining was producing any yield and large companies employing dubious and dangerous mining practices owned these mines. Zephaniah did not lose hope for wealth and a new life. When the richest alluvial gold deposits surfaced in Pleasant Creek, near Stawell, he only needed to readjust the place for the dream, and not the dream itself, from Ballarat further to the west at Pleasant Creek and the Deep Lead.
In mid 1858 Zephaniah and Hannah were able to move west, but the ephemeral nature of a gold rush meant that this one too was fading and moving back to the centre on the perimeter of Sandhurst. In 1857, 50,000 men invaded Pleasant Creek and cleaned the earth of the easy pickings leaving the mining companies to work the deeper leads. By the end of 1858 they had moved on.
On 17/01/1859, the western Victorian region of Glenorchy, close to Pleasant Creek, Sarah Ann Blandy was born to Zephaniah and Hannah. She was followed on 15/08/1861 by Samuel Thomas Blandy recorded as born at Ledcourt Station; a huge squatter’s run that included the town of Glenorchy. According to these children’s birth certificates Zephaniah Blandy was born in Basingstoke, Hampshire, 1834. He declared his occupation as a farm hand, presumably at Ledcourt Station…His father’s name is listed as Thomas, a name mentioned in the 1851 Census as living very close to John and Sarah.
An 1865 map of the land squatter’s stations shows that Glenorchy is northwest from Stawell, through Pleasant Creek, on the Wimmera River, and is close to the intersecting borders of several stations or “sheep runs”. Ledcourt Station at nearly 500 square miles was well known in the colony. The name may be a corruption of the Aboriginal word for spear point or a reference to the leads of gold that run through the region. The Wimmera River formed the natural northern boundary of Ledcourt. Lake Lonsdale (a 40 square mile overflow basin) and a shallow swamp for most of the summerlay in the southeast of the station and the town of Deep Lead further to the east. The sharply inclined granite of the Mt Difficult Range of the Grampians, a ceremonial site for the local Aboriginal tribes, marked the south-western boundary. Pleasant Creek is the closest town to Ledcourt Station. The Blandy Family settled close to the gold fields in the security of regular work.
The occupiers of Ledcourt from February 1858 to March 1865 were Alfred Douglas and Joseph De Little. They operated a business in Melbourne from 1858 as Douglas, De Little and Co. Merchants. In mid 1858, at the expiration of Zephaniah’s indenture, the newly founded De Little, Douglas and Co was in need of farm labourers to assist in digging the deep bore wells, breaking horses, fencing sheep pens and shearing. Regular work on the land was available and there were rumours of bringing the squatters into account by “shearing” off their land. And, of course, there was still gold being mined by the 70,000 people living in the tent city of Pleasant Creek. So, for Zephaniah there was more than regular work and gold, but also the possibility of becoming a land owner.
Vast arrears of Australia were locked up in pastoral leases held by squatters, many of whom grew wealthy while their workers lived in poverty. The class war and resentment for the squatter’s wealth extended beyond the rural background and into cities and the halls of power. The squatters in general, disregarded rule and authority and made few friends in government. Their wealth in land gave them power. By the start of the 1860’s ill feeling was distilling into a view that the stranglehold should be broken and that the land should be subdivided and made available to “land selectors”. The politicians envisaged significant advantage in the selectors being local farming families who settle the land and enjoy the prosperity imagined by the immigrants. The people recognised that land was the new gold and farming more reliable than prospecting.
There is no land office record of Blandy ownership although it is puzzling as to the reason. Zephaniah was in the area at the time of the release of prime grazing land in this region of Victoria and as a local farm hand there was available support for the purchase. Something was wrong; something in his life prevented his bid for the land. By 1865 most of the selections were complete and the new farming class was wild with energy for the land and the pursuit of agricultural success. If only the selection process had been delayed a year, for the reliable rains of western Victoria, essential for the development of new agriculture did not come in 1865.The Wimmera River wasted to less than a creek and the local Aboriginal tribes camped in the centre of Lake Lonsdale. Sheep died in their tracks from lack of grass and water, and the dark granite dust swirled around the carcasses to help with burial. Many of the new ‘bush barbarians’ were ruined. Ledcourt Station was sold with the remaining sheep for a fraction of its value 10years before. Both the new land owners and the established were wiped out by one season.
Three years after the great drought of 1865 Hannah Blandy married a gold miner, Enias Waldron,in the central Victorian gold town of Maldon, near Sandhurst. The marriage certificate states that she was born in Kintbury, Berkshire, 1836 and that she was widowed in 1863. The certificate is clear, Zephaniah died in 1863. It further states that there were 2 live children and 1 dead. Both these statements are in conflict with other supported facts. The first child William Zephaniah Blandy, my grandfather, married Mary Emma Theresa Banks in Gisborne in 1880; the second, Sarah Blandy married a Mr. Somerville in Glenorchy in 1881; and the third, Samuel Thomas Blandy married Amy Hodge in Glenorchy in 1882. No death is recorded for Zephaniah in any State in Australia, at any time. At the time of Hannah’s second marriage William is 12, Sarah is 9 and Samuel is 7. Plainly all three children are alive and a lack of other evidence suggests that so is Zephaniah. It is mere coincidence that Hannah and Sarah Blandy, the wife of John Decimus, remarried within a year of each other both stating that their husbands had died at around the same time?
In 1868 Hannah left Glenorchy to marry a miner 8 years her junior. In 1875 in Golden Square just outside Sandhurst she married for the third time to Richard Gregory Rowe. The marriage certificate states that Mr. Waldron died in a mine accident yet no death certificate can be found to confirm this statement. She states that she has 2 live children and 1 dead, consistent with her other story. In the mid-1800’s to be a working class woman without a husband created real survival problems. The choice lay in the near slavery of domestic service, but not for a woman with children, or finding a man. Sometimes the truth was best not stated.
Of the children both Sarah and Samuel returned to Glenorchy to marry in the early 1880s. The connecting thread of emotion that encouraged their return to their birthplace for marriage is not apparent. Their mother was living in Sandhurst as evidenced by the marriage to Richard Rowe, and the future birth of all Samuel’s children is in this same city. The Blandys are now based in latter day Bendigo. William is in Gisborne but where is Zephaniah?
John Decimus Blandy vanished from Sarah’s life sometime prior to 1864 and Zephaniah William Blandy from Hannah’s life around 1863. It is reasonable to conclude that both men came to the “Great Southern Land”, “Terra Australis Incognito”, “Australia Felix”, in search of wealth, either from the gold or the land, and left their families to take up the same search elsewhere. There is significant circumstantial evidence for a partnership between these two men.
A search of the Church of Latter Day Saints International Genealogy Index (IGI) finds John Decimus Blandy. I have no doubt that it is the one who came to Australia. He was baptised in 1803 the ninth child of ten to William Blandy and Mary Hooper. One of his siblings is Thomas Blandy baptised in 1801, like John, in Shalbourne, Wiltshire. That name “Thomas” again, but this one is a sibling of John’s. This is not the Thomas living nearby in the 1851 Census. Thomas married Elizabeth Radden in 1830 at Whitchurch. It is apparent that Thomas could be the name referred to by Zephaniah as his father, making John Decimus his uncle.
In March 1875 a man by the name of Mr. Blandy arrived on the SS Ceylon, an 1140 ton vessel that docked in Melbourne from Galle, a southern city in Ceylon. The ship travelled from other Australian Ports, including the new gold rush zones of Western Australia, collecting other passengers, but the indication on the shipping record is this Mr. Blandy came inward from Ceylon.
In 1878 a man calling himself Zephaniah Thomas Blandy (can a middle name make that much difference?), stated as widower, married Eliza Bradshaw in Berwick, a small farming parish on the northeast perimeter of Melbourne. This Zephaniah Thomas Blandy says he was born in 1831 in Southampton and that his father’s name is Thomas and his mother is Elizabeth Radden. This Zephaniah Blandy is the nephew of John Decimus. Is this the same man from Ceylon? Is he the same man as Zephaniah William Blandy? There are no other records of a Blandy arrival in Australia. Ultimately there is no record of death for this man. The marrying minister is the infamous Nathaniel Kinsman, a marriage celebrant of dishonest notoriety.
(1) St Catherine’s Index Vol 2c, pp 474.
(2) St Catherine’s Index Vol 2c, pp 306.
(3) Melbourne Archive Office, unassisted passengers entering Australia.
(4) Berkshire County, Hungerford district, Kintbury sub district, Inkpen Folio.