Over the years MDHS researchers have had many rewarding communications from people not just locally but from various parts of the world in search of people from the past who had some connection with Mortlake and district. Only yesterday we have been in communication with someone whose ancestors lived briefly at Mt Shadwell in the early and mid-1840s, long before the town of Mortlake came into being. Back in 2009 we were approached by Catherine Liddle, a freelance journalist from Yorkshire, who was researching the stories of early 20th century emigrants to Australia from the town of Silsden in Yorkshire. Following is the article Catherine produced on one such emigrant whose connection with Mortlake was brief....and ultimately sad. It is one of the forgotten stories relating to Mortlake and World War 1: in including it on our facebook page I am attempting to minimise the risk of the story being forgotten once again! Craige The intense chill of a dark December evening in 1900 did not deter hundreds of cheering spectators from lining the streets of the Yorkshire textiles and farming town of Silsden. They were there to bid a memorable farewell to three young men: Phineas Clarkson, Walter Berry and William “Limbo” Rawson, all sons of well-known local families, who were seated on a wagonette and pair outside the Punch Bowl Inn, waiting for the procession to begin. This was to be the start of their 12,000 mile journey to a new life in Australia. The local newspaper described them as “strong and lusty chaps who seemed in capital spirits.” Few Silsden people - apart from a handful of convicts in the 1830s who did not go willingly - had embarked on such an adventure; indeed, most had barely travelled outside the county at all. Silsden, at the dawn of the twentieth century, was an insular hard-drinking old settlement, with its own unique dialects, and there was both puzzlement and pride in the decision by Phin, Walt and Limbo to take assisted passage to the other side of the world. Eventually the procession to the railway station one and half miles away got under way, with several other conveyances following the wagonette and many more supporters going on foot, waving flags and singing. The landlady of another inn presented the boys with a bottle of “good cheer” to drink on Christmas Day on board ship. Other less breakable gifts were thrown onto the wagon. Amongst those followers was a small seven year-old boy, David Mason, a distant relative of Phin Clarkson, who was swept up by the excitement of this unusual event. He barely knew of Australia but told everyone he would have his own adventure one day. Within months of Phin’s departure, David’s brief childhood was over. His mother died shortly after giving birth to twin girls; his father sought solace in the local taverns. David, as the eldest of five, with some help from caring aunties, assumed much of the responsibility for keeping home and family together. He attended school infrequently and took on a variety of jobs, although later letters would show him to be literate, often thoughtful, and to have careful hand-writing .As he entered his teens, welfare workers suggested that he should join the Scouts and the West Riding Territorials (Territorial Army), known locally as the ‘Saturday night soldiers’, to keep him on the straight and narrow. By 1914 the family needed him less. One sister, Violetta, was already married with a child of her own. David, now 20 and working as a labourer in a bobbin mill, longed for freedom and an outdoor life. He remembered his vow of thirteen years earlier and in May of that year he sailed from Tilbury in London to Melbourne. There was a large party of boys on board who were travelling with the Dreadnought Scheme, bound for the Scheyville training school in New South Wales. On the ship’s manifest, David Mason is described as a farm student, rather than farm worker, which suggests that he may have been with this scheme, but I have not located evidence for this. In any event, he could not have lasted the course as, within a couple of months or so, David had made his way to Mortlake, Victoria. He was employed as a dairyman by the Brumley family who lived at The Hill, the imposing bluestone house at the foot of Mount Shadwell. Sadly, none of David’s surviving and detailed letters home to Silsden include any from his few months spent at The Hill. Later references suggest that he was happy there, if somewhat homesick. It was another of the tragic ironies in David Mason’s life that, just as he was beginning to live out his dream at Mortlake, the First World War was declared. He held out on the farm for three months and then stepped forward to enlist at Mortlake in November, the commissioning officer being Wells Brumley, a member of the family who lived at The Hill. David arranged that part of his daily military pay should be allocated to Mrs Brumley at The Hill, - almost certainly Sarah, wife of Alfred - and he increased this allocation substantially in 1916 as the war ploughed on relentlessly. The reason why he sent money to Mrs Brumley is not entirely clear: was it to keep open his job when the war was over or had she promised to send his allocation to the struggling Mason family back home? After three months of training at Broadmeadows, outside Melbourne, David Mason became a horse driver with the First Division’s ammunition column and went with them to Gallipoli and the Western Front. He died of wounds to his head and abdomen on September 30, 1917, strafed by a German plane as he attended horses in the wagon lines near Ypres. David was 24 years old. Only minutes earlier, he had been writing postcards to Silsden and to Mortlake from the relative safety of a dug-out. Writing alongside him was Driver Peter Byrnes, of Irish descent, from Orange in New South Wales. After his friend’s death, Driver Byrnes carefully parcelled David’s cards and sent them to English friends and loved ones. “The news will be a great blow to his people, as it is likewise to me,” he wrote in an accompanying letter. “I had been camped with him for some time and had become very much attached to him............Poor David was always talking about his sisters of whom he was very fond. I trust they will accept my sincerest sympathy in their sad bereavement. David was well thought of by all who knew him.” The name of David Mason, who is buried at Ljssenthoek Military Cemetery, does not appear on the Mortlake War Memorial but he is recorded on the cenotaph in his home-town of Silsden where poppies are laid every year in remembrance of the 100 local boys who never came back from the Great War. His sister Maud Mason of Silsden arranged for David’s name to be commemorated on the Roll of Honour at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Catherine Liddle, 2009
Posted on: Sat, 30 Nov 2013 00:10:57 +0000