Shortly after receiving the first half of her New South Wales Government gratuity, Caroline departed Sydney, probably with her eldest son, Archibald, on 9 June 1866, aboard the Maid of Judah. Her name was found in the shipping lists in The Empire; the only other reference to her leaving was made two days later when The Sydney Morning Herald reported that it had mistakenly omitted to mention her name in the passenger list. It’s likely that Caroline always intended to join Archibald back in Britain. Throughout their marriage, they had endured long separations. This would be the last. There is no evidence as to whether she was contemplating returning to Australia once her daughters had been educated or whether she had decided to live out her life in the country of her birth. There is, however, every indication that she was not giving up on the colony and was pleased that her sons had settled there.
Caroline was fifty-eight years old when she slipped out of Sydney, leaving the men in government still arguing over her worth to the colonies. For almost half her life, since arriving as a young matron of thirty, she had pursued a single overall goal, the advancement of poor settlers in the colony, and been both a buttress and a visionary for the development of Australia. She had found a wide canvas, already dabbed with different hues — those of the original Indigenous people; the first settlers with their brutal penal codes; and the free settlers looking to escape a constrained, hungry, tired Old World for the raw vitality of this new one. In 1838, the colony had been at a crossroads. Its rapid development with an influx of thousands of immigrants was fuelling a critical humanitarian crisis.
Bringing new perspective, Caroline set to work on this canvas with her own composition in mind. Deliberate, unhurried and effective, she singlehandedly changed the attitudes of the colony’s powerful governing elite to the plight of the desperate bounty immigrants. She gave thousands of new settlers the chance to establish themselves in jobs and on land throughout New South Wales. Having sketched out her vision, she returned to Britain to encourage and send out thousands more of the families and friends of the earlier settlers, as well as hardworking lower- and middle-class immigrants — all people she knew would have a better life in Australia. Again, to make her plan work she co-opted the government leaders to her cause. She added the final touches to her image of Australia by insisting that land and multiculturalism be considered, along with the rights of all people, especially women.
It had been a remarkable career. Acting from morality and love, also and undoubtedly with humour and hubris, she had left an indelible mark upon the colony. She had seen many of her ideas take effect, though it would be many years before her other, more radical concepts would be accepted.
For close on forty years, Caroline had been a nomad. That Saturday in early winter, when her ship finally weighed anchor and set sail through the Sydney Heads, she may not yet have realised that it would be for the final time.
CHAPTER 15
The Final Journey
1866–77
Barclay Road, Fulham, London, March 1877
The curtains across the bay windows had been pulled back to let in the timid spring sunshine. There was only a hint of warmth in it, but Caroline was inordinately cheered by the sight of sunlight spreading across the patchwork quilt that covered her bed. She looked outside to where clumps of daffodils swayed in the breeze, their golden-crowned heads smiling bright. She had always loved them, always seen them as tokens of a new beginning. She shifted position slightly, trying to make herself more comfortable. The effort brought on a shuddering series of coughs and gasps for breath that left her exhausted and aching. She didn’t think that she could stand much more of this. If God was ready for her, she was almost ready to go.
Her coughing brought Monica into the room. The sight of her daughter worried Caroline. At twenty-six, Monica should have been a married woman with her own family, not nursing her old, invalided mother. Making an effort for her daughter, Caroline drank the medicine that Monica tenderly held to her lips. She pretended that she felt better for it, then sent Monica from the room again, saying that she wished to rest.
As she lay back on her pillows, laughter wafted in from the footpath outside, children on their way to the common to play — a happy sound. With her eyelids drooping now against the daylight, Caroline’s mind drifted back across the years. She thought she heard again the giggles of little girls skipping along the beach in Madras. She had tried to prepare them for a better future. She wondered how they had turned out in the end, if she had made a difference.
She sighed deeply, feeling a certain contentment. She had no such doubt about her immigration work. “They needed me,” she whispered, although she was the only one listening. She thought back on all those rough journeys through the bush, the months at sea and days on thundering trains, the contracts and letters she had written, the meetings and committees and lectures. Chiefly, though, she remembered the people. The wealthy and powerful who had assisted in her work – there had been some good men and women – but mostly she thought about the poor and the needy, the ones she had helped to a better life. So many of them had been heartfelt in their thanks to her for giving them a future.
If she had a regret, it was for her children. She had dragged them along behind her, perhaps showing less concern for their welfare than a mother should have done. Even so, they had grown up well, becoming fine men and women. She supposed that she had Archie to thank for that. Indeed, Archie had been the perfect husband: she could not have achieved even a quarter of what she had done without his support. Kind, uncritical, compliant Archie — she owed him so much.
Clouds covered the sun; the room grew chilly. Her mind drifted back to that big warm southern land and the immigrants. She had been vital to them back then, especially the women, but what about now? Was her work only as fleeting as the sunshine on a cold March morning in London? She knew it wasn’t. She had given them not just a good start, but a fair start. They would thrive, as would their children and their children, right down through the ages. There would be changes: democracy was coming; it was inevitable. She smiled as she remembered someone at one of her lectures suggesting she should stand for parliament. Maybe one day there would even be a lady governor in Australia. Anything was possible.
Part of her wished that she could live forever, to see what would become of the land she loved. She knew, though, that her time was drawing near, and her body had had enough. She was pleased, though, that her sons were in Australia: that meant that part of her would remain with them, live on in the colony and be part of its destiny.1
Liverpool, spreading inland from the Irish Sea, was, in 1866, a microcosm of Britain’s urban industrialisation. It was one of the wealthiest cities in the country, even for a short time challenging London for the title of the richest, yet its schizophrenic confines housed the elegant and the sophisticated alongside the brutal and the desperate — the Brownlow Hill workhouse, for instance, with its degraded inmates numbering up to three thousand, surviving pitilessly only miles from visionary Oriel Chambers, a revelation of stone and glass, the world’s first metal framed glass-curtain-wall building — a forerunner of the New York skyscrapers twenty years later. On the water, the Prince Albert docks were the focal point of Britain’s own influx of immigrants. In a portent of the reverse post–World War II immigration more than a century later, Liverpool, with almost half a million inhabitants, was a European melting-pot, hosting large numbers of Scandinavian, German, Greek, Irish and Jewish people.
This is where Caroline landed on 23 September 1866, to be reunited once again with Archibald.2 Compared with Sydney and Melbourne, Liverpool would have felt crammed and noisy, but the streets would have been teeming with bustling energy. After eight years living in the mild Sydney climate, Caroline may have found the autumn weather decidedly cold and the city’s environment almost alien: the wind blowing in off the Irish Sea and the weak sunshine; the damp, hushed pinks of verbena and phlox, and the gentle calls of sparrow, greenfinch, robin and thrush, so soft and muted after the
startling sounds and blazing colours of the Australian bush.
Caroline and Archibald settled into a home on Brookland Road, in the Old Swan district of the city, about five kilometres from Greenbank, home of their friends the Rathbones.3 As noted earlier, the friendship between Caroline and Elizabeth Rathbone probably dated back to when Caroline was lecturing in Liverpool in 1853, and they seem to have remained close. In a letter from Sydney, in 1865, Caroline thanks Elizabeth for her “motherly kindness to my children”, before going on to say, “Oh how much I long to see you to thank you for your sympathy.”4 Elizabeth’s husband, William, came from a renowned philanthropic family. A wealthy merchant, and politician, he had, amongst other endeavours, established public baths and washhouses to help fight a cholera epidemic in the city in the 1830s. Before arriving in Liverpool, Caroline had apprised Elizabeth Rathbone of her desire to live close to the docks so that she could visit ships and be within easy reach of would-be emigrants seeking information about the Australian colonies.5 There is no evidence, however, that Caroline ever engaged in any such activity in Liverpool. She may have been too ill or, once again, too distracted to do so, but the fact that she even contemplated continuing her work pays tribute to her indomitable spirit.
This would be Caroline and Archibald’s final reconciliation. They had parted so many times and for so many years during their marriage; that was now ended, and they would spend their final years together. For a short time, Archibald Jnr was the only child, albeit a grown-up one, at home with them in Liverpool. When Archibald Snr had arrived in Britain in 1864, he had initially taken the girls and Sydney to visit relations and friends before seeing to their education. Caroline Jnr, eighteen years old in 1866, was being taught by the Marist Sisters at Elm Villa Convent, “a pretty little house with a garden on Holloway Road” in Highgate, London, whilst Monica, now fifteen, had been sent to a convent school in Belgium, where the fees were not too high, and Sydney, twenty, was most likely in Ireland, also extending his studies.6
Less than a decade earlier, Caroline had been famous throughout England, Ireland and Scotland. Not just the London newspapers but, largely due to her lecture tours and the interest in emigration, the regional and small-town press had regularly reported her thoughts, as well as the progress of her Family Colonization Loan Society. Now, though, when she returned to Britain as a private citizen, there were no reports and no comments. It was as though she had never existed. All that was to change briefly, however, as a result of a bizarre episode.
In early 1867, an audacious trickster, Henry Philip Dashwood Arthy, was convicted in London’s Bow Street Court of having defrauded the Royal Bounty Fund using false pretences and sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude.7 Six months earlier he had petitioned the British Prime Minister, Lord Derby, pretending to be Caroline. He stated in his letter, “I was the original founder of the present government system of emigration to Australia.” He further claimed that “Caroline” was now a widow, suffering ill health and in need of funds to educate her grandchildren in Australia. The British Government paid the imposter £100 before the deception was discovered. The real Caroline gave a deposition to the London court disowning the letter, noting that she was still at sea when it was sent, and rebutting any suggestion that she was a widow. The report of the court case and its resolution was published in newspapers up and down the country, thus spreading the word that Caroline had returned.8
Almost as quickly as the story had surged, it died. Soon after, however, financial issues brought Caroline back into the spotlight fleetingly. Unsure if they would receive any more money from New South Wales, and with Archibald’s pension yearly losing value, the Chisholms were once again living in extremely straitened conditions. In May 1867, the British Government awarded Caroline an annual pension of £100 “in consideration of the valuable and disinterested services rendered by her to emigrants in New South Wales”.9 Civil List pensions were reported in all the newspapers. Some of these publications had not forgotten Caroline’s commitment and energy in her heyday, and like their colleagues in Australia were scathing of the government’s parsimony. Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper wrote, “There are thousands in this country who bless her for her brave work in the cause of emigration; and there are tens of thousands who revere her name in Australia . . . This time Lord Derby has selected most worthy objects; but he . . . has been niggardly to Mrs Chisholm.”10 Other papers simply reported the award without comment, like The Northampton Mercury, which added only that she was “a native of Northampton”.11
*
Not unlike many other notable people who fade from public life as they reach their eventide, a gentle dusk began to envelop Caroline. Her close friends and family were aware of her plight but few others were. With the glare of fame turned off, she was sheltered from any unwanted intrusions during her final years with Archibald. In 1869 the couple moved to Highgate in London. It’s unlikely that Caroline had ever fully recovered from the kidney disease that had so incapacitated her in Australia, and now she was suffering from a new ailment, dropsy, an old-fashioned term for oedema, possibly even cerebral oedema.12 Whatever the cause, she was extremely unwell, and on the point of being bedridden. Sydney, now twenty-three, had already returned to New South Wales and Archibald Jnr, thirty-three, was planning to join him. It is possible that Caroline’s sons left Britain without realising just how unwell she was at that time, particularly as such intimate details may not have been shared with them. As a family, too, they had been used to travelling from one side of the world to the other, so the boys may have expected to visit their parents again. Before he left, Archibald Jnr visited family in Scotland. A cousin later wrote to his father, “You will all feel heavily the departure of dear Archie for the Colony . . . and the more so considering the frail state of his dear Mother’s health . . . and you yourself not being over strong . . .This is indeed a world of many sorrows.”13
Caroline in old age (courtesy of Don Chisholm)
Not all the Chisholms were sorrowful, though. Henry, thirty, was still in Sydney and progressing well with his civil-service work and growing family — by then he was the father of three children: William, four, Mary Ellen, two, and a newborn, Archibald Frank. As for the girls, Caroline’s namesake, her oldest living daughter, was now twenty-one and, despite suffering from what was probably fibrositis, was married that year to Edmund Gray, the son of Irish Member of Parliament Sir John Gray. The couple settled in Dublin but found time to visit her parents. The last child at home was the youngest, eighteen-year-old Monica, who, having returned from the convent school in Belgium, was helping to care for her mother.
Caroline, Archibald and Monica maintained a quiet life, never losing touch with the family members in Australia. Archibald Jnr married Anne Loder at the end of winter in 1870. Ironically, the advertisement in the Sydney newspapers attempted to pay homage to both his parents and ended up something of a melange: “Archibald, eldest son of Major and Mrs Caroline Chisholm, Strathglass, Invernesshire, Scotland, to Anne Jane, second daughter of the late Henry Loder, Esq., of Sydney”.14 The following year, Anne gave birth to twin girls; sadly the younger one, Letitia Isabella, died three months later.15
Though Henry was well established in Australia, it seems that Sydney, after returning to the city for which he was named, suffered some kind of reversal at work and was possibly sacked from his job. He wrote to his parents about his disappointment. Caroline may have been confined to bed, her body wretched and disobliging, but her mind was still as ebullient as ever. She wrote back to her son: “I do not believe in chances, but I have faith to think you are going through special training to fit you for your future — good metal stands the heavy crush when the inferior would fly into fragments . . . Cheer up Sydney, the sun will yet shine on.”16 It was a remarkably positive homily from a woman wracked by pain and confined to bed, a prisoner of her own body, who was forced to exist in one small dark room, without even the funds to alleviate the dreariness of each succeeding day. By this
stage Caroline may have realised that she was unlikely to see her three sons again. It is probable, though, that she supported their choice to make their lives in Australia. After all, she had spent most of hers promoting the many advantages of living in the Antipodes, so it must have seemed only fitting that her descendants would be born and grow up in that sunshine land on the other side of the world that she knew offered so much promise.
*
The years slipped away. Then tragedy struck, in Sydney and most unexpectedly, at the end of January 1875. Just five years after his wedding, Archibald Jnr died of rheumatic fever. He was thirty-nine, and left his wife, Anne, with their surviving daughter. It must have been devastating for both Caroline and Archibald. They had now lost both the sons born in India, along with their two baby daughters, who had died within six months of birth, as well as two of their granddaughters. Of Caroline’s eight children, only four remained. More fortunately, at this time Sydney’s luck improved. He became a clerk for a stock and station firm and married Isabella Loder, the sister of Archibald’s widow. Henry, now the oldest, was forging ahead making a solid life for himself in the New South Wales Justice Department.
About this time, Archibald wrote to Henry on two matters that were probably preying on both his and Caroline’s minds. He asked Henry to try to locate the gold medal Caroline had received from Pope Pius IX back in 1853 — as mentioned earlier, Archibald had pawned it in Sydney when the Chisholms had been desperate for funds. It seems that it was never found. The other concern was for the couple’s unmarried daughter, Monica, who in 1875 was twenty-four. With Caroline now bedridden for a number of years, Archibald, at seventy-seven, was becoming aware of his own mortality as well as hers, and was worried for Monica’s future. Since returning to Britain, Caroline and Archibald had been existing on his meagre pension and her small annuity, the total being a paltry £392 a year. Archibald explained to Henry that when both he and Caroline died, Monica, as his dependent, would be entitled to only £60 per annum (from the Madras Military Fund); he hoped that their friends might, in the eventuality that she remained unmarried, make representations to the government to award her at least half of her mother’s pension too. He wrote that he was leaving letters to that effect addressed to Henry and various friends.17
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