The Mayne Inheritance

by Rosamond Siemon

  The hospital minutes of the period give no explicit indication that anyone knew anything of the Maynes’ tragic family history. However, hindsight reveals hints of an invisible component; sometimes the phrasing of sentences suggests that a few members of the committee were well aware of the family background. That this awareness was caring, and provided confidential support for James seems likely. Where it was otherwise, he could only expect a continuation of knowing smiles, nods and winks behind his back.

  10

  The Tobita Murder and Its Aftermath

  In the crisp morning hours of 9 June 1904, a badly mangled body was found on the railway line a short distance from ‘‘Moorlands’’, between Auchenflower and Milton stations. The victim was Tatsuzo Tobita, twenty-four, a Japanese from Wickham Street in Fortitude Valley. The Maynes had now been home for seven months.

  Railway officials and policemen searched along the line collecting pieces of clothing and body which had been widely strewn by a passing train. The searchers and the late Mr Tobita’s two fellow Japanese workers were interviewed. At the inquest the facts that emerged were that he was a managing partner of the merchants Asahi and Company, and had been in Brisbane since December 1902. He was said to be a jolly man, but had behaved erratically the day before he was killed. There was no mention of the Maynes, and since the foreigner had no relations in Australia to query his death his body was buried as a suspected suicide.

  Almost immediately a now unmanageable Isaac was confined and restrained at his home at ‘‘Moorlands’’. The window of his room was boarded up and the family were again abruptly faced with the disturbing reality of their inherited prospect of insanity. An anxious James, who best understood the medical possibilities, was expected to be at the General Hospital for eighteen hours of every day. He was a surgeon; that in itself had a frightening connotation. For a responsible man such as he, the uncertainty of all their futures would have amplified the inner chaos and torment he must have been experiencing. Usually, when faced with the strong winds of gossip he was as a blade of grass, now, faced with a brick wall of horror, he was the strong wind. An immediate responsibility was to protect the family from a new threat to the continued aching hurt of their damaged reputation. Another was to help Isaac to any form of mental stability or rehabilitation possible. Nothing could now help the dead Tatsuzo Tobita.

  Who restrained Isaac and attended to his needs was never revealed. Perhaps the reclusive William was pressed into service. There were staff at ‘‘Moorlands’’—a gardener, a carriage driver who attended to the horses and the half-dozen Jersey cows, and a maid. They surely made some connection with the two events. It would have been too much to expect that they would say nothing about the murder at their back door. Nor could the staff at Thomas Bunton’s have been entirely ignorant of Isaac’s severe personality disorder. If he was still working there, which is unlikely, they would have been given some reason for his absence.

  The locals knew it all, of course. The whispers became open discussion, and today’s elderly people still recount the handed-down versions of what happened. Their current stories vary widely from the gardener being the victim, to an Italian friend of Isaac’s, or a foreign caller who was raped and murdered. Even the then long-deceased John Markwell and his son Henry John Markwell, whose horse threw him in 1868, are sometimes said to be the victims. Strangely, few people today seem to know that the victim was a young Japanese trader who lived and worked several miles from ‘‘Moorlands’’, in Fortitude Valley, and who had taken the train to meet an anonymous person near Toowong. Perhaps Tobita’s identity vanished because he was an Asian: in those racist days, no one bothered over-much about a dead Japanese.

  In an effort to maintain complete secrecy on this new family scandal they locked their brother away but could not do that forever. If they had hoped that Isaac’s condition would improve and he could be quietly kept stable, they hoped in vain. After three months of coping with their uncontrollable brother, to say nothing of enduring the outspoken local comment, James arranged for a month’s leave from the Brisbane General Hospital. Again Dr McLean acted as Medical Superintendent.

  Isaac was taken to Sydney, a task which would have needed the effort of both brothers, if not a third attendant. The options were to go by train or ship; neither easy with a sedated or restrained patient if any sort of anonymity was to be preserved. To go by train to Sydney meant a change of train at the State border town of Wallangarra. However, this train had the advantage of some privacy. It departed from Central Station and travelled via Ipswich to Wallangarra, so they could quietly board it from their own back gate at Auchenflower station. The names of most Queensland/New South Wales train passengers departing and arriving were listed in the daily press, as were those who came or went by ship. During this period no one named Mayne is listed for either form of transport. The Brisbane Hospital minutes record Dr Mayne as being absent from 4 October 1904 but it was not until 27 October that Isaac was admitted to Bay View Asylum at Cooks River in New South Wales. Once more the care and responsibility for his eldest brother, and loyalty to the family, were forcing James to neglect his own professional ambition and any hope for some sort of normalcy in his life.

  Two days before Isaac was admitted to Bay View, at a Brisbane General Hospital meeting, Dr Hertzberg reported that Dr James Mayne was suffering a painful illness with a poisoned hand in the Sydney Hospital and that he was pleased to hear that he was recovering. A month’s extension of leave was granted to Dr Mayne.

  In fact James does not appear to have been in hospital at all, but arranging more permanent psychiatric care of Isaac; who, quite probably, was the one in a Sydney hospital. It seems more likely that the recorded minute indicates the way James’ colleagues in Brisbane understood his difficulty and respected his wish for privacy. If so, they were affording him the only help and support they could. The evidence provides a strong possibility that, accepting his own sexuality and fearing its effect on his sanity, especially in the light of Isaac’s mid-life breakdown, James did ultimately admit himself to Sydney Hospital for tests and treatment. If so, that would have occurred between 28 October and 26 November 1904, after Isaac was admitted to Bay View. This cannot be proved or disproved: those Sydney Hospital records were destroyed some fifty years ago.

  For James it now seemed to be a matter of maintaining as much secrecy as he could and covering for Isaac’s actions at all costs. The ultimate cost was the truth and the wreck of the rest of James’ professional life. Isaac was admitted to Bay View in a state of acute melancholia. James, who committed him, told the two examining doctors that Isaac had business worries, there were no insane relations, and his habits were normally active but gentle and temperate. He added that this had been Isaac’s only attack, and that it had occurred only two months earlier. Every one of those statements was incorrect. They were surprising, coming from a medically trained brother whose genuine aim was to secure Isaac’s recovery or improvement. A strategic inked-in question mark at the end of James’ recorded information at Bay View suggests that the admitting doctors did not entirely believe him.

  It seems that a lifetime of covering one’s background against spiteful schoolboys, curious neighbours and inquisitive colleagues, made James’ adoption of a shadowy, evasive life almost second nature. To survive as well as they did, the Maynes may have needed to habitually dissemble.

  At Bay View the admitting doctors noted that Isaac was stout and very nervous. ‘‘…continually anxious and suspicious as though expecting something to happen of a dreadful character. He was sleepless and full of melancholic delusions’’. James did admit that his brother had been restrained and under constant supervision to guard against self-injury, but he gave an incorrect duration of that confinement at ‘‘Moorlands’’—two months instead of three. His fear could have been that to tell the exact truth might have ultimately incriminated Isaac in any future examination of Tatsuzo Tobita’s death.

  It was now, if at all, that James sought
medical help for himself. If nothing else, the last five months must have exhausted him mentally and physically. He was known to be a very humane and gentle man, but he carried the guilt for all the family in covering up for Isaac. The lies he had to tell, apprehension that the deception might all come undone, the constant fear that William, Mary Emelia, or he himself would sooner or later have to walk down that same dread path as their father, sister, and brother, must have been an unrelenting torment. And for James, as a surgeon, there was that added dread of a breakdown at the Brisbane General Hospital.

  He arrived back at Brisbane on the night of 28 November, and the following morning called on James Stodart, MLA, the Chairman of the hospital Committee of Management, and offered to resign. The reason given was a personal health problem. Stodart assured him that the Committee would grant him an extension of leave until he felt able to cope with his hospital responsibilities. James was adamant that he would resign. It was, no doubt, some balm to his shattered spirit that his ability as a doctor and administrator was valued, but he knew that if the truth ever emerged, his carefully built-up world would disintegrate. He would not have that disgrace reflected on the Brisbane General Hospital. Despite Stodart’s urging that he reconsider, the next day James wrote to the Chairman:

  In pursuance of my interview with you yesterday I beg you to be so good as to place my resignation in the hands of the Committee with the request that they will do me the favour to permit my locum tenens to continue to act on my behalf until they have completed arrangements for my succession.

  As you are aware my health had been unsatisfactory for some time and the distress that I have lately undergone has left me quite unfit to take up work again. If I were not assured that I must be free from such responsibility for some considerable time I would not have adopted this course which is determined upon after mature deliberation and at the cost of personal inclination.

  1 December 1904.

  He also resigned from all clubs and associations except the Queensland Cricket Association. A less sensitive, less caring man would have ridden out the storm, been open about his brother’s illness, and kept on with his profession. James was not built that way. If proof was needed that within the hospital hierarchy James’ and Isaac’s story was wide-open and discussed, one only needs to see the three exclamation marks which the secretary has irreverently entered in the column beside the minute noting James’ excuse for his resignation.

  Nothing James did could take the heat of gossip from the family. All the covering-up did no more than cloud the truth and promote speculation. When the Brisbane Courier noted his resignation as Hospital Superintendent on 3 December 1904, it gave the reason as ‘‘ill health’’. Some mentioned the damaged hand. Across town that did little but raise eyebrows. As the senior brother, William’s role in the decision-making about Isaac could not have been nonexistent, but by keeping an extremely low profile, he did not exist for the newspapers or gossipmongers. In fact not many people knew that there was a brother called William.

  It was now December. The festive season was under way. For the Mayne household it would have been an understatement to say that Christmas 1904 was bleak.

  Almost immediately another tragedy enveloped the Maynes in gossip. This was the death of the twenty-one-year-old Carl Markwell, on 24 January 1905. In the vast amount of evidence taken at this inquest not one published word links him to the Maynes. Unfortunately, their story has been so overlaid with fantasy that it was predictable the family would be linked to the bizarre death of a young homosexual whose friends included rich men about town. Occurring so soon after Tatsuzo Tobita’s death and the public belief that Isaac Mayne had killed him, any good mystery would have been attributed to them.

  The name Markwell as a victim is constantly and erroneously linked to Isaac. Quite possibly this arose because, over time, public gossip, now linking Carl Markwell and Isaac as the murderers of Tatsuzo Tobita, became confused with the name of Mayne’s former neighbour, a different but related family of Markwells who had sold ‘‘Moorlands Villa’’ to the Maynes. The tragic history of that family has already been mentioned, but as today’s persistent myth includes both Markwell families, some clarification is necessary. It is well documented that the fatal riding accident of young Henry John Markwell took place on River Road, Toowong, in 1868. The people who witnessed the accident carried him to his father’s house, ‘‘Moorlands Villa’’, where he died. At that time, Patrick Mayne was dead, and Isaac was a schoolboy living with his family next to the butchery in Queen Street. In 1881, John Markwell senior died of natural causes at ‘‘Moorlands Villa’’. A current popular story which also needs to be debunked is that Georgina, supposedly Patrick Mayne’s first wife, haunts ‘‘Moorlands’’. Patrick’s only wife was Mary. Georgina was John Markwell’s second wife. After she died in childbirth, John married again. The widow he left was Harriet. If any of Markwell’s wives wanted to do any haunting, one would suppose they would do it on the site of ‘‘Moorlands Villa’’, further up the hill, where Wesley Hospital now stands.

  As the Carl Markwell death in 1905 was, and still is, so persistently linked to Isaac Mayne, its coincidental evidence and timing must be examined. Two days after James returned from Sydney, young Markwell, an office clerk, began insuring himself with five companies for a total of £2,250 and made a somewhat unusual will. Two well-known Brisbane men were his trustees and his bequests to his mother and two sisters were on condition that they did not commit adultery before marriage. Until a few weeks before his death, Markwell’s wages as a clerk with the merchants, Siemons, in Roma Street had been twenty-five shillings a week, but with a change of job, he earned thirty shillings and paid twenty of them to his mother for board. Despite the fact that he had no other money except the balance of his wages, he owned a collection of several pieces of gold and silver jewellery and some valuable gem-studded tie pins. A photograph of one of his trustees, wearing a velvet trimmed jacket and a silk top hat was among his effects. He had frequently spoken of going for a trip to New Zealand, a favourite holiday destination of the Maynes, and he had discovered enough about the symptoms of epilepsy to fake them and convince a doctor that he was an epileptic.

  In the early evening of 24 January 1905, he and his sister had taken a long tram ride from his home in the eastern suburb of Wooloowin to the western suburb of Toowong and then home again. He then stepped into a hot bath and drank potassium cyanide. The faked epilepsy was to suggest accidental drowning so that the insurance could be claimed.

  Taking tram rides was a common pastime in those days, but the fact that Carl Markwell went to Toowong gave rise to gossip that he went to the Maynes. The tram route was two blocks distant from ‘‘Moorlands’’. It was the train which had a station at their back gate, but walking was also a common pastime and there may not have been a scheduled train at a suitable time. Selina Joyce, a housemaid from Toowong, gave evidence. Neither her employer’s name nor address was stated, but she proved to be a family friend of the young Markwells. Speculation was stirred when the question arose as to how and where Carl had obtained cyanide and detailed knowledge of the symptoms of epilepsy. Clutching at any link, the rumourmongers noted that a friend of James who visited ‘‘Moorlands’’ was the Hospital Dispenser, Douglas Brown. A magisterial inquiry was held and the body, immediately exhumed, was found to contain traces of potassium cyanide, commonly used by photographers, and not hydrogen cyanide. The photography shop and the salesman were easily identified. There was no link with James Mayne or his friend.

  The wild speculation surrounding Carl Markwell’s death is tangled and full of half-truths. No reason was offered for his suicide; simplification would be falsification. There was time between James’ return from Sydney and Markwell’s detailed insurance and suicide plans for him to have learned from James that Isaac had been declared insane and committed to an asylum. Other members of the household could have told him earlier, but that is drawing a long bow and suggesting that Isaac and Carl we
re friends. Nothing in the evidence suggests that they knew each other. I contend that it was quite coincidental that within a week of Carl Markwell’s suicide, Isaac Mayne hanged himself.

  Brisbane’s court of public opinion decided that Isaac and Carl were involved in a lovers’ pact. The facts are that the Mayne family had been excessively secret about Isaac’s committal to Bay View. Few, if any, outside of the family knew, and it is highly unlikely that they told a young caller who may, or may not, have known Isaac. That is, unless the housemaid who gave evidence worked at ‘‘Moorlands’’. Had Markwell been at ‘‘Moorlands’’ on the night of Tobita’s death and been associated with Isaac in that crime, it is even more unlikely that the family would impart to him knowledge of their brother’s whereabouts. The gossiping public only learned where he was when, on 1 February 1905, the Sydney Morning Herald headed an item ‘‘SUICIDE IN AN ASYLUM’’ and noted that ‘‘in a private asylum for the insane at Cooks River … Isaac Mayne, a solicitor … a native of Queensland…’’ The local papers took up the item. As for Isaac learning of a supposed friend’s death before taking his own life, that, too, is most unlikely. He had been under supervision and restraint for his own safety at both ‘‘Moorlands’’ and Bay View Asylum. To take his own life he had to exercise the same sort of cunning as was evident in some of his father’s actions. He acted on a chance opportunity. When his attendant left his room briefly at 5a.m. on 31 January, Isaac, who was thought to be asleep, disappeared. He was found two hours later suspended from a beam in the asylum pottery shed. He was fifty-three.

  James, so vulnerable, was acutely sensitive to the new vicious and unsubstantiated gossip. With a need to put the whole miserable story behind them forever, he fanned the gossip by acting with more haste than commonsense. Isaac’s body was railed to Brisbane on the day of his death, and, because of the heat of midsummer, buried at Toowong within hours of arrival.—Suspicious haste, murmured Dame Rumour. But no secret was made of the funeral; notices appeared in the Brisbane press. The public wanted to suspect a cover-up and misread James’ reason for haste.